All right, time to set the controls for the heart of the sun.
There is a very important question floating in the center of my mind like a persistent turd and today I am going to do my best to flush it by addressing it as directly as I can :
“Was my childhood really as abandoned and isolated and lonely as I remember it being and as I have been telling myself for decades, or were all the things I needed right there for me and I just could see or feel them because of my depression?”
That was a lot shorter in my head.
I have accepted the internal narrative of utter abandonment to describe my childhood for decades, and that’s certainly how I remember it feeling.
Under that narrative, I was cruelly abandoned to the abuse of my peers by callous administrators and teachers who hated me for showing them up in class (quite innocently) and thought I was getting what I deserved.
And this remains true for as far as it goes.
But how far does it go?
I’ve come to realize recently just how depression’s anhodonic numbness can act like a big thick wall that keeps you from feeling the good things and the bad with equal efficiency and how that might blind a person like me to the reality of their situation and give me a false impression that things were far worse than they actually were.
To be clear, here, though : ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Subjectively speaking, the childhood I got is the one I remember, and no amount of re-evaluation will change the fundamental fact that I felt abandoned, lonely, and miserable all the time.
That said, if there were people there trying to help but who just couldn’t get through to me, I think I am better off knowing. I know I was incredibly hard to reach as a child because of just how deeply into myself I withdrew in response to the rape.
I was there, seemingly rational and sensible and eager to please, and yet I wasn’t really there at all. I was a million dimensions away and only communicating with reality via long distance relay.
So maybe a lot of people tried to help me but just couldn’t reach me, so they gave up.
And there I was, desperately lonely in my little bubble, too numb to sense what was going on outside my little world, not even aware that someone was trying to help.
What I needed was someone with a strong will, a sharp mind, and a whole lot of determination who could get me to focus on them and give them all my attention and take them seriously for long enough that the “I am trying to help you” message would finally get through to me.
I mean, I know there were people trying to help me in the first three years of elementary. They did all sorts of tests on me and various adults talked to me about how I felt and such and I absolutely adored all the attention and loved showing off how bright I was on these tests, and I suppose on some level I knew they were trying to help me but I realize now that I never took them seriously. It was all a game to me.
And who knows. Maybe by irrepressible need to show off did me wrong because I certainly didn’t seem sick, lonely, abused, or depressed when I had an audience.
It was when I was all alone, with no adults to impress, that things got very bad.
And that’s the part nobody ever saw.
More after the break.
Feeling kind of haunted lately. And paranoid. Like there’s something waiting to GET me.
And there sort of is. It’s called an anxiety attack, and one seems to be dogging me around lately. In random moments when I am between things – like, say, when I get up from the computer or get out of bed – I will have this heart ripping moment of blind terror before the usual heavy-handed emotional suppressors kick in.
So something is trying to “get” me. I probably should let it. Get it over with. Maybe even find out whatever my subconscious is trying to tell me.
Well, besides “Boo!”.
In general, I want to cut way back on my use of that emotion cutoff switch. It’s the root cause of most if not all of my problems. It suppresses all but a very narrow band of emotions and specializes in killing any large changes of emotions – even positive ones.
Thats why those occasional times when, seemingly randomly, something actually breaks through my defenses and makes me all emotional mean so much to me.
There’s so much I need to feel.
And yet, my default move is still to suppress. HARD. Too hard – I go to far in the other direction and end up driving myself crazy like a person in a sensory deprivation tank, only it’s my emotions that are missing, not sensory input.
I scramble for something, anything, that can make me feel something. One of the most basic functions of the nervous system is to maintain a minimum stimulus level. Fall below that level, and the nervous system forces the organism to seek more stimulation.
But I don’t really know what will increase my emotional stimulation levels. And if I did, I would probably be too scared of “losing control” to do it.
Because if you lose control, you’re no longer IN control. And if you’re not IN control, you can’t control the outcome, and to you (me) that’s instant annihilation chaos death hell.
It is the Unthinkable. The Worst Thing Possible. The thing that is so bad that you can’t even say what it is or what you think is going to happen.
It’s pure dread, a priori to any physical manifestation or realization.
The idea that I could completely lose control of myself and the situation and have everything turn out fine and dandy is mindshattering to me.
I mean, I have to admit, for logic’s sake, that it is theoretically possible, just like it’s possible to blindly dash through eight lanes of rush hour traffic without getting hit, but in both cases, it would be down to sheer luck.
And yet, I know, deep down, that I need to ease way the fuck down on the trying to control outcomes and concentrate instead on being the best me that I can be.
And that involves being able to say, “I am going to be me as I am and I don’t care what happens as a result!”.
And I don’t think I am ready for that yet.
In fact, it scared the hell out of me just typing it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.