Feeling kind of depressed at the moment, despite the sunshine outside my window.
Been thinking about what I have been calling The Suffering in my mind. It’s all this pain from my mental wounds both past and present that keeps me from moving forward.
It’s like I can’t truly heal myself when I have all this Suffering to do. And as long as that’s true, I never have to face the world and grow up.
This is my Suffering, it is both my burden and my shield.
No, that’s too simplistic. It’s a piece of the puzzle but it’s no solution.
Because why do I need to hide from the world so badly, then? What makes me afraid to grow up? What convinced me that the entire adult world is nothing but another stretch of midnight tundra for me to die on? Why am I so sure I could never survive out there?
I think it must trace back to my sense of total abandonment, I am stuck in the abandoned child’s mindset, where I am forlorn and helpless and my only hope is to attract a caregiver via my charming and piteous helplessness.
You know. Like a real man.
So now I must be my own annoying therapist and ask : what would being able to survive on my own mean to me?
First answer ; I don’t know. The bottom falls out of my brain when I try to think about it. It is such a deep challenge to the fundamental structure of my entire psyche
Logically, it would be a gain, but emotionally it definitely reads as a massive loss.
I think it might be that my sense of abandonment runs so deep that I cannot truly imagine myself as being strong enough to survive on my own.
When I try, I can’t get past the ancient feeling that if I am strong enough on my own, people will TRULY abandon me forever, and then I’d be truly fucked.
Even though by definition I don’t need them any more. I am strong enough on my own.
That’s the foundational assertion of the entire syllogism.
So it’s an emotional paradox. In order to move forward, I have to imagine a world and a life in which I was as perfectly capable of handling modern life as any other citizen.
After all, billions are handling them just fine as I type things.
And some of THEM are idjits. Or at least way dumber than ME.
Which brings me back to the need to become harder. Something in me has to solidify and become tougher and stronger and less sensitive if I am to heal up and be strong.
And I have been dodging that necessity for a very long time. But why? What am I afraid of giving up? Is it just the pain and loss of innocence I fear, or something else?
What would losing that last little part of me mean?
Dunno. But that’s enough skullduggery for now.
More after the break
I bet immortals procrastinate a lot.
You don’t see a lot of people who are both funny and stupid. Wit skews smart. Even the comedian with the dumbest, cheapest, easiest jokes has to have something going on.
Secrets of the Changeling
Obviously, The Changeling is me.
The name refers to the theory that the European myth of the “changeling”, namely a child being replaced by a duplicate from the faerie folk, may have actually referred to autistic children, who can indeed seem like strange and inhuman children.
I had been pondering my own bizarre nature as a child – no interest in toys, or energetic play on the playground, or play really at all in the usual sense.
All I wanted to do was read and play games and watch TV.
And I was a weirdly calm, serious, sensible child from the very beginning. I spoke like an adult and had a dragon sized appetite for information and never ran or screamed or shouted or otherwise acted up.
That made me one strange kid indeed. Positively spooky at times, I would imagine.
And that got me wondering if I might have been mistaken for a Changeling child too. So I wrote that little conversation between two worried parents as a way to work through some of the idea connected with this notion.
It’s a sensitive subject for me, for obvious reasons. That weird little boy was me, and I still remember what it was like to be him,
I tried so hard to get people to like me. But I just did not have the tools I needed. All I had was the ability to charm adults by being adorably precocious, and even that did not work for very long.
Eventually, the strange chill that lay beneath the charm wore through and they abandoned me in favour of more easily understood (and withstood) children.
Nobody knew how to deal with someone like me. So they just…. didn’t. I was not equipped to fight for what I needed at all. So the path of least resistance was to rebuff me when I came to them for comfort, knowing that I would then just go off and be miserable and therefore stop making them deal with me.
It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. All that matters is that you’ll get away with it.
Nobody ever suffered any consequences for abusing, neglecting, or rejecting me. Not my bullies, not my teachers, not the school administrators….. and not my family either.
Lesson : learn to inflict consequences on those who wrong you. Give them the unequivocal message that you are not prey and they need to back the fuck off.
So much for civilization. That’s for grownups. For children, it’s jungle savagery all the way so that children get properly brutalized before civilization makes them wimps.
No wonder they make us read Lord of the Flies. As a fuckling warning.
I didn’t ask to be a Changeling child. I wasn’t trying to be weird. I was just being who I was, just like any other kid.
But I suffered for it anyway.
I don’t know how many times an adult suddenly walked away from me while shaking their head as if to clear it after waking up.
Guess I overloaded their brains.
Story of my life, really.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.