On feeling poisoned

I’ve often talked in this space about feeling poisonous, toxic, radioactive, and so on. It’s a feeling that’s almost always there, and sometimes it gets pretty bad. There’s been times when I felt like just looking at someone would taint them. I can’t recall the last time I felt truly clean on the inside.

Maybe it’s never happened. Not since I was raped as a preschooler. That’s when someone else injected their poison into me. And I have carried it ever since because I refuse to pass it on to anyone else.

It dies in me.  I will not be a transmission vector for evil.

Spoiler for a 20 year old video game : at the end of the classic PC game Diablo,  after you beat the game by slaying its eponymous demonic villain, there is still the problem of what to do with the potent evil entity and/or force that was animating it. The only solution you have on hand is to take that evil spirit into yourself.

That ending has always appealed to me on a metaphorical and psychological level because it mirrors my own inner struggle so perfectly. I feel like a great evil lives within me, put there by someone who no doubt got it from someone else, and that person got it from another and so forth and so on all the way back to the dawn of humanity.

Or even further. For all I know, this all began with some particularly cranky amoeba.

Of course, in my case, this feeling of toxicity has both a psychological and a physiological component.

Psychologically, it comes from a variety of sources, but they all boil down to the same thing : how I was treated.

Life treated me like I was toxic and so I came to believe it. My family treated me like an unpleasant afterthought. My peers at school hated me and had fun doing it. The teachers on whom I was pathetically emotionally dependent did not care for me either.

They felt the same way my peers did about me. They tolerated me out of sheer professionalism alone.  Looking back, it’s clear that they, like everyone else, really didn’t want to deal with me and I didn’t have the psychological tools to demand my due.

I was hard to handle but too meek to protest being ignored. Dealing with me was difficult but ignoring me was easy.

That made it a no brainer for everyone around me.

When you are treated like that for long enough, you have no choice but to believe it to be true. At least, if you’re a psychologically permeable type like me.

I adapt. That can be a bad thing. Some adaptations work for the situation you are in but are terrible afflictions once that situation ends.

And others are simply too crude and heavy handed. They over solve the problem and thus become problems of their own, to the point of being worse than the original problem and leaving you with a net loss.

Children should not be de facto abandoned their first day of school.

The other half of the equation is physiological. I am not a healthy man and I do a poor job of looking after my many health issues.

There is a horrifying catch-22 aspect to that. I do such a poor job of looking after myself in large part because my health problems make self-care very hard for me.

I just don’t have the strength.

Topic threadjack due to sudden revelation : I don’t think I truly want to get better.

I shall explain. I just realized that a very big party of me passively but very effectively resists efforts to take care of myself, and it goes beyond treating myself the way I was treated or the massive inertia of depression.

No, it’s worse than those : I don’t want to get better because healthiness turns the volume knob of life up far too loud. I use being sick and depressed as a shield against reality – sometimes to dull my inputs to a tolerable level.

And every time I have gotten myself to a seriously healthier state, it has resulted in a life that is too goddamned emotionally loud. Once my perceptions are cleaned up and I can truly feel the world around me has, on a deep level, terrified me, no matter how good I felt on other levels.

And so it was just a matter of time before my subconscious mind sabotaged things so that the old regime, with its comforting numbness, could return.

I’ve talked about depression being a shield to hide behind in this space before,a very long time ago, but I have never seen the problem quite so clearly before.

And I don’t know what to do about it. How do you treat someone who is afraid to be healthy? What kind of pill fixes that?

I’ve thought before that the solution was to turn the volume on life very slowly, with frequent stops to let myself adjust to the new input level.

And that sounds sensible,. but I don’t think it is implementable. I don’t have that kind of fine control over my input levels.

The maladaptive solution I have been using is to control the volume be isolating myself from the world. Kind of like controlling the volume on your stereo by moving further away from it. It technically solves the problem but in a way that costs a hell of a lot more than it brings in.

The only solution I see is for me to find some source of inner strength that can see me through the nightmare of adjusting to the new, higher input levels. Were I capable of religion, that would that source.

But I am not. And that’s not a brag. I wish I was. But I am not.

So I don’t know what to do. I need someone to hold my hand through the process and tell me everything is going to be okay and anchor me through the storm.

At least I have a clear fix on the problem now. I will bring it up first thing in my next therapy session and see what my shrink says.

Maybe he knows what to do when health terrifies you.

But you know what?

I seriously doubt it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

I am not anal

At least, not in the Freudian sense.

I have talked about my being oral retentive in this space before. Under Freud, that means that I never completed the transition from the oral phase on an infant (passive. self-oriented, concentrates on pleasures via the mouth like talking and eating) to the anal phase of a toddler being potty trained.

Said little pooper has transitioned from oral passivity to a phase where they must differentiate themselves from others and learn control themselves – to not do what their body is telling them to do – in order to please its newly differentiated caregiver(s).

As an extension of this, the child learns disgust, and the concepts of “mess” and “dirt” and other extensions of the anal phase. It learns to control its environment in order to satisfy these newly awakened and shaped sense of “dirty” and “clean.”

And I…. didn’t quite make it.

That’s very clear to me now. Obviously, I made it enough to know where the poop goes, but I never got the lessons in taking care of yourself and your environment.

This was, I have decided, do to neglect.

Nobody was paying enough attention to me to enforce anything but the most basic hygiene rules on me. Nobody had the slightest intention of investing anything like that amount of time, attention, and energy on an unwanted interloper like me.

It’s a little odd that my babysitter Betty didn’t step in to fill that role. She was a wonderful babysitter and I will go to my grave loving her with all my heart, even though she probably barely remembers me now.

What could be more middle class than hiring a working class person to love your children for you?

Looking back on my early childhood. I think she probably did perform the role if teaching me to be more neat and tidy and to look after myself.

But then I got raped at the age of 4. And that’s a textbook thing that causes children to regress. I regressed back into the passive oral stage, and was still there when school, rejection, bullying, and total social isolation happened.

No wonder I never made it back to the anal stage. I’m lucky I didn’t end up regressing so far that I became a zygote.

As a result of this, I have very little urge towards cleanliness. My room is always a total mess. Showering is something I do purposefully but without any sort of natural urge egging me on. My excessively deep inner focus makes me quite oblivious to the state of my surroundings. Nearly all the extensions of the anal stage urges are weak to the point of barely existing in me.

And I know that’s wrong. I can feel the wrongness of it. I can feel the lack of appropriate emotional reactions to certain inputs. I can feel the hollow space where they should be.

But the worst part is that these stages happen in sequence, so failure to complete one hampers the development of the others down the line.

In my case, it means that not only did I not complete the anal phase of my development, I never ever got within long range sensor range of the final stage, the genital stage.

That’s the one where you learn to get pleasure from interacting with others.[1] This where all the kindergarten level social programming comes in about sharing, getting along with others. and making friends comes in.

I never went to kindergarten.

And yet I was blessed with this outrageous IQ. So the school part of school was never difficult for me. It was so easy for me that I never even took it seriously.

Kind of wish I had. At least in high school. Scholarships, as it turns out, would have been a very good thing for me.

But nobody asked me to try for them, and I have never been long on initiative.

So here I am with my genius level mind and my infant level social development, trying to make it in a world for which I am not at all ready for even though I am 44. I live in a state of constant maximum retreat from reality. I am always dealing with the absolute minimum amount of reality, and especially sensory input, that I can get away with and my standards for “getting away with” are extremely low.

Childishly low, one might say.

I think this disconnect between my mental development and my psychosocial development explains a feeling I have had for a long time.

Basically,. it’s a feeling like my soul is too small for my brain. I often feel like my magnificent mind is this enormous overpowering entity and I am this tiny figure cowering in its shadow, terrified by its power and force of presence.

On my better days. I at least feel like that tiny figure is in control of the mighty machine it is too weak and scared to deal with.

And I have spent a long time trying to forget that there is a difference between myself and my mighty mind. Pretending it is me and I am it is second nature to me. After all, I tell myself, who am I if not that smart guy? Where would I be if I didn’t at least have brilliance going for me? What else do I have to offer the world but my mind?

But I am not my mind. My genius is not my defining characteristic. I am so much more than a really smart dude.

In a way, I feel like my big brain has been pushing me around for a long long time. Like it’s a pet that has grown into a menace due to neglectful owners.

But I am not my mind. I am me, the person, Michael Bertrand. And if my mental monster of a mind can’t handle that, it can fuck right off.

Because I was here first.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Try not to think about that one too hard. It will not end well.