Dinkaltranen

Things have been a very mixed bag recently, but I have managed to turn most of it into moments of growth. There was a period last week where I was doing really well and getting everything done. I felt like an adult, just a decade too late. Then I fucked up and drank one night in celebration of all I’d done and killed all the momentum. Currently working my way back up to it, this writing is what I call minimum acceptable productivity. It’s doing something that isn’t nothing, it’s exerting force instead of being acted upon. Creation not consumption.

My body hurts from exercise. I’ve been doing really good with that and my health in general. I know I probably shouldn’t be proud of that, but I am. When life is really hard, it’s good to keep moving uphill even if it’s just a little and with breaks. Thinking about what I can or need to do, what changes I need to make. What risks are acceptable, what I can do now or later. Thinking about women. God, women!

Wondering what I really want, what I need to do to get there, most importantly what I am willing to sacrifice to get there.

I bought a new car recently. Not new as in brand new, new as in a second hand one that isn’t as beaten up as shitbox of my old one. At first I really just wanted to take my old one to the scrapyard. I didn’t want to go through the indignity of fixing it up, explaining the remaining problems to buyers, and having to go through the whole process of dealing with 50 people and all the stress that came with that. But really, I need the money. I’ve got time right now, where I didn’t before. It’s going to be hard, and miserable, and slow, and I’m going to curse myself for being useless while I do it, but I can absolutely fix it and sell it, and I really should. So I’ve been doing that. It’s probably the most adult thing I’ve done in a very long time. I’m proud of myself again, even if right now I’ve broken my tempo.

I miss my friends a lot, but also I know that our lives have moved in very different directions, and that it’s a sign I should go look for some new ones. I’m going on a walk up a mountain to find some. But I am worried, am I doing this again? Am I repeating my actions?

I started writing down what I wanted or like in people. I like deep, smart, idea oriented people, and had been looking in a place where I could find said people. I didn’t really consider that I was engaging with people who are not only deep and smart, but young, and young deep people are usually still working through their problems. I don’t blame them, I still am too. Ironically enough interacting with deep, young, smart people might have just been the thing that helped me through my own issues.

I thought for a long time that I knew I didn’t need anyone else to complete me, but I think subconsciously I was maybe looking for precisely that. I probably communicated that desire for dependency, and maybe that’s why I drew so many broken people as much as they drew me. It is the only explanation I have, supported by several pieces of evidence: a nagging, gnawing feeling when I look at someone. Something about their eyes, or their smile, or their being in general. A sense there is something going on with you, that you hold a secret that you are wishing to scream out for everyone to hear, but are… what? Too afraid? Unable to gather the strength? Knowing that to do so will help no one? You see it too, don’t you, you see me just as clearly as I see you. How long can you wait before spilling your soul before me, or I before you?

As long as that part exists I believe one is incapable of love. Dependence is not love, even though love may be seen through dependence, in the sense that a mother may love a child and a child love their mother. Love is interdependence, together, growing, as one. Not replacing the others missing pieces, but two beings willingly entwining themselves despite their absent parts.

There are bottomless holes that can never be filled, and the solution is not to jam in whatever you can find to stem the desire of the feeling of something entering it. You must make peace with the hole. For that you have to do some very hard things, like accept that you are not less of a person because you are not or were not loved. The terrible cruelty you experienced was not a moral judgement of your character. I say this from the point of privilege of being someone who has been doing this work and no longer has to deal with quite as much of the infinite pain that comes from the gaping holes in my being. I don’t have the answer of how to do this: as someone said, it’d be like telling you my winning lottery numbers. First of all, I don’t even have all of them, and secondly, it’s for a game that only I am playing. The numbers would be useless to you if I told you them.

The only way to get a sensation close to 'closing' the holes is through great pain and hardship, processing the past, and examining what it was that hurt you so. A lot of the times learning the answers will render you completely dysfunctional as reality quite literally crumbles around you. The alternative is going through life experiencing a series of explosions, as your psyche strains then breaks under the impossible weight of the past. I thought I only had one explosion, but looking back more carefully I realise that I had a little under a dozen and still have been having them. After each explosion I felt reborn, renewed, with a new outlook or strategy. It was ego death. But it wasn’t permanent and the new me still had the old wounds. It makes sense as a mechanism to stop complete destruction: have controlled burns that diffuse the pressure. But in reality, I was never stable. I was always boiling, moving towards my next climax. And as a result I lost much of my life.

Despite all I am saying, I am still not stable. I most likely have a long way ahead of me. I still have my inner conflict, my complexes, but I am more aware of them and managing them better. I grieve much about what I have lost to my instability. Relationships, goals, moments. But even then to grieve feels like I am losing more to itself.

I nearly wrote before that you should revisit the past, and had to correct that; this is how you get stuck like I did. A lot of people do this unconsciously in their own way. For me it was a sense of being helpless, and having others who were meant to look after me hurt me, because that is much the root of my trauma.

My mother, my abuser, countless others. They saw me helpless, or made me helpless, and then hurt me when they should have cared for me. When I couldn’t find people who made me helpless, I would make myself helpless, usually through alcohol. I say this in retrospect, for I don’t know what drove me to do these things in the moment, let alone until I wrote this sentence. Writing it, they all spin through my head. I slow down. It is overwhelming. Sometimes I wonder how many others were recreating a compulsion much like me. How many I conscripted into my play.

It is a fantasy, however. It is a cruel recreation, where you are shielded from what really happened by casting others into a role that is not theirs. Because of this, it can never be therapeutic, or heal you, or grant insight. The only way you can understand and process it is going through it by yourself, because, truthfully, the most cruel and awful things in this world are often without any reasonable meaning. Finding an answer that lets you live with yourself, lets you move on, is what is important. Something you can tell yourself that feels true and lets you form a structure of yourself. The recreation is regression, regressive fantasy, and worst of all as you were helpless in it, it is not your own.

I am running out of steam, and this blogpost went quite different than how I thought. Whilst I am still effectively adolescent, I am no longer stuck there, or at least, I think I am not. My greatest fear is that this is the result of another one of those explosions, and that I am going to fall back into the pit and lose everything all over again.

At least for now, everything is okay. I've just got to keep working on things, just like my car.

And that’s all right.

Take care,

E.