Let’s talk a little more about what is deep down fundamentally wrong with me.
There is a definite hard limit to how close I can be with anyone, or at the very least, how close I have been to anyone.
I think of all the people of the world, the person I have been closest to is my brother Dave. Or my mother. It’s hard to say which is closer, because my tie to my mother is the strongest one in my universe but I have spent a lot more time hanging out with my brother and in many ways we are still remarkably in sync.
But even with my mother, there’s this distance and a sense of detachment. I come from an extremely intellectual family, and while that has resulted in four cracking smart kids, all four of those kids suffer from depression and/or anxiety issues.
So….. there’s that.
So there’s the distance our intellectualism begat. We were never a family that dealt well with sticky emotional issues well. In that, we’re as emotionally repressed as millions of other Canadian households. We are great talkers and thinkers, but the emotions are not usually on display, let alone discussed.
I get the feeling that problem goes deeper in me than I can even grasp at that point. All that bright but cold intellectualism. Sigh.
Then there’s the additional detachment from my birth order issues. I was left all alone a lot of the time because my siblings had their own groups of friends and I had none. So in that sense, there was nobody to get close to till I got my first group of friends in Grade Six. Trevor and Kevin.
We bonded over Kiss.
And then there’s the big one, the detachment that came from having been raped. When I took my mind away and told myself it wasn’t happening in self defense, it did severe damage to my connection with reality, especially on an emotional level.
That’s the big one, I imagine. That’s the massive wound that is so hard to heal. That’s the one that made me so hard to get close to even if someone wanted to. That’s what made me such a strange child coming from my own weird little dimension.
But the fact that I was so articulate and friendly disguised – and disguises – that fact from people. Were I overtly hostile and antisocial, people would know how to deal with me and that would form a stable basis for connection with the world.
Maybe not the easiest connection. But connection nonetheless.
But I am not antisocial. In fact, I give all the appearance of being present and friendly and cute and sweet and entertaining and funny and all those good things.
But I am not really there. Or rather, I am there and not there at the same time, like I deal with the world via hologram.
It seems like I am really there, even to myself. But I am not. I am always dealing with things through a projection of myself.
The very concept of actually being completely present chills me to the bone.
It’s so very cold in this here shadow.
More on this after the break.
I feel like I have more to say about my broken self, but it’s not coming to me.
But I want to keep plugging away at it because I know, deep down, that this is big and if I can shift it, I will make a lot of progress.
Oh, I remember something : I think other people can sense the wrongness in me. But because I give good hologram, they can’t really put their finger on it. I seem like a nice, friendly, cheerful guy, but there’s just something…. off about me.
That’s because, despite my best efforts, the illusion is not perfect. My overt vibe is good but the undervibe has all kinds of nasty shit in it.
Like my anxiety. I want so desperately to be liked and praised and given affection but on the other hand I am extremely afraid of really connecting with people because I know I can’t connect with them without them connecting with me and my deep down depressed brain is sure that if someone connects with me, all the nastiness and bile and really bad stuff that I hide with my hologrammatic skills with come rushing out of me and into the other person and my guilt and shame will be such that I will die.
Or want to, anyhow.
So I hide behind my masks and facets. Everything you see is real but nobody sees everything. Not even my therapist.
Not even me. There are parts of me that I am still hiding from myself. I know it. And so much of me lies dormant, waiting for the spring that has been so long delayed.
I really have no idea who I really am. All I have ever known is my nascent self. I don’t know what it is like to be in a relationship, or have a job, or have a sex life, or do something meaningful and important.
I want to burst into rowdy bloom but that would require a change of situation. I would need to move to someplace sunnier and warmer than the environment which I can provide for myself.
So again : the problem is that I need a lot of help but lack the ability to get that help for myself. I can’t think of anyone that would take on the massive burden of care that I require, and I don’t think I could possibly do it for myself.
And I sure as fuck can’t pay someone to do it.
It’s like those scenes where someone is having a heart attack and they end up dying because they can’t reach the phone to dial 911 for themselves.
That’s how I feel. There might be a world of salvation out there but I will never know because I lack the strength and motive power to find and use it.
It’s all terribly tragic and ironic, I suppose.
I wish that, with all my magic, I had a spell to make myself well.
But I am just a sick wizard who can’t reach the phone.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.