Now

Now, I can’t be around people without completely going somewhere else. I can’t relate and just feel natural and enjoy the flow of being together. I can only think, terrified, about keeping them at ease and trying to appear acceptable and appropriate to them: laughing and scrunching my face up, nearly closing my eyes in a contortion to create the look of a smile, no matter if something is funny or not. When this is going on, every moment is a little humiliation. “I am SO fucked up.” But they will never know what I am thinking. My internal experience is grotesque. Almost every time after I have made another effort to be with people and give it a good effort on the bright side, I feel beaten completely down, drained. I have to just completely escape and medicate to soothe myself from a whole traumatic experience, that I have apparently done to myself, but I have no idea how to not do. I have to eat a tub of ice cream or spend over $10 on a heavy bag from McDonald’s. I have to completely. Drown. It out.

I’d have to really think about “do I know how to relate?” How? I am scared all the time. I am angry often. The thought “I am a bad person” haunts me every single day. Every single minute, and second, sometimes. It’s been so long since I have just related with someone and had a good time. I’m so far away. I think to be healthy is to be focused on goals, and to just exist, as you maneuver through the world and the people of the world. I don’t know how to do this. I am caught in a reactive cycle. I don’t feel I have a foundation of self. I feel empty. And so much of my effort is spent in vain, trying to fill myself up. To other people, I think these efforts look absolutely crazy, incomprehensible, and maybe dangerous. Picture this...you enter a room where this guy Emau is, who you know. When he hears your footsteps coming closer, he turns, with an angry and scared expression, failing to hide a container of ice cream, as he barks out, in a dire voice you haven’t heard before, “What are you DOING?!” What would you think? How would you feel?

I think inside, I end up caught in a state like a cornered animal...only able to operate from a point of fight or flight. And that’s ugly to see. Have you ever seen a dog really bare it’s teeth and snarl? Maybe it’s not so different. The animal is wounded and scared, and so am I. The sad part is, the wounded animal might hurt you. Based on the real or perceived threat to which its responding. I grew up with parents and siblings, and around extended family, in states like this. I think it causes a child to remain in an arrested early mode of viewing the world and their own self... perhaps the child does not yet develop a self, per se, or does not know how the self. Black and white thinking is the best available defense, it seems. The child remains terrified of the void where a known self should be, and perhaps fights tooth and nail—scraps—every opportunity to observe or even acknowledge that void. But it’s also perhaps, the one and only way out.

Sadly, other false ways out are grasped at, proving in the end only to be ways deeper in. This too is a part of my story. After high school I found a college professor who would end up being all too willing to confirm my worst, most fearful assessments of myself. I didn’t fully get out of it for 8 years, obsessing on his demeaning words and overblown judgements and pronouncements, blowing in his wind as my clothes and feelings turned to rags and tatters. He conscripted and used me to achieve his own sexual abuse on female graduate students. I was an easy “inside man” he could manipulate into making his grooming “student approved.” The list is so long of all the horrible things he said to me. He hates himself, and one of the reasons is that he hates himself for being white. I remember when he looked right at me in class once and said “we’ve already heard your story before,” when the idea of sharing personal testaments came up, or personal art works, or something. After one of his concubines, who I naively thought was my friend, stood me up the fifth time to hang out, I told him this, and he looked at me and said with such contempt and dismissal, “You give others so little leeway, when so much has been given to you.” After one of my friends told me they attempted suicide, I called this teacher, desperate for advice on what to do. He hates being asked, and I had to make my own decision to call 911. After that night, when I returned to school, he told me, scolding, “you should think about taking counseling classes.” For many days after that he would not look at or acknowledge me, as he took my friend completely under his wing, doing one of his big shows. “Spearheading the PR campaign” to take care of that student. Later, someone tattled to him that I’d mentioned using marijuana. He held that over me like I was a murderer. Later, he twisted my employment for a food delivery service to be “delivering weed,” and told this to another professor, and others I know. By the end of it all, my reputation was in rags and tatters, just like my clothing and feelings in my little “blowing in the wind” metaphor. I felt totally, completely, cut off from those peers and colleagues, who just a couple of years before, had accompanied and supported me to the mountaintop of coming out. They were like my first true family. Every relationship was destroyed, between the effects of my own personal hell and the added hell of the “professor.”

Maybe me and that professor are not so different, in terms of our lack of a known self, and our similarly functioning, although differently configured false selves. It was familiar. Getting treated with respect and kindness was, in a way, unfamiliar, unknown, part of the void, something which made me look at my unknown self... but by taking his emotional beatings to the pulp, I could stay willfully ignorant of my Self, of my own innate beauty and goodness as a part of the universe and a child of God. As the little kid whose soul was lit on fire by the Tchaikovsky music in “Fantasia.” A smiling, happy child of God, at any age. One who deserves to live, to exist, and to have a good life.

You can truly forget, and abandon, the self. You can drown it out in so many ways. My ways of choice have been binge eating, and impulsive, non-functional dives into porn, tv shows, and video games. That professor would have you believe, and I think has many believing right now, I am addicted to drugs, or sell drugs, or any and all of that that would serve as a utile condemnation in any particular moment. I am not any of those things, but if I was, it wouldn’t change the goodness of my true self, just as the binge eating, porn, and even lashing out don’t. I am still good no matter what happens. I weathered being raped too, which was a terrible turning point after my second college year, but I am still good. I have endured these things, and inflicted pain on friends and many people who have tried to help me, lashing out against looking at the void, preferring always to blame myself, unconsciously. But I am still good.

I had to temper my impulses by several layers just to achieve writing this here in this phone note. I had to overcome the desire to make it a Facebook post and to set off whatever explosive repercussions that would lead to. (I have done that before, by the way.) I have even checked my impulse to put it up in my blog. I don’t even know how to share it. Impulses are always a part of the game, while I’m in this type of mental state. In fact, even my more absolute statements in this note are impulsive, and too final and total in their wording. I had to get this stuff out. I feel better and see a little clearer for it. It’s not permanent though. I think I will spend years working on this. It will be time well spent though.

I want to have more music in my life. I want a dog. I want a boyfriend or girlfriend. I want to experience the benefits of a healthy weight again—mobility, clothes, improved body image, bigger dating pool, better feelings in my body, no more sleep apnea. I want to run again... I don’t want to die yet. I want to have friends again. I want to be able to feel relaxed, natural, regular relating. Regular hanging out.

Sadly, whilst personal hells persist, sometimes bridges must be burned. This I have learned for sure, for myself. I grieve the loss of that family who helped me come out in college. But in many cases, the best way to experience that love is to let it go. This is a sad thing of life. But it is a part of the way toward something better for everyone. Just as I ended up needing that professor, and my family of origin, to be out of my life, there are those who I have emotionally harmed, as that cornered, scared, dangerous animal, who need me to be out of their life. To them, this may be a necessary choice to take care of themselves.

As for me, I have to continue in the pursuit of Self.