The one I want to cough up before it finally kills me.
What I am talking about is the big blockage between me and the world. The big ol’ clog that causes my energies to back up on me and make me sick and either makes me want to take it out on myself or turns into anxiety and burns out that way.
I wish I could just, in one mighty coughing jag, hork the goddamned thing up and finally be rid of it. I know it’s just a wad of scar tissue and toxic residue and I would be infinitely better off without it.
But I can’t do that, because as it’s keeping my energies from going out, it’s also keeping reality from getting in.
Without it, I would have to face reality, naked and bare and unfiltered, and I haven’t been able to do that since I was raped.
When I was raped at the age of four, I fled deep into my own mind, and I have depended on that wide and airless gap between me and reality to keep myself “safe” for the rest of my life.
And I am 47.
That’s why “be here now” is a concept that has always freaked me out. I mean, I agree with it philosophically and spiritually. It definitely seems to be the way to go if you can pull it off. Forgetting everything but the one moment you can be sure of, the now. Sounds like a great way to clear all the clutter of half-digested thoughts and moods and memories and plans and intentions and so on that accumulate in our minds as we live our modern complicated lives.
But when I try to go there myself, I get really scared. I can’t live in the present moment. Then I would have to deal with reality directly, no clog no filter, and that would leave me without the defenses I have built.
Like the big one, intellectualization. As maladaptive mechanisms go, it’s really quite extraordinary, as it allows you both to detach from events and feel like you have power over them at the same time.
After all, if I am fascinated by something, that means I have frozen it in place in order to better examine it, and thus rendered it inert and harmless. And if I then analyze it, I figure it out, and file the information away, and that gives me a feeling of power.
Almost like I have triumphed over it via the power of my mind. It started off as potentially stressful and scary, and now it’s wonderfully safe knowledge.
That’s how an icy intellectual defines victory, I suppose.
But I know, intuitively, that I am missing something. Like a19th entomologist who thinks he knows everything about butterflies from examining dead ones mounted on plaques, I get the feeling of understanding everything while having never seen life alive and moving and complex.
To truly understand things, I would have to deal with things in the hot and heavy now. No distance, no freezing, no detachment, and definitely no time to figure it all out before I accept it as true.
And that’s the rub : I can’t function without that gap. And yet, so much of life is completely inaccessible without being able to handle things in the here and now.
More after the break.
The silent ice
The other thing I get from my illness is a preternatural calm.
It is the quiet of the grave, of course. Not a natural, health calmness based on being in harmony with life and its forces and thus coming from a strength of spirit.
Oh no. That’s far too stable and healthy and alive.
No, it is the calm of death. A place where the stuff of life has been frozen out of everything and nothing that lives can survive. My icy tomb where I lie in state, frozen and frightened, superficially powerful but frozen into immobility by the same deathly chill that froze everybody else.
So all I can do is lie there and do my best to melt.
Being frozen serves a sort of purpose, though. A deeply and tragically maladaptive one, but one nonetheless.
It keeps me calm. It is the opposite of anxiety. It keeps all that ambient adrenaline cooled off to the point of being nonreactive, and thus tells the sleeping giant of my massive anxiety to chill the fuck out, dude.
It’s a terrible way to live. A healthier organism wouldn’t rely on so primitive and crude a mechanism just to cope with being alive.
It would just fucking learn to deal with shit. Via life experience spurred by instincts.
But I have always seen too much and known too much for that. I saw the world through an adult’s eyes when I was still in elementary school. I knew the follies of various eras of life and I smugly thought I was avoiding them with icy detachment and a wry (but still very humanistic) sense of the absurd.
I was so fucking stupid.
All my classmates simply went with their feelings a lot of the time, and by doing so, actually completed the developmental stages we are meant to complete in order to grow into functional adult human beings.
Whereas my ever so smart frozen self never developed at all because I “knew better”.
I really want to reach back in time and tell that kid to wake the fuck up, stop hiding from the world, and go out there and get some goddamned experience already.
Why is it that my stern advice to myself always sounds like it’s being delivered by a grumpy old gym teacher with a heart of gold?
Of course, I could tell myself that now too. And I want to. I want to run out there and take on (and take in) this big ol crazy world.
But right now it just hurts too much. I have a lot of damage to heal first.
Until then, I am going to have to expand my world via tiny baby steps instead.
Just watch my toes twinkle.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.