No, we’re NOT all okay, ya chirpy little twat.

I know I am not. And patient readers know that being “not okay” is something I find very hard to admit.

Even when I am utterly miserable, my instinct is to say I am fine. The very idea of telling people how I really feel makes me break out in a prickly sweat.

Now why is that?

Fundamentally, I think it comes down to havibng no faith that anyone can help me. And if nobody can help me, then admitting to my true feelings can’t possibly help and will probably end up hurting.

So why bother? Tell people whatever it takes to make them go away and leave me to suffer in solitude.

Oh, no, you don’t have to worry about me, I am fine. You jusrt go backj to your no doubt vastly superior life and leave me to be the weird little cipher in the dark that I am.

Unrelatedly, woe is me, for I am so very lonely.

It makes me wonder if it will ever be possible for me to let people in. My fear is that my traumatic and kindergarten-free early childhood means I missed a vital developmental window of time where I was supposed to get my primary socialization, and when I did not, it left me permanently damaged.

That would mean I am, in essence, emotionally and socially crippled. And that is a terrifying and depressing thought.

Lately everything just seems so dark.

Well, what if I am truly emotionally and socially broken? What then?

I’d have to figure out some way of dealing with it. What that might be, I don’t know.

How do you cope with having the same desire for human connection as any other naked beach ape, and yet you are permanently unable to get it?

Besides suicide, that is.

Just a thought.

I can’t afford to think my situation is hopeless. I have to believe that some day, if I keep going to therapy and wringting my emotions out onto these pages, the great wall of numbness and death inside me will be breached and I will finally be able to feel the wamrth and the love that people have for me, and I will no longer be so alone.

There are a lot of other reasons why I don’t tell people how I really feel. One is not wanting my pain to contaminate others with my toxicity.

As long as the pain stays in me, I can control it. Contain it. Guard it, in a way. Keep others from getting hurt.

If I let it out into the world, it can go on hurting people, who then go on to hurt other people, and so forth and so on until it spreads through the world like a plague.

What a terrible way that would be to go viral.

And if I keep all the pain to myself, I don’t have to deal with the deep deep shame I feel about it. Nobody has to know what a hideous beast I am underneath it all. I can go on pretending to me something wholesome and decent and worthy.

And if I do a good enough job of it, I will even be able to fool myself.

Another reason I don’t tell people how I really feel is that I can’t tolerate other people getting too close to me emotionally.

That’s where the bullet really hits the bone. Like any undersocialized monkey, on a deep animal level I freak the fuck out if I find others in my personal mind space and will then do anything it takes to get them the fuck out of there.

And that is a terribly malformed response. Sharing mind space with others is exactly what human connection is all about. If I can’t tolerate that then I am fucked, because that’s where the medicine I need to become well would have to come from.

No wonder I am so alone.

And if I go even further into this malformed response, I start to feel extremely aggressive. Like I want to utterly annihilate all my mental intruders, leaving nothing of them behind so that I might finally know inner silence.

And that scares the hell out of me. I have some very dark and powerful demons inside me. People don’t realize this because I never let them show.

But I have some deep down craziness that is capable of terrible things.

And that’s very hard to take. I can face my depression from time to time and take a good look at it and look it in the eye.

But the anger – the sea of seething, white hot annihilating rage that simmers within me – that I can barely acknowledge, let alone express.

But then again, maybe that’s just one of my depression’s dirty little tricks. It knows that it uses this internalized aggression as fuel and protects its supply by making me feel crazy with anger every time I try to let any of it out.

But there is so much of it. And its hurts so much. It’s so fucking hot and toxic, like plutonium laden lava.

Clearly, it has got to go. If I can get rid of it, a lot of the barrier between me and others will go with it.

Maybe that’s the real problem. If that barrier goes, people will truly be able to see me. They will truly “get in”. They will be able to walk around my mindspace, I will truly be violated and I can’t let that happen again.

Being raped at the age of 4 was violation enough for a lifetime.

I won’t let anyone touch me ever again.

And that is the bitter and lonely truth of it all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.