Part of me is… dead. I am dead inside. Some part of my died along the way. And it’s not coming back. [1]
And if I needed to know just what I have been mourning, it is… that. That dead part of me, the part that died a long time ago but that I have never been able to let go.
And so it has stayed with me, poisoning me from the inside as it rots away.
For a while, I thought that everything was merely frozen inside me from the icy touch of emotional repression, and that everything inside me would one day thaw out and be rejoined to my shattered whole.
But now it seems like some of me just plain died over the years. Call it… freezer burn. Cryogenics never has been a precise science. There was bound to be some tissue damage.
Now I am left wondering how exactly I let go of this deadness inside of me and let my mental immune system attack it, render it harmless, then flush it out of my system forever.
Hard to say how that would work. I have a feeling that a lot of my psyche has been arranged around the necessity of never ever touching my deep, deep wounds, and I do not, at this moment, know how to reach that deeply inside myself to fix the bent, bruised, and broken parts at the very heart of me.
The change required will be deep and fundamental. Far more than merely shedding a skin, it will required something a great deal like surgery, and there is no anesthetic for surgery of the soul.
If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not working.
I froze myself to avoid the pain, but in doing so I also kept those deep awful wounds from ever healing, and life is very difficult when you are frozen stiff inside.
Even more so when part of you is dead, dead, dead.
Once more, I am forced to realize that do not really know what it going on inside this scarred and splintered soul of mine. Perhaps it is simply not possible to be your own analyst and I am wasting my tiem wandering in these long leashed loops of mentation when a wiser soul would be able to get at the problem directly and act in its own best interest, unbound by chains of rationality and sense.
But I am forty years old, and change gets harder every day. It sounds almost silly when I say I want to change but don’t know how. If you want to change, just… change. Right?
Wrong. Not when you have spent as long as I have developing and honing your rational self to the point where retracting it seems impossible, like asking a turtle to remove its shell.
It couldn’t do it even if it wanted to do it.
All my mental tools are absurdly rational. Maybe this is why I have been unable to heal myself over all these years. The very tools I am using are wildly unsuited for the job. I might as well be trying to eat my soup with a hammer.
And sure, I make progress now and then. After all, you can get SOME soup into your mouth with the hammer. But on my own, my mind is capable of many wonders of wit, insight, analysis, and understanding… but it cannot heal the damage to my soul.
Once more, I think of faith. There have been times lately when I feel myself reaching out in desperation for… something. I don’t know what it is. But I want to align myself to let its light fill me. I want to twist myself into whatever shape will let that light shine all the way into my soul, and make that deep dark place warm and alive once more.
I wouldn’t call it God. I am still too strictly rational for that nonsense. But I will call it the God in me, that is, the part of me that others reach via faith that represents the perfection towards which we strive and the purest form of the love and approval we so desperately need.
I am extremely willing to try to reach that. I am far beyond caring whether a route to happiness is “cheating” or not. We drive ourselves to madness with our inane Skinner Box games that tell us we are not allowed to be happy unless we “deserve” it. or else, anarchy and chaos.
Fuck that noize. I deserve as much happiness as I can get my greedy hands on, and I need that light so badly in order to heal ancient wounds and burn out the dead parts of my soul that I am willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
And perhaps it is this new-found spiritual yearning towards completeness that will ultimately be my salvation. Part of me has woken up and freed itself from the permafrost and this part of me does not merely intellectually understand that I am so very cold inside and that warmth is what I need, it actively yearns for connection with some great Source within me that is beyond all the rules and theories and ideas and hence can provide the spiritual sustenance that I have lacked for so very long.
It is hard for me to accept that there might ever be something more important than the truth. My ferocious desire for the truth, my Veritas Uber Alles side, has grown extremely strong and powerful over many years of learning and sifting and distilling and analyzing so much information.
It has, in fact, taken over without my ever really willing it. The shine of my own mind has been my substitute for spirituality for a long long time.
And of course, nobody can make themselves believe that which they know to be untrue.
But maybe, just maybe, someone like me can start believing something they do not know is true.
And maybe that’s exactly what I am going to do.
- Obviously not literally. Tissue necrosis is nothing to joke about.↵
I can relate to your dilemma, and have thought along similar lines over the last decade or two.
I think identity, beliefs, self-knowledge, awareness of mortality, and especially yearning for connection and transcendence are all involved in a complex soup.
Popular culture’s obsession with “happiness” as an expected by-product of living the right kind of life and owning the right kinds of toys, undoubtedly does not help to the extent we internalize these expectations and feel like we’ve failed in some fundamental way if we don’t feel good all the time. How much these feelings that we’ve failed in life contribute to shutting off parts of ourselves, to avoid feeling bad about ourselves, who can say?
Many find solace in easy certainties. Our minds are self-programming, and for those sufficiently self-aware, also capable of self-reprogramming. I think in THEORY, there is no psychic damage that can’t be repaired, or at least improved. Perhaps that’s why it’s so frustrating when all the components of our psyche create complex webs of contradictory requirements that make a practical solution seem impossible.
As a programmer, I see a chilling similarity in what is often called “dependency hell”. This is NOT about being a dependent person, but about a very complex system of many components, where each component requires specific versions of other components, creating a very complicated web, that sometimes creates difficult-to-resolve conflicts. To install A, you must first have B and C. But C requires D and E and F, and F requires G, and G requires A. Ahhhhh!!!!!
So you want to ditch a coping mechanism that has outlived its usefulness, but real parts of who you are depend upon it. There’s probably a way to ditch that part of yourself, but it WILL involve pain and it may only be possible if you ditch or change several dysfunctional components in a particular order…
It’s probably way too complicated to manage analytically. You’d have to have the blueprints to your mind’s architecture to figure out what order to remove toxic parts so that good stuff isn’t ditched and you do not get overwhelmed. After all, even the toxic parts probably serve some sort of purpose that will require adaptation when it’s gone.
All this said, I really believe the “dead inside” feeling is more illusory than real, even though it feels imminent and tangible. It’s more that our mind is trying to reprogram itself, is aware there is a problem needing to be solved, and finds that any solution is unthinkable given your current mind configuration. We tend to be very blind when we approach unthinkable thoughts. Perhaps that is the black hole that we instinctively avoid, perhaps wisely. Attacking the problem head-on may simply not work until some different things have changed first. Then a solution may be visible.
I dunno. I’m probably babbling. 🙂
One approach I find helpful when trying to change some big behavior that I haven’t been able to change, is to just keep a look-out for small improvements of any sort I can make. Maybe park at the far end of the lot, or get off one station early, to get a bit of a walk every day, or cut down on salt, or look myself in the mirror every morning and remind myself of some talent or good trait in myself, or treat myself to a warm bath now and again. No idea how this helps, but it seems to.
FWIW.
— ross