I feel so weak lately.

And not just in the physical sense, although there is plenty of that too. On the physical level, I feel like I am a trembling invalid in the grips of an old timey disease like malaria.

But that’s probably just the unstable blood sugar that is methodically killing me. So, you know, no big deal.

I’m too mentally ill to do much about it anyhow.

No, the kind of weakness I am talking about is the emotional kind. I really feel like I have no strength to fight the bad messages from my broken brain lately. I keep knuckling under to its demands and it is getting me down.

Witness : all the convention I missed in order to keep that damn thing happy last weekend. It’s like having a dangerous and rapacious pet.

And I am not sure where this comes from. I know there have been periods when I had plenty of fire in my belly to tackle and destroy my depression, but that seems like forever ago now.

The problem, I feel, is that I have no pilot light. If flame goes out, there is no deep source within my soul to draw upon in order to re-kindle my soul’s fading fire.

To, as usual, over-extend the metaphor, without a pilot light, all I can do is wait for lightning to strike and give me fire again, like the cavepeople at the beginning of Quest For Fire after their fire went out.

Meanwhile, I can’t push back against the darkness because I have no traction. I guess that is what happened when your soul is filled with ice and snow. It doesn’t matter how much mental force, of whatever kind, I can bring to bear via this outsized engine of a mind of mine… without traction, all it can do is push me backward.

I need soul friction, damn it.

Instead, I just keep sliding though life on that slippery slope that ends with the grave. The days slip through my numb and nerveless fingers and I watch my life going down the drain with a strange detachment, like it was happening to someone else.

On television. To a character I didn’t care about one way or another.

And I know this bizarre clinical detachment’s lab coat and stethescope are just the bullshit props of a very broken mind that can’t take life in realtime. let alone handle real emotions, the kind that threaten one’s suicidal self-control.

There are times, I must keep telling myself, when you should not detach. I realize as I am writing these words that I have spent a long time slaving under the belief that I am always better off being detached and “logical” about everything. Even in moments of strong emotion, where emotional detachment is hideously wrong on so many levels, there is always a part of me sitting outside it all, analyzing everything so that I always choose the “right” or “smart” path.

It’s not entirely false. I am one of those people, like Robert Anton Wilson said, that always wants to know what’s really going on.

In the service of that noble and sensible sounding mission, part of my mind stays detached from every situation. And it is very easy to fool myself into thinking that there’s nothing wrong with that. That, in fact, it’s the right thing to do.

But now I can see that there are things you simply cannot see from the safety of a seat at the center of things. That this submersible of mine that keeps the waters of the deep at bay so I can explore in comfort and safety is actually what is cutting me off from the desperately needed emotional inputs that might actually heal me.

There are things that I can never learn and truths that I will never see unless I learn to get out of my shark cage of a life and swim naked in the waters of my emotions.

They’re very deep.

I need another period of opening my heart to let the emotions in, not caring if they “detach” me from the place I cling to like a barnacle as long as they can wash me clean and let me live anew.

This would all be so much easier if I had religion, damn it. If I had a faith, I wouldn’t be stuck playing this strange game of chess against my own emotions. With religion, I would have that source, that pilot light, to re-light my flame. My mental software would contain that permission to generate much needed emotional inputs when necessary.

Compared to that, all my oh so impressive skills of inference and analysis seem like a jug and kazoo band next to the mighty orchestra that is religion.

Oh well. At least I have a really great view of the world up here on this mountain where I am dying of hypothermia, frostbite, and lack of oxygen.

It’s a nice place to die, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Perhaps spring will bring me some renewal. God knows I could use it. Perhaps when the days are longer and the sun is brighter and green things are sprouting everywhere, I will find what I am missing and reconnect to the breathing, living world.

I still have so much ice to birth. So much frozen pain wrapped around this little heart of mine like a blanket of snow waiting for me to dig it up and spread it out in the sun to melt. It can seem so much like that spring will never come.

But winter always ends. The thaw always comes. It’s one of the very few things in life in which you can have total faith. The world keeps turning as it spins through space and time flows ever onwards. The wheel never ceases its spin, and if we are patient, and if we are wise enough not to fight it, it will brings us back into the sun again.

I hope to be that wise some day.

But I still have so very much to learn.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.