Short answer : I dunno.
It started with a YouTube video essay I was listening to and they were talking some boilerplate stuff about giving up on the person you’re pretending to be in order to truly be yourself – typical authenticity jive, very individualist – when the narrator mentioned always pretending to be okay and suddenly it broke through to me that I am always pretending to be okay and that I had no idea if I really was.
In fact, shockingly, I might not be capable of that level of introspection. That might seem strange coming from a guy who has written millions of words in this very space about all his psychological issues, but that’s a product of analysis, not true introspection.
I don’t think I can truly look deeply into myself. And if I try, one thing becomes very clear : my deep inner self does NOT want to be looked at, and resents me for trying.
It feels like I have actually been hiding from myself for a very long time. That cranky inner self of mine is a wizard at spinning complex illusions that seem like the real me, or facets thereof, but the truth is that they are more like fictional expressions of myself.
So they are expressing something real, but they themselves are mere projections.
But that’s the only version of me I know how to be. I don’t have a “real me” that I have been holding back all these years, gritting my teeth at the part I am forced to play while my true inner being yearns to be free.
My inner being just wants me to leave him the fuck alone.
Seriously, he’s like an angry badger in there.
I guess I have been hiding within myself for a very long time. It makes a lot of sense now that I have thought of it. I knew that I had withdrawn into myself in layers and that the real me was inside those layers like a Russian nesting doll.
I never can remember the proper name for those.
But what’s new is the realization that those layers became my layers of illusion. It’s like this entire time, I have been a child in an adult sized mecha suit clumsily trying to pretend to be a real person.
Well I am a real person.
I’m just not an adult.
And the whole damn show is just a way for me to hide from the world while operating (minimally) within it. Being a mecha suit, it’s quite clumsy and not well suited to life in this adult real world, and so I have to remain isolated most of the time so that I can take the mecha suit off and relax.
Here in my room, alone, the child inside the suit can function, more or less. There’s nothing here to challenge my dyspraxia or my social anxiety. I can be basically a brain with a computer and exist in a kind of virtual mode where I don’t have to cope.
But here’s something that’s hard for me to confess – even the version of me I cherish the most, the version I am when I am relaxed with my friends, is not the REAL me.
It’s about as close as I can get at this point in my journey. And I love that version of me, more or less the same version I am when I am being Fruvous online, although of course I have a lot more freedom when I am being a fuzzy lil fox.
But I get the feeling that the “real” me would be a lot less warm and friendly and easy to get along with because the “real” me was raped when he was only four years old and has to live with that reality every single day.
No wonder I prefer to stay distracted and avoid being him as much as possible. He’s a much more cold and bitter and angry version of me that’s more like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting only without the good looks and sunny disposition than he is the warm and fuzzy fox you know and love.
So do I. I’d rather be him than me, every day of the week.
And now I know why.
More after the break.
Piercing the membrane
I feel like I have entered a new level of painful but fruitful paring away of the dead flesh and impacted scar tissue of my mind to release the dormant life sleeping underneath.
I am excited by how much my mind is resisting the scalpel, so to speak. All of my best psychological insights and progress has come from going exactly where my mind does not want me to go so I look forward to really digging into the bad stuff and bringing it into the sunlight where it can heal.
I’m not sure how much of this leg of my journey I will be able to put into words. As articulate as I am, this may go below and beyond a level where words apply and into the realm of pure inchoate emotion.
We will see.
I know that I am well beyond caring if what I need to do to heal myself hurts. Fuck pain. Pain is temporary and ultimately meaningless, especially when weighed against the permanent gains of deep catharsis and the making of the subconscious conscious.
So bring on the pain and the resistance and the friction and the fear. All they will do is convince me that I am on the right track and make me all the more determined to push down on the handle of the knife all the harder.
Time to use my incisive mind as a healing tool.
Nurse, laser scalpel please.
And I don’t care if I am working where the sun don’t shine. I don’t have to be able to see or understanding what I am doing or where I am going or what it all “means”.
All I need to do is follow my feelings to the dead diseased flesh, and keep digging.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.