Savvy readers will remember that my sister Catherine told me I was “useless” when I was very small because I was slow and clumsy learning physical tasks.
And I don’t hate my sister for this. We were all kids at the time. And Lord knows, our unhappy home gave us all a lot of reasons to lash out.
The real mystery is that we got along as well as we did.
So no, I don’t hate her for telling me I was useless.
But the truth is, I believed her.
Those incidents and others like them, incidents where I got yelled at for trying to help or trying to do things for myself and doing them “wrong” and ones where I was told that “the best way for me to help was for me to stay out of the way[1]” left me in a position where I couldn’t do anything for myself and felt horribly guilty about it.
It occurs to be just now that there was another path : I could have become spoiled and entitled. I would have become a much worse person and I am glad I didn’t go there, but you have to admit, it would have protected my self-worth and probably led to a more functional (if hard to live with) version of me.
But what really happened is that I became an emotional cripple who was convinced that any attempts he made to look after himself would end in disaster and so all he could do was hope someone else came and did it for him.
Thus, it is yet another part of the childhood baggage I am still dealing with today. It’s the main reason I am such a total slob. It’s why I am sitting here in a filthy bedroom that I never, ever clean because when I even contemplate cleaning up, this crippling fear grabs me and chokes the confidence out of me and makes me wish I hadn’t tried.
Logic be damned, that sad and lonely boy inside me is still convinced that trying to do things himself can only lead to him making things worse and getting in huge trouble for it to boot.
I can feel the waves of condemnation and guilt and helplessness crashing down on me just from thinking and writing about it.
And it seriously impedes one’s ability to grow up, man. Ya know? If you can’t even look after your environment to a minimum level, if you don’t feel competent enough to do even the most basic things, how can you become an adult?
The worst part is that I am that I had and have a learning disability. Something like dyslexia, in that I get the same “hall of mirrors” effect in my head that dyslexics talk about – but not dyslexia because it literally means “bad reading” and I read well,
I read damn well.
So I literally could not have done things faster or better. I got punished for having a learning disability. I spent my life hating myself for having a learning disability.
Even now, I struggle with this because it’s an invisible disability and very hard to explain even for me.
I don’t even know how I would asks for a diagnosis.
But I am through with feeling bad for being broken.
After all,I didn’t ask to be born this way.
I’m just the poor schmuck who has to cope with it.
More after the break.
Taking your foot off the accelerator
All right, time to tackle this one.
I’ve sort of mentioned in passing how I have realized that part of how depression manipulates me is to take a mood or emotion that is heading in the direction it wants me to go and ramps up the intensity until it breaks through whatever resistance I have and have no choice but to do what it wants me to do.
The image in my mind is of KITT suddenly accelerating and smashing through a wall.
Only evil. So not KITT, KARR.
And I want that to stop. I want to learn to take my foot off the accelerator and deal with the world in an emotionally real way. It’s a cheap and dirty trick my depression plays on me and I am sick to death of it and I need to stop falling for it pronto.
But it won’t be easy to stop the acceleration. It operates on that deep down level that can’t be directly acted upon by the rational mind.
All you can do is sort of poke around in there like a mechanic working on an unfamiliar engine and try to figure out what connects to what.
Unfortunately, despite knowing that this is not the sort of thing rationality can fix, I only have rational tools at my disposal. So all I can think of is self-monitoring and interrupting the process midway for a sanity check.
I imagine saying to myself,. “STOP. Now what is REALLY going on? Forget the panic and the bad brain chemicals, if you were calm and rational right now, how would you describe the situation?”.
Could work. At the very least,it would give me an opportunity to step back from all the panic coursing through my veins and treat it like a passing affliction, like a coughing fit or high fever, that I can simply ignore while it runs it course, patiently and indulgently letting it do what it needs to do without letting it overwhelm me.
Remember, one of depressions biggest, fattest, favorite lies is that you “have no choice”. You have to do what it says. And it will enforce its will via panic, shame. or whatever else works best on you.
But it’s a lie. You have a choice. You can choose to stay in the game and endure whatever emotional bullshit your depression throws at you. You can do it while staring your depression right in the eyes, daring it to fuck with you.
Keep it up long enough and your demons will fade away, defeated.
And you will have emerged victorious.
And that feels pretty damned good.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.