Like I have said before, there is control, and there is the illusion of control.
Let’s say you want to avoid getting into a car crash. True control over the situation would come from driving carefully.
The illusion of control would come from hanging a “lucky” rabbit’s foot from the rear view mirror and plastering the back of your car with bumper stickers about Jesus.
Superstition is, in fact, all about the illusion of control. We over-brained monkeys are all too aware of how vulnerable we are to the whims of fate and even more keenly aware of the limits of our ability to control anything but our tiny piece of the big bad beautiful world and so we need things to give us the feeling that we can keep bad things from happening to us.
And it is this mechanism that is the mainspring of the “just world” fallacy. You hear about something terrible happening to someone, and you immediately convince yourself that it can’t happen to you because that person did something wrong to “deserve” their fate.
And you’d never do something like that, so you’ll be fine. Right?
Of course, the hyper-neurotic solution to avoiding auto accidents is to never, ever get into any kind of motor vehicle or even walk along a busy street. Maybe even avoid media where cars are even mentioned, let alone depicted
And sure, that means living an incredibly limited and circumscribed life, but hey, it’s worth it in order to be “safe”. Right?
It sounds absurd, but that’s the sort of life I am living right now, and have been living for my entire life. I stay isolated from the “real world” most of the time precisely because that is my way of controlling my anxiety and that is just as absurd as the car thing.
In fact, it’s worse, because it covers absolutely everything except for this very tight and confining cage I live in that locks me in place with my eyes glued to screens in order to shut out that big bad world I completely refuse to deal with.
Not in any concrete way, anyhow. Blogging doesn’t count.
Now as Nietzsche pointed out,. the aesthete and the puritan are just as decadent as the jaded decadents because they cannot control their desire to limit or punish themselves.
This illustrates how the desire for “control” can rage out of control and consume your entire life and leave you, in fact, without any real control at all.
Because if you can’t control yourself, you can’t control anything else.
Myself, I have sacrificed pretty much my entire adult potential on the altar of my overwhelming fear of dealing with the real world.
When I was raped at the age of 4, I turned my back on the world and buried myself in my world of TV, books, comics, and video games.
Then Skyrim happened to me, and boom went the TV. Used to watch all kinds of Netflix with Julian during meals. Not after Skyrim.
Then I got a tablet, and boom went the reading. Now, my bed is just a place where I play a different kind of video game.
So now, it’s pretty much just video games and blogging. Sad.
As for the illusion of control, with me, it manifests more as the illusion of freedom. After all, from my perch here on the internet, I can see the whole world, and my Olympian point of view and incredibly in-depth perception and insights do a great job of hiding the fact that in terms of actually living a life, I am hanging from the wall in a dungeon.
My prison cell might come with a telescope, but I’m still in jail.
More after the break.
On the other side from you
Don’t worry. I know it’s not you. It’s me.
I have been so cold and so lonely for so long because I am broken inside. All the warm and love and acceptance I have ever wanted could be right outside my door and I still would be too scared to let it in.
And if I did let it in, I wouldn’t be able to feel it. I’m still too numb, too frozen, too locked away from reality by a childhood trauma so severe that it still warps my mind and ruins my life and drains the lifeblood from my soul 46 years later.
I think by now it has been clearly established, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is not going to heal on its own.
No, I will have to do… things. Difficult, painful, but painfully necessary things. I will need to reopen old wounds so that they may be cleaned up, sprayed with antiseptic, and packed away again, properly this time.
After all, the first time it was done by a child.
When I was on the phone with Doc Costin last Thursday, I compared my current state to being like when someone broke a bone in the days before modern medicine.
The bone may very well have knit together again, but without a doctor to set it properly, it would knit together haphazardly and often quite painfully, like someone has just stuck the ends and shattered bits of bone together with Crazy Glue.
I feel like that’s what happened to me. After I was raped, I had to pull myself together well enough to keep going despite the truly devastating injury to my psyche.
And I had to do it all alone, at the age of 4. I didn’t even have the words to tell anyone what had happened to me, and if I had, well, it was 1977, they probably would not have believed me anyhow.
So I buried the memory, just like a billion rape victims before me. It was the deepest of traumas and it has gone untreated for my entire life.
And it’s still there, festering away. Making it so hard for me to get my shit together and actually make something of myself.
But at least I am awake to it now. I feel like I have passed a milestone in terms of fighting back the numbness and waking up inside, and things are definitely not ever going to be the same again.
I’m up now. And I am not going to go back to sleep until I’m healthy.
Metaphorically speaking, that is.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.