One addendum to yesterday’s tale : tomorrow I have an appointment with the hospital’s infectious disease specialist.
Emphasis mine, obviously. When the nurse told me that, those two words hit me like a knee to the groin. All my feelings about being toxic got triggered. I had the urge to run and hide in shame.
It passed. But, it sucked.
Took 60 units of insulin last night. Immediately felt a lot better. Going to take another 60 units after lunch.
I’ve been such an idiot, letting all that slip. The injection took so little effort.
But then again, I know that’s not what this is about. Self-neglect is self-abuse. It’s the most passive-aggressive form of taking your anger out on yourself.
It would be easy to talk about depression making me lazy, or how my video game addiction has hollowed me out and keeps me from doing most other things, or talk about how I never learned to care for myself because I was never cared for, and all of that would be one hundred percent true.
But only up to a point. Because one of the sublest ways we lie to ourselves is with true statements that miss the point.
And the point is, I have been passively self-harming. In fact I still am, more than likely. This is the sort of thing that runs very deep, and it will probably take me a long time to unravel all the layers.
So once more, I reach the place where I have to admit to myself that what is really behind it all is anger.
It’s always anger with me. I should get “IT’S THE ANGER, IDIOT!” tattooed on my inner eyelids so I am reminded of it every time I blink.
But that would hurt.
I am working on uncorking my anger. Being sick and therefore crankier than usual has helped. Over the last three or four days, I have been letting loose more on Facebook.
If something pisses me off, and it’s not from someone I know, then I vent. I mean, why the fuck not? I have the right to be just as snappish and irritable as everyone else on the internet these days.
Well, okay, maybe not. But it feels good to not just passively absorb everything – to be able to express how I feel even if how I feel is mad.
I have decided to label my new attitude “feisty”. That way it’s still kind of cute. Like I’m a cranky old man, or a scrappy little dog, or a fainty patronized woman.
The point is, that’s a lot closer to my real personality. I’m a firey, passionate person. That comes with a certain amount of natural combativeness, and that is something I have dealt with so far by just blanket suppressing it.
And that makes me so angry!
Kidding, mostly. But obviously that’s not nearly good enough. The biggest delusion of the ego and superego is that the id can be suppressed forever without consequence.
But it is the lifespring, the source, the place from which all energy flows. Cut that off and you kill yourself inside.
Trust me on that. I know of what I speak.
As uaual, I will be back later.
Well I just fucked up big time.
See, I already wrote this half of the post. Had it all perfect and dynamic and kewl.
But by not paying attention to a warning message, I ended up losing all that work and now all those words are victims of entropy.
And that hurts. Losing our precious words hurts writers like a death in the family, or losing a limb. Any writer worth their caffinated beverage of choice feels like what they write is a part of them – an extension of themselves.
And it hurts like a son of a bitch to have that ripped away.
But oh well. Life goes on. I won’t bore you (or me) with the technical details, but sufficith to say that I could not have diddled myself better if I had hired a team of elite hackers to rappel down my walls and do it.
They don’t have to do that. But it makes them feel special.
So I am choosing to see this as a spiritual growth experience. The experience of rewriting this damned thing will begood for me as it is a valuable lesson in not letting life push you around.
A previous, lesser version of me would have run away from the situation. I would have given up immediately and flopped down on my bed in despair and maybe even just plain given up on finishing this blog entry entirely.
And I was tempted. Those thoughts went through my head.
But fuck that pansy-ass shit. I am way stronger than that. I knew that this was a ‘get back on that horse’ type situation. The kind where delaying would only give the wound time to close and form a scab over it, and the best thing to do was to get right back there and do the only thing that will heal it instead : write, goddamn it. Write.
So here I am, re-doing work I thought was already done. And it sucks. But it ain’t that bad. Most things aren’t nearly as bad as fear makes them out to be.
I feel like I am developing an inner Sam Elliot. And I like it. I’ve never had decent male role models in my life, so I guess I have to make my own.
And if my little life lessons – which are mostly for me – seem harsh to you, listen to this bit of wisdom I have just deduced :
It’s not about teaching myself to be a man. Not in the old sense anyhow.
It’s about teaching myself to be happy. Those old unreconstructed males knew a thing or two, and one of those things was that in order to be happy you need to have strength. Grit. Power. Toughness. And above all, courage.
Those are virtues even in a candyass city life like mine. And they come straight from the core – the id.
To be happy, you have to raise and tame the beast inside, not just cage it.
Damn I wish I had a mentor for all this.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.