Aren't you lucky.  Two entries in two days.  Look here for yesterdays (you know, if you never figured out that annals button)

     You can't ever go home.  Who said that?  Do you remember who said that?  I can't remember who said that but it came to my mind this morning.   I am sort of at home this weekend.  It is home in that my dad, mother and sister who still lives at home are here.  I have never lived here though, as they moved here after i had left home.  I don't think in my applying this saying to my situation that i am using it in the original intent.  
   As i recall the original intent was that no matter what you did, when you went away you grew up or changed such that the warm and friendly feelings of home would not be there when you returned.  Or at least it could not be the same.  That the feelings of your childhood were lost in your childhood.  
   That's not really what i was thinking.  I mean rather, that you can't come home again because it is, in fact, the same as it was when you left.  That the reasons that were there when you left still exist.  For they will never change, how could they?  

  It used to be that i had a wall that protected me from the things about home that i hated.  It was not that i didn't notice them or that i wasn't aware that they existed, rather it was that i had this wall, this protection that made it such that they would not hit me emotionally.  It didn't matter who screamed and for what reason, who they were yelling at, what they were saying.  There might be some sort of short term anger associated with the incident but there would be no long term hurt.  The water that washed off my back, so to speak.  
   These walls, well they began to grow and overtake the rest of my life.  I have long been known as a person who has these walls.  The walls that keep the world from affecting me, that keep me closed, that keep me protected.  I don't think it would be possible to find walls that are better protection against emotional turmoil and pain than the ones that i have.  I am a person that can be there and totally engaged in any situation without ever becoming emotionally tangled.  
   Well, i guess there is some room for disagreement about the statement, 'totally engaged' if i am not completely bought in with my emotions.  I won't be the one arguing your point either.  I am not sure what it means to be completely, emotionally bought into a situation.  I don't know how it is different from what i do, because i am never there.  It is not part of my being.  But i am learning.  Or rather this is a facet missing from my life that i am trying to encounter and cope with.  
   I think i have touched on this a time or two in the past couple of months in my journal.  With vague sounding references that don't really tell you all that much.  As a result of some stuff that went on in late January and February i have decided to begin to work on this.  To become a person who has complete, or at least more reliable contact with his emotions.   
   It has not  been easy, not easy at all.  Those parts of my mind are almost atrophied, kind of dried up and shrunken.  Not to mention that as i have begun to explore them, i have hit a whole bunch of things about my life that were, well, not, unknown, not blocked, but that i had made not matter because i had these walls to lean on.  it's like viewing things through a fog.  Or, like a sort of dissociation.  You can see it happening but it just doesn't matter as much.  I am not ready to talk about what got me to where i was with the walls or to revisit the pain here that i have relived as i am dealing with the stuff but suffice it to say that a lot of it has been rather intense.  Of course it hasn't been all pain  either, there have been a series of epiphanies and breakthroughs, the incredible feeling of which would have been unfathomable to me a year ago.  

Not only do i have emotions, i can be overcome by them. 

   So, i have made progress, i am become more open, more sensitive.  I have long considered myself to be a sensitive person, but the sensitivity seemed to only matter where others were concerned.  I could feel pain if my friends were feeling pain, i could feel joy if they were feeling joy, but, for myself, these things were relatively foreign.  I can't remember the last time i just got excited at something because it was going to happen.  But things are different now, I am feeling things. I am feeling more than i have been able to in the last 18 years.  This is incredible and amazing and good.  But it is not all easy.  

   Now, a lot of the reasons that i built these walls in the first place was the relationship that i have with my parents.  Or rather i don't think it is the relationship itself it is the parents themselves.  Or something like that. Not horrible people, or at least i can't say yet that they are, but people that, well, are the people that they are.  We shall have to leave it at that for now i am not willing to say more.  Suffice it to say that rather than become a quiet, unassuming recluse who was afraid to speak or act, meek beyond recognition, i used my walls to great benefit to become the person that i became to be.  The person that i love as myself.  
   Seeing my family in the past hasn't been a problem. It wasn't horrible.  I could say, without chagrin or problems that i don't much like them, we need not even speak of love.  The yelling, the consuming rage that could be caused by one but no matter what still had to envelop all, the abuse, the insults, they were heard but they didn't matter.  They bounced off the wall with the worst result being just a  momentary spat of anger. 

  Enter myself, who has been trying very hard to take down these walls.  Who has been coming very close and making all sorts of grand progress.  Well this weekend i decide that since i can get an extra day off and since i have not been home since Christmas that i should come home for the long weekend.  Five days.  I realize now that his was a grand and great mistake. 
   For, you see, i have done the worst possible thing.  I have killed my protection.  The wall, is gone.  I have tried for two months to subdue the wall, though it would try endlessly to regain itself, to pop up at the slightest hint of pain.  Every time i felt emotions coming, negative or positive the wall would come crashing down but i would stifle the impulse.  So, here i am, in my parents house.  Defenseless.   Without a wall.  I stepped on it enough for it not to come back even when i really do need it.

   I can sort of feel it around and i think if i truly reached for it, it would come back for me.  I think, though, that if it comes back it will come back even stronger and i will have lost my efforts of the past few months.    Here, though i am feeling things that are not good.  I don't remember the last time i felt this small inside. I don't know if i have ever been made to feel so much like a nothing.  
   This couldn't happen with the walls in the way.  Not now though, now i have chosen to not use them.  I have no power of blockage.  I can do nothing but listen and absorb.  It used to be that things said didn't matter, that rage narrowed at me didn't do a thing, that constant rage flowing all around me didn't give me rise.  But here i am, feeling ill.  I lay today on the sofa, and wanted to just curl up and be absorbed into the couch.

   I think there is no choice here. I think that i am going to have to distance myself from these people. I don't think i can handle it here anymore.  

   It is a little weird.  I used to take issue with the way that my brother would completely ignore my parents when they asked him to visit or do things for them.   When my brother would not help my dad even though asked.  I used to think that it just an impolite and ungracious way to act.  I would help, i would be there instead.  But, what if, what if the way that my dad provides constant yelling, belittling remarks and abuse at the way you are helping made him feel like i did today?  All of a sudden i was discovering that maybe he was being an ass because the things said and done, were hurting him, as i was hurt today.  
   This notion disturbed me, that my brother might have been in the right.  That my parents might be entirely deserving of ungracious behaviour.  I am not ready to go there though.  I don't want to think about that anymore.  He's not supposed to be right. 

   So, uh, yeah. Things are completely normal right now.  We are watching almost famous.  I am enjoying it, they are tolerating it.   

   I don't know.  I am not putting the walls back up.  Does this mean i have to ditch my family?