This will be interesting.

Due to a concatenation of events, I will be doing all 1000 words of my daily blogging in one sitting for the first time in a long time.

Basically, I wanted to eat before therapy, but I was not yet ready to blog and didn’t want to blog before therapy gave me something to blog about anyhow, so I did not blog as I ate my lunch like I usually do.

Then after therapy, I felt too depressed and emotionally fragile to blog, so I said to hell with it and punted the day’s blogging to my alternate schedule, 7 pm and 10 pm.

But then I forgot all about that and ended up watching some stuff with J&J as I ate supper, and as a result of that I started blogging at like 9:15 pm.

That leaves me 2.75 hours to do 1000 words.

No problem. Piece o’ cake.

Therapy went okay, I suppose. But I realized that I have a problem with my therapist that tends to lead to my coming away from therapy feeling worse.

Stop me if this sounds familiar : he’s always jumping in to try to solve my problems when all I really want from him is for him to listen to my problems.

It’s almost like he’s from Mars and I’m from Venus.

And it was especially ironic today because one of the things I was trying to tell him about is how doctors keep brushing me off like my concerns are trivial and don’t matter like the doctor from my most recent ER visit did.

And I know my therapist is doing this with the best of intentions. He is trying to help. I can’t fault him for that.

But it’s very depressing to me because it makes me feel like he is yet another person who isn’t listening to me and choosing to talk over me instead.

So he and I will need to have another talk about this. The subject, broadly speaking, has come up before, although not in this exact form.

But it’s my therapy, dammit, and I should not be sitting there listening to him go on and on about stuff I already know.

I’m not looking for solutions. I already know all the things I should be doing. I always do.

Doesn’t make them any easier to do. In fact, it has the opposite effect. I would be better off banishing the entire concept of “should” from my mind and starting over.

And I keep trying to do that. But eventually the shoulds return when I fail to put anything else in their place.

I’m still working on that.

No, what I want from a therapist is intelligent listening. I want someone who understands mental illness to listen to me talk about mine and occasionally ask a question that either keeps the emotions flowing or forces me to look at my issues from a different perspective and thus shed new light on it.

I do not need life advice. It never truly applies to me anyhow. Even when it’s coming from my therapist, who should know better.

But no, even his advice misses me entirely, and instead is meant for someone with far more motivation and far less fear than me.

“You should do this! and this! and this!”.

Yeah yeah. Add it to the pile of shoulds in the corner. None of that is going to happen. You might as well be telling me to sprout wings and fly away.

Because the things you are suggesting seem just as impossible to me. I will shrug and agree that yup, that sure sounds like something I should do.

But nobody thinks to ask me whether I will do it or not. The answer may surprise you.

And as you know, my depression has been pretty bad lately. Hence the title of this blog entry. It feels like a cold dark night even when the sun is out during the day, and I have two states : distracted, and miserable.

So I try to stay distracted.

I really feel like I am going through something. Processing some large chunk of emotion, perhaps. Straining to push it through like I am trying to pass a stone.

Of course, the massive allergy attack I just had despite having taken my Reactine today is not helping matters any.

Guess the pollen count must be pretty damned high.

But anyhow, back to my emotions. I feel like I have mental indigestion, and it always makes me wish there was the psychological equivalent of serum of ipecac so I could make myself vomit up whatever it is that is ailing me and be done with it.

Barring that, I guess all I can do is wait it out. Maybe try to guide my mind towards the point of greatest catharsis in order to “lean in” to this crisis and get it over with.

I will gladly set fire to my pain in order to destroy it. Let it burn, the flames purify me with their agony and their clarity.

There are worse things in life than pain. Pain can wake you up and make you feel alive. Pain can teach you many things. Pain can cut through the fog of your mind and banish the numbing clinging miasma that is killing you like sunrise burning off fog.

I’ll trade physical pain for emotional pain any day of the week.

I am choosing to stay with my pain this time. Normally I would escape up into the aerie of The Big Picture and look down at my problems from an Olympian height as if that was a way of dealing with things.

Transcendence is not that cheap. You have to feel the fucking emotions first.

At least I am making significant progress against my own bullshit. It’s a cliche, but the greatest enemy truly is our own illusions and it is only by stripping those away that we can finally deal with our problems.

Luckily, I already have a mercilessly truthful point of view, and so stripping away my own illusions is just an application of a pre-existing skillset self-referentially.

So I am perfectly capable of aiming the scalpel of my mind at the excess fatty tissues of my all too bloated mind.

Physician, peel thyself!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.