Was Therapy Thursday today. Had a decent session.

I did most of the talking. All in all, that’s a good thing. To me, therapy is most about getting stuff out of my mind by expressing them, much like this blog, and so a session where my shrink resists his urge to jump in and argue with me is a good one.

I seem to bring that out in people. I think it’s because the whole package – my strontg presence, my emotive strength, my powers of verbal expression, and so on – subconciously gives people the feeling like I am trying to overwrite the contents of their mind and they therefore have to argue just to maintain their identity.

As evidence, I site the dozens of times in my life people have said things like “you argue like there’s no chance you are wrong^[1]” or “I have the right to my own opinion!^[2] ” or “what makes you such an expert?^[3]” when as far as I can tell, we’re just talking about stuff like all the other humans.

They probably wouldn’t phrase it like that, though.

Presumably, in an alternate timeline, maybe one where I did not get raped at the age of 4, I realized at an early age that I could use my powers of persuasion to make money and ended up a rich ad exec or something.

But in this, our current univers, I ended up with a personality singularly unsuited to exploit those powers. I am far too sensitive and responsible to victimize people like a con man would,. even in more legal forms like finance. I get no thrill from the idea of controlling people and having them under my thumb.

Just seems like too much responsibility to me. I mean, once you have them, you have to take care of them and look out for them and I am already gone, man.

And sure, I am as greedy for cash as anyone else. But not to the point where it supplants my morality.

Nothing supplants my morality.

So in a broad sense, I suppose I am an Amish tech genius.

I have the skills, but I won’t ever use them.

What else… oh, right after therapy,. I had an appointment for wound care at the Richmond Medical Sciences Center, or as locals refer to it, “that building across the street from the hospital”.

Technically, that could refer to two different locations because the hospital faces two different streets. I had to learn which one it was via context.

Being very precise with words is occasionally a liability in this inarticulate world. Especially when you have one tiny toe on the autism spectrum and thus have a tendency to take things literally when under stress.

I did not come to that self-diagnosis lightly. And it’s a highly tentative and qualified one at that. There are just some things about me and my history that don’t make any sense unless you add some sort of social disability to the equation.

Like all those times I have felt that people expected something of me that I desperately wanted to give them but could not.

Presumably, normal people pick up some kind of cue from others that tells them what response is needed and things go smoothly onwards from there.

But my antenna is busted, and I ain’t picking up jack shit. Lucky me.

One thing discussed in therapy today was my feeling that when I was raped, I pull myself into my mind so hard that it did serious social damage on all levels.

The image in my mind was one of having been at the site of an explosion that burned me deep all over and the skin came back but not the nerves.

So I look normal. But I don’t feel the world like other people do.; I can’t feel the warmth of the lover of others or the feeling of social connection or even the simple happiness of being around people.

Instead, I trudge on endlessly, naked and alone in the dark and dying of the cold. The cold which nothing can relieve because the signal just can’t get through.

Just miles and miles of Siberian winter, till the day I die,.

I’d like to think it’s possible that my social damaged can still be healed, even at the age of 46. That if I found the right social environment,. one where I feel appreciated and useful and accepted, and got me the positive social input I need to counter all the bad social input I got as a child,. that I could come to life and join humanity and leave the cold dark tundra behind me.

So I still hold out hope. I don’t know how to find such an place. I suspect it would involve being around people who are a hell of a lot healthier than me so that I could learn from them and absorb their good vibes and happiness.

Part of me would fight that. So part of my therapy would be to fight or at least restrain that part of me.

I have felt toxic and filthy and broken and wrong for so long that my system attacks anything pure and wholesome and good like it’s a foreign invader.

They would have to be particularly nice and patient people because they would have to deal with my not fitting in right away and all my awkward vibes and weird corners.

But I would be willing to fully submit to such an environment. Do what they do, saw what they say, act as they act.

It’s not like my ferocious individualism has ever done me any good.

Maybe I should learn to go along to get along for once.

It’s not like it could make things worse.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.