I’ve told this story here before, so I will try to be brief.
Once, when I was a miserably depressed elementary school student, some well meaning adult at my school told me, “everything is going to be all right. ”
Clearly that person (I forget who it was) was trying to soothe and reassure me.
But I was an occasionally quite volatile little bundle of brains and nerves and mental illness, so I replied by angrily saying, “You can’t say that! You don’t know that! You can’t predict that! You don’t control that!”.
As I recall, they were quite shocked and upset by my reaction. And the truth is, despite the fact that I was a child at the time, I do feel a little bad about that.
On the other hand, I stand by my statements, and I am not sure that my reaction would be any different if someone said that to me today.
Don’t come to me with your mindless positivism. Fuck that shit. The truth is, statements like that hurt me terribly and that’s why I lash out.
Because the tone in warm but the content is bullshit. It’s nonsense. It has no actual content to it but it acts like it does and so, to me, it’s like an Xmas present with nothing inside – an empty promise containing nothing but bitter disappointment.
There’s something very Gen X about that sentiment. I had to deal with a lot of puerile positivism from useless goddamned ex-hippies in my childhood.
Guess I am still bitter about it.
But I wanted to talk about that bad reaction I had today because it’s been on my mind as an example of how things went wrong with me somewhere.
Because that’s not a normal reaction. I can’t say I understand it, but most people find statements like that reassuring and appreciate hearing them.
That goes triple for kids.
I can only assume that, for the unbroken, the sentiment is what is important and the actual content is secondary, They are, essentially, reassured because someone is reassuring them, and it’s as simple as that.
There is also the question of faith. The simplest definition of faith is the belief without evidence, and if one is capable of that, then believing things are going to be okay just because someone (like a parent) you know and trust said so is not that big a deal.
I wish I could do that. It would make things so much easier.
But when I lost my innocence to a stranger’s cock when I was four years old, I lost my capacity for trust and faith at the same time.
I figured out at far too young an age that adults were full of shit and didn’t know any more than I did (and often a lot less) and I think that really hurt me.
I intuit that faith in one’s parents and adults in general is necessary to healthy development because it acts as the foundation for the child’s entire ability to trust in their own safety and without that, the child becomes incredibly insecure.
Just like me.
And well, if one of those adults turns out to be a monster that rapes you.. and you can’t even tell anyone about it or think about it or anything… and you have no religious faith to run to either…. well, faith and hope never really stood a chance, did they?
And being bullied while the teachers ignored it took care of any chance I had to believe in the system as well.
No wonder I am still broken after all these years.
It’s a wonder I can function at all.
More after the break.
Getting the bad out
When a patent repeats a behaviour over and over, it generally means that the behaviour is expressing something that the patient ha no other way to express and that the behaviour cannot express fully in one go, so it has to be repeated.
That’s why I end up talking about the same crappy things from my childhood over and over again in this space. I have a lot of long, cold, lonely days stored up inside me and bitching about them on this blog helps let some of that coldness out so I can thaw out, at least a little bit.
I wish I knew how to speed up the process and bring on the Flood. Melt the iceberg around my heart once and for all, and to hell with the consequences.
But I am too stable and sensible for that. I have built this frozen fortress prison of far too well and it is not going to come down any time soon.
Not without some major source of heat, anyhow.
And that could only come from my long suffering id. I was talking with Doc Costin yesterday about how I knew about my dark side and why it was there.
I told him how there was a part of me that wants to say to hell with everyone else and just do what is right for me, me, ME.
To leverage all my many gifts in order to get all the money, power, and sex I can. And that would mean becoming a scheming, manipulative, greedy con man who swindles, cheats, and arm-twists his way through life not giving a damn about the trail of human wreckage he leaves behind him.
He’d be a monster of incalculable proportions.
But Doc Costin was right when he said that I am not actually capable of being that person. Nevertheless, thinking about him from time to time comforts me.
He’s a monster, but like the evil Kirk, he’s really just the product of a profound imbalance of the mind, and if I could ease up on him some, he would stop being such a monster and maybe actually give me the heat I need to melt my heart.
Or at the very least keep me warm at night.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.