I’m pretending to be snowed in today.

I’m sitting at home playing with the cat and looking at the lovely snowfall out my back window so I don’t have to look out the front windows and see that the roads are clear and I could go to work or anywhere else I wanted.

For reasons that are private, I’m sad today. I’m trying to just go ahead and be sad. To feel the feeling and not try to cover it up with frenzied activity or drugs or alcohol or anything else. I’m not avoiding it for once.

I wrote not long ago that when I have the notion that I’d like to have a glass of wine with dinner, I’m able to have that thought and let it go, like Mcarp’s zen masters do when they are meditating. Today, that’s what I’m trying to do with this sadness.

This is real sadness, too. It’s not my depression. It’s important to me to process it. I’ve not been very adult in my life about feelings. Most of my life, whenever I felt any strong emotion of any kind, I looked for some way to drown it out. Literally drown it in alcohol for many years, but other times to drown it out in some other way. Some of the ways I’ve tried to supress emotions is by reading, watching movies, smoking pot, getting out and going from hither to yon, and, to my shame, often by using one or more women to boost my self esteem and distract me.

The result of stuffing my emotions rather than feeling them and processing them has been that those emotions come out sideways. Sometimes, I’m so successful at stuffing so many emotions for so long that they all come out at once in a suicidal gush. Sooner or later, I’ve found, emotions have a way of being felt and making themselves known and translating into some kind of behavior or another.

I don’t like it that I’m so emotionally stunted and I don’t like it that I’m emotionally fragile. I’d like to be the Marlboro Man. Stone faced and strong. Independent and self sufficient. My reality is that the Marlboro Man is an illusion. That’s not who I am and it’s not who I’m ever going to be.

Men don’t cry. I’d like to find the asshole who thought that one up as the paradigm for American culture and kick his ass from here to next week. Probably the same guy who thought up the idea that all American women have to look like the models on the cover of Vogue. Let’s get that jerk and run him out of town.

Right this very minute, I wish I COULD cry. Just get it over with and done. Nobody’s around and nobody could see me or shame me or tease me or anything.

I think I’m a little afraid to cry. That once I get started, it’ll be like when the suicidal gush comes and once I have that first tear, I won’t be able to stop because all the sadness I’ve stuffed will come out. Would that be so bad? Probably not. Probably the best thing for me. I don’t think it’s possible to cry yourself to death. So, what am I afraid of? Don’t know. I’m just default afraid. Whenever I don’t know what to do or how to act, I’m scared. Non specific anxiety. I’m afraid I’ll lose control, even though the truth is that I’m not in control and never have been.

I know this. If I’m ever going to get better at having emotions and not stuffing them and not being afraid of them, I’ve got to give myself some experience in having emotions and dealing with them honestly.

This is something that most people learn when they are much younger than I am.

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to emotions.

First, I had to drink for 40 years. Then, I had to sober up. Then, I had to have therapy. Then, I had to get my antidepressants right. Only now, in my 50s, am I in a place where I can do what you probably did when you were, say, 10-18 years old. I’m a pretty quick study. I expect that sometime before I retire I’ll be able to get mad, get sad, get glad and get over it.

Don’t be concerned for me. Be glad for me. Rejoice that I’m on my path to humanity. Be happy that this time I’m going to be a little sad for a little while and then be OK. It’s so much better than the alternative.

Peace.