L2

It's harder to be yourself
Than it is to be anybody else

I had a bit of a breakdown over the weekend, or rather, I hit a breaking point - you can pick which euphemism sounds better - and I'm now in an interesting place. It all goes back to that counseling session I mentioned in the last post. This was the second week in a row that I had this really rough session where I just kind of spilled a bunch of shit that I had previously tried to avoid.


My therapist asked me how I often I did that at home. The answer was 'none whatsoever.' Here's the thing, though: doing that shit felt right. It was devastating, but it was also self-affirming. Expressing those things that I had spent so long trying to bury brought me into an enhanced sense of reality. Devastated and broken, I was, nonetheless, myself.

That's the realization. That's the epiphany moment where a bunch of different threads from over the years come together to reveal a bit more of the greater picture. The threads were these:

1. The Monster is Me

I stopped believing in god in high school. I had tried the born-again thing a few times in my teenage years. There was one in particular at Calvary Chapel in North Spokane where the pastor was giving this sermon. I remember it was in the evening, so it wasn't a typical sermon; I think it was for Easter, but I can't be sure.

Anyway, he gave this sermon and he invited anyone up to the stage who wanted to give their lives to god, the implication being that it would take my pain away. At the time, I was in an extreme amount of daily pain, so that sounded pretty good to me. I went up, said I accepted Jesus into my heart, and cried my eyes out in faux-relief that my pain would be gone.

Didn't stick, of course. The pain remained, and it wasn't until a round of therapy that I started to think of it less as this evil invading force, and more a physical disease. It was chemicals, and not the devil, or my corrupt soul. God was not going to help me. Therapy and medication would.

Over the years, this understanding of my sickness led to the realization that the disease in my head was not this separate entity, but actually a part of me. I had this running impression of having a monster locked deep inside of me, one that had to be caged and warded against. At some point, though, I understood that I was really just locking away part of my self.

Even so, I believed it was necessary. 

2. I Live in a Bunker

For much of my adult life, I have felt a varying degree of detachment. In recent months, I've come to understand that this is a result of having a personality disorder. Even before that, though, I knew that I existed in this mental web of defenses. 

I imagined it as interacting with the world from within a bunker. I didn't see anyone personally; I saw them on a video monitor. I didn't speak to them directly; I communicated through an intercom, carefully scripting my words. I wasn't getting abused on a regular basis; I heard distant thunder, safe within the walls of my internal fortification.

A personality disorder tends to be the result of our survival mechanisms outliving their necessity. I needed that bunker to survive what I did, but it would become a prison once I no longer needed it. In a lot of ways, my adult life has been dedicated to trying to dismantle this bunker so that I could construct some kind of life for myself.

My degree of success has varied wildly.

This bunker has caused some of my bigger interpersonal failings in life. I would encounter people who I eventually felt safe sharing myself with, and would make this connection that I new I sorely needed. Living in the bunker as I was, however, those people would be all that I saw. I would become obsessed with them. I would try to make them my life, and myself theirs. Obviously, that tends not to end well.

3. I Am Not Genuine

One of the uses of the bunker was to tailor the image I projected. It allowed me to be different things to different people. I could observe the things someone liked, and I could mold myself to be something close to those things.

This wasn't a nefarious thing. The point wasn't to manipulate people so much as protect myself. Living with my abusive father, it became necessary to be aware of his mood, and to mold my behavior based on those moods so I could avoid being the target of his frequent fits of rage. That became an intuitive thing for me, and it remained so as I grew older.

It's not always easy for me to be so objective about it. I have harbored a lot of self-loathing over this behavior. I have seen myself as a manipulative and conniving little shit at times, and when my close relationships fell through, I would blame my duplicity. I would say that I deserved to be lonely, and that I did those things because the 'real' me was worthless and unlovable.

Tying Loose Ends

When you're going through all this, it's hard to see how it all connects, even if you know it does on a cognitive level. In the moment, it feels like different currents taking you in different directions, all threatening to drown you in some aspect of your misery. When you're drowning, its hard to maintain any real sense of purpose. What good is it to pursue your dreams when you keep feeling this way? You know those dreams aren't going to fix what's broken - things like fame and money can't fix an intrinsic flaw.

So you try to fix the flaw. You try to examine it, and analyze, and experiment. You try to change your behavior, or your surroundings. You try to manufacture some sense of purpose, but no matter what you try, you end up back in the same place: broken, miserable, and hopeless.

Now into my 30s, I've felt a growing sense of exhaustion. It takes a lot of energy to try and keep so many little demons and secrets locked away. It's utterly draining to constantly restrain these thoughts and feelings, and then feeling bad for having them. 

That's what makes it seem so hopeless sometimes, you know? No matter what you do, it keeps coming back. You finally move out of your mom's basement, and it just moves with you. You change the way you interact with people, and it just lingers. You tell yourself that you're gonna write stories and change the world, and the exhausted gatekeeper in your head just gives a bitter chuckle at the delusion.

When you get tired enough, you start thinking about whether it's still worth doing. You think about whether your friends would really hate you if you did it, or whether it's enough to know that you won't know either way. You think about how good it would feel to feel nothing at all.

I've been through this particular thought process more times than I can recall. Sometimes it was literally a daily thing. Most times, I just put my head down and soldier ahead. On occasion, I get just close enough to the edge to see a clearer picture of myself. I have that moment of clarity.

I spend far, far too much energy trying to bury myself. These thoughts that I tell myself can't be allowed to manifest? Those thoughts are a part of me. They are integral pieces of my personality that I keep suppressed so that people will like me. Those efforts to suppress myself are what keep me locked in that bunker. They keep me from being real. They keep me from being me.

I want to tell my stories. I want movies to be made from those stories. I want those stories to change people's lives. More than any of that, though, I want to be at peace with myself. I want to feel whole.

Parts of me are not missing. They have been here, the entire time. I've just been doing my damnedest to kill them, and the result is this sense of disconnection. I don't want to do that any more, which is handy because I can no longer afford the energy to keep doing it.

I don't know what this looks like going forward. I suspect there'll be a good deal of anger and bitterness that I've been keeping buried. I hope that I will be more ready to say the things I want to say, instead of giving up half-way through writing it because I'm too tired and think people will hate it anyway.

The only thing I know is that I will be more genuine, and I don't know that I've ever been that for a prolonged period of time. I think it's worth trying, even if it'll be terrifying.