..back. My aching, decrepit back.
I was struggling to get my food together in the kitchen when it suddenly occurred to me that my struggles had a lot more to do with back pain than leg pain.
Sure, my legs hurt like they always do when I am standing, especially when I have stand unsupported in order to do something that takes both hands, but the pain in my back every time I turned my trunk was far worse.
This is not exactly news. This realization has been building for some time. It just hadn’t dawned on me yet because I have had back pain for so long that I just tune it out.
Well I tuned it back in today, and whoa nelly. It ain’t good.
There’s a lot of pain in my back these days. My best guess is that it has to do with my playing video games without changing how I am sitting for hours on end.
But it could be vertebra gnomes for all I fuckin know.
Unlike my leg pain, though, I can partially treat this back pain myself via my advanced Eastern medicine practice of pushing down hard on my spine until it’s the right shape again, more or less.
And yet, I don’t do that very often. And even when I think to do it, I feel a great resistance to the idea from the unhealthy portion of my mind.
So what the downtown fuck is that all about?
At this moment, it seems like it’s the same thing that keeps me from cleaning my room : an unwillingness to take responsibility for myself.
And deep within the foul and sticky heart of that unwillingness lie my profound issues around abandonment and a resulting lack of nurturing in my childhood.
Some very stubborn part of me keeps me from properly taking care of myself because some irrational fragment of my developmental programming insists that these tasks are somebody else’s job and I am not supposed to have to do them yet.
And that therefore if I do them myself, someone somewhere is “getting away with it”
This is almost comically irrational. Whoever’s job it was supposed to be they are thousands of miles away and pretty unlikely to show up to give me a cuddle.
By all rights, I should surgically remove that hope from my soul. It’s very counterproductive and I would be far better off without it.
But that ignores the fact that the basic emotional need it represents is still unmet and I can’t just wish it away.
I could force the issue but that would involve me becoming a colder, harder person than I am right now. I would have to embrace a more “you can’t count on anyone but yourself” point of view, and I do not like where that leads.
As always, YMMV.
Because believe me, there is a brutal, cold, selfish version of me waiting in the wings. The kind of person that has given up on all things soft and sensitive in both the world and himself and dedicated himself instead to grabbing as much as he can for himself without a single thought for the consequences to others because all he cares about is basking in the glow of how god damned clever he is.
I don’t want to be that guy. But he’s in there ready to come out if life fucks me over badly enough that I decide the only way I am going to get anything is to take it.
But for now, I will continue to use my powers for good.
More after the break.
Here come the maybes
Time to represent the other side.
Maybe I wasn’t as neglected as my standard narrative says.
Maybe all the love and acceptance and warmth I crave was right there in front of me but it couldn’t get through the thick invisible wall being raped at the age of four left me with.
Maybe all that coldness I experienced was, in part at least, due to my goddamned damage. Maybe I have spent most of my life locked away in an arctic cold deep freeze of my own devising while all the time complaining bitterly about how cold I am.
It’s at least a possibility.
But it’s a lot less satisfying that having people to blame. There is a righteous purity in being the universal victim and a kind of coward’s victory in being really bitter.
And I am. Lord knows I am. I don’t express it except in this space, it doesn’t exactly jive with my cute and cuddly persona – but I am a very bitter and resentful man.
But maybe that is unjust. Maybe people tried to connect with me but the wall was too high for them to climb. Maybe I shut people out and shut people down without even being conscious of doing so.
That’s way less satisfying than my standard narrative. Why, there isn’t even a villain.
I mean yeah, there’s my rapist, but he left the stage right away. He wasn’t there for my lonely sad childhood. He wasn’t directly responsible for any of it.
And blaming a metaphorical invisible wall isn’t very satisfying. It’s hard to get really mad about being fundamentally broken. Possibly from birth.
I was a weird kid even before I was raped.
But after I was raped, it was much worse, and all because of that wall I put up to keep the suddenly very evil world at bay.
In theory, that wall could totally come down now. The danger is long gone. My life is quite safe, medical issues aside.
But I still don’t feel safe. I still feel like the moment I let my guard down, life is gonna GET me somehow. All that social damage from bullying is still there.
So it’s up to my deeper self to heal the damage and set me free.
Because living in a deep freeze sucks. There’s nobody to talk to and I am pretty sure these tater tots are freezer burned by now.
But I can’t escape until all of me wants to escape.
And I am still hauling a lot of old damage around.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.