I am not a whole person. Except, perhaps, in potentia.

I am a whole person in the same sense that an acorn is an oak tree.

Now relax, I am not saying I am something horrible. I am just acknowledging the fact that my mental illness did not only isolate me from society but also from all the usual life experiences that make someone complete.

You all know the drill. Never had a job that supported me. And the jobs I have had are at least twenty years behind me. I honestly do not know what it is like to work for a living. I never have. Perhaps I never will.

If I am to generate an income for myself, odds are it will not be via traditional employment. It will be through my creative works in some fashion.

Aaaaaand I have never been in a relationship. Never fallen in love. Never even had a sex life, for fuck’s sake.

Which reminds me : I need to confess, in this space, that it’s very hard for me to have sex. And that’s not just because of the antidepressants. The truth is that when I try to have sex, no matter how horny and into it and everything else I am, a powerful psychological reaction is triggered and it is determined to make me regress into the safety of my mind just like I did when I was raped.

So what happens is that this intense counter-reaction fills my mind with electric ice and makes me quite stupid and thick-witted and slow. And passive.

Ever so passive.

It’s not what I want at all and it has given previous lovers the impression that they were doing something wrong or that I did not find them sexy.

The truth is far stranger and more depressing than that.

And I know of only one way to escape it : take myself and my needs out of the equation entirely. Turn sex into a performance instead of intimacy. Concentrate on knocking their socks off with my mad sex skill and take their ejaculation as my applause.

It’s a neat trick because my partner is highly unlikely to object and I get to take my bow and slink away to wonder what the fuck is wrong with me.

That’s just the strange kind of bird I am. I am far better at performing than living. Like m’man Will Smith says. “my life is a cage but on stage I’m free”.

Something very deep goes haywire when I try to pursue my own desires. Some fundamental circuit ends up feeding back into itself and then short circuits, and I am left paralyzed and confused by this misfunction.

Perhaps the problem is that I see myself in my desires and I still cannot stand my own image. Something in me violently attacks/rejects anything that mirrors who I am, and so pursuing my own wants and desires is doomed from the start.

Maybe I just plain can’t handle getting what I want. It’s too intense and too real. My far too sensitive circuit breaker kicks in and severs the connection and the energy flows back into the system when it was suppose to go into the world.

And just adds to my profound emotional constipation.

Maybe the problem is that I still can’t accept who and what and how I am. Maybe because I don’t really know. It’s hard to find out who you really are when your mind goes sizzle crackle POP whenever the subject of yourself is approached at all.

These are the sort of identity issues that one is supposed to sort out via life experience when one is young. But I socially died early on in that process. The insulation of isolation took hold and got thicker and thicker over the years until I can’t feel a god damned thing any more.

I am so, so far from the Sun.

And when I think about it, I can feel the profound wrongness of how my life went. I can tell you exactly where all those miles and miles of taiga and tundra inside me came from. They came from days and weeks and months and years of total social isolation. They came from sitting there surrounded by my fellow students and feeling alone and worse than alone.

Feeling like I didn’t even belong there. Feeling like everyone hated me and thought I was pathetic and wished I would just go away.

I’d rather be alone at home. I can ignore it when I am home. When I am alone, I am not surrounded by happy, healthy people whose very connection to one another throws my disconnected and distant self into sharp relief. Alone at home, I am no longer a starving child surrounded by a feast he cannot touch.

So alone at home I stay,
And do what I can to pass the time away
While watching my life wash away
Into meaningless, purposeless foam.

Nothing I do is meaningful. Nothing I do matters. Nothing I do leaves an impact on the world. Nothing I do expresses who I am.

And maybe that’s not a coincidence. I can’t very well express who I really am when I don’t even know who I really am and probably would reject it if I knew.

That’s why it all has to come out through poetry and metaphor and other literary decides. That’s why I can only express who I really am when I am wearing a mask. I have to be sure that I will never catch a glimpse of the real me before I feel safe enough to express some small but vital part of who I am.

The night is always cold inside me, and sunrise never comes.

I cling to others for their heat, and share my bright warm light with them in hopes that come of it will reflect back to me.

But still I sit at the bottom of a frozen sea.

With none to rescue me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.