Crackpot History.
Give yourself one wish. That's what I came up with, when I was first learning self-care. Whatever that wish is, that first instinct should tell you what's going on at the center of your mind. Use that. Analyze that.
Even looking at it now, I become derisive, self-critical to the point of bitterness. What could I have wished for? This is followed, of course, by what *should* I wish for?
My mind, actually. That's what I wanted from the very start. Really.
I was born into an upper-middle-class white family; as blind chance goes, I was impossibly fortunate. To say otherwise, to say that the pressures weren't mostly negated by the benefits, would be nonsense. The table was set, and the food was going to be amazing.
How unkind it was, then, to also be born with hereditary major depressive disorder. For our metaphorical purposes, it consituted an eating disorder. No matter how much I profited or what came with the immense inherent privilege, I would not be allowed to enjoy it. I never really felt guilty about being in my position, did my best to help others once I realized where I was coming from, but...nope. No joy. A quick flicker of this strange medley of hopes and hype, that I'd made things better for a nanosecond, that I could help people somehow, and that I could and would help more as I got bigger or better...and then it was gone. Death was back, and hungry. The earliest that I can recall this feeling is six years old, a year after my grandmother told me all about death, and how it would get us all one day...probably starting with my ailing father, who wouldn't be there when I got home from school. This could happen at any time. Any moment. Even during snack time. Snack time, that sacred period of peanut butter and social homeostasis, was no longer a safe haven. It was like finding Idi Amin hosting your block party...and realizing some of the neighbors weren't there.
I was a child. You're only supposed to explain death to children in very broad strokes. The fact that my paternal grandmother was an unmedicated bipolar sufferer spares her such expectations, particularly from within. Still, it was easily the worst gift she gave me. This includes the macramed slipper-socks from 1976.
And to be really charitable, giving a six-year-old slipper-socks is probably not as bad as educating him about what we now call COPD. Imagine knowing that the ruler of your personal demimonde is going to drown in front of you, and there is nothing you can do to save him (or, by extension, yourself and your reality.)
So there I was, the Maude-less Harold of my first grade class, the spokesmonkey for juvenile neurosis. (No, there was never a telethon. Who would have called? Our parents, with whom we could not relate?)
To say I may have been an awkward child is also impossibly vague; I had no aptitude at sports, no social skills beyond those of a trained marmoset, and I wasn't all that good-looking. I wasn't sullen on the outside, but I was only truly gregarious around adults. I'd been trained to be, and it was a role I excelled in. Precocious humor was my forte; its subtleties were lost on my peers, however, until at least high school.
Inside, I soaked in a black swamp of knowing I wasn't a good enough son, a good enough student...and I had no friends. When I did, they were all going to leave anyway. I knew how; even if they didn't abandon me, for which they could not be blamed, they would die. I was inches from drowning, inside my head, at almost all times.
That feeling followed me, with growing intensity and a gnawing sense of entitlement, until I was about forty-two years old. It's not actually gone, but the drugs and the talking and the thinkarounds and the drugs have really drained that quagmire. On a bad day, it gets up to my waist. Then the sun comes back up, or somebody sends a virtual high-five on Facebook, or my girlfriend sends a picture of her desk, or...or I just find a way to answer my own wishes. I've learned to seek the tiniest photons, the little packets of energy that make up what we know as light, with the same avarice I used to find fear and doubt in all possible environments.
In between six and forty-two, though, I wasn't my best self. I dated, married, divorced, dated again...and had three children. My sons show no sign of this monstrosity, other than the marks of having been my children. My fear and anger are cause for constant apology, because I will never be sorry enough. They know, and have almost always known, that my feelings and behaviors were unacceptable. I made a point of telling them that, so they wouldn't think I felt justified in being shrewish.
And yes, I have apologized to most of my partners, even the ones who knew the score when we met. I do my best to treat people more kindly than fairly, but...there were lapses. I was very jealous, very insecure, and probably not as much fun as I was trouble. (I don't mean that in a bad-boy sense; there would have been more apologizing to do.)
I dropped out of college because I couldn't be bothered to improve myself. Jobs, chosen because they'd have me, fell apart. My health declined into mild horror. The rest of the world did what it does, for good or ill, but I can assure you that I took little pleasure, or at least no reasonable duration of it, in the good. (Dad died seventeen years after Grandma warned me he would; he buried her, and my beloved uncle, a decade prior to joining them. With him gone, I abruptly slid into the upper lower class.)
I became a Nets fan, too. That should have been all the warning sign a clinician would need, if you know anything about basketball. The technical term is "masochism", I believe.
I lost my footing and slipped off the world.
Here I am in space, then.
Make a wish.
Even looking at it now, I become derisive, self-critical to the point of bitterness. What could I have wished for? This is followed, of course, by what *should* I wish for?
My mind, actually. That's what I wanted from the very start. Really.
I was born into an upper-middle-class white family; as blind chance goes, I was impossibly fortunate. To say otherwise, to say that the pressures weren't mostly negated by the benefits, would be nonsense. The table was set, and the food was going to be amazing.
How unkind it was, then, to also be born with hereditary major depressive disorder. For our metaphorical purposes, it consituted an eating disorder. No matter how much I profited or what came with the immense inherent privilege, I would not be allowed to enjoy it. I never really felt guilty about being in my position, did my best to help others once I realized where I was coming from, but...nope. No joy. A quick flicker of this strange medley of hopes and hype, that I'd made things better for a nanosecond, that I could help people somehow, and that I could and would help more as I got bigger or better...and then it was gone. Death was back, and hungry. The earliest that I can recall this feeling is six years old, a year after my grandmother told me all about death, and how it would get us all one day...probably starting with my ailing father, who wouldn't be there when I got home from school. This could happen at any time. Any moment. Even during snack time. Snack time, that sacred period of peanut butter and social homeostasis, was no longer a safe haven. It was like finding Idi Amin hosting your block party...and realizing some of the neighbors weren't there.
I was a child. You're only supposed to explain death to children in very broad strokes. The fact that my paternal grandmother was an unmedicated bipolar sufferer spares her such expectations, particularly from within. Still, it was easily the worst gift she gave me. This includes the macramed slipper-socks from 1976.
And to be really charitable, giving a six-year-old slipper-socks is probably not as bad as educating him about what we now call COPD. Imagine knowing that the ruler of your personal demimonde is going to drown in front of you, and there is nothing you can do to save him (or, by extension, yourself and your reality.)
So there I was, the Maude-less Harold of my first grade class, the spokesmonkey for juvenile neurosis. (No, there was never a telethon. Who would have called? Our parents, with whom we could not relate?)
To say I may have been an awkward child is also impossibly vague; I had no aptitude at sports, no social skills beyond those of a trained marmoset, and I wasn't all that good-looking. I wasn't sullen on the outside, but I was only truly gregarious around adults. I'd been trained to be, and it was a role I excelled in. Precocious humor was my forte; its subtleties were lost on my peers, however, until at least high school.
Inside, I soaked in a black swamp of knowing I wasn't a good enough son, a good enough student...and I had no friends. When I did, they were all going to leave anyway. I knew how; even if they didn't abandon me, for which they could not be blamed, they would die. I was inches from drowning, inside my head, at almost all times.
That feeling followed me, with growing intensity and a gnawing sense of entitlement, until I was about forty-two years old. It's not actually gone, but the drugs and the talking and the thinkarounds and the drugs have really drained that quagmire. On a bad day, it gets up to my waist. Then the sun comes back up, or somebody sends a virtual high-five on Facebook, or my girlfriend sends a picture of her desk, or...or I just find a way to answer my own wishes. I've learned to seek the tiniest photons, the little packets of energy that make up what we know as light, with the same avarice I used to find fear and doubt in all possible environments.
In between six and forty-two, though, I wasn't my best self. I dated, married, divorced, dated again...and had three children. My sons show no sign of this monstrosity, other than the marks of having been my children. My fear and anger are cause for constant apology, because I will never be sorry enough. They know, and have almost always known, that my feelings and behaviors were unacceptable. I made a point of telling them that, so they wouldn't think I felt justified in being shrewish.
And yes, I have apologized to most of my partners, even the ones who knew the score when we met. I do my best to treat people more kindly than fairly, but...there were lapses. I was very jealous, very insecure, and probably not as much fun as I was trouble. (I don't mean that in a bad-boy sense; there would have been more apologizing to do.)
I dropped out of college because I couldn't be bothered to improve myself. Jobs, chosen because they'd have me, fell apart. My health declined into mild horror. The rest of the world did what it does, for good or ill, but I can assure you that I took little pleasure, or at least no reasonable duration of it, in the good. (Dad died seventeen years after Grandma warned me he would; he buried her, and my beloved uncle, a decade prior to joining them. With him gone, I abruptly slid into the upper lower class.)
I became a Nets fan, too. That should have been all the warning sign a clinician would need, if you know anything about basketball. The technical term is "masochism", I believe.
I lost my footing and slipped off the world.
Here I am in space, then.
Make a wish.
posted by Thom Guthrie, Bassist and Adventurer at 9:43 AM
1 comments
