Therapy Thursday. Today’s session was… intense.
First off, we showed up late. My fault – I think I set my alarm for 12:25 am and not 12:25 pm. D’oh! That’s so me.
So we didn’t even leave until 12:45 pm, otherwise known as the time of the appointment. Not a good feeling.
By the time I got there, having been suddenly awoken by Julian (for the very best of reasons) and low blood sugar from not having time to eat before I left plus the utterly horrid weather (dark, cold, grey, rainy) had me, to put it mildly, in a melancholic mood.
In other words, I was depressed as hell. And so for most of the session I vented all my frustrations and fears, or at least a representative sample thereof.
It started with the shit I talked about yesterday about how disappointed I was that I had to remind my fucking doctor why he had ordered the test results we had gone through, and then kinda spiraled down in ever tightening circles like a crippled bomber in its death throes until we crashed at “I’m too sick to do the things that would make me well”
So the good part is that I expressed a lot of my negative shit and that is always a good thing in the long run but feels fucking awful while it is happening and shortly after.
The parallels to
So right now I feel pretty crappy, although food has helped a lot. I am still not in a very good mood but at least I don’t feel like I am dying from the inside out.
I feel like I am still learning to let the bad stuff out. I still struggle with the side of me that feels like my only safety lies in being cute and pleasant and fluffy and fun and never showing my dark side to the world at all.
To in fact hide that side of me in shame and terror, afraid that if people see it they will flee from me forever.
But the thing is, the darkness is part of me as well. And it needs to be expressed. It doesn’t matter how the world reacts to my ugliness and it doesn’t matter how little I, myself, want to pretend that all is lovely flappy Happyland with me all the time.
What you cannot express owns you. Over time, it accumulates, and gets stronger and takes over more and more of your mental resources while you sit there wondering why you find it so hard to think, helpless against the burglars you won’t admit exist.
Hmmm. There’s a pretty decent story structure in there somewhere.
I have decades of ice cold silence stored in those places where normal human emotions and instincts should be. It all has to be dug up and melted and that means it has to be felt and experienced on some level.
And that’s why I have come to associate an icy cold feeling in my chest with psychological progress. It means I am birthing my trauma and pushing all that terrible isolation and pain and inwards-turning and that always sucks but it is way, way better than holding it all in.
Call it the Shawshank Road to Recovery.
Because before you are free, you have to go through a lot of shit.
Feeling somewhat better after a long nap.
The darkness inside me never rests. It roils, it boils, it squirms, it worms its way around. There is a fundamental instability at the very core of my being that is both the source of my mental anguish and the engine of my enormous creativity.
The relationship between creativity and depression goes very deep.
After all, all that inspiration has to come from somewhere.
Creativity requires chaos. There has to be a generator of the possibilities that the selector element then combs through to find the good stuff.
And for many of us highly creative types, that generator is a dark and terrible wound that cannot heal.
It’s hard for me to imagine a life where nothing ever just pops into someone’s head, let alone the often quite rich, complex, and surprisingly complete ones that pop into mine.
But that’s how it must be for a lot of people. Well, maybe not quite absolute – it’s not that they never get spontaneous idea but they don’t get them all the time, like I do.
My head is always teeming with ideas, thoughts, emotions, processes, and every other form of mentation known to man and God.
It’s a pretty loud neighborhood, but we have our fun.
And it’s been that way for as long as I can remember. I suppose that’s what happens when a kid with a naturally high IQ turns pathologically inwards.
They build a playground in their mind and stay there most of the time.
And the thing is, I know that I have all this power. My mind is an incredible thing and I am one heck of a guy and I could do amazing things in the world.
But first I have to escape this cage of fear that is holding me back and that keeps me playing fucking video games in order to not have to deal with life at all.
But the same thoughts keep circling in my head.
I can’t do this by myself.
But nobody can help me either
Nobody can come into my mind and be my willpower and resolve
But I can’t do this by myself
And so forth and so on, ad infinitum ad nauseum.
All I can do is keep birthing my trauma. Just keep painfully pushing out another shard of shattered glass, one after another. Keep throwing up onto the page until I have purged the toxins from my system.
That’s gonna take a long time. I’ve got a lot of toxins.
Is there such a thing as a juice cleanse for the soul?
At least I can try to make my physical self a little healthier. Take ALL of my pills, move around a little more, find more productive kinds of fun.
I haven’t made music in a while. Or videos.
Maybe it’s time I got back to things like that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.