My mood seems to be drifting towards the negative end of things lately.

I feel increasingly pent up, frustrated, irritable, nihilistic, and angry. I had my first “I hate my life” moment in months yesterday. I want to do something – fight something. lift a massive burden, fuck a mighty beast, punch a mountain in the face, anything really, so long as it takes a lot of energy and vents my aggression.

And it’s unpleasant (to put it mildly) but it doesn’t worry because I know what it is all about. Another big iceberg of frozen pain has broken off the glacier that sits on my heart, and it’s making me angry as it melts.

That, and my dissatisfaction with my current life is building up. Maybe this time it will come to a crisis point and then transcend into a period of determination and resolve that powers an attempt to grab some long term progress once more.

Like getting an agent. Or a gig off of UpWork. Or joining a political subReddit and trying to make a name for myself there. Or looking for writing contests i can enter. Or any of the other avenues I know damned well lie open for me to pursue any time I want.

My kingdom awaits.

It waits for me to be healthy enough to go claim it. I know deep in my soul that I can make a very big splash in the world if I put the world in. I no longer have the luxury of self doubt : I know I’m amazing, a truly gifted communicator (and so much more), and that all kind of success are possible for someone like me.

But I have to get healthy first. Until I do, I will continue to cling to my little hidey hole and be unable to risk success.

Yeah, I said risk. Because that’s how the sick scared part of me sees it. It sees success like it sees everything else : like it’s a big hand reaching down to pull me out of my hiding spot and take me away to a place where I will be naked and exposed before the world, with no way to escape when it all becomes too much for me.

So it prefers to stay hidden and “safe” and let the days pass me by without my making any kind of mark on the world till the day I die in utter obscurity and ignominy.

And what a tragedy that would be! All this power and talent and potential wasted because my mental illness smothered it in its crib.

Well fuck that.I’m going to use my frustration and rage to bash away at walls of my depression like an angry Juggernaut (bitch) and keep on bashing till I make an exit for myself, and then I am out of here.

And so what if I have to abandon all my usual escape routes? That just means that the only way out is through and I will have no choice but to succeed if I want to be able to return to the peace of the hidden.

That works for me.

More after the break.

---

No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

Pink Floyd, “time”

Because there is no starting gun.

I consider myself a textbook case of “failure to launch”. I had everything I needed to succeed in life – I was in college, getting my usual stellar marks,. impressing the heck of of my profs, on my way to a double major in psych and philosophy, when my parents dropped the boom on me that they were withdrawing funding and ruining my life.

That second part was, to be fair, only implied.

As patient readers know, that was about the worst thing that could have happened to me. I was just starting to truly emerge from my shell when I was kicked out of the nest I had built for myself and forced to return to the town where all the bad shit had happened to me and to the very bedroom I had used to hide from the world when I was not at school.

And that’s when I stopped growing. I managed to pull myself back from the brink of insanity by sheer force of will, but my growth has never resumed.

Until now. Maybe.

But I know another person, a different kind of person, would have reacted differently. They would have rebelled. They would have stormed off to get their own apartment. They would have used the year and a half I had to wait before restarting school to get a job, applying for scholarships, and do whatever else it took to overcome.

But not me. So the question is, what do they have that I don’t?

My answer as of this moment : instinct.

They had instinct pushing them forward, demanding action. driving their decisions. Instincts that told them this could not be allowed to happen and gave them all the anger and spite and other motivations they needed to succeed despite this.

But not I. My early childhood trauma (raped at the age of 4) drove me deep into my own mind and put a thick wall between me and the whole world of the instincts that drive healthy organisms to eat, drink, fuck, and do all the other things required to live.

Instead, I live in an airless vacuum so cold it could flash freeze a live yak in seconds. Whatever instincts I still have can’t operate in that kind of cold.

The circuits are frozen shut. Blood does not pump. Machines break down. Molecular motion itself has died.

That “starting gun”, as it turns out, was instinct.The instinct to live and grow and thrive. The instinct to fight for what you need even if you can’t logically justify it. The urge that makes life go

The instinct without which your life is cold and isolated and lonely because the cure for all those things is following your instincts, and you’re too “smart” for that. .

You god damned fool, you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.