I am sick and tired of surrendering all the time. ^[1]

Because that’s not the real me. I’m a fighter. I’m a scrapper. I don’t take crap from anyone. When I activate, watch the fuck out, because now all my intellect and verbal skills have been crystallized into their most deadly form and it’s all being aimed at whatever asshole has pissed me off.

So why should I let this asshole that calls itself “my depression” get away with fucking me over? Why should I surrender to it when I should be drawing on all my latent rage and my naturally combative nature to fight tooth and nail for my own happiness?

So I am giving up on giving up. No retreat, no surrender. From now on, the only way out of the situation is over the dead bodies of my enemies.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. Mostly.

The urge to flee and hide is some major league mojo and too powerful a force to merely discard and suppress.

So the idea is to harness that by taking retreat and surrender off the table, so that the only way to get the escape and relief I crave like heroin is to deal with the problem and by opposing end it.

Looked at that way, becoming stronger and healthier and such seems way more doable. It’s not a matter of becoming an entirely different kind of person.

It’s just a matter of redirecting my existing emotional energies into something more conducive to my enjoying life.

But it does mean doing something I have been avoiding doing for my entire adult life : becoming a harder man.

Harder. Tougher. More calloused. Less sensitive. More aggressive. Less passive. Better equipped for survival and fighting to get what I want. No longer a sad little boy hiding from the terrifying real world in video games.

Instead becoming a big strong man who is ready, willing, and able to use the extraordinary gifts with which he is blessed to squeeze some goddamned happiness out of this rotten old world and actually enjoy living for a change.

It’s like I have had a million dollars in the bank all this time, but I was living like a pauper because the power of the money and the associated responsibility scared me.

Well fuck that noise. It’s time for me to use my superpowers to enrich my life.

I am not the helpless abandoned child I imagine myself to be.

I’m a balls out full on fucking wizard, and I am sick of waiting for the world to come find me in my social duck blind and verify my specialness.

I am ready to go out there and prove it, in giant flaming capital letters. I am goddamned amazing and I deserve a much better life than that sad little boy can provide.

Don’t worry, kid. You’re coming with me. And we’re going to find a place that is safe and warm where we can be happy.

Even if we have to build it ourselves.

More after the break.

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Today was Therapy Thursday, and I did my best, in my sideways stumbling way, to put across my recent thoughts about myself, my powers, my ego, my worries about going insane or turning into an asshole to my shrink.

And it’s that last bit I am going to talk about : turning into an asshole That’s the other bugaboo my depression uses to keep me under its big fat thumb.

So when I try to think about freeing myself from its stranglehold so I can finally be free to grow, my depression, in addition to the mega-messiah demigod delusions of grandeur type thoughts, also feeds me id fueled arrogant rage thoughts about how much better I am than other people.

And that’s a more realistic worry, to be honest. A lot of people (especially men) in my position react to a world that doesn’t understand them and sometimes actively hurts them for being smart by defensively flipping the script and saying “I’m not inferior to YOU…YOU are inferior to ME!”.

And I can feel those stirrings within me. Heck, the stuff I wrote above the break today smells strongly of that kind of thinking.

But just like I said I might have to go a little crazy in order to become sane, I might have to become at least somewhat of an asshole to be able to learn to love myself.

I don’t want that to be true. One of the only virtues I can claim is that I am one heck of a nice fellow. A real sweetie. Sensitive, caring, understanding, lovable ol’ Fru.

But is that the real me? Yes and no. None of it is faked, those are real motions and I really do care about people, and care very deeply.

But that’s not the entire me. It’s a curated version of me. I am beginning to realize that I am super good at showing a selected facet of myself while keeping the gem its hidden in the dark.

Put another way, I wear a lot of masks. And they are all me in the sense that he who makes and wears the masks never changes. Only the masks change.

I think the most frightening thing, however, is that while I have that mask on, that mask is me. I am one with the mask.

That’s why I occasionally talk about having “modes”. To me this is second nature, but I suppose to a more fixed person it might seem like I am a different person in each mode.

But no. I’m just reflecting the light using the facet of myself that the situation prompts.

Somewhere inside me is a little director who decides which facet to use at which moment. The one that reflects the situation best, I suppose.

Anyhow. Dragging myself back to the point, none of those facets is the entire me, and in order to become whole, wholesome, and sane, I am going to have to gather together all these little compartmentalized parts of myself and knit them into a whole and entire me.

And he/me will still be a heck of a nice guy.

But he/me will be a lot of other things too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.