I feel like I’ve never been emotionally close to anyone. Ever.
I know this isn’t technically true. I know I was close to my mother before she went back to work. And I was close to my babysitter Betty until she left me too when I started school. And after that I was still kind of close to my mother until she abandoned me emotionally by freezing me out.
But I can’t really remember what it was like. I have a vague recollection of warmth and that is all. Perhaps those memories don’t even make any sense given the long cold decades of emotional isolation that followed.
Or maybe they are simply too painful to recall and my mind is just protecting me.
Sometimes the happy memories are the most painful of all because they remind you of what you have lost.
So you tell yourself it’s always been this way, and it helps.
Either way, there has been a (thus far) impenetrable barrier a mile thick around my inner being, the “real me” underneath all the layers of illusion and intellect and evasion.
I can’t imagine how it could be breached from the inside by yours truly. At least not deliberately. My systems are far too compromised to heal themselves.
It would take something far more powerful than my palsied soul to force an operating system level change on my mind and make me whole again.
Wha could do that , I don’t know. Religion? Fat chance of that. I’ve been too skeptical for far too long for any magical thinking to take hold.
Romantic love? Possible in theory but dunno how I would meet the guy.
A long weekend filled with nonstop gay sex? Could be effective and with your donations I would be willing to give it a try.
More after the break.
When the walls…
No secret as to where that unbreakable invisible wall came from… the rape.
When a stranger’s cock shattered my tiny four year old’s soul and gave me a wound from which I still bleed to this day, 45 years later, I retreated ro the only safe place I could – the deep dark depths of my mind.
And, unsurprisingly, I slammed the door behind me then welded the door shut, never to be opened again.
After all, I was just a kid. A painfully bright one, but still just a kid. Thoughts of how to get out of this shark cage I had constructed were beyond my powers of forethought.
So I became like some kind of sessile sea creature that can extend its tentacles into the real world but at the slightest sign of trouble reels them all back in, closes up like a clam, then shapeshifts to blend in to his surroundings.
I became, in a word, avoidant.
And it’s a very effective defense mechanism, but no way to live.
If you can call this living.
I’ve made my outer life match my inner life.
Isolated. Closed off. Almost immobile.
And so very, very alone.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.