My birthday was fine.

Had it at White Spot. I feel lucky that circumstances conspired to sync my birthday with FRED. Not only did that mean that all of my friends were there without my even having to invite them, I got to celebrate my birthday on my actual birthday instead of the nearest convenient weekend or whatever, and for that, I am truly grateful.

Joe got some tailor done for me, plus got me a couple of cool T-shirts. Felicity paid for my dinner. I expect a card from my mother any day now – apparently she sent it a while ago and it’s taking a long time to get to me.

I expect I will get gift cards from my siblings eventually.

I know my mother sent the card a long time ago because I got to talk to her Sunday afternoon. I love hearing from my mother. Just the sound of her voice makes me happy. I may have issues with how I was raised and what messages I got, but at the end of the day, she’s still my Mommy, and I love her super hard.

I have got to get to see her before she passes. Or I will pass shortly after her.

From her, I learned Catherine is possibly going to be coming home to PEI this August. That, obviously, would be when I would want to be there should some miracle deposit the $1000 or so the trip would take into my bank account before then.

I want to see my family and the old home town. I must be reaching that point in the karmic cycle where I want to reconnect with my roots. I get quite homesick sometimes and I guess I have been away from Summerside long enough that all the residual Summerside left in my system has been purged and I am now able to admit it.

For many many years, I was just glad to have gotten out of there. It was far too small a cage for the likes of me. There’s a reason that ‘the Island’s biggest export is brains”.

What, excactly, would have been there for an intellectual monster like me to do?

So you can understand how for a long time, I didn’t even want to think about coming back. Once you get out of that tiny cage, the last thing you want is to go back to visit it.

In every small town escape case like me there lurks a fear that somehow it will drag us back in. Like it has its own gravity well and it takes a constant input of energy in order to stay out its grips.

After all, every small town is a universe unto itself. When you grow up in one, whether it’s a tiny villages or a thriving hamlet, the town limits are the walls of your reality and everything in your life is bounded by those walls.

When you finally escape, you are essentially leaving known space, and it takes a long time to accept that this newer, biggest universe is your home now and you belong there and it is safe to put down roots.

Assuming you have the resources to do so. I just turned 46 and I don’t have them yet. Without a job or romance, there is not enough to anchor me to one place.

All I have is my friends, and while they are marvelous, wonderful, and very patient with me,. man cannot live by friendship alone.

No wonder I always feel like a balloon terrified of coming loose from its string and sailing off into the sky till it can’t even see the ground any more.

It’s that fear that makes me cling to things as hard as I do. I have a bad case of vertigo of the soul and it feels a lot like gravity is working in the wrong direction and that if I am not super, super careful, I will fly into the sky and never come back down.

And all that would be left of me here on Earth would be a drooling vegetable where once a truly extraordinary mind once lived.

I know that all sounds crazy. But that’s how I feel inside. All I can do is express how I feel. I can’t guarantee that it will make sense or seem sane.

I’m a lunatic like any other. I just fool people by being a highly articulate lunatic who gives the appearance of being very sane. logical, pragmatic, and smart.

But the truth is that I am crazy, and not (just) in the comedy sense.

It;s not something I think about much. The fact that you are not sane is a very distressing and disturbing thought that attacks the very foundations of your sense of reality, and so it is a very unpleasant thing to ponder.

Plus it conflicts with depression’s maximize self-loathing programming. After all, if I am crazy, that means I am sick, and if I am sick, then I have an excuse for doing so poorly in life, and that would mean reducing my amount of self-loathing, so clearly that thought cannot be allowed to live.

Why, that would jeopardize everything my depression stands for!

But I really am a crazy person. A mental health services consumer. I have many active delusions – beliefs that directly contradict reality yet nevertheless persist because they are a product of a chemical imbalance and while that imbalance remains, so do the delusions it engenders.

I am just lucky that I am neurotic, not psychotic, and so my delusions are all emotional, like feeling like everyone hates me and wishes I would just crawl off and die.

This is patently untrue, and yet, I still feel that way most of the time. It’s very hard for me to believe anyone actually wants me around.

Even at my own birthday party, part of me felt like nobody there really liked me.

That’s what happens when you are held hostage by your own goddamned brain chemicals and nothing you can thik or feel will change that.

So there are things you know to be false, but still can’t help but believe.

And to me, that’s what madness feels like :

Knowing something is wrong and that making no difference.

Some problems can’t be solved by thinking.

And against them, I am helpless as a child.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.