Hear me out here.
Nobody has ever truly understood me. I have always been operating on a level above most people’s capacity to comprehend, and it’s a major factor in my feeling of severe isolation and loneliness.
I want to connect with people. But I have so little in common with them. It makes it very hard to relate. And it’s been that way since my first day of school.
I had zero interest in the sorts of things kids my age normally did. The sandbox, monkey bars, and most toys had zero allure for me. I didn’t want action figures from my favorite cartoons. I didn’t want marbles or jacks or jump-ropes. I didn’t want to play a sport or be a singer or a fireman or whatever.
You know what I wanted? Books. Lots and lots of books.
Who could understand a kid that weird? Nobody understood me and I have lived in a little world of my own as a result.
My question for today is…. is that really such a big deal? How important is it to be understood? Is it really an insurmountable barrier to interpersonal connection? Or is it something that can be negotiated?
I understand them, after all. With startling clarity sometimes. I can get where they are coming from and that should be enough.
The hurdle there is that I can’t see a way of taking that kind of attitude without looking down on people. Tolerating them and indulging them and loving them, in a broadly humanitarian way, but not seeing them as equals at all.
And that idea, frankly, grosses me out.
I am emotionally allergic to elitism. I’ve loathed it all my life. I want equality. I want to relate to people on their own level. I want to be with people, dammit.
But is that possible when I have to talk with them in a way I find artificial and cannot truly express who I am with them?
You know what I want? The common touch. My father (RIP) had it. He could talk to absolutely anybody on their own level, as an equal, with respect and decency.
I think the secret for me would be to stop trying to relate to average people on an intellectual level. They are never going to see eye to eye with me there. No matter how good I get at expressing myself, there will always be a large gap on that level.
But that’s not the only level there is. You can relate emotionally, socially, even sexually. There is more to human existence than the life of the mind, and I would be much better off if I concentrated on developing those sides of myself instead of constantly banging my head against the brick wall of trying to make myself understood.
Right now, I feel in need of rescue. I need someone to come find me in my lonely castle on my lonely island in the middle of my lonely kingdom. Find me, and take me by the hand, and lead me out of my grey domain and into the sunlit lands, where at long last I can be happy and healthy and free.
Pretty sure that hero is going to have to be me.
God damn it.
More after the break.
That crippling wound
Let’s talk more about that profound and very deep wound at my core. The one that my whole life and very being has been built around. The one I got when a total stranger raped me in the showers of a fancy exercise club.
You know. That one.
Talked about it a bit with Doc Costin yesterday. Told him that it was clear that real recovery can only happen if I deal with that primary trauma.
All my other problems lead back to there. The whole reason I can’t get anything done is that the ice ghost of my depression freezes the impulse from my blood in order to keep me from doing anything that so much as looks like it might brush up against the wound and cause me pain from it.
It’s the reason I am so weak and timid and lacking in backbone. It’s hard to be strong when you have such a terrible injury to the very heart of your soul.
It’s like having a severe spine injury. Right next to the rib cage. Untreated. You might learn to get around but you’re certainly not going to enter the Olympics ever.
And that’s how I have lived my life. Crippled. And crippled in a very inobvious and subtle way that has taken me all these years to figure out.
Unfortunately, there’s no crutches or prosthesis for the emotional cripple. I can’t go get a wheelchair for my weary soul, or a truss and belt to hold me up and keep me upright. And there is no miracle surgery to make me whole and healthy again.
God damn it.
But I closing in on the solution now. I feel this wound as a distinct and named thing now, and that is always the first step towards being able to deal with something because now my conscious mind can help.
It does have its uses, after all.
Right now, I feel like a dog gnawing on a wound. Gingerly, at first, because I don’t know how deep it goes or what it’s attached to.
But eventually I will dig deep and rip that motherfucker out.
OK, so that would actually kill the dog. Look, there’s no such thing as a perfect metaphor. Not even from me.
And I’m a man who makes great metaphors.
Perhaps surgery would work better. Or that old standby of mine, the soldier using tweezers to remove bits of shrapnel from his flesh with nothing but whiskey to use as both antiseptic and anesthetic.
And each little piece gets dropped into an emesis pan with a clink. And there are a lot of muttered curses because it hurts like a mofo but I never stop because it also feels real good to be rid of the stuff.
Well this is the biggest piece yet. Goddamned thing must be as big as a dinner plate and as thick as tank armor.
No quick yank for this one. Getting ready to remove it will take some time.
But when it is gone, the rest should fall out too.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.