Stop hitting yourself

Let’s talk about that brutal inner prosecutor of mine.

I don’t know how to shut it off. That’s been firmly established. They say a lot of recovery is about self-forgiveness and that certainly applies to me. I am constantly tearing myself apart with the harshest and most unfair judgments imaginable. Judgments that basically amount to nothing I do being even remotely good enough.

Whatever I am doing, I am doing it wrong and I shouldn’t have even tried. That’s the voice of my depression and at this point in my life it’s a very strong voice. And it’s pretty much been able to act with impunity and without mercy for a very long time.

Whatever I do, it’s never enough.

 

And I know it’s a deadly feedback loop, where my lying cheating fascist prosecution attacks and hurts me then uses the fact that I am broken and wounded as further proof that I am horrible and worthy of punishment.

I know that this closed-loop emotional response system is deadly toxic because the same emotions circulate over and over again without being expressed, and the system, maladaptive to the end, responds to this not by forcing an outlet into existence but by shutting down most of its functions and devoting all of its remaining energies to containing the toxic sludge inside me instead.

And the toxins accumulate and the slude becomes more and more radioactive and I end up losing 20 years of my life to depression.

Well, depression and the ability to totally mask my symptoms when others are around. My invisibility reflex has cost me dearly in terms of help and nurturing opportunities because nobody can help you with problems you actively work to conceal from them.

I assume that a lot of people had some idea that I was dealing with some serious shit and had major issues. Or at the very least, they got that there was something wrong with me. I probably put out a pretty weird vibe.

Mixed messages, for sure. I try to be fun and interesting and entertaining, and I’m a sweet guy. And I know I can be very charming and charismatic when I am “on”. But I am also awkward and alienating due to my total lack of socialization as a child, and the resulting awkwardness as I try to think my way through social situations most people navigate through via trained instinct.

It’s like the normal majority all have telekinesis and I am the poor guy trying do everything without it, and then judging myself mercilessly for not doing it as well as them. And they don’t even know that they have it and so they are genuinely puzzled by my inability to do that which is incredibly simple and basic for them.

And try as I might, it’s still an invisible disability and one without a name that immediately explains my problems and so I end up being this pathetic bumbling buffoon who is doomed to forever be apologizing for making the sort of mistakes that people have never seen before and making people maybe not want me around.

Like take Friday night. Please. I was at Felicity’s parents place, hanging out with her and Joe and watching videos like we do, and at one point I ended up needing to use their guest bathroom.

So I do my business and wash my hands and think nothing of it.

next morning, I get a message from Felicity saying I left the faucet running. and it had run all night as a result.  Yes, I somehow forgot the “turn off the faucet” step of washing my big ol hands.

And I mean…. who does that kind of thing? Crazy people, that’s who. Mentally intact people do not. And this is the kind of thing happens to me over and over and over again and there seems to be nothing I can do to stop it.

All through my childhood,. I was told I could prevent these mishaps by  “just paying closer attention to what you are doing.”

And I try, I really do. But no matter what, it never adds up to competence. If I pay more attention to one thing, I let another thing slip. It’s so demoralizing and depressing to know that despite your best efforts, your life is going to keep bringing you back to the same humiliating place over and over again.

I hope some day I am famous and respected enough that the bizarre brain errors of mine are seen as a charming eccentricity and symptomatic of the high cost of genius.

Or at the very least, that I get enough money for it to no longer matter.

I do wonder sometimes if there is something physically wrong with me. Like there is some subtle but deep error in how my brain works that keeps me from being able to cope on a physical level.

I’ve talked before about how my brain prioritizes its inner processes over anything to do with reality. So I never know when something internal will overwrite whatever it is I am trying to do or remember or whatever and I am left struggling to cope with the resulting loss of realtime cognitive coping power.

It makes for a highly unstable mental environment.

And yet, it is also what give me my magic powers. Those powerful internal processes are what power my creativity, intellect, and insight. I am constantly struggling to truly understand the world and that means that many tracks of correlation and deduction are running at all times – even in my sleep.

Especially in my sleep.

With my conscious mind asleep, those rude and greedy inner processes have the whole mind to themselves. No wonder I wake up tired all the time.

It never stops.

In some ways, I feel compromised. because I know this intense prioritization of internal processes is the source of a lot of my problems.

But I could never give up the benefits of them.

I mean, if I didn’t fill my mind with all this stuff, something terrible would happen.

I would have to live life in the real(time) world.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

The mother of all ice cubes

Just to get this out of the way : water imagery!

I have been contemplating the iceberg that sits on my heart and keeps me from being able to totally relx around people, let alone be truly open with them and thus connect with them on more than an intellectual level.

I can feel it\ there, a gnarled knot of tension and fear and paranoia, and compared to it, the rest of the the ice around my heart is a  half-cup of lukewarm slush.

It’s where all those miles of frozen tundra inside my soul come from. It is the frigid prison I built for myself to keep the world OUT and be SAFE. Safe where nobody could touch me. Safe where I knew the arctic winter cold would kill anyone who tried.

And some have tried, and died, banging their hearts on some mad bugger’s wall. I didn’t know how to let them in. Presumably I did know at one time, but after a while these things get rusted in place.

It’s not their fault. I just couldn’t relate to them. They were… normal. They had normal childhoods with normal parents who fussed over them, scolded them, looked out for them, worried about them, and fought with them.

I couldn’t be part of that world. Not with all that ice in me. I was stuck in an over-intellectualized trap that kept me safe… and isolated. I could never let down my guard. Not with people who live in the real world, undetached.

I still don’t know if I can be part of that world. I’d like to be. Heck, I long to be. part of that warm and shining world that I saw in the windows of other people’s houses. I would look and wonder what it was like to live there. In that world.

But I lacked the language and the mental flexibility to recognize what the problem was. I suppose that was part of the shared reality of my family. I would look into those houses and wish I was there but then I would admonish myself and feel guilty because I could neither see nor articulate what they had and my family did not.

Life just seems more…. real in there. It was a world full of people for whom icy intellectualism is not an option so they had no choice but to deal with things as they come and do they best they could with the muddle of emotions and thoughts that life had given them.

Sometimes they act on emotion. And they don’t feel ashamed of it either. That’s an acceptable thing in their world. These people did not grow up in the kind of regime of extreme emotional hygiene I did.

In many ways, my mother is a very sweet, kind, wonderful person.

But if you are afraid to upset your mother because you love her so much, that does not leave a lot of room for honesty, and without honesty, there is no intimacy. No connection. I feel like my siblings and I all got the same programming mixed in with our sloppy joes on Saturday night,.

That programming said : always be peaceful and calm and happy around Mom. Don’t let any negative emotions show because she will get upset and she is such a strong projecting empath that the negativity will come right back at you, along with the terrible guilt about having upset her.

So I don’t know about my siblings, but I never told her a damned thing about what was really going on in my head or my life. Around her, I was always OK. Fine, really. No need to worry about little ol’ me. Nothing to see here. Move along.

That left me with nobody I felt I could talk to about my problems. And no way to express all my negative emotions… including the suicidal ones.

And the thing is,. I think I internalized this regime of always being A O K as far as the world was concerned. It was definitely not okay for me to not be okay. I knew deep down that what people wanted was a response that reassured them enough so that they could go back to not thinking about me.

Like this little alarm went off in their heads now and then and they realized they had been ignoring me for a long time and there was probably something they should be doing about that. Probably.

So it was easy for me to give them that signal they wanted. I knew that no good could come of saying anything but that I was fine. People wanted to maintain the momentum of their daily lives and if I had given a non-OK response, it would have ended up in an emotional train wreck as people reacted with a level of shock commensurate to my suddenly projectile vomiting blood while my head rotated.

Get your kids the Fun Time Exorcist Sprinkler Toy today.

That’s how unexpected a non-OK response would have been. A non-OK response would have forced people to deal with me as a human being when they were so comfortable forgetting I existed.

No way that would have gone unpunished. No way I rated even one percent of that kind of emotional investment.

My conception was an accident. Do I was born already an inconvenience. An imposition. And my family was quietly determined to keep the disruption to their lives to an absolute minimum, and that meant minimizing me.

And to this day, I feel like I don’t have a right to exist. Like I am a detriment to all who know me and nobody ever really wants me around or wants to hear from me,. and if I am lucky enough to accidentally get some attention, I am comeplled to do my darnedest to entertain them as best as I can in order to encourage them to keep the attention coming for as long as I can.

That last thing I would do is reveal anything remotely negative or serious about myself. Then people would run away in packs because I was already wearing their patience thin just be attracting their attention and reminding them I exist.

Any negative emotion coming for me would be a patience-snapping unendurable imposition of the highest possible order.

So I kept everything locked up tight inside. Nothing else was safe.

And I learned to disappear. After all, that’s what seemed to make people the happiest. When I did my level best to preserve the illusion of my nonexistence.

Don’t talk at the dinner table. Don’t attract attention to yourself. Never ask for anything, ever.  Not even if your life depends on it. Go along with whatever your parents ask of you, They are both busy and tired and they have enough on their plates dealing with their three older PLANNED children. The ones they INVITED.

So you’ll just have to fit in wherever. Or not. We don’t care either way. Just don’t bother us by having any kind of needs or wants or desires or anything.

Meanwhile, I was drowning at the bottom of an icy-cold ocean and being crushed by the pressure.And I didn’t even know it.

It persists to this day. There’s a lot of things I would like to talk over with my mother AND my siblings, but that would disrupt THEIR lives, and so no matter how much it might help me, it’s completely out of the question.

My needs never even enter into it. I am worth absolutely no investment of time, energy, consideration, or even mere thought, or any other conceivable resource, whatsoever.

And that’s why I grew up to be crazy,

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.