Aromantic

It’s one of those times again. I’m perpetually short of breath. My skin feels tight and it feels like something has its claws in my chest and just keeps squeezing. Every day blurs into the next and all I want to do is scream. And sleep.

Sometimes I can learn something from my depressive episodes. It requires a moment of calm in the fury. It’s as if an alligator has me in its death roll, jaws tight, spinning and spinning and – somehow – I, in a moment of dispassionate clarity, notice which direction the bubbles from my scream are headed and I make a note to myself that, if I get out of this, that’s the way up.

Possibly more accurately, I’m in the irresistible gravity well of self-loathing. While I have nothing better to do than sink ever downward, I examine the physics of my fall, and, by doing some instinctive mathematics, noting all of the bodies powerful enough to exert their force on me. Thus I can infer the shape and location of the dark planets disrupting the orbit of the known objects in this tediously drawn out metaphor for my psyche.

Acute depressive episodes, if I can have that moment of clarity, allow me to measure the profile and power of the demons in the dark. If I can get a decent look at the shape of the horrifying feedback loop my brain gets stuck in, I guess it was worth something. Lesson learned, on to new terrifying vistas.

It takes a number of these insights to extrapolate a picture for myself, and it takes time, examination, and rumination to turn that picture into emotions and then words. My emotions don’t really translate well, at least not without a hell of a lot of work, so this process is laborious, at best.

This particular cycle seems to have shed some light on why I hold myself in such restraint when it comes to feeling connected to someone. To not belabor the point any further, I simply can’t place that much responsibility onto someone that I love. Allowing myself to feel loved, genuinely engaging someone on that level – at least at this point in my mental instability – is potentially a death sentence in which I make my loved one the executioner.

I have abysmal self-worth. I genuinely hate myself with the heat of a thousand comments sections. As such, I end up outsourcing my value to the outside world entirely. This ends up with me being kind of a needy piece of shit, begging for validation on the regular. Thankfully, there’s Facebook. It’s my one stop shop for people to make me feel like I have any trace of merit. I can diffuse the power of that sucking hole inside over whatever percentage of my friends haven’t unfollowed me yet.

I hate doing it. It’s tedious, annoying, and narcissistic. Also, probably not an effective long term solution. However, it’s gotten me through so far, despite… everything.

The reason I’m so scared to have a genuine relationship is because if I began to focus on just one person for all of that support I need, it would be hideously unfair, cruelly dependent, and ultimately it would taint any of the joy that romance is supposed to infuse into one’s life. They would become my reason to live, in the worst way you can imagine. Every word. Every action. Every facial tick. Everything. All of it. Everything that they do – it would be how I determined if were still worthy of drawing breath. You know, after it was all put through a filter of my own paranoia and self-loathing.

So there’s me, watching each minute thing a person does, weighing my life against that. They’d become my sole anchor to being a human. That isn’t a relationship – that’s profound sickness in the form of dependence. Romance, playfulness, confidence – they all die. All I’d do is panic each time the cloud of a bad mood crossed my lover’s face. Each harsh word, every deep sigh, all of it would send me into a catatonic haze, afraid that that would be the end of it all, that would be what pulled the rug out from under me.

What kind of person would I be if I knowingly did that to someone I professed to care about? And, in some dim, distant way, to myself? Logically I know that to rest my survival on something so potentially tumultuous as one other person’s perception of me could be disastrous. Especially when I know I’ll interpret the signs in the worst way possible. Especially since, when the chips are down, I begin losing all ability to communicate. Especially since, as soon as I begin seeing the signs of negativity, I immediately begin planning my exit strategy, hardening my heart out of self-preservation.

Especially since I know that I can in no way offer someone anything of equal value.

I can’t do that again. I can’t turn someone’s love for me into that toxic dependence again. I can’t turn someone into my life support system again. I can’t turn love into pity and obligation again.

I have to get better. I don’t know if I can, but I don’t want to be alone. Most of my relationships were pretty awful and easy to write off, but I’ve lost wonderful women now, because of my own weakness and terror. Because, like all abused children, I carved sword and shield from my own self, built myself into armor protecting… nothing. I used up all of myself to prepare for strife and suffering. I am prepared for battle, but not for life. A hollow suit of plate, fighting a battle many years lost. A ghost, needing someone to haunt in order to feel connected to the world, yet unable to stomach the guilt of being such a parasite.

There is no optimistic resolution here. No closure. No hero’s journey. I give you nothing and yet implicitly ask your validation. Same as always. 

Apathy

Recently, my anxiety topped out and the predictable result happened: emergency shut off. I've slipped into depersonalization. It feels like Actually David has fucked off and some sort of Backup David has had to take over.

I don't really feel anything, but logically I know that I need to maintain Actual David's interests in the world or else shit will fall apart, leaving Actual David a mess to deal with whenever he ends up getting back. I'm groping for metaphors, but it's like the store of Me is being run by the assistant manager who knows how to do everything but simply has no personal investment in the outcome, and just feels annoyed and harried by the unwelcome responsibility of running the show (or having to do anything, really). Perhaps maybe I shut down improperly and have rebooted in safe mode, only bare bones functionality until the problem is properly sorted. Maybe this is what Sam felt like when he lost his soul in season five of Supernatural.

During times like this, I feel like an observer watching myself go through the motions. When I care, I will often philosophize about the difference between this "I" and "myself," what is observing and what is being observed, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to properly express what it feels like when I say "I'm not me." The inherent paradox is staggering and nonsensical, but I feel it nonetheless.

Such times will inevitably lead to isolation, which is largely fine. I'm a fairly isolated person to begin with, so few would notice. I end up believing that it would be detrimental to Actual David's life if I were to attempt anything resembling sincerity with those who are normally close to me. They would notice the disconnect and take offense, if prior evidence indicates. Their opinions of me would, if history holds, shift to believing me to be "emotionless," "robotic," "rehearsed," or "distant." At this moment, all of those labels would be accurate, but I don't necessarily believe them to be on a longitudinal scale.

To carry the metaphor, the assistant manager believes himself to be competent enough to run the store for the untrained customer's needs. However, if any higher ups came to inspect things, they would immediately notice the AM's failings, drawing attention to how unprepared the general manager was for his own absence. The AM also knows that most of the problems come from the fact that he doesn't truly care about the outcome, but still doesn't want to get the GM in trouble.

So, yeah. That's where I am. Hollow and apathetic. Likely only for the moment. Time is flying past me and recollection of recent events is very hazy, as I'm not doing the normal human contextualization of events with emotional judgment. I guess it would stand to reason to ask why even bother writing this? Partly as a "Please excuse our mess while we remodel" warning/supplication. Partly because I'm aware that documenting my mental illness can help people and helping people is a good thing to do. Partly to lower people's expectations for me, mostly so that when Actual David returns, he won't have a pile of shit to clean up, as I anticipate serious feelings of guilt with the return of emotion.

So yeah. That's where I'm at. There's no need to worry about me; I'm likely more stable than usual. I'm performing all necessary life functions as well as normal. The worst I can say is that I've let some cosmetic issues go due to seeing no practical value in expending energy to maintain them. I've also not communicated this current situation before this post, so there's the chance someone could have noticed my change in behavior and been offended by it, which I certainly didn't intend. It takes a while for me to catch up with what is going on inside me. By the time I have adequate explanation, the damage is done. So it goes.

As for now, the store is tended, if sparsely. Please excuse our mess.

Trigger Warning

I want to kill myself.

I’m not going to do it right now, so don’t alert any authorities or anything, but I want to. I don’t want to want to, but that’s life, right? This has been my reality since around age eleven. I just want to kill myself.

Some days, I want to stop feeling and let myself die. Some days, I want to murder my greatest enemy - myself. Some days, I hate everything in the world. So. Fucking. Much. That I simply can’t see my way to exist through another horrifying day. Some days, I am so exhausted by the thought of doing laundry that I don’t know how the hell I’ll be able to accomplish any task ever again.

Those are the most prevalent flavors of my suicidal thoughts. Obviously, I haven’t gone through with it. I haven’t a fucking clue how I haven’t, but I’m still here. I’ve achieved some delicate balance. Most of it comes from releasing the notion of ever being happy. I don’t exhaust myself with chasing ideals of fulfillment. I don’t strive or desire. I’ve let my ambitions go. I simply don’t have the resources for such things. I’ve been much more stable since doing this.

Being a gamer, I have to make the comparison that it’s almost like mana usage in Dragon Age. There is always a part of me fighting off the desire to end my life, like a shield spell that uses a dedicated 30% of my mana pool. I start my day out at 70%. The Deal With Constant Pain spell takes another 30% or so, some days more, some days less. On any given day, I’m operating at about 40% of average mana, so I don’t have a lot of room for anything but work and basic life maintenance. I live within a very narrow margin that I have to carefully monitor.

It’s been worse, it’s been better, but I’ve been relatively okay of late. I only think of killing myself every couple of days, and usually without any real emotional investment in the idea. It’s been far worse. If you live in my town, there have been many nights when, had you been walking down Orange Street, you might have found me sitting on one of the benches outside of the eight story parking garage, crying softly to myself, going back and forth on if I was going to get into that elevator.

Right now, I seem to be at the Groucho Marx level. “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” I can find and experience enjoyable sensory phenomenon. Death will end that and I only have one shot at this, so, if I want more pizza and orgasms, I guess I’d better deal with the rest of the bullshit. This is Level One, and about as high as I can expect to function.

Level Two is I Can’t Do This To My Friends. I know firsthand how hard the suicide of someone close to you can affect you. At this level, even though my isolation and depression have separated me almost entirely from feeling like I can ever connect with anyone on a meaningful level, I know that many people would likely be damaged to some degree by my death and I can’t handle the guilt of doing that to so many lovely people who have been so charitable, if misguided, to care about me.

Level Three is I Fucking Hate You All.  This is when I begin to resent that every person in my life is passively guilting me into living even when they refuse to help (in my twisted vision of things). I want to scream in the face of everyone who professes to give a shit, saying that thing that I know I could say that would drive a permanent wedge between us. I want to dissolve every connection once and for all, leaving me alone and free, able to end my life with no one to mourn me. Because if all I’m doing is living for other people, and THEY AREN’T HELPING ME, why the fuck should I care how they feel after I’m gone?

Obviously, I realize the distorted cognitions of Level Three. I know people want to help, I don’t actually resent them (you). I just resent the fact that no one can reach inside me and actually do something to fix me.

I don’t know what Level Four is. I suspect that if I find out, I won’t have the opportunity to record it.

Why am I writing all of this? Chris Cornell just committed suicide, so the topic is in the ether. Naturally, we all have feelings about it. Naturally, there is a greater discussion about mental health, depression, and suicidal urges. Naturally, this sets me into a shitty place.

The following is a Facebook post I made about a year ago on the topic of how people want to help. I feel it bears repeating.

"If you're depressed and contemplating suicide, please reach out."

I've seen (and said) this statement many times. It's earnest and well-meaning and I’m glad for the many caring souls who say it, but I've begun to see the terrible flaw in it.

Let's say I have a friend. We'll call him Mort. Mort is depressed and becoming more and more suicidal. He is consumed by self-loathing and just wants it all to end. I post the "If you're depressed..." line on Facebook, which Mort sees.

Here's the problem. I have put the burden of action to protect Mort's survival onto Mort. I have put the burden of action onto the person who least wants to see Mort survive. He, in that psychological space, is the least qualified person in the world to care for Mort. The onus is on him to exercise self-care, when all he wants to see is his self end.

Do you see the problem?

If you are depressed, please, absolutely reach out if you can. But more than that by FAR; if you see someone who is having trouble, reach out to them first. Don't make the person being slowly crushed under their own suffering take the first step. And don’t tell them life is worth living, get involved and show them.

I’m astonished that people are surprised Cornell hung himself. For the love of cake, he wrote a song called “Pretty Noose.” Are people so naïve that they think money, fame, and love can fix this shit? This doesn’t get fixed. You cope. That’s the best you’ve got. And maybe you cope until life gets around to killing you. And maybe you find one day you just can’t cope anymore and expedite the process. But that’s what we’ve got. Coping. And sure, some of us can accomplish a lot with their remaining 40 or 70% mana. Maybe their pool of resources was just bigger by nature, I don’t know.

One thing I want to say as I close. When and if I kill myself, it will be my decision. There is no decision more personal and more mine than my continued existence. My persistence is my endorsement of my self and my reality. At some point, I may no longer be able to abide one or both of those things. And if you judge me for that, you can go fuck yourself. Be sad for my passing, be sad it came to such an end, whatever. Feel how you feel. But to judge someone who took their life? To call them a coward or weak? If you can even think such words, your myopic, infantile ignorance of how hard a person’s struggle can be makes you a useless sack of shit. I’m not endorsing suicide, but I do think there is a rather unnecessary negative stigma on it. It is sad, but that’s it. To blame or denigrate someone for their choice, to immediately jump to saying how selfish and thoughtless and awful and cowardly it makes the deceased? That makes you garbage, as far as I’m concerned. Take your judgment and shove it up your ass. It’s my life, it’s my death. You may have the opportunity to make either of them somewhat better, but in the end, for better or worse, I’m responsible for me, even if I, the actor, am a slave to myself, the construct.

And I don’t like what you got me hanging from.

Just maybe...

A lot of emotional processing this year so far. Legends passing, medications changing (reducing depression symptoms), the usual introspection. Maybe... maybe not so bleak. Maybe finding my way towards hope. Or faith. Not in gods, but maybe us. Maybe me. Maybe deciding to grope in the dark, rather than pretend I'm a part of it.

I posted only four items to my blog in all of 2015. I've barely touched my novel. A writer has to write in order to be. I haven't *been*. There have been so many things keeping my fingers off the keys, the vast majority of them lies I tell myself.

As we age, we will watch all of our heroes die. All of them. We'll lament that the world is poorer for their passing and wonder how the world will get on. There have to be new heroes. New people to inspire and give of themselves so freely and fearlessly. I think there is an underlying panic in that realization, because of the idea that comes crashing down after it; it's us. We have to be those people. We at least have to try in whatever way we can muster.

I have to stop telling myself that the world doesn't need to hear what I have to say, that I'm just one more voice in seven billion equally valid (or invalid) voices. I have to not be so convinced of my own worthlessness that I don't even bother trying. I have to realize that small measures are still progress. I have to.

David Bowie, amazing as he was, seemed to live by the notion of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what stuck. He tried *everything*. Frankly some of it wasn't great, but so much of it was revolutionary. I can try something.

Alan Rickman didn't start acting until he was 46. There is no time table for beginnings, nor is there one for success.

Maybe I'm not too exhausted to try. Maybe I'm not too disheartened to try. Maybe the world would like my voice. Maybe not. Maybe I should fucking try regardless.

Maybe I can be someone I'm proud of.

Maybe that's worth everything.

Sex And Its Acquisition

I’m just going to put it right here that this one might be too much information. It’s also going to be a bit rambling. I’ve lacked the clarity for good writing recently (assuming I’ve ever had it), but I need to try. You’ve been warned on both counts.

I have an extremely troubled relationship with sex. I’ve written previously about the sexual abuse I’ve dealt with both as a child and an adult, so I don’t want to spill too much more metaphorical ink there. I’m going to try to focus on the now.

As I’ve aged, I’ve been on my own path of self-analysis and discovery. This has been educational, but it hasn’t been pretty. With the tumult in my personal life over the past year, my focus on my shortcomings has grown by about a million percent. Due to the nature of this tumult, my primary focus has been on how deficient I am with regards to intimate relationships, and not limited to the romantic. As open as I am about my emotional states in written and/or public forums, I have intense difficulty baring my inner self directly to another human being. How this most practically manifests is that I am very good in crowds and very uncomfortable with spending time with just one other person. It’s as if I have an inverted form of social anxiety.

Practical examples: I can put an open invite on Facebook to see if someone wants to join me for lunch, but the idea of messaging someone directly is terrifying. Writing about my depression or anxiety, or talking about it in abstracts to a group of people is fine, but really opening up about it to another person is something I just don’t do. Talking with one person is just too intense. I feel like I’m burdening them. With a public discussion, anyone who wants to chime in can, while when I speak to one person, I feel as if I’m forcing them into the position to where they feel obligated to respond. I hate doing that because it feels like passive-aggressive coercion.

This interpersonal anxiety has lately been at its highest level in my life. Knowing that I’m going to be hanging out with someone fills me with a certain amount of dread. My biggest fear, and I know a lot of people who know me will find this hilarious or baffling, is that I won’t have a damned thing to say. This is coming from the guy who never shuts the fuck up and ends up dominating just about every group conversation he’s in (sorry). I feel this intense performance anxiety that I never felt stepping onto a stage in front of hundreds of people. On a stage, I’m anonymous. I’m not there, and it’s fine. Sitting across the table from someone, I can’t be anonymous. But I’m still terrified that I’m not there, and it’s not fine.

For the record, as much as I dread the idea of prolonged interaction, I make myself do it because I do need it. If I do talk directly to another person, though, it isn’t really a sign that I’m comfortable with them as much as it is a sign that I’m making the efforts to overcome my discomfort in order to show them that they matter to me.  Booze helps.

So. How does this relate to Sex And Its Acquisition, as the title suggest? In a word, profoundly. We’ll take on Sex first.

Do me a favor. I want you to become fully aware of your blinking and focus on it for thirty seconds. I’ll wait.

If you’ve done that, or if you’ve simply recalled a time when you’ve done that before, I can build a metaphor. You take a natural, effortless fact of your life and you’ve intellectualized it. You become aware of just how unnatural and controlled that simple thing is once you are cognizant of it. “Am I blinking often enough? Am I doing it at the same speed that I would if I weren’t controlling it? Are my eyes going to start bleeding? Do I look like Hannibal Lecter?” That’s just with your eyes. Imagine that with your entire body and performance. With sex, Jesus, it’s everything. The performance anxiety has led to a serious focus on technical skill (trying to avoid bragging, but I don’t want it to seem as if that is the problem), but that isn’t intimacy. I’m pretty great at casual sex, but the more I begin to care about someone and the more their opinion matters to me, the more emotionally distant I become during the act. I’m analyzing everything I’m doing at every given second, my partner’s every facial expression and body motion, and every next move that could occur and evaluating each of them, and I am never in the moment. It’s more like I’m playing chess than indulging my carnal urges.

Once again, I don’t want to brag, but I’ve had enthusiastic reviews. I don’t feel inadequate on the technical level. That’s not my concern. However, as it was in school, even when I had a 4.0, I still thought “This is the one I’m going to bomb” before every essay and every test. It’s that same feeling every time a woman starts undressing. Again, though, booze helps. And there is a cause to this performance anxiety. Having been made to feel like a sexual object by an abuser for so long and at such a formative age (and then again and again) still affects me. I know I need to let that go, and I’m working on it, but goddamn, letting go of trauma is not my strong suit.

Let’s move on to Its Acquisition.

Every now and then, someone will make a comment about how sexually successful I am (if praising me), or I’ll hear about someone saying how much I get around (if criticizing me). This rather baffles me. I had a brief stint of “sexual success,” but that was while I lived in New Jersey. Over half of the partners I’ve had in my life were during this time. This was less than three years. I credit this far less to any skill or attribute of mine and far more to the forthrightness and take-charge attitude of Jersey Girls (for which I am deeply grateful). The reality of it is that most of my friends that I’ve talked to about this have had more sexual partners in the past year than I have had in the past decade.

I feel like no small amount of the public perception of my sex life (why is that even a thing?) comes from the fact that I’ve been in open/poly relationships. There’s a certain stigma that comes with that, I suppose, and I guess I’ll just have to live with that. And for the record, I’m not discussing this to try to manage my public image or sway people into my corner. It’s just that if you’re going to praise me or deride me, I’d rather you do it for accurate reasons.

Honestly, I don’t really know how to initiate romantic contact with women. Every now and then, I’ve been “smooth” by accident. Again, booze helps. (I think a pattern is emerging.) It was a little easier when I was a kid and had the brash ignorance and inconsideration of youth on my side. Now, it’s just gotten so awful in my head. That and the social discussion on sex and inter-gender relations has made me even more locked up than I ever was.

Once again, I’ve been made to feel like a sexual object in a profound way that has had lasting effects. I know what it’s like when sex is a threat, not a joy. It contaminates just about all of my perceptions of sex. As a result, I never want to make a woman feel threatened or uncomfortable in any way relating to it. Ever. The very idea makes me feel physically ill. With today’s discourse on male/female relations, I’ve gotten so paranoid about all of this that I can’t comfortably take any action at all. I hear so often that all men are creepers, or potential rapists, and are part of rape culture. Each time that I feel like someone would feel that way about me, it makes me want to jump off of a cliff just to remove my particular perceived threat from the playing field. I’ve even heard the act of saying “Hi” to a woman called “a micro-crime.” So what do I do now? When I see a pretty girl, I refuse to look at her for fear she would be intimidated. I cross the street so a woman won’t think I’m following her. I don’t say hi. I don’t do anything at all, unless a woman has shown irrefutable interest in me. And even then, I’m still paranoid that I’ll make the wrong move and fuck everything up and feel like an awful human being, which causes me to do nothing at all.

I don’t want to make any woman uncomfortable. It’s not because I’m some fedora-wearing Nice Guy, it’s because I know what it’s like. I can empathize with feeling objectified. And I really do get why women feel beset by threats. The environment women live in today is filled with constant objectification and, too often, terrifying physical harm, and I’m crushed to think of it.

The problem is that approaching someone with romantic intent requires the chance that you will make someone uncomfortable, whether you’re male or female. Hell, there are a fair number of academic reports about body language and how breaking the “Moral Looking Time” is a required step in conveying interest. It can also be extremely intimidating. So in my attempts to be as non-threatening as possible, I appear completely disinterested. Either that or women are so used to blatant and invasive acts that my form of showing interest simply doesn’t register. Either way, I’m not hoisting the blame onto women for how it affects my life, it’s just a frustrating reality. We live in a world where it’s the only safe option for women to be immediately defensive in the face of male attention.

So where does this all leave me? Feeling disconnected. Feeling broken. Worst of all, feeling stupid. Like there should be an answer that I’m just too dense to see. My crippling self-consciousness gets in the way of me making meaningful connections, and in no arena more than that of sex and romance. But there was no point to this. No denouement. I haven’t figured anything out here. I’m just complaining, as I do, about how deficient I am, and hoping someone will have the answer for me on how not to feel like such an emotional failure.

But please, if you take anything away from this, let it be this: yes, a lot of human interaction makes me uncomfortable. I still need it and I still enjoy it, despite how anxious it can make me.

Home

The water lapping against my body wakes me slowly. Gravel and dirt on my face in the dark. So cold. So disoriented.

The river. Something Bad happened. I’m not ready to think about it.

My limbs are leaden. Moving hurts through the shuddering, but I have to get up. I have to go home. I have to get to my baby girl. I prop myself up slowly. The cold is in my bones, but I have to get home. I can barely feel the sharp rocks or the flowing water through my frozen nerves, but it’s there. I hurt all over, but I don’t care. I have to go home.

I finally manage to stand. The river is dark, only flickering lights reflecting from the streetlights from the bridge above. I look down at my dress, torn and bloody. Something Bad. Grasping hands and angry mouths – no. The Something Bad can wait. My daughter needs me.

I take a few awkward steps. The shivering almost topples me, but I am of one mind. I take a few more, but fall despite my resolve. It’s doesn’t matter. I have to crawl up the embankment anyways.

I get to street level and pull myself up an overturned garbage can to stand again. It must be late. There isn’t a single car around, nor anyone to beg for help.

I don’t live far. I’ll make it.

I start walking, each step a torturous effort. I’m so fucking cold. I walk through the silent streets, willing myself on.

Something dislodges from between my legs and falls to the sidewalk, making a wet sound in the quiet. I close my eyes and refuse to look at it. It doesn’t matter. Home matters. I keep walking.

My house is dark. My keys are gone, in the purse torn from me by – no. I kneel like an old woman, bracing myself against the door. I push the large flowerpot over by accident, but I find my key. My shivering fingers can barely put it in the lock.

My house is quiet. No crying. I panic. I don’t know how long it’s been since I was here.

My baby.

I crawl up the stairs and down the hall to her room. I again have to drag myself up something to stand, her white, wooden crib. Waste is coming out of the sides of her diaper and there are fine salt tracks from her eyes. My poor little monkey, how long have you been alone? I reach out to hold her to me. She burns to the touch. As I pick her up, she rouses and wails. She must be starving. God knows I am. I clutch her to me, uncaring of the mess. I don’t even smell her – all I smell is the river, even still.

My baby.

So warm.

I try to coo to her, to comfort her, but my throat can only manage a croaking groan. I kiss her head, barely feeling her fine black hair on my lips. I fear dropping her with my unsteady limbs, but I hold her fast. I’m her mother and she is the only precious thing in the world.

I put my lips to her chubby little arms and bite, her warmth pouring down my throat. Hush, little monkey, I want to say as I gulp. Momma’s home.

Tunnel Vision

Though I’m sure it comes from many things, I think a large part of it was from moving around so much. Kindergarten through graduation, I went to ten different schools. Sometimes, they were rapid-fire moves. Between fifth and sixth grade, I went to four schools, and I went to four high schools in those four years.

I was used to being impermanent. Unnecessary. Superfluous.

Possibly worse still, I was used to every person I ever knew or liked being only a fleeting presence in my life. I would know someone just long enough to grow affection for them and then I would never see them again. “Well, my parents are moving to another state. I guess I’ll never see you again, so... bye.”

I coped by devaluing the outcome of closeness and substantive interaction. I accepted that no relationship would last. People became shades, only existing when right in front of my eyes. When they were gone, they no longer existed. That sounds so cold, and it is, but I had no other way to live. Had I tried to maintain my ties, I would have collapsed under the weight of loss. So I gave up trying to care. I gave it up and came to know the difference between isolation and loneliness.

My mother, bouncing back and forth between her obsession with me and her tremendous neglect, made this worse. She would tell me that she was all I needed, but then she spent three years in bed, leaving me with my step-father. He was a fiend. So much so that I never speak his name. He is a monster that looms in my past, my own Unnamable Terror. His seething hatred of me, his constant, explicit reminders that everything I said and was would never be good enough, they drove me further inside. My mother’s insistence that I was her perfect little boy, just as long as I adhered to who she wanted me to be, pushed me deeper.

I became a performer. I Complied. I Appeased. I was whomever others wanted me to be, because who I actually was was nothing anyone cared to see, as far as I knew. I was always a disappointment. Not Good Enough.

Somewhere along the way, I lost who I was. I never got to know myself, not in any clear sense. I can look inside and I can see the trash, but anything good is alien to me. All I see is the broken little boy, terrified of everything and everyone, unable to take any positive affirmation from others.

It seems like I have emotional tunnel vision. My sense that only what is in front of me is real has limited my scope of the world. I see the world through a pinhole. If you are in my field of experience, you take up my whole reality. And when you aren’t, you just fade away. It’s so rare for me to miss someone when they are gone. My mind just doesn’t work that way. When I see a person that I love after a long time, I immediately realize how much I wanted to see them, but I have no prolonged sense of longing for another’s company that I believe others experience. It’s like everyone in the world is The Silence from Doctor Who, except in that moment of seeing and remembrance, it is a feeling of love. And guilt.

Because all of this makes me feel so fucking guilty. I feel like a terrible friend or loved one. Trying to be charitable to myself, I feel like I’m fun to be around. A good conversationalist, good for a laugh. But not good at any of the stuff that cements bonds between others. The little gifts to let others know that I think of them. The spontaneous invitations for a beer. The simple, out of the blue statement “I miss you.”

I live in my own little world, and because I am somehow trapped inside, I require others to knock on the door to my reality. It’s up to everyone else to drag me back to reality to remind me that they exist. I can only assume that to be exhausting, and I’m sure that it is very detrimental to a person’s feeling of being valued by me. I never contact someone first. I am always the respondent. Surely that must make people question if I even like them.

To casual relationships, that strain is likely not so bad. To my closer relationships, this is crippling. How could anyone think anything except that I don’t care?

Possibly my biggest problem to overcome is that, despite the fact that I want to live in the world with people and passion and meaning, I resent it. I resent reality. Even now that I am an adult and have relative control over the path of my life, I still fear everything being swept away, again and again. So I am my own warden here. And, while I need to leave the confines of my head from time to time, I resent constant knocking at the door.

I am trying. I’m trying to reach out occasionally, just to bring some energy to my relationships, so that they aren’t all so one-sided. I don’t want to be this way, and it is probably one of my biggest sources of dissatisfaction in my life.

I mean it when I say I care, but how I care is stunted. After a while, words aren’t good enough, and I know it. I truly want to have stronger connections, to expand the boundaries of my world to include others. I want to annex you. Or maybe just have thriving trade routes, I don’t know, my metaphors are getting away from me (as usual).

What it boils down is that I want to feel like a decent friend. At this point, I have no idea where to start rewiring myself, but as little as simple words mean, I do hold so many great people in my heart, such as it is. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re one of them.

Silence

I’m about three blocks away when I realize I’m still wearing my bathrobe. Must look like The Dude. I just had to get out of the house. I couldn’t face her. Even if she wasn’t disappointed in me, the very fact of her human presence around me made me hate myself and my failings.

I walk and walk. I walk in no particular pattern, just following whatever crossing lights were white. Path of least resistance, as usual.

Ugh. Why am I so not who I want to be?

The bad thoughts were starting to encroach again. I’ve been getting isolated and weird. Trying to meet people halfway, people whom I knew liked me and wanted to engage with me. People I love. I feel like I’m slowly warping into a person I don’t want to be. I feel myself slipping further and further away from them, even as I sit and smile mid-conversation. All I want is silence.

I’ve even stopped listening to music, one of my biggest passions of my youth. I don’t care about new bands or shows or anything. When I do feel the urge to listen to something, just to break the monotony, it’s always barely audible.

It’s like I can’t stop listening to the silence. It calls out to me. When I have to be subject to noise, I find myself longing for deafness. I want to finally hear nothing. Maybe if I didn’t hear how awful the sound of my voice is, I wouldn’t hate everything I have to say.

I walk, scowling at every car that passes for interrupting my peace. I try to step outside of myself, remember that they have as much right to walk the Earth as I do. But it immediately follows that none of us has any right. It makes it easier to hate them again for the crime of life.

There is a high parking garage gone dark. Only diffused moonlight filters through the cement structure. I duck into it and follow the smooth concrete upwards. The noise from the outside is turned down, having to traverse many angles to reach me. But it still seeks me. I walk slowly, carefully, as quiet as I can manage. Every scratch of sand beneath my shoes scrapes down my brain. When will this just end?

I make it to the top of the parking garage and the wind mocks me with its hiss. I sit down near the center of the parking level. There aren’t tears for this kind of desperation. I’m past tears. Tears are for amateurs’ little jaunts into sadness and despair.

Tears are for the living.

I sit and I stare.

I walk to the ledge and stare down. The city is quieter, but not quiet enough. As my foot shifts, a sharp metal clinking forces into my head. A long, thin nail lies at my feet. Maybe one last effort before I give in completely.

The second eardrum ruptures easier than the first one.

It’s quiet. I look down at the city and feel the wind brush me, neither one making a sound. I can almost enjoy my other senses now that I have the silence. Now, I kind of do want to cry.

As I start walking down into the parking garage, I notice the sound of my blood, round and organic. It was almost enough, but the necessary functions of my body still intrude into my head. The proverbial wind leaves my sails. I slow my pace to keep my heart rate low.

“James?”

I turn in fear and fury to the voice behind me. There is only darkness. I freeze.

I should not hear anything. And my name is not James.

“James?”

It’s still behind me. Closer.

“James?”

I turn again, met only by shadows. I can hear my blood rush. The shadows look finer, more defined in my terror.

“James?”

I run.

I can hear what sounds like wet meat slapping on the concrete and sound of bone crunching under heel.

“James?” The voice sounds afraid, pleading.

I corkscrew down the halls of the parking garage, hounded by the increasingly desperate cries.

I see the exit, a dark frame around the street’s safety of light and society. I burst out of the exit.

I don’t hear the car coming.

Once Upon A Time...

Once upon a time, there was a girl, a very messed-up young girl. At seventeen, she went off to college. She was haggard and tired of her life and felt so old. She felt so old that she was blind to how naive she really was.

           

She had always been a daddy’s girl. She had yet to realize that the things her father did with her weren’t quite right. She didn’t realize that her father was a little too loving. She didn’t know how profoundly it had compromised her, wouldn’t know for many years.

           

She got to college and found freedom. She had been used to such confines that she was overwhelmed. Everyone else takes that same journey their freshman semester. She was one of those destined for particularly trying times.

A few weeks into the semester, she met a man. He was a few years older, had been at college a few years longer. He was recently out of a relationship considered famously disastrous around the campus. He set his sights on her and she was deeply flattered.

She wasn’t really ready for a boyfriend. He told her that he wouldn’t share her with anyone else. They spent the night together.

He was just so into her. She was confused by that, flattered and disarmed. They spent a lot of time together – she didn’t know how to navigate college yet and he wanted her.

Time passed.

They ended up in a de facto relationship. Her roommate had gotten fed up with being locked out of their room for sex and she offered to switch rooms with the man.

He confessed things to her.

“I was arrested for threatening my ex and her new boyfriend with a gun. Does that scare you?” he asked.

“No,” she said, sure she could handle this. She’d handled worse. And, after all, he told her he loved her. Surely that meant everything would work out. Surely.

The girl was not just metaphorically tired of life. She was always exhausted. After a couple months, when she tried to beg off his sexual advances, he stopped being kind.

Not long after, he became cruel.

“I’m too tired, I just want to go to bed,” she whined.

“Why won’t you ever fuck me?”

“I’m tired a lot. I just can’t tonight.”

He leaned in close in the dark. “I’m not letting you sleep until you fuck me.”

She turned over and faced the wall shrugging the blankets closer to her face. He kept picking away at her, getting louder and louder.

“If you’re a dyke, just tell me you’re a dyke. Then we can tell all of your friends you’re a fucking dyke and then I’ll let you go to sleep. Are you a dyke?”

“No,” she said, tears in her eyes.

“Then fuck me,” he shouted.

Eventually, inevitably, she would let him do what he wanted.

Exhausted, trying to not audibly sniffle her nose or shed any tears, she would let him.

Four, five o’clock in the morning with classes fast approaching, after hours of trying to maintain her own dignity, she would let him.

Numbing herself, slipping away in the dark, she let him.

Almost every night, she let him. She always tried to resist. She tried to exert some power, some agency in the relationship. He was never too tired to grind her down into compliance – he had seemingly limitless energy for that.

Eventually, she needed some sexual release that wasn’t emotionally crippling. All she had was herself. He found out and flew into a rage.

“You want to masturbate but you don’t want me? What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking broken?”

The only answer she could come up with was “Obviously.”

She didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t yet know what the word “coercion” meant, and she’d never heard it paired with “rape.” Rape was rape, getting beaten up or tied down or drugged. What they had was “relationship problems.”

           

She tried leaving. He would always pull her back in somehow. She didn’t know how to leave. She had no idea how to even talk about what was happening. She was consumed by shame. She felt like an ingrate, as if literally anyone else would be lucky to have a man who wanted her as much as he did. She felt frail and flawed – a failure.

           

She couldn’t let go of trying to be happy. She was stupid and stubborn. She believed that she was an adult, not a barely eighteen year-old idiot with a martyr complex. She fucked up her second semester, hard. Over the summer, she went home while he stayed at the college. He visited her a few times when he could get away from work. All they did was fight.

The next school year started and they moved back in together because she didn’t know how to say “no.” But that was sort of the theme of her life. They picked up right where they left off. No end in sight.

Any time friends would come over to their dorm room, she would put on this huge smile, afraid that if she didn’t perform he would take it out on her later. She always tried to keep the friends over as long as possible, to delay the inevitable. He could always outwait her.

Towards the end, he stopped making her have sex with him. And she, fucking idiot that she was, took it personally! She actually got self-conscious, thought she wasn’t pretty anymore! Can you believe this moron?

At the end, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they were done. She had fucked up school pretty bad and was going to be kicked out. He, well, who knows what was going on with him. He never seemed to go to classes. He was always just there, waiting.

She wasn’t sure if she had tanked school as a way to get away from him or because she just didn’t have anything left to work with. Either way, she was leaving and they were done, whether he wanted to accept it or not.

The dorm they lived in had separate rooms. The night she finally had enough, she locked her door. After an hour and a half of him banging on her door, she snuck out her window and walked around the campus.

It was early winter in Florida. A cool, clear night. She walked to the large center court and stared at the few stragglers wandering through under the dim orange lights. She said her goodbyes to the college, the first place that she had, however briefly, known freedom. She berated herself for squandering it. She resigned herself to the fact she would forever regret fucking up her full ride to college because she made the wrong choice in a person.

But she was done.

Fourteen years later, she’s friends with him on Facebook. Because she feels that she has to be. Because it might seem petty of her to not forgive. Because not forgiving might mean weakness. Because – well, fuck if anyone knows.

 -----------------------------------------------------

This is how I failed out of college. And this is why it matters so much to me that I am graduating in two weeks, fourteen years after the fact.

I couldn’t write this with the proper genders, because the rape of men by women is still minimized and scoffed at. Especially when it can be qualified and diminished as something like "coercive rape." 

I still feel like a worthless thing when I think of her. I am still friends with her on Facebook, because I feel like I would be less of a man if I weren’t – however that makes any fucking sense.

I’d prefer if no one showed this to her. I’m still, despite all my growth, afraid of her.

The Ghost and the Machine

The Ghost and the Machine

Identifying Lockean Problems Through Science Fiction

John Locke’s empiricism explores a number of notions on identity that may not be as fleshed out as one might hope. Many other philosophers have attempted to clean up untidy ends, while others pull at the loose strings to unravel his ideas even further. One of the key points foundational to his system is the parsing out of various types of being. He offers accounts for what  he believes constitutes identity over time for vegetables, animals, men, and persons. His division between “man” and “person” is perhaps one of the trickiest and most important concepts, a space in which many debates rightfully take place. In order to examine and intellectually test the implications of Locke’s system, one must engage in thought experiments that defy conventional laws of nature. There is no better arena to explore these notions than science fiction. This paper will examine Locke’s notions by discussing the conceptual integrity of identity through John Crichton’s “twinning” in the television show Farscape and the process of teleportation in Star Trek.

In order to rigorously examine these experiments, some criteria must be determined to establish on what identity can be based. Vegetables, the simplest changing life forms, require material organization that allows for the change from one form – such as a seed – to another – a tree. It must also have a story of continuity, a “continuity of insensibly succeeding parts united to the living body of the plant” (Locke, 210). Animals are a step up the chain in that they possess perceptive abilities. Man possesses the capabilities of the “lower” forms, but not much more than that – Locke discusses the possibility for a soul, but assigns no empirical value to it. The identity of man is judged by his place in space and time, so there must be spacio-temporal consistency, just as with the vegetable and animal. These notions combined can be discussed as part of bodily continuity theory.

Alternately, there must be psychological continuity theory. In this, Locke explains the nature of identity for the person, a very different organized being than man. The person is the conscious, perceptive being that can reflect upon his self. The primary identifier of the continuity of consciousness is memory, the self’s ability to maintain a personal story connected through time. This is where the ground becomes shaky, as memory is a deeply unstable notion. Harold Noonan states “if memory and consciousness are together regarded as logically necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity then forgetfulness ensures the loss of, or an interruption in, personal identity, and this is surely implausible. That is, it is implausible to hold that my past identity as a person should depend on the present vagaries of my memory” (173). Another concern is that “Memory could not be logically sufficient for continued personal identity because memory is only ever partial, what is remembered is only ever a subset of what the individual was actually conscious of at the time that is remembered” (Helm, 184). However, for the sake of argument, it can be said that memory acts as an imperfect informant from one period of time in a person’s life to the next. This imperfection should in no way undo Locke’s entire project, but does allow for many reasonable challenges.

With this framework established, the boundaries must be tested. Under the restrictions of this rather humdrum universe, there are seldom significant outliers to the traditional human experience which shed light on the “normal” notions of identity. Mental illness can offer some perspective, especially those individuals afflicted by multiple personality disorders, persistent vegetative states, or fugue states. These human organisms do not properly synch with the expected one-to-one ratio of man to person. However, Locke has provided at least some answers to these cases. The truly difficult cases lie in speculative fiction. These thought experiments allow for hypothetical conclusions to be drawn from a variety of interesting – if unlikely – situations. Through these reflective exercises, Locke is put through his paces to see just how well he would hold up in the case of unlikely situations.

The first unlikely situation is pulled from the science fiction television show Farscape. At a certain point, the main character, John Crichton, is subjected to a process called “twinning.” It is described as “the splitting of Crichton into two identical beings; neither of the Crichtons can be called a copy and neither is the original; they are both equally John Crichton” (“John Crichton”). This is an example of a hypothetical situation referred to by Sydney Shoemaker as “branching.”

The very instant that Crichton experiences fission, there seem to be two versions of the John Crichton. Both have equal, legitimate claim to be called Crichton in the historical sense of identity through memory and retrolineal spatio-temporal continuity. However, from that point on, they are both experiencing different subjective realities and, as such, each can only be referred to as a John Crichton. Crichton A and Crichton 1, named so for the purposes of this paper, experience almost all forms of continuity required to maintain personal identity as John Crichton. Each is thereafter exposed to different environmental and interpersonal stimuli, resulting in slowly diverging behavior patterns, which would also fit rather well with Locke’s notions of tabula rasa and its implications for the empirical development of identity. This is a source of great distress for the Crichtons, as each one considers himself to be the original and the other to be a usurping pretender.

Paul Helm would not agree that either have a legitimate claim to Crichtonhood, saying “Given Locke's criterion of identity no divided consciousness could be identical with the undivided consciousness since there is another consciousness spatio-temporally continuous with the original but distinct from the other consciousness... Locke's criterion of identity seems to require us to say that upon division the original consciousness went out of existence” (183). Helm argues that a consciousness must be connected with itself forward through time, not simply backwards through memory, in order to maintain continuous personhood.

In his discussion on the identity of vegetables, Locke states that a plant must exist as organized matter “constantly from that moment both forwards and backwards” to be considered the same plant (210). This also applies to both animals and men, but not necessarily to the person. Locke says of person that “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (211). It must then be the case that, at least to John Locke, John Crichton the man died the moment he was divided, though Crichton the person could arguably have lived on in the forms of Crichton A and Crichton 1. Bodily continuity is destroyed while psychological continuity diverges into two persons growing ever more unique.

The other hypothetical situation is the concept of identity and the use of transporter technology from the classic show Star Trek. As a means of near-instantaneous long distance teleportation, a transporter dematerializes an individual and rematerializes him or her at another location. This is a process of total destruction and recreation, as a person’s being cannot be physically transmitted through space. This concept is very similar to Sydney Shoemaker’s hypothetical “brain state transfer” procedure, in which “Precise details of your brain states will be recorded and then, simultaneously, your entire body will be destroyed and, in another location, exact duplicates of your brain states will be implemented in the blank brain of a body previously cloned from you” (Naylor, 390). In the case of Star Trek, an exact duplicate of one’s body is also created. On the show, characters are portrayed as calmly being atomically destroyed and remade with seemingly no disorientation or discomfort.

From the Lockean stance, a few problems arise here. First and foremost, there is not just a gap in memory (as a night of drinking may produce), but a momentary gap in existence. For at least a few seconds, there is no Captain Kirk. His position in spacio-temporal continuity ceases entirely. This would eliminate the possibility for bodily continuity outright. Captain Kirk the man must no longer exist. Thus it remains, does Captain Kirk the person persist?

Andrew Naylor does not believe he does. Returning to the brain state transfer procedure example, a new clone “would not be you according to a properly formulated psychological continuity theory [because] the psychological states of the clone would date not from any times prior to the onset of the operation of the BST-device, but only from the time at which the device structured the brain states in which those psycho logical states are realized” (390). Naylor believes that the memory of doing a certain action, e.g. making out with a hot alien, must have been generated during the act of getting down with said alien.

While this may hold sway with the bodily continuity theorists, it does not seem to refute psychological continuity. It shouldn’t matter when the memories were created in the “new” mind. A strict empiricist should realize that it makes no difference that memories are newly instantiated in the mind – memories are not required to have developed immediately responding to external stimuli. One can never verify the inception of a memory empirically as it is impossible to return to the original stimuli to experience the memory being created. The knowledge of the development of memories itself lies in memory and is therefore hazy at best. The true empiricist should recognize that the only requirement is that the memory can be recalled. The only sensation that is able to be recognized is the immediate sensation of the act of remembering. One cannot verify the age of a memory, only place it within a temporal context relating to other memories. As such, memories are only situated relationally – they don’t come with fixed time stamps. The personal identity, the thinking, sensing mind that extends backwards to past actions must remain if the person carries with him or her the narrative of collected life events. Strictly speaking, the age of particular memories have no empirical value and should not could. This implies that the person persists, albeit with a fresh new man after every away mission.

Consciousness is constantly being interrupted, usually on a daily basis. Sleep interrupts personal continuity, and yet the person persists. Locke says “Socrates waking and sleeping are not the same person” (213), showing that these gaps in personhood are rather quotidian. Identities are continual, not continuous, and this is a source of no small anxiety for individuals and societies. People use connective narratives – “I was asleep/drunk/temporarily insane” – to avoid having to confront the possibility that, for at least one evening, they did not exist as the discrete individuals they claim to be. Over the course of a nap, a person ceases to exist, which can be a very troubling notion. The truth is not in the details for Locke, but in the overarching trends, just like identity. Each person is a chaotic advancement through time, not some imperious, unbroken line. While his system is in no way unimpeachable, it certainly offers a greater account for the unavoidable Heraclitean flux that people seem to experience as a necessary part of daily life.

Works Cited

Helm, Paul. “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 54, No. 208 (Apr., 1979): 173-185. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

“John Crichton.” Farscape Encyclopedia Project. Farscape Encyclopedia Project. 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

Locke, John. “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Modern Philosophy.” Ed. F. E. Baird and W. Kauffman.4^th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. 173-239. Print.

Naylor, Andrew. “Personal Identity Un-Locke-Ed.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 2008): 387-396. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

Noonan, Harold. “Locke on Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 205 (Jul., 1978): 343-351. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.