In many ways, I feel like I am struggling to be born.
For many years, I was merely an embryo of a very advanced age. All those years living day to day, spending all my time online and playing video games and being a semi-good roomate to whoever was keeping me, I never ever thought about the future because it scared the hell out of me to even try.
When I tried to think about the future, all I saw in my mihnd was a TV tube tuned to this slate grey void and a tgerrifying feeling of dread and despair.
I didn’t really start being born till I finally found my voice long enough to ask my GP, Doctor Chao, to find me a therapist.
That was so hard to do. And it took me so long to get there.
He hooked me up with my psychiatrist, Doctor Costin, and it’s through seeing him that I began the long and painful process of birth.
No embryo wants to leave the womb. But it can’t stay there forever. Not if it hopes to grow and change and become a real person.
And I have been seeing Doc Costin for five years now. A long birth indeed. And it’s thanks to him and his therapeutic skills that I ended up going to Kwantlen and then VFS. So some of that being born has definitely happened.
But by no means all of it. I won’t be fully born until I graduate out of this gulag of mine and get a job and a boyfriend and can pay my own way for once.
After all, you can’t stop being an embryo if you continue to cling to your umbilicus. I won’t get to be a real boy until I can cut the cord and live and breathe on my own.
Until then, the days will just keep on passing by and I will continue to feel like I am floating in aspic, unable to touch or feel anything directly, living on what little human warmth can penetrate the walls of my icy womb.
Therapy awoke my inner spark. It did this by slowly removing enough of the accumulated garbage in my mind that it could finally get enough oxygen to oxidize and provide a tiny bit of warmth of my own.
I have been jealously and zealously guarding that little spark for years. It is my pilot light and I worry that the universe wants to snuff it out, and with it, my hopes.
Not rational. So what.
I want to do more. I want to use that spark to light a fire within me that can melt my blood and organs and thaw out my scarred and rusty heart and finally let me know what it is like to be truly alive.
But my timber is still too wet. The spark won’t catch. The spark plug doesn’t fire. So I either need to dry out my wood faster or find a superior source of ignition.
Come on, baby. Light my fire.
It just occurred to me that a lot of my unwillingness to truly open up to people and share my pain with them is because I can’t keep them safe if I do that.
I want them to be safe. It’s important to me. If I care about someone, I want them to be safe and healthy and happy and content.
Loosing my demons upon them is the opposite of that.
I’ve talked about this in this space before: how I feel like that which I have locked up inside me, all my pain and horror and so, so much isolation, is far too dangerous to ever let loose on some poor person.
Even if that person is my therapist. More’s the pity.
And maybe that whole deal is bullshit. Maybe that’s just my depression’s go-to reliable trick for keeping me from releasing any of its toxins and thus taking away its power.
Maybe my bullshit is no worse (or better) than anyone else’s.
Maybe that’s what I am afraid of- that my pain is not special and that were I to loose my demons on an unsuspecting world, the world would just shrug and say “So what?”.
But it can’t be all that because I know how greedy-needy I am inside and how badly the deep dark evil part of me wants to just reach out and take whatever the hell I want, and to hell with the consequences for others.
And I know that if I open up to people, my power of personality, facility with words, and strong emotive capacities will amplify and focus the message into a Wave Motion Gun of communicative destruction.
The things I need to express have been around for a very long time, and have only grown more toxic and deadly over the years.
Of course, that could be bullshit too.
But it’s how I feel so it’s what I have to deal with in order to make any progress.
I am still probing the limits of rationality. I have gotten far enough that I am willing to admit that my emotions know things and I can only learn these things if I listen to them without forcing them into the straitjacket of that which can be justified logically.
I am still very uncomfortable with the idea of venturing outside the brightly burning light of my rational mind, but I at least agree that it is a trip worth making.
Any minute now. Seriously.
And again, I wish I could just rip the band-aid off and be done with it. That I could just open the door between my emotional self and my reason and tell them both to do what they gotta do, I’ll be taking a nap.
There must be some way I can learn to feel the world. Not just process, analyze, rationalize, and store it. That’s all too cold.
I need to truly feel it, emotionally and spiritually. No more chilly reserve. No more smug detachments. No more acting like I am not a part of things.
I am here, I am real, and I am alive.
And I am evr so ready to be born.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.