I understand perfectly about your not wanting to trigger someone. I got the feeling from writing about the river that I would trigger some very ugly feelings in me again.

I live with a monster. It's a terrifying monster with the power to kill me. It's called "depression". And I feel I'm fighting it all alone.

So I call anything that triggers those feelings: "Waking the monster."

That song I wrote in Creative Corner is a perfect example. I was going to sing it in my shrink's office. Not now. I'm just going to write it down and slide it across his desk. I'm going to write everything down and slide it across his desk, because I feel it will help me. But even doing that wakes the monster.

You have to understand that I normally withdraw and retreat from everyone. I bury memories deep down so I forget them. (They still haunt me). Going to Father Lindsay was a radical step for me. Chronicaling everything to this degree and handing it all in to my psychiatrist is a radical step for me. Any normal social interaction for me is a radical step. I've been a hermit for years.

Withdraw, retreat, bury; those have been my normal tactics for my entire life as a matter of survival in an emotionally abusive household where I had nowhere to run. The constant agony has pushed me to a crisis point where something has to change. Physical suffering is the one thing in my life that will make me reach out and makes being alone unbearable and for me, reaching out and even getting a hug is the scariest thing in the world.

Worse than death.

Father Lindsay has spoken to my psychiatrist. I'm not sure how far the conversation went. My psychiatrist couldn't even acknowledge that I was his patient and the priest just told him to listen. He did tell him about the counsellor and from what Lindsay told me, my shrink was not happy.