It’s occurred to me that mayba I am going about this whole recovery thing all wrong.
My natural response to challenge is to attack it with a huge amount of mental force. I have lots to spare and so it is natural to me to simply turn my mighty analytical mind to the problem and, usually, totally destroy it.
But that does not work on everything. And that’s the problem. Because when it doesn’t work, I tend to give up.
A perfectly example is my experience with arts and crafts in school. I hated them. Why? Because I had a hard time doing them. Unlike all the more academic subjects like English or History, arts and crafts did not instantly yield to my ferocious intellectual assault, and often refused to do that like the intellectually privileged kid I was.
A normal kid with normal grades would have been forced to do it till they got it right. But between my intellectual gifts and my spectacular willful stubbornness, there was nobody to make me do them, so I never learned to persevere.
I resent a lot of the teachers I have had for what they never did for me – like stopping the bulling, for example.
But I also resent them for what they let me get away with. I’d just sit there refusing to do what everyone else felt they had to do, and got away with it because nobody could handle me at all.
And let me tell you something, you nice people you.
People who believe in and follow the rules hate people who break the rules and get away with it, like I did, with the white hot passion of a thousand suns.
No wonder I got picked on. I was, in a way, a successful criminal.
I have never, ever feared authority. Not even in the principal’s office. That might be the most middle class thing about me.
In a perfect world, there would have been someone in my life who could kick my ass. Someone who had the force of personality and intellect to force me to pay attention, follow the rules, and stop fucking around.
But there wasn’t, so I never learned to do that. Never in my entire childhood did I have to buckle down and work hard to overcome an obstacle, therefore I have no memories of having done that and the sense of triumph and mastery it brings to draw upon.
So I have been wimping out when things get tough for a very long time.
And it’s frustrating to try to imagine a way out of it. My powerful yet wimpy mind doesn’t want to go there. Intellectually, I know that there must be an infinite ocean of difficult challenges out there just waiting for me to tackle them full force and just keep banging away at them till I succeed.
But unless they come in video game form, I doubt I will be doing it any time soon.
More after the break.
I suppose I need to stop being so tender and delicate with myself.
The question, as always, boils down to the question of fleeing or staying. We can heap all the extraneous complications on it we want. We can talk about childhoods and chemical imbalances and rotten luck all we want, but it’s still fundamentally about whether you stay in, or tap out.
I tap out. Most of the time, anyhow. In fact, my failure to endure is so complete that I tap out of the things I think might have to tap out of due to other things I also tap out of.
It’s the 3D chess of failure.
It follows the pathology of progressive phobias : First you are afraid of the thing itself upon encountering it. This fear response is so strong that it attaches not just to the thing itself but to other, related things and ideas. So then you encounter one of these precursors to the thing itself. That fear response is so strong that it then attaches to other things and ideas relating to the things and ideas relating to the thing itself.
And so forth and so on. If the pathology is particularly virulent, you can end up with someone with such a large network of phobias that they can’t do much of anything without triggering the whole damned thing.
That’s the position I am in. I know, intellectually, that what I am truly afraid of is socially awkward moments. I also know that these are not the big deal that my phobia makes them out to be and that a lot of what I feel when they happen has more to do with my past than anything present in the present.
And if that was it, my condition might be manageable. But of course, that’s not it. Radiating out from that fear is an enormous spiderweb of fear that stretches out to infinity in all directions, to the point where it limits the things I can do without triggering my fear to a very small set of long-established low-physical-stimulus high-effort-to-reward-ratio things that do a passably good job of seeming like life.
But they are not life. If they were, I wouldn’t be able to handle them. Life is bright and loud and scary. The only way to avoid the fear is to obey the phobia completely.
Failure to do so will throw me into utter panic.
I am well beyond the point where the fear is about the thing itself. What I am truly afraid of is my panic attacks.
When those are on the table, you don’t need anything else. They are punishment enough to keep me in line.
And I don’t know how one goes about fixing that. I wish I could just unplug the whole thing from the wall and be done with it.
Instead, all I can do is keep going to therapy, and hope that by doing so, I will one day pull all the shrapnel and toxins from my soul, and be free.
All I need is a little faith.
Yeah, about that….
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.