Trying to Grieve
I recently replayed Soma. I wrote a review of it that I was going to publish when I returned from my hiatus, and then someone else beat me to it. If you want to read that, you can click here, though it is at most a rough draft. I think if I could add anything to it, I would say that despite being called Soma it ignores any of its own philosophy as it relates to the body.
I was already fighting ego death and existential crisis. Replaying it only provoked more introspection, which provoked intellectualisation, which provoked me to remind myself I am unable to tolerate my feelings.
I do not want every entry to be the same ruminating lament of dead dreams and the incomprehensible past.
But right now, I am alone. This is what helps. I won’t worry about writing well or trying new things. I won’t worry about whether I’m enabling things or if I feel like I am lying. I am just going to write. I am going to grieve.
I am broken, and in getting better it seems like I just make things worse. My life has been torturous. I use this word because it has that quality in which the intent was a response provoked by suffering. In torture, you can give the answer, and they will keep torturing you. What do you do in that case? Plead, tell them that you’re telling the truth, and just endure as they ask of you the same question over again, until they begin punishing you for saying the truth. What then? When you are punished for your genuine existence?
Accept the punishment, endure. It turned me into a deeply traumatised personality. Or personalities. I am just myself right now. I don’t know who that is. It is whoever is writing this. I don’t know who that is, because I do not know who I am. And without knowing who you are it is very hard to tell who you aren’t, you simply are, that is what it is like to be me. Descartes’ statement of identity. When I finally escaped my torturers, I began to torture myself in their absence.
I don’t know what happened to me. Recall changes memory, and I have a dozen different variations of the same events that could be true. I have the truth my body remembers, the truth I wrote down as things were happening, the truth that I recall now, and the truth I understand logically as a combination of these things. Even now each of those accounts are prone to change with recall. I can question all of it even before that.
I don’t know what it did to me. Environment and agency feed into each other. All I will say is that the person I became in the past to survive is a shadow to me in many senses, but most especially the Jungian. They are behind me, in the past, but still ‘with me’. I impose myself over it and it remains visible, we are one.
I don’t know what I became. I am the larger part. Confusing when words lose their meaning or gain new ones. I became a man who is doing his best and still losing, and it is impossible to tell anymore who’s to blame, I must ignore that and assume it is myself, I must focus on the climb. I must climb up. If others want to climb with me they are welcome. If they want to drag me down, even unconsciously, they are welcome to try. But I am going to keep climbing. I have a long way to go. Up is the only thing that matters. I don’t even know who I am, every time I think I’m right I’m wrong, but I know that Up is the only thing that means anything. I must have faith in myself, which means listening to my gut, which means ignoring hope in anything except Up.
I don’t want to look Down anymore. I don’t want to be the past. I want to be the person I am in this moment, in this very second. That is very hard. I am carrying a lot of things from Down, from the past. I am carrying all of my self-defeat and self-hatred and self-flagellation still. I am carrying all the things done to me and that I have done to others. All that terror and hate and disgust. I know that I could destroy anyone if I really wanted to, and they would be completely powerless. I can only save people once I am further Up, right now it will lead us to dragging everyone involved Down. Even if I want to help, right now it will consummate the tragedy, and birth something much worse.
I lost everything. I am not going back willingly. I am trying to climb, and all of my energy is going to not falling. Don’t fucking touch me. I cannot endure your weight, and you cannot endure mine. Maybe we can do a last push together, but even that is a horrific risk. Worst of all it might not even be ‘me’ that you’re helping.
I can feel myself getting worse, even as I get better. There is a disconnect, when I change. I, whoever that is, still exists. It is overlaid in a variety of ways. Sometimes, it feels like I am behind myself. Other times, it feels like I am possessed, an actor is wearing my mask. The worst times are when it is subtle enough that I miss it completely, there is that blink, and then 5 hours later it happens again, and I realise what I have been doing this entire time. In that way it reminds me almost of psychosis. I am convinced I am something I am not with absolute certainty, and the worst ones are where it only becomes clear after looking at my behaviour after the return.
This is the part that is getting worse. I don’t know if it’s the stress, or if my disease is actually progressing, or if it can progress. It doesn’t change my goal of Up either way, but the idea of more weight is depressing. It would mean I would be even more prone to being alone in literal, physical reality, whilst simultaneously having more company in the worst way. The idea of not being myself is incredibly disturbing, even if I don’t know who I am. Maybe I’ll rephrase it and say that the idea of someone else who I don’t know being me is disturbing. It’s the same thing. It’s terrifying. It’s the idea of a copy of you going around and doing stuff.
That’s probably why Soma fucked me up so much on my recent playthrough. It hit far too close to home.
I thought of a joke just then. Next time someone asks me why I can’t remember something, ask them if they have any idea how hard it is to parse knowledge between multiple identities who don’t really know each other. It’s not funny. That’s bad. It is a cruel joke on the asker.
The lines are blurring.