Okay, I swear this is the last time, but…. sorry about that story about the dog yesterday.
I never intended it to be so long and so sad. But like a lot of men, I am deeply emotionally repressed, and when I started writing about the dog a tiny little crack appeared in the dyke around my heart and a whole lot of sadness, loneliness, and the raw red pain of isolation and neglect came flooding out.
Obviously, the dog is me, with just a thin patina of metaphor. Or rather, the dog is how feel. He’s my emotional reality. He’s the person I am deep inside, underneath all the layers of social artifice and concealed armor and folie a deux,
If I can make you love me, then maybe I can love me too.
Or at least hate myself less.
I know that I do not deserve such hate. By all objective measures, I am a pretty amazing fellow. Bright, talented, unique, honest, sweet, creative, and on a good day maybe just a little bit magical.
But the self hate remains because my anger does not have anywhere else to go yet. So I take it out on myself via internalized abuse.
It’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
i don’t know why I feel such shame when I write something super sad. Like I had done something dirty in public.
I mean, lots of people write super sad stuff, though possibly not quite as sad as mine.
Mine is basically me crying with words.
I suppose I just feel bad for bumming people out. It’s an extension of my fear that if I ever truly opened up about my depression to anyone, it would destroy them,.
That’s not an entirely crazy fear. I collect and purify and distill my darkness instinctively, and I am 47, so I have had a long ol time to brew up some pretty brutal shit.
Even my therapist gets shell shocked and freezer burned when truly exposed to the nightmare within, and he’s treated hundreds of patients over the years.
Once more, I am special and unique in a bad way.
I can feel my id rumbling somewhere below my ribcage. It wants to just scream “fuck everybody” and charge into the world like Juggernaut on a crack bender, destroying anything that gets in my way, grabbing whatever I want, smashing anyone who dares to oppose me, using all my mental strength to bully, manipulate, trick, trap, fool, or annihilate whoever and whatever I need to in order to get what’s due me.
Not sure what that is. Money, for a start.
Of course, I would never actually unleash the beast like that. But after decades of leaving him tied up in the back yard, I am now more willing than ever to consider negotiating a much more mutually beneficial deal with him.
Because the thing is, when you don’t feed the beast…the beast feeds on you.
And I am running out of meat.
More after the break.
Which way is Katharsis?
Because I want to go there.
Last night’s profound emotional expectoration reminded me that the best thing for me is expurgate all my old emotions and for me, that means writing about them.
So (very gruesome image warning) I want to keep pressing on that wound until i have gotten all the toxic gunk out that I can.
Then, if possible, go digging for more.
Because this bad stuff is good shit. When I express it, I feel better after. And not just better. I feel healthier. Stronger. Saner.
The problem is that I do not yet have the emotional tools to attack the problem directly. I have the determination to lean in to my pain and thereby get it out, and I have a very vague notion of what “direction” that is in my as yet very blurry and numb emotional world, but I don’t yet have the ability to sight a pool of latent emotion and go after it like it’s my own White Whale.
Which would make the latent emotion…. whale oil? Ick.
Instead, something has to remind me of something that reminds me of something that reminds me etc until I stumble upon something juicy, then I need to have the awareness and wherewithal (awarewithal>) to grab that reservoir of emotion and start drilling.
But I am working on it. This emotional reasoning (aka “feeling your way) is still pretty new to me, but I am a believer now. I no longer worry that my little light will get lost and swallowed up by the deep dark woods of my emotional life.
It might be a tad dark out there, but it’s nice. Comfortable. Warm. Safe. And I know that I will be able to find my way around when my eyes get used to the light, and that all the little animals will come and visit me when they get used to my scent.
And I know that there is nothing out here that I didn’t put there. Even the scariest of ghosts and the hairiest of monster and the wickedest of demons is really just my pet, doing what it was told to do.
I must remember to freshen their kibble.
SO it’s really just me and my friends out here. And that ain’t so bad.
Figures that my plan for developing my emotional awareness is basically to explore it metaphorically. Metaphors really are my go-to tool for expressing that which is hard for me to put into words directly.
Like a lot of other writers, I suppose. After all, Melville had a lot to say about vengeance, obsession, tunnel vision, and rage, and he could have written it all down as philosophy or psychology or whatever, but he knew that to really express it, he needed a metaphor.
Me, I construct elaborate metaphor so easily they are like a native language to me.
Everything else is an act of translation.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.