My sister says I shouldn't be terribly concerned and that it is a kind of venting, me, I'm somewhat concerned.

For years when things got to be too much I'd go places, just shutdown for a while and visit in my mind places I liked and had been before. I'd sit atop some rocks in the woods and watch the clouds roll by, and so forth. Meditating as it were. For many, many years I had a conscious fracture who stood between me and the outside world to act as a buffer. I suffered serious abuse as a child starting at age two, and two events, that I now remember in a level of detail I wish I didn't.

Fast forward many years, my alter finally shorted out and died protecting me, which means I'm left trying to find new ways to live. I still go places, and while some of my sacred special places, real places are still there to me, still available, I've been going to a new one that scares me a bit.

I'm a Stargate Fan, a pretty big one. I've also got a pretty powerful and vivid imagination, always have, and since I'm still in ways five, it makes going places easy. I've even gone through the gate and visited other worlds, just to see what gate travel was like.

Of late however, right at this moment even, while I'm in my bedroom sitting in bed writing this, I'm also in the gate room. For those who've seen the show, picture the gate room, all the blast doors closed, base power off, iris open, outgoing wormhole connected and the only light in the room from the event horizon. I'm just standing there playing with the event horizon, locked in the gate room all alone, my only way out through the gate. No gdo, no radio, nada.

For those who've never seen the show, in simple terms, it is a huge concrete and steel box buried 28 floors below ground, and when sealed off is like being buried alive. The only way out is to go to another planet entirely, but I have no idea what planet since I didn't connect the gate. I suspect I know which one, but that isn't important, it just ISN'T this one.

So I'm just standing there, or at times sitting there, all alone. I'm literally in both places at once, and sometimes I feel like if I just step through I'll disappear and end on another world in a life so much better than this one. It makes wandering intentionally so much harder, because I get confused sometimes, will I be able to get back? Which one is real?

Sometimes it is amazingly peaceful, and having grown up with the ever present hum of the Enterprise Engines in the background to now have the gate instead is interesting and cool. It started out that I'd intentionally lock myself in the gate room with an open wormhole to meditate (Kel no'reem) as a way to help myself focus, but now, well it is something else.

I mean I KNOW that the gate is a fictional device, the gate room an equally fictional place, and so forth, but it all feels and seems as real as this one does. I feel like I'm stuck. I can walk up and down the ramp, hearing the sound of my feet hitting the steel decking, I can run my hands over the walls, bang on the walls and blast doors and so forth. I just don't want to step through the gate now because I'm afraid I cannot or will not come back, and well life here isn't anything to write home about. In fact, it is about as much fun and as much use as being stuck in the sealed gate room with no power, all alone.

What's got me worried is this is going on real-time, concurrently. . .

So, yeah, there is this very real part of me that knows it's all just dissociative venting, protecting myself from the stress in my life, but there's also my heart. My heart in so many ways is still five, tired of being blown off, and doesn't have to deal with the passage of time locked away in the gate room.

So I've just replaced one kind of closet with another, and am now stuck dealing with both. No small wonder I'm starting to have physical impacts that I didn't when I had a conscious fracture.

Carrie Underwood is singing "Wasted" on my Sirius Radio now, and I feel like it's been four plus decades just like that. Isn't is Ironic?