I’ve often talked in this space about feeling poisonous, toxic, radioactive, and so on. It’s a feeling that’s almost always there, and sometimes it gets pretty bad. There’s been times when I felt like just looking at someone would taint them. I can’t recall the last time I felt truly clean on the inside.

Maybe it’s never happened. Not since I was raped as a preschooler. That’s when someone else injected their poison into me. And I have carried it ever since because I refuse to pass it on to anyone else.

It dies in me.  I will not be a transmission vector for evil.

Spoiler for a 20 year old video game : at the end of the classic PC game Diablo,  after you beat the game by slaying its eponymous demonic villain, there is still the problem of what to do with the potent evil entity and/or force that was animating it. The only solution you have on hand is to take that evil spirit into yourself.

That ending has always appealed to me on a metaphorical and psychological level because it mirrors my own inner struggle so perfectly. I feel like a great evil lives within me, put there by someone who no doubt got it from someone else, and that person got it from another and so forth and so on all the way back to the dawn of humanity.

Or even further. For all I know, this all began with some particularly cranky amoeba.

Of course, in my case, this feeling of toxicity has both a psychological and a physiological component.

Psychologically, it comes from a variety of sources, but they all boil down to the same thing : how I was treated.

Life treated me like I was toxic and so I came to believe it. My family treated me like an unpleasant afterthought. My peers at school hated me and had fun doing it. The teachers on whom I was pathetically emotionally dependent did not care for me either.

They felt the same way my peers did about me. They tolerated me out of sheer professionalism alone.  Looking back, it’s clear that they, like everyone else, really didn’t want to deal with me and I didn’t have the psychological tools to demand my due.

I was hard to handle but too meek to protest being ignored. Dealing with me was difficult but ignoring me was easy.

That made it a no brainer for everyone around me.

When you are treated like that for long enough, you have no choice but to believe it to be true. At least, if you’re a psychologically permeable type like me.

I adapt. That can be a bad thing. Some adaptations work for the situation you are in but are terrible afflictions once that situation ends.

And others are simply too crude and heavy handed. They over solve the problem and thus become problems of their own, to the point of being worse than the original problem and leaving you with a net loss.

Children should not be de facto abandoned their first day of school.

The other half of the equation is physiological. I am not a healthy man and I do a poor job of looking after my many health issues.

There is a horrifying catch-22 aspect to that. I do such a poor job of looking after myself in large part because my health problems make self-care very hard for me.

I just don’t have the strength.

Topic threadjack due to sudden revelation : I don’t think I truly want to get better.

I shall explain. I just realized that a very big party of me passively but very effectively resists efforts to take care of myself, and it goes beyond treating myself the way I was treated or the massive inertia of depression.

No, it’s worse than those : I don’t want to get better because healthiness turns the volume knob of life up far too loud. I use being sick and depressed as a shield against reality – sometimes to dull my inputs to a tolerable level.

And every time I have gotten myself to a seriously healthier state, it has resulted in a life that is too goddamned emotionally loud. Once my perceptions are cleaned up and I can truly feel the world around me has, on a deep level, terrified me, no matter how good I felt on other levels.

And so it was just a matter of time before my subconscious mind sabotaged things so that the old regime, with its comforting numbness, could return.

I’ve talked about depression being a shield to hide behind in this space before,a very long time ago, but I have never seen the problem quite so clearly before.

And I don’t know what to do about it. How do you treat someone who is afraid to be healthy? What kind of pill fixes that?

I’ve thought before that the solution was to turn the volume on life very slowly, with frequent stops to let myself adjust to the new input level.

And that sounds sensible,. but I don’t think it is implementable. I don’t have that kind of fine control over my input levels.

The maladaptive solution I have been using is to control the volume be isolating myself from the world. Kind of like controlling the volume on your stereo by moving further away from it. It technically solves the problem but in a way that costs a hell of a lot more than it brings in.

The only solution I see is for me to find some source of inner strength that can see me through the nightmare of adjusting to the new, higher input levels. Were I capable of religion, that would that source.

But I am not. And that’s not a brag. I wish I was. But I am not.

So I don’t know what to do. I need someone to hold my hand through the process and tell me everything is going to be okay and anchor me through the storm.

At least I have a clear fix on the problem now. I will bring it up first thing in my next therapy session and see what my shrink says.

Maybe he knows what to do when health terrifies you.

But you know what?

I seriously doubt it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.