Becaue my depression has gotten a lot worse lately.

Not to the point where I am at risk of self-harm, thank goodness. This is not that kind of depression. This is something…. different.

I feel like I am falling down an infinite hole within myself, and as I fall I get smaller and weaker and dimmer, and somehow I know that this will continue until I end up watching the tiny tiny spark that is all that is left of me wink out of the night sky, lost forever.

I feel like I am trying to flee from everything in every direction at the same time, and that the pressure created by this infinite retreat just keeps building and building within me, making me feel crazier and crazier.

Sooner or later, something is going to give. The dam will burst, the seams will split, the rivets will pop like popcorn and the whole great steel beast in whose belly I live will give out one last big groan before dying.

Dunno what happens to me then. Nothing good, I would imagine.

If only I knew how to stop running. How to overcome all this fear and turn and face all those ghosts chasing me and maybe even chase them for a change.

Anyone got a power pellet?

But I really feel like the depression has me by the balls lately. And the throat. I feel so very weak and cold and helpless. My soul feels threadbare and thin and the darkness inside me has never been this deep…. or inviting.

I keep thinking about retreating even further from reality than I already do. But that’s hard to even imagine because I already have a very low reality existence.

Where else can I go? What else can I do?

Lapse into a coma?

Maybe I need some institutional time. Some time spent somewhere where I can get intensive treatment for a couple of weeks might do me a lot of good.

I know one thing : I can’t do this all by myself any more.

I never really could, to be honest. This depression of mine is too much for a depressed person to be able to handle.

But I have repeatedly hidden this truth from myself because, well, then what? So I can’t do this all by myself. What’s the alternative?

Doing it with others?

I wish I could believe that was possible.

I wish I had faith that there are people out there who can help me. Truly help me. People with wisdom I can use. People with power I can borrow. People with knowledge that I lack.

People whose love I can feel.

But I gave up on that a long time ago. I know that is very unhealthy, but it is nevetheless true. There was a time in my life when I still looked for true connection in the world, the kind that would banish all my loneliness and make me feel seen and understood at last.

That lasted till maybe Grade 9.

After that, I gave up. Nobody can actually handle all that I am. People get around as much of me as I think they can handle and that’s it. Nobody sees more than a slice of me because I know that if I exceed their load limit, they will flee.

It’s not their fault. They have no choice. They have to do that just to survive. Otherwise the sheer oppressive weight of my personality would smother and crush them.

I’ve always had for more power than I knew how to handle. And there was never anybody around to teach me how to handle it.

Nobody who could reach me, anyhow.

But that’s a whole other….. thing.

So I guess I am just stuck here, freezing to death in a world with no clothes. Feeling deathly still and quiet inside, unsure whether this means I am dying, or just tired.

Probably a bit of both.

It’s times like these that I wish I could stick my metaphorical finger down my psychological throat and make myself throw up all the badness and pain and emotions gone toxic in storage and all the rest of this wretched ragout inside me so I could purge myself and, for a little while at least, be empty and clean.

But I am pretty sure that doesn’t happen except maybe at those ayuasca retreats.

Remember Encounter Groups? I don’t, except as a name for something that was going on in the 70’s.

But I read about them today and apparently they involved a lot of different forms of non-sexual body intimacies. People rubbing, touching, caressing, and speaking soothingly to one another, as well as the more usual group therapy type stuff.

The idea was to reconnect with our time as infants and children and try to heal some of the deep emotional injuries that keep us from being happy adults.

And a lot of that revolved around disabling the terribly destructive stigma that say needing to touch and be touched by others is somehow infantile and weak and therefore deeply shameful in an adult.

Especially an adult man.

And this seems like a potentially devastatingly effective form of interpersonal therapy, so it makes me wonder where it went.

What happened in the 80’s to make us all reject this kind of (literally) touchy-feely stuff?

And it also makes me wonder about how hyper cuddly I am as Fruvous and how furry culture in general is far more open to all forms of intimacy than the mainstream, and what that means about us and about me.

Are our animal personas a way for us to bypass the bad programming and reconnect with a more simple and honest existence?

Even our sexually open-minded ways can be seen as an attempt to return to a time of innocent pleasure before all the complicated shame and taboos came along to bind and complicate our simple joys.

I know that when I say I use Fruvous to express things I can’t express in my real life, that definitely includes the need for physical affection in all its forms.

There are so many harmful and unnecessary walls keeping us from being whole.

I consider it my duty to try to break those down.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.