I feel like I am beginning to understand just how vast my reality issues are.
And I can’t help but notice how well they line up with my initial response to the trauma of being raped when I was four years old.
Like millions of other rape victims, I responded by withdrawing into myself. HARD. I told myself, “this isn’t real, this isn’t happening” and I fled from reality in order to get as far away from what was happening to me as was possible.
From that point on, I withdrew from the real world as far as I could without falling down an open manhole or walking into traffic.
Most of the time. On a bad day, well, let’s say it was good that my neighborhood did not get a lot of traffic, so as long as I could cross Granville Street without getting run over, I was good to go for the walk home.
School partly forced me out of that shell. I was still quite thickly armored there but the necessity of paying attention to the lessons and doing the class work meant I could not completely withdraw into my shell.
So I became a robot who went to school. Not for the whole time. I did have friends for some of those years.
I honestly wonder what they saw in me.
But for a lot of those years, I was a lonely child who went to and from school completely alone, came home to an empty house, got virtually no attention from parents who were always tired and stressed out from work, and barely knew his siblings.
They had their own lives and they didn’t include me.
They certainly felt no obligation of care. Nobody did. Absolutely no person in the universe felt like my welfare was their problem.
Which is unusual for an elementary school child, n’est-ce pas?
But nobody looked after me at all. They were more than happy to just ignore me and assume everything was fine because if it wasn’t, I would tell them about it.
What heinous bullshit. When I did try to tell them about my troubles, they shut me down right away, presumably to stave off the impending horror of having to think about me for more than a few seconds.
And one of the iron clad rules of my universe growing up was that I got nothing because I deserved nothing. Absolutely nobody was going to give up the tiniest sliver of what they had in order for me to get my share and so I… didn’t.
Anyhow. Reality issues. Sorry, when I start bitching about my crappy childhood, it’s kind of hard to stop.
Sure is cathartic though.
Anyhow, my radical detachment from reality was not readily apparent. I think that was part of the problem. I was very good at convincingly pretending everything was just fine when anyone bothered to ask about me.
Because I knew they didn’t really care at all. They just wanted me to tell them everything was fine so they could go back to not thinking about me at all while reassuring themselves that they did care.
A little. Now and then. Whenever it was convenient.
There I go again.
Scuttlebutt is that my mental health journey will have to involve re-attaching myself to reality so that I can finally balance out all that senseless intellectualism that has been holding me back for so long.
Unsurprisingly, I don’t wanna do that. The very thought of getting cozier with reality makes me feel a little sick.
Reality is so limiting. Why would I want to get enmeshed with that?
it’s a trap, I just know it. Next thing ya know, I am dragged out of my internal bunker and forced to deal with the real world whether I feel like it or not and I am forever severed from the only real safety I know : in the center of my own mind.
I think I will just stay with that feeling a while, see how it plays out.
More after the break.
No avenue of retreat
I guess the above highlights the important of escape in my psyche.
To my mind, the worst possible thing is to be trapped. I need the maximum amount of fluidity, agility, and adaptability in order to feel safe. I have to be free to flee deeper into myself at a heartbeat’s notice because that is how I survived being raped as a toddler and it’s the only way I know how to survive right now.
All my napping, video game playing, and yes, even blogging, are just ways of hiding from reality by immersing myself in something engrossing and/or all-encompassing that leaves no room for the big bad world in my mind and thus shuts it out.
My mind can’t be filled with anxiety and terror if it’s full of Dragon Age : Inquisition.
Now obviously, if I was simply to stay in reality long enough, I would get used to it and it would no longer seem like such a scary and horrible place.
I would acclimate. I always do. I am, after all, an extremely adaptable person. To a fault, actually. So I would manage somehow.
But the fear the very idea of taking such a step inculcates in me makes it nearly impossible to contemplate actually doing it.
There is no arguing with the deep part of me that is fully convinced that taking such a step would be the very worst kind of suicidal madness.
Actually, scratch that. Suicide is way less scary.
But let’s not go there.
I guess what it really boils down to is that, despite all me writing and analysis and seeming reasonableness, at the end of the day, I’m still fucking crazy.
And that’s what I have to deal with if I am to bargain for my sanity. The sheer screaming muttering gibbering madness that is at my core from the unresolved trauma of being raped 46 years ago.
And until I find some way to calm my terrified little animal down, I am never going to be able to cross the moat of my madness and frolic in the green and gentle land beyond.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.