1989

In therapy we worked on a performance of illness circa 1989. Not quite the standard LI technique given the specific circumstances of the motivating event but still attempting to connect past you and current you to the past emotional state at the same time.

I went to a professional sportspuck game with Pete, which required several hours of driving. On the way there it became clear to me I was ill. Pete was annoyed that I “made myself carsick” and I tried not to let him know I was feeling bad. At the game it became more difficult to hide my illness; I needed to lie down. And so I did, on the concrete floor of the upper tiers of a chilled arena; at first in the aisle but eventually an usher found me a spot on the floor behind some empty seats, so that I wasn’t in the way. Pete was annoyined that I was ruining the game for him. I had a jacket that could cover about half my body so I had to choose contact with the floor and/or air for some parts of my body. Eventually the game was done and we went to a hotel, where Pete chastized me for being too loud while I vomited, telling me he was ashamed that I disturbed people trying to sleep in other rooms.

So like, bad times. I did not perform illness well. I was not prepared for a road show. And I was trapped in the same car/room/arena as someone who hated me for being sick the whole time. I just wanted to escape. To lie in the trunk of the car until we got home the next day, so I wouldn’t have to try so hard to look okay. So I wouldn’t be so easy to notice. So I could stop hurting everyone around me with my overreaction to what I was told was a trivial problem. I couldn’t control myself and I kept selfishly imagining my pain was bad enough to justify the discomfort it caused others to notice.

This is one of Pete’s more actively bad traits – he can’t handle other people being injured or ill or really any kind of distressed. In the best case he plays dumb and pretends he’s on your side while finding and excuse to disengage. In the common case he is angry and afraid in response to his own anxiety, and he takes it out on what he believes is the cause. It’s particularly bad for young people in his care because young people are a domestic issue and he is unwilling to address domestic issues.
At the time I imagined that I lacked sufficient self-control to be safe for the public. I wasn’t enough safe enough for my assigned old people. And escape to isolation would have been an improvement, if I could have managed it. I did eventually when he went to sleep – I could stay in the bathroom and have a towel for warmth and be quiet enough to not wake him while I was ill. And it was a great relief.

Obviously the problem was with him. He not only neglected to care for me but actively lied to me about how I was hurting people – him and anyone who was nearby. But the isolation of family prevented me from having access to any information about how normal people lived, so I found a way to make sense of my plight by inventing a world where what I perceived as illness was just a manifestation of my selfish nature, not a real impact to my body. Where my unwillingness to control my temperature and vomiting ¹We spoke of vomiting the other day, and you were a little incredulous about my ability to control it. But this is the sort of thing that motivated me to learn. There are times it can’t be controlled, but often you can trade some other discomfort for a bit of control, can use some tools to counteract the reaction, and with discipline you can … Continue reading and other signs of distress was evidence of my failure to grow out of infancy.

I still sort of live in that world today. Where any bodily discomfort is both 1) imaginary, at least in severity – it’s easy for me to believe that I’ve never in my life felt as bad as you do right now and 2) evidence of my lack of preparation or control or consideration for others – if I am going to allow myself to feel unwell I should have the decency to do it in private at a time that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. Obviously my smart brain knows this is not true but it’s pretty well baked in to decisions my dumb brain is on charge of.

So in therapy we spent some time imagining that I was taken care of instead of abused on that day. I sometimes struggle when my therapist suggests I could have had better care. It’s difficult for me to imagine what that would look like, even now. It’s easy for me to be focused on escape, and the hope that isolation would free me from enough social burden to at least let me try to deal with my broken self instead of trying to ignore it while I dealt with everyone else. Even though I know that independence is dying alone in the woods. But presumably there’s a version where instead of lying in the trunk for 2 days slowly dying I could have had access to a bed and toilet and water and social comfort ²Social comfort is also a thing I have trouble imagining even now. I do get it sometimes. I often go to some length trying to arrange it for myself when I can predict a need for it. But the range and frequency of comfort I imagine being available to me are so small that I often don’t believe I can be comforted..

Imagine a continuum, from social harm ³the people around you cause harm and make it difficult to regulate your emotions to isolation ⁴no people around or they have no impact on your emotions to social aid ⁵the people around provide help and make it easier to regulate your emotions. When you’re at the social harm end of the scale all directions are up and isolation is a clear win. It’s much less bad than things are now. And so when your being abused or otherwise mistreated by the people around you it’s totally rational to hope for isolation. To strive to get away so you can be safer. And once you’ve trained for that situation it’s easy to make it your default – to assume that any bad situation would be better if everyone would just leave you alone.

But it does matter where you are starting from. If your past the neutral of isolation and even an inch I to the social aid side of the scale, isolation is a step back, a step away from getting better, a step toward the social harm you fear. When you feel compelled to pull back, to cut yourself off, to find a path to improvement on your own, consider whether that’s the shortest route to where you want to be from where you are now, or just the direction you remember from all the times you were hurt before. You’re here now, and you’re safe, and the people around you can help even though that was not always true.

I’m asking you to help me. Every time you see that I’m worried you should hear me telling you that I’m having a hard time making a decision. I don’t need you to tell me the right answer but I am inviting you to share your opinion with me. Not to be judged or substituted for my own but to be discussed, so that I can understand how you came to it, and use it to clarify my own thinking. I don’t know what I want and I’d like to talk to you about it so that maybe I can figure it out.

Not that worry is all I intend to share here. I also try to share joy and hope and many other things. But worry is a thing I share all the time, and one you should see as a request for your guidance, or at least your companionship. Just like when I share about pain or hopelessness. I want your help regulating my emotions, and keeping my life pointed toward improvement.

Many times the things I am worried about are easier for you. You don’t have a weird trauma rule or trigger about it. Or you are one step removed and can think more clearly than I am able. Or you know facts I do not. Or you can reframe the issue in a way that makes it simpler. Or you show me my fear and how it keeps me from doing what I want. Or maybe you can’t do any of those, but you could tell me that you see my conflict and help me cope with it being unresolved.

It’s what I do for you. I see your anxiety and I shout at you about all the ways I can make it be less lonely. About the ways I can help you with things that seem hard to you, because the same thing doesn’t seem hard to me. Not because I think you are wrong to be anxious, or that you can’t handle it without me. Not because I want to control your life or your decisions. Just because I can see it being hard and I don’t want you to be alone when things are hard.

This belief I have – that my illness isn’t real, that my pain isn’t sufficient, that my distress is an unfair burden on others – is part of the reason I imagine my physical existence is so horrific. It’s definitely the reason I can’t respond to my body or the environment and why I can’t talk about my wellbeing. In part I feel compelled to hide it to protect you, but in part I merely don’t believe it’s something I should respond to. I imagine that I misunderstand the sensation I’m have, or that my weak and impure motivations exaggerate it beyond all reason. It’s the same sort of belief that makes me assume I’m hurting you by being around, or by being noticed, even when you tell me otherwise. It’s old and so broad that it’s tricky to get past. First I have to find the edges, and so far I don’t even know what shape it is.

I watched this ⁶From the broader series in this channel: https://youtube.com/mrskimps the other day: https://youtu.be/xMabpBvtXr4 It’s about fascist forums and the method of “rational” commentary they use to push extreme and violent agendas, but it felt very on-point with respect to the way I learned to dehumanize myself when I was young. Which makes sense – I was a fucking PoW in the fascist conflict of “states rights”. Err, “parental rights”. The popular power of the fake sincerity is no surprise to me because I’ve seen how it works. Not just with the radicals undertaking the violent parts of it, but with the slightly less aggressive bigots who want to participate in the hate without social consequences, and against potential allies because of the threat of violence from radicals.

The video comments on the inconsistent and irrational points of view that this technique uses, and how they can’t be resolved into a coherent viewpoint. But I know they can. The consistent factor is the way everything is someone else’s fault anytime it would contradict the speaker’s then-current feelings (which they mistake for beliefs). And that’s how I eventually built The Rules to help protect me. They aren’t regular rules wherein internal inconsistencies would clearly invalidate them, or where it’s possible to make reliable predictions about what violates them or not, they’re rules about how to control and predict a fascist’s reaction to improve your chances of survival. And to really make them work the trick is to believe that you’re the cause of all the pain you’re accused of. To believe that, as a member of the accused group, you really are every type of terrible you are accused of. To make yourself the monster they see, in the reflection of their own emotions.

The upside of that oppression is that I learned to build rules about humans. Not rules to control their behavior, but to describe and predict it. Rules that I built into a moral philosophy that is both strong and adaptable. Rules that help me consider all the types of humans, to imagine everyone’s pain, to genuinely want to reduce suffering even if it means I must change. But it’s incomplete. It will never be done, obviously, but it contains a giant hole in the center: me. None of the compassion or dedication or strength my philosophy demands I offer to everyone and everything around me applies to me. I still judge myself by the purity of my motives and the invisibility of my impact. And I have a lot of trouble even noticing when that happens.
But I had a thought the other day, about Dog. About how I want to treat Dog as human, except insofar as his nature as a dog demands otherwise. But I sometimes have trouble with that last bit, sometimes find it difficult to find the balance for Dog’s agency and autonomy. I always want to give him more, but that’s not really what he wants. He would eat all sorts of things that would kill him if I didn’t stop him. And run into traffic. And 40 other deadly things. I don’t feel bad for providing him the support he needs, but I have trouble working it into my moral philosophy.

And I can see that one of the problems is that I don’t really believe that any one can or should help me in the way that Dog needs help. Can keep me from eating diapers or chasing raccoons or can provide me care when I am ill. It’s certainly not a thing that anyone did for me when I was as capable as Dog is now. It’s still mostly not a thing a get, or that I even imagine I could get. I’m more capable now than most dogs, but only in certain aspects, and even then not reliably. So maybe I can use Dog to poke at the holes in my mind. I do think I can improve them if I can spot them, but right now I’m just stumbling along until I fall in, or worse still, following some “safe” path I know, whether or not it goes where I want to be.

Which is one of the reason I say I want your help. Your discussion of my life, your companionship, your influence on which way I am pointed. I bark at you about all the dumb things I want to stick my snout into and I hope that you’ll yank my chain a little if I’ve got it someplace dangerous. I’m not asking you to guide me on a 5′ leash, but I sure wish you’d pay attention to where I am, and tell me when I’ve got my head stuck in a fence. I spend a lot of time explaining my motivations and plans and actions with you, and I’d love to have some social pressure that’s based on our love and not just the rules of power structures. I want all of you to yell when I’m doing something dumb, and to cheer when I do something that makes you smile. It will help me be a better dog and you be a better human.

Likewise I want you to drag me along, like a middle-aged fat man behind an energetic dog. To tell me about what you’re doing and to motivate me a little with your enthusiasm for it. To drag me along as you do all the things that interest you, the things that you love and that make you happy. To let me share some of your joy and your discoveries as you snuffle along in your own life. Imagine the pressure you feel from me isn’t a yoke shackling you to my demand or pulling you to a path you don’t like, but merely my lumbering inertia as I try to keep up with you, and my suggestions about things I’d like to do with you. And I promise if you drag me someplace full of mean dogs and broken glass I’ll help you get back to safety.

I finished The Fifth Season ⁷There’s some really good geological and stone imagery in these books too. Facets and strata and pressure and heat. Crystal and fracture and polish. The whole series gives us a framework to talk about humanity in terms of geology and stonework and it’s amazing. series last night. That whole thing is about systematic oppression and reactions to it. About the cost of change and the danger equality presents to power structures in general, and to those who would promote oppression in specific. “There is the despair of ages on his face, all because he refuses to admit there is more than one way to be human.” N. K. Jemisin says. The series is full of all sort of tragedy in a world that is literally trying to kill them even outside of human intervention. But it’s pretty hopeful at the end, and explains the end person narration in a way that’s very sweet. It ends by imploring us: “Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way the new world begins.”

Finally I wanted to make a plea about shared media. One of the ways I have successfully become a real human myself, and have pulled other people out of their isolation, is with shared media. Movies, TV, books, YouTube, narrative games, documentaries, audio books, community theater, etc. – they all give us the opportunity to have both a private experience and to share based on a thing we both know. To develop vocabulary that describes both the media itself and our world, and eventually even ourselves. One of the reasons watching movies alone feels so hard for me now is that I rarely get to watch them with people. Even less frequently get to discuss them in depth. And I miss it. Not just for myself but for you. For what we could do with it together. It’s a low-risk way to engage with other humans, but you have to decide to do it with them.

So think about how you might like to do that. I’ll consume your stuff. Or make recommendations for mine. I already host almost 100% of the A/V media I consume, so it’s easy to access. I’d read you a bedtime story – I already write one most days. I’d do it by correspondence or in person or over the phone. I’d host a Twitch stream or consume one with you. I’d write a program that lets us stay in-sync across the Internet while we browse TV tropes or dedicate an hour of each Thursday to a live event. It can be real-time or asynchronous, written or oral, literal or meta. Hell, I’d fucking learn Swedish (a language I’ll never use) to read Harry Potter (a book that will trigger me about living under the stairs) with you in another language. However you imagine storytelling might work in life, please consider finding a little time to include me ⁸Now that I finished Fifth Season I’m going to do the Harry Potter spinoff (http://www.hpmor.com/) that E suggested – I’ve liked it over the first few chapters as a way to engage with a bit of pop culture that tricky for me – and then back to The Queer Art of Failure that I started months ago at V’s suggestion but … Continue reading. It’s a thing that made me who I am, that forged some of our relationships in years past, and that I would really love to have some of your attention about now, because I think it can help us both be better to each other.

I have things to say about glasses and work and clothes and other practical things, but I think we can save those for a message where I don’t turn you into a dog (or a sweater). Some of these need today’s activities for context, and I do want to figure out how to talk about my health here, but I think today’s big picture thinking will stand alone. I guess we’ll see when Shanda reacts to it tomorrow.

ZiB