5/6/16

Today's Horoscope

All signs:

Today the stars want to remind you to not kill yourself in tiny increments. They're not talking about suicide, but by all means, don't do that either. They're talking about dying inside.

Except for a lucky few, we all have extremely painful or traumatic events in our lives. I'm talking about the truly horrific ones, the ones that you only tell a few people about, if you tell anyone at all. The ones that shake you to your core, and change you and damage you and leave scars that never fully heal.

The only way to deal with them and still function is to kill the part of you feels the pain, if only for awhile, until you can even look it in the eye. So you build a wall around it or you chain it away in the recesses of your mind and act like it doesn't exist. It's too raw, too new, screaming at you constantly.

So you bury it, and put a damper on your emotions so the torments only poke at you now and then. When you're ready, you'll go back and face it and try to heal.

That's the plan, anyway.

And it's not a bad plan. You need to insulate yourself sometimes, lest the electricity burns you to your core. Doctors and psychiatrists, social workers, animal rescue people, soldiers, police officers, and a thousand other people have to build up a disconnect or they would lose their minds.

It's a very delicate balancing act, though. After so many horrors and disappointments you can end up not caring. There are a lot of those people that become hardened and cynical and lose some of their humanity, and it's hard to blame them. Well, nowadays people love throwing blame around, but we shouldn't.

The same thing can happen to us if we're not careful. We all have a lot to deal with, and the plan we made to ignore the pain now and get back to it later often just stalls at the ignore part. We never get around to doing the work, so we just keep it locked away and never resolve it, never heal. And so a little bit of us dies.  

Soon our brains see it as the easy way out, and our brains are very efficient. They will always take the easy way out if we let them.  That's why you need to motivate yourself to exercise or mow the lawn or stop drinking. You are fighting all your instincts, even if those instincts are bad for you.

So we start to handle everything by shutting it out or burying it deep inside us. We stop caring about others, because the dead spots keep us from understanding their situation because we can't access those feelings that we've suppressed.

We can become petty and cynical and hardened to the people around us. We start to feel contempt rather than pity, and disgust rather than compassion.

And then we are dead inside, because little by little, drop by drop, we have shut down the thing that makes us human and humane. Like so many ways in our lives we are ruined by a coping mechanism run amok.

The only way to avoid it is to find resolution as quickly as you are able. It's never going to be easy, so you can't wait for that. Lean on your friends, or get professional help if you feel you need it, but don't let the dead spots rob you of your soul.

While the stars seemingly fill the night sky, the darkness in between is inconceivably massive. While it is true that the universe is held together by dark matter, remember one thing: We cannot see it, we cannot touch it, we don't even realize it's there. That's not what you want for yourself. You want to be in touch with your emotions and your humanity, and to fill yourself with all the light you can, because you really don't want to find out what kind of things can live in the shadows.