Sweet Baby Isbach

Did LI about early childhood in therapy. Which was tough for a lot of reasons. LI is often a lot of work in trying to generate and stick with a terrible feeling so that you can have it while you learn to tell a different story about it. Which I need for being an infant, because my current story is incompatible with being a happy human.

Before we even started my therapist was trying to explain the process and talked about imagining myself as a “sweet baby” or various other terms intended to reflect the fact that essentially no condition or behavior of infants is unacceptable. But my brain doesn’t believe that fact. My brain is pretty sure that I was a monster masquerading as a human, and that my unmet needs were the result of my inhuman demands. Is confident that no human could take care of me, and that I must pretend to be human by not responding. Not to things that cause distress, but also not to things that would reveal my interest. I tried not to engage in anything except endurance.

Obviously I don’t remember being an infant. I don’t remember most of my life in any sensible narrative form. There isn’t a sensible narrative form to remember and there’s and endless supply of things I’d do just as well to forget. But it doesn’t really matter because the impacts are obvious and the parts of the story I’m missing are so universal as to apply to literally everyone.

Which is what we did – just tell a universal story. It’s was essentially the therapist asking me to imagine a story they told about “me” that is simply a description of the general things an infant does as they develop control of their body and mind and the ability to manipulate their environment. Things not about my life but about the lives of healthy human infants. Things I technically know happen to most infants and could typically provide to an infant but can’t imagine happening to me personally. Things that almost certainly didn’t happen to me – a lack of experience does that does make me bad at various parts of being a human.

But not because I am fundamentally incapable, just because no one ever helped me do the things that and infant need feedback to learn. It’s the list of things I don’t understand and no one can explain to me – like what mothering is or when manipulation is good – because they “just know” and assume everyone else does. But I don’t know and can’t learn from your insistence that it’s true. Can’t be comforted by your assertion that all humans have a certain kind of feeling. Because I don’t, and if all humans are supposed to it’s just more proof that I’m not one and can’t be trusted around them.

So I spent an hour imagining that I had spent the first several years of my life experiencing bodily sensations. This is actually a thing I repressed, and started repressing before I could talk. That I could tell I was doing in a way people didn’t like while I was still and infant. I was trained to make do with less, to express less, to need less. To pull so far away that I could escape the narc anxiety feedback loop ¹Which is probably why Mother hates me in a way she doesn’t hate the Kids – the two tiny humans I raised for her – because I did escape from her, even as an infant, and all it cost me was my humanity.

Eventually I’m supposed to imagine that it was possible for people to pay attention to me and to help with my needs. This is not currently happening. When I listen to this story of fake infant me there is no version that feels safe because even as an old person I can’t imagine anyone taking care of me. Not as an infant, and not now if I wasn’t capable of coordinating my own care. There’s no version where I imagine humans that react to me without panic and disgust. After we get through the generic infant story we pick up cues from my actual life at like age 4, to try to integrate the pieces. But once I’m in this state of mind I can’t imagine anything being safe until I’m like 16 and have access to a placd to sleep (the back of my truck) and money (because now I can work most days). Which is actuate and also a long time to go without feeling even a little safe. Which is why I can’t believe the story about being made safe by others, because I was the only person who ever made that happen.

I did better with the part where I’m supposed to imagine learning infant things, like bodily sensation or recognizing humans. Where I imagine there’s a version of sensations that isn’t merely endured and unexpressed pain. I am still afraid that the expression will be bad, but it seems plausible that there are sensations that I can like, at least in certain circumstances, and not only sensations that I have to avoid. It makes me feel really incapable, knowing that I still don’t know things that I should have learned in the first few weeks of life. It’s a challenge to feel like that isn’t my fault – that I wasn’t and am not a bad human – because I was so comprehensively taught that I am a problem.

I continue to have some trouble with the way grounding is emphasized in these sessions. It doesn’t resonate with my actual experience in them, or in broader life. Under most conditions I always feel about as safe as I ever have, because I know that I can always leave. It’s never more than 13 hours until I can be on a train away from every human who might try to hurt me, and to a place where I can stay technically alive with no support (and with only medium luck required). It’s not a lot of safety – it’s the amount you can get by running away and living alone in the forest with very limited equipment – but I almost always feel at least that safe ²This is why confinement is so intolerable for me – it means I cannot flee my oppressors, and I know that sometimes fleeing is the only thing that will keep me alive..

I know emergency management is a step that happens before fleeing, and I generally feel very prepared for emergencies. I also react quickly to soothe my own tension to a level that lets me make decisions and achieve a wide variety of goals, so I am confident I will be able to recover under most conditions. Even when I’m triggered I don’t usual have much trouble feeling enough distance from the past to be “safe”. It’s just that I don’t know a version of safety that comes from anyone else.

A thing I learned more broadly about LI – that I sort of knew but hadn’t framed well – is that it’s about making up a self-consistent backstory. Not one that I actually lived, because that one was terrible and full of plot holes and makes everyone sad, including me. That one prevents me from knowing human things or relating to people about them. So I need a new story that matches mine well enough to be real but includes support and safety I did not actually have. I need to imagine what my life would have been like if all the same things happened but I actually got help with them as the occurred. If there had been some recovery time between them so I could have a baseline to compare to and not continuous crisis. Not quite a fabrication, but enough of a retelling to make it a parable instead of just torture porn. To make it a story I can relate to humans and not just this disconnected fairie tale that happened to a monster.

In the framework of storytelling I can imagine my therapist as an editor. Someone who can point out when my story is inconsistent either with itself or with reality. Someone who can provide prompts to help me find an expression for and idea I already have. Someone who wants my help asking better questions so I can decide what the story is about. There’s still the unpleasant part where I have to inhabit the bad feeling to invent a story for it, but I practice that all the time by myself, and with you. It’s a thing I do here all the time. And framing the exercise as construction of my backstory helps me take reassurance that I can try more than one thing instead of needing to get the answer right.

Which is a thing I wouldn’t have learned without talking to V about anachronistic amendments to memory, and specifically retroactively redefining one’s identity. I asked you if I should “correct” my memories of your identity to match the way you imagine yourself now, even though that wasn’t “true” at the time I experienced it originally. You didn’t know if course, which is the mark of a good question – it spawns more questions. But you were kind enough to help me think about it. I considered my name change, and whether or not I have always been Zach Isbach. Originally I decided that it didn’t matter what name people used to refer to historical me – that it was only my dead name after April 30, 2018. But I see now that I was never Zachary Kotlarek – that was never part of my identity – and so the only name that was ever mine is the new one. The fact that I didn’t have it in 2002 doesn’t mean it wasn’t my name, just that I hadn’t learned my name yet. It would be fine to understand that there was a transition sequence, if I used to identify with an old name and no longer do. But I am free to understand the blank spot in my identity as relevant even though I did not notice it at the time.

And it’s a thing I couldn’t have learned without J taking to me about knowing the answers. About feeling like identity isn’t a thing unless you can carefully define it ahead of time. About the fear of trying things that you might not want to keep. I’ve been trying to convince you that identity is a thing you get to tell a story about. That it’s not a thing with sharp edges and a standard set of attributes, it’s the narrative you create in describing it. Just like gifts are not objects for consumption but props for sharing a feeling. Identify is the story we tell ourselves about how to feel about our lives. That we ask others to feel with us, to connect them to us as we share our lives. When I imagine my past as a static thing that defines me I am trapped by it and my only option is to flee. But if I imagine I can tell an evolving story about it it’s possible for me to not only feel better but to take the risk of trying different versions until I find one I like.

I now have lots of things to say to @BPS about manufacturing memory. They’ve been talking about it and I’ve been prodding the idea if storytelling as life management. For myself, for their ADs, and also as a way to get you to better communicate with me. I’ve talked to them a bit about formats and presentation experimentation but I haven’t been able to pull it all together. I think now I can tell a story about storytelling as a way to encode memory as ritual, about glitches in the process and experiments as the changes to the encoding. About encoding not just for efficient archival for but alternative storage. And about how that process works historically and not just going forward – how that’s humanity and not a limitation of disability or an artifact of adaptation (at least not more than any other human thing). I’ll link it when I write it. Or maybe after they reply ³I am 900% more confident that a person I only know from YouTube will reply to my not-yet-written rant than I am anyone will even acknowledge, let alone discuss, the next two week of Screeds. Granted, they are more interested in memory research than you, but it’s not like I never talk about things we are both interested in, or like I … Continue reading, so you can see their perspective immediately.

Another thing I learned is that I can only imagine 2 kinds of attention: the kind that means we’re in an emergency and the kind that means you are using or manipulating me. Either you’re paying attention because things are so bad that you are having trouble making decisions, or you’re being insincere and are using the attention for some selfish interest. Which means, lie the image from Whinging Wayward Walrus discusses, that I feel like having your attention is an emergency. That I when I have your attention the most important thing I can do is improve the situation until you no longer need to give me attention. That or withdraw, to try to protect myself from whatever abuse you have planned. To get away form the situation where you try to Compliments Song (Brendon Small, Home Movies) me into doing something for you or acting as your proxy to collect other people’s attention for your own use.

Which means I am great at helping when you are having an emergency (though of course your emergency often makes you disagree in the moment) even if I am also having a hard time. This is a very useful skill and one that I’m happy to share. That I like sharing because I know it is useful in very hard times. But it also means that there’s no version of attention that feels safe to me. No version that correctly builds connection.

I suspect it’s also why some of you feel like my attention is so overwhelming at times – because you’re in a situation where you’re expecting abuse instead of help, and the offer of attention makes you feel trapped not relieved. Combined with the way that I am able to notice emotions you are trying to avoid having this can result in a lot of feedback that says “I hate when you notice me”, which my brain is particularly poorly suited to understand correctly – for me that’s clear confirmation that your life would be better without me. You imagine I’m “smart” and can sometimes be I charge because I “know the answer” (whether or I do or not). But you behave as though this is a thing that makes you defense and quiet and keeps us seperate and not a thing that proves my understanding of you and makes us connected. It would be better for all of us if we could agree on a better story about what’s happening in those situations.

I learned some smaller facts too:

1. I imagine ice cream as emergency food and I hate it because it makes me feel like there’s an emergency happening. Ice cream was a thing we had not for desert but when I declared a state of emergency at 2230 hours when the Kids and I hadn’t eaten all day and there was no food – we could split a couple thousand calories of ice cream ⁴shitty ice cream that had been in the freezer for months before going to bed. But I had to be prepared to take the blame for creating an emergency.

2. I don’t feel entitled to declare an emergency for myself under any circumstances, or for others without their agreement (or at least third-party approval). This is why I can’t get appropriate care for myself. It’s why I can’t get some of you enough help even when I know you need it. I’m good at emergencies but willing to tolerate far too much before declaring one.

3. I am too tolerant of ongoing crisis. This one is tricky because the world is full of ongoing crisis. But I am willing to tolerate daily conditions not good enough for a dog – to tolerate them in my own life and in yours – on the basis that things are too stressful right now to hope for anything better. From time to time that might be the only available response, but it can’t endure. It has to end – ideally in minutes or hours but certainly within a day or two – and not just push from one to the next. I shouldn’t put up with it in my own life and I should not be afraid to “manipulate” you into getting help with yours.

And probably other things about therapy and relationships and learning to feel and move and talk. Plus all the non-therapy things I did today. But this feels like plenty for the moment.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.