My head is not right

All this will become clear

I haven't actually died, but I continue to get weirder and weirder.  My inner life is a very interesting place to be right now.

Quick roundup of news before we get down to business:

Work is little better, but progress is being made, slowly but surely, and it looks like the whole place is going down the toilet anyway, so my concerns of having a bright career future at such a fine organisation are dwindling.  My new manager is a cowbag.  My old manager is properly wonderful.  My emails are evil.

A friend who goes by the name of Joanna came to visit.  Good chats, potable beers and general positivity all round.

Christmas looms.  I mostly have all the presents.  It should be a good one.

Now, down to business.  This is a long one, and it ends up in a very troubling place.  It was quite hard to write all this, but it's even harder trying to live with it.  Bear with me if you can, but this post carries a severe Weirdness Warning.  Credit should go to my therapist, who is really fucking good, but the results of his inquiries are pretty much as follows:

My head is not right...


It's hard to know where to start with this, because it's a very weirdly-shaped thing that's going on.  It's like a ouroboric tesseract, or something.  Feel free to look up both of those words.  Also, I think what I'm ultimately searching for, through therapy and introspection, is where to start with this.

That paragraph eats its own tail.  That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Starting to become clear...

I escape reality.  Let's start with that.  For as long as I've had anything serious or important to do, right back to homework and set-text readings at secondary school, I've run away from it into my fantasy worlds.  Through A-levels, University and my work life, I've always taken refuge from my responsibilities in ways that have resulted in a form of addiction.  It's a very adolescent thing to do, and it's something I feel that I have yet to grow out of.  The language I've used there could be a clue.

The worlds I escape to have been briefly explored on this blog so far, but it's broadly femdom-themed with submissive males and females scuttling about suffering abuse or humiliation of some form or another.  Pretty standard stuff for the most part, although there's some weird outlying stuff that sometimes pops up (like the stuff with the dolls).  I'm typically in the fantasy, usually as a male, often cross-dressed as a maid, very occasionally as a female character.  I'm almost always submissive.

And then things get weird, because in the fantasy creation process, namely all the spreadsheets and powerpoints that I cook up to dominate myself, I'm actually in charge.  I'm reflexively topping-from-the-bottom.  It's also true in the captions I make and the stories I write.  While I think I'm being submissive, in a way, I'm actually playing out dominant fantasies, giving voices and characters to my imagined superiors.

And also, it begs the question about why these submissive fantasies are the ones that I take solace in.  I'll just hang that one over the fireplace here...

Moving on, I have issues.  I'm slowly coming to terms with the fact my childhood was not great.  Second child, older sister, introversion, alcoholic father with attendant work-performance issues, mother trying to protect and compensate, moving to a new town, moving to smaller and smaller houses, gradual realisation that we were doing that because of my father's exponential career fails, etc. etc..  It explains a lot about who I am, and why I like the things I like and do the things I do.  In short, two strong women were everything to me while a weak man fell from grace.  That's pretty much my entire childhood experience summed up in one sentence.

And here's where everything starts going wrong.

Because of my childhood experience, I really like women.  This is great, because Feminism.  What's less great is the massive inferiority complex that I've internalised from a very young age.  I've come to see masculinity and its results as hugely problematic and damaging, and the more I read about feminism, the more this is confirmed.  I can never see myself as equal to a woman.  Thus, feminism goes wrong.  All my enthusiasm for it, for supporting the cause, for dedicating my family life to the championing of social justice, it's all rooted in the pedestal I put women on.  It all becomes another aspect of 'better than me', and that's absolutely what feminism is not about.

In my home life too, it looks on the surface like I'm being an excellent husband and father, but again, this goes wrong.  I iron, hoover and cook because I'm submissive and it suits me.  I encourage Furiosa to go for promotions at work because I'm submissive and it suits me.  I listen to what women have to say because I'm submissive and it suits me.  Effectively, what I'm doing is trying to emulate my mother, in order to overcome the inherent inferiority of my masculinity.  I'm putting myself second in the name of feminism, because I don't think I deserve equality.  I'm trying to defeat my father by being my mother, and I never think I'll ever win.

And then it goes completely wrong...  Remember that question that I hung over the fireplace in Act 1?  About why I have all these dom-sub fantasies?  Well, it's about to go off in Act 3:

My fantasies are my childhood, and vice-versa.  I've managed to make perverse sense out of my parents' situation and turned it into femdom.  The women with power and control are my mother and my sister, and I get them to abuse cringing slaves as a way of punishing my father.  As you can imagine, this revelation, from about a couple of weeks ago, has been tantamount to aversion therapy for my fantasy creations.  I now find it incredibly difficult to go to my usual places and do all my usual things on the internet without this looming spectre of gut-churning wrongness.  (While proof-reading this post just now, I had to stop and stare in disbelief at this paragraph for about a minute or so.  I invite you to do the same.)

And you'd think that aversion therapy would be a good thing, as the whole point of this blog is ostensibly to identify the addictive behaviours and reduce them, but no, there's a sting in the tail of this snake that's almost done eating itself:  I use my fantasies to escape from reality, because it's only in my fantasy world that I make sense.  My submissiveness and my inferiority complex don't match the real world, so I need to fabricate a dystopia in order to feel comfortable and soothed.  I've become addicted to using a warped, twisted function of my troubled childhood to deal with the problems that stem from my troubled childhood, and now, for the past couple of weeks, I've gone cold turkey.

My head is not right.

And that completes our circle for today...

I'm trying to deal with work stuff and home stuff, and I have nowhere to run to when it all gets too much.  I think I'm a failure at work because that's what I saw my Dad do.  I think I'm a failure at home, because I'm an anxious, depressed addict with no consistency of mood, energy levels or presence in the room.  I'm falling apart here, haunted all the while by the ghost of a man who also fell apart, and desperately trying to find new ways to avoid everything, keep my head straight, and not be too unhinged around my family.  The sins of the fathers...

Fuuuuck...

But here's one final question, from my therapist, which will hopefully turn out to be the killer question:  What am I avoiding?  I'm obviously avoiding something, with my fantasies, and cat games on my phone, and my burgeoning Netflix anime habit.  I've been avoiding it with this blog, and I've been avoiding it during therapy sessions as well.  There's obviously something very big and very troubling for me that I am deliberately Not Seeing.  I've spent my entire life not seeing it.  My special superpower is not seeing it.  My attention just seems to slide straight off it.  It happens when I look at my work emails, and it happens when I sit down with a computer.  The thing I wanted to do, the thing I planned, the things on The List...  I immediately find something else, something more engaging, where my mind is safe from all the anxiety and responsibility that I find so utterly terrifying for some unknown reason that I just don't see.  There's something that connects this with everything in this post, and I'd be a lot better off if I could just get a look at the invisible, cloaked, stealth, teflon-coated motherfucker...

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