Starring Run DMC and Rock and Hyde!
Just kidding. It’s about being so damned avoidant.
I’ve been making little attempts to reverse that avoidance by deliberately forcing myself to stay with things that normally make me retreat or run away.
Like those five tabs for various ways that I might find remote work that have been taking up space in my browser forever.
And no wonder, when even looking at the tabs fills me with guilt and self-loathing that makes me immediately flee into some distraction or another to escape my own inner wrath and persecution.
Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem.
And because of the nature of this self-excoriation, I have of course been blaming myself for it and hating myself for being too weak to resist it and do the thing I want to and/or should do anyhow.
And that’s insane. It’s like an entirely internal version of a kind of prisoner’s syndrome, where the prisoner finds it far easier to blame themselves for the abuse they are suffering from their jailors than to blame the jailors themselves.
Because when you are truly beaten down, the idea of rebelling is far too scary to contemplate. Directing the anger towards the right target means confronting the very demons who control your life and have the power to punish you, or worse, even if that confrontation is entirely in your head.
It’s far easier to direct the blame inward.
And yes, this observation has vast political implications.
But I don’t want to go there right now.
So to free myself from this self-flagellating cycle of internalized abuse would require me to essentially confront my inner prosecutors and deny them their power and authority over me and reject their corrupt and sadistic rule.
Sounds good, right? But it’s a lot to ask of oneself.
Because the way down dirty truth of it is that even these demons of mine serve my real agenda, which is to give myself ample reason to continue to not grow up.
Without these tormentors, there would be nothing keeping me from finally growing and rising and becoming a genuine actual certified grownup, and deep down I am convinced that this means utter annihiliation somehow, so it must be avoided at all costs.
And boy are there a lot of costs.
It’s a crying shame to be so at war with one’s own growth. Cue my usual routine about how every time a butterfly is born, a caterpillar dies. With a fixed sense of self, any significant change really does seem like death because it does mean the death of ourselves as we currently conceive of ourselves.
But it is only the false self that dies. The true self can only die when we die. The real me – the person I have been since I was born, the one that has always answered to my name – is as green and eternal as the springtime.
And not just because my birthday is in May.
So I should let myself grow up already. Get the hell out of my own way, beat my inner prosecutor to death with a fucking shovel, and allow myself to soar up into the sky like the majestic fabulous scintillating wonder I am.
Emphasis on should. There’s a hell of a lot of things I should do and I never do them because of that avoidant shit I talked about in the beginning.
Clearly the fascist government within has to fall, and as to what will replace it, I guess we will just see what springs up when its gone.
Maybe then my long dormant seeds of adulthood will finally sprout and grow.
More after the break.
Coming out of hiding
One of the biggest struggles in my therapeutic journey is to overcome that urge to hide from everything and everyone.
I talked yesterday about how that came about. A childhood full of being resented just for being born, where it seemed like everyone was always at least a little angry with me, taught me that existing out loud meant danger and I was only truly, truly safe when I was alone in my room.
He typed while sitting alone in his room like usual. Sigh.
That brought up a rather large morsel of my loneliness and pain.
Good. The more of that shit I process, the better off I will be. It might not be fun while it’s happening – kind of feels like I swallowed a big lump of ice and it’s stuck right over my torn and tattered heart and melting very slowly – but when it’s gone, I will be all the lighter and happier for having rid myself of it.
Anyhow, where was I? Right, coming out of hiding.
It’s going to be very hard to convince myself that it’s safe to be seen. I have fled the light like a startled cockroach for my entire life.
In my early life, people meant danger. That is the brutal and terrible lesson etched deep into my soul starting from when I was raped and continuing all through school as I got bullied and neglected and socially ostracized.
All that did was drive me even further into myself. And along the way learn to remain retracted from reality into the comfortable confines of my own mind as much as I can.
The fact that school was easier than your average fuck for me did not help either. So much time spent just sitting there, bored out of my gourd because I had finished the school work in a couple of minutes while the rest of the students took twenty or more is absolutely staggering to think about.
Not to mention sitting through the teacher repeating everything so that it hopefully got through to even the slow kids.
Yeah, I know that, teach. I heard you the first time. I was right here.
So even while the teacher was teaching, I was mostly zoned out.
No wonder I grew up seeing my enormous IQ as a burden not a gift.
And I still kind of feel the same way. I mean, at the present moment, my prodigious intellect isn’t doing me much good.
Doesn’t matter how much brains you got if they’re all crazy.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.