Absolution

All writing is autobiography.

Intro: Writer’s Block

They say that “all writing is autobiography.” Whether we mean for it or not, the words we use, the stories we tell, and the hills we choose to die on… these all end up being confessions of self. There are few truths I resent more than this.

It’s incredibly difficult to write anything in the presence of self-hatred. Every word I punch out reads like a looking glass into all my inadequacies of thought and character. Stylized though my sentences may be, the content is always the same: Me. My opinions. My pains. My goals. My worries. My joys. My objects of concern.

Naturally, all of these are garbage.

My primary (pathological) strategy to bypass this brick wall was to try to depersonalize everything I would write. I would think: I don’t like taking up space, but maybe if my writing has as few traces of me as possible, I won’t be so bothered writing or publishing it. Right?

Wrong.

Again, you can’t escape yourself in your own writing. It comes out of you. Kafka was miserable, horny, and deeply disillusioned about bureaucracy; all of Kafka’s stories ended up being about how bureaucracy is miserable, and all his protagonists were horny (even ones that were insects.) Nietzsche had chronic ulcers; he wrote with the combustive temper of someone who could not sleep because of stabbing abdominal pains. I’m an agoraphobe who doesn’t like their presence being acknowledged; I don’t write.

When I do, it’s still the same story. None of my essays could have been written by anyone else but me. And even if I’m not the subject of anything I’ve written, it’s still about what I am bitter about, frightened by, or taken with. I can’t really hide it. It’s me and it’s mine. And usually, I hate it at least a little. Yet, the indirectness fails to satisfy me. It’s not really what I want to talk about. I don’t suppose talk-therapists advocate for a vague “beating around the bush” when it comes to processing trauma. So for once, I’ll actually speak about myself. Hopefully there will be something instructive to take.

Part 1: Childhood is Defenselessness

Childhood is defenselessness and adulthood is mercy. This may well be the salient feature of the continuation of humanity, made potently evident when you look at those who were abused as children. When defenselessness is not met by mercy, the child fails to thrive, and their development is arrested. While many recover, most do not. They grow up to adopt this lack of mercy, slave to every retaliatory, spiteful impulse, to be issued upon anybody, weak or strong. This lack of restraint, while capable of inflicting powerful damage, is indicative of a weakness of character. A failure to command oneself can be no virtue. It is a certainty in my mind that this type of person has no business in child-rearing. As such, their lack of mercy is a lack of maturity, and an inhibition of fitness.

So what happened to me when I was a kid? What was I not able to defend myself from? Was I touched? Sure, but I really couldn’t give much of a damn about that today. Barely did back then. Beaten? No, I was actually lucky enough that nobody put their hands on me in that way. Impoverished? Nope. My parents did well enough to put me in classes with the real white people. We certainly aren’t power players, but we know more than a few. If you ask most of the stock questions, you won’t find what really happened to me.

My being ill has always been in conflict with my being smart. They pull in completely opposite directions. The smart thing made it such that I was always appreciably ahead of what the teacher was instructing and what my classmates were digesting. It’s not a brag cause it’s not an accomplishment. I earned nothing, and did nothing. It was just boring and lonely. It means most of my childhood was spent waiting for nothing. Woo me and my big fucking head.

As for the sickness component, it puts the brakes on everything. As we all have learned over the past three years, sickness isolates. People don’t want your misery and they certainly don’t want your Epstein-Barr infection. So you suffer it alone, in private. This means that you have to abandon all the cultural rulers that we use to measure each other with. Friends? Nope. Money? Nope. Education? Nope. Romance? Nope. Bills, blood panels and shoddy insurance coverage? Ehh… maybe one exception.

It’s not a life, and it’s certainly not a childhood.

Much of my adolescence was spent in hospital waiting rooms. Much of it was wasted there too. Soft music, stuffed animals, toys, and kids magazines would always be there in the pediatric clinics to placate the senses of the child, but ultimately, I was there to be poked and prodded to no end. I knew it like a dog knows it’s about to be taken to the vet. As the specialists we saw grew more and more obscure, all the stuffed animals and toys disappeared. We had reached a point where there wasn’t a big enough market to even attempt, however pathetically, to soothe or comfort the child.

WARNING: The stethoscope feels cold as ice against your back.

I had it in my head early on that I wanted to be a doctor, because in my naivete, I presumed they would be of some help to me. But in my years of experience with them, I have become jaded seeing their deep propensity to get the story so wrong, so confidently. I just don’t respect their craft after seeing such hacky methods. Also they blindly drugged me to the point of agoraphobia, anhedonia, mania, hypersomnia and permanent cerebral, renal and intestinal damage, so there’s that.

I’ve been to doctors for many things. Persistent infectious disease. Possible amputation. Concussions. Chronic pain. Systemic disorders. Being a little too aware of how nooses are tied. Almost ubiquitously, they don’t seem to know what’s going on, much less how to effectively address it. They even go as far as to deny that you’re experiencing any issue because they can’t see it. I knew I felt like shit, and I didn’t know why the validity of that claim had to be hinged on the ignorance of some other person. But I was just a kid. I didn’t know I would have to stand up for myself in situations like that.

After all, a child is defenseless against an adult.

Part 2: Doctor’s Note

malinger (verb) - exaggerate or feign illness in order to escape duty or work.

Schools punish kids for being sick because the administration finds it annoying. The teacher, once with a work schedule so rigid and predictable that it could be planned a year in advance, now has this straggler bringing up work from 2 weeks ago, asking for an explanation of what happened in class in the last 10 hours of lecture. Well, to recap that, you need another 10 hours... for one fucking kid. And as far as extensions go, it doesn’t matter how sick I was; grades were getting finalized on the last day of school. So, instead of providing the necessary accommodations to help me succeed, they screwed me and didn’t do anything. Nearly every year I had school, I had missed upwards of 20% of the instruction (edging up to 40% in some semesters.) Missing 20% of class means one would have to learn the material in only 80% of the time as the other students, with a fifth of the material being completely unguided. Less time, to complete more work with no help. They called it accommodation.

I call it punishment.

The first line of opposition was always the doctor’s note. Before I could be screwed, I had to be threatened with being super-screwed. If I didn’t come to school after an absence with a piece of paper that read, “This kid is kinda fucked up, dude,” all the work for that day would be marked as a 0. It wasn’t enough to be traumatically debilitated and isolated as a 12 year old; I had to prove it to these grown-ass people. A 35 dollar copay every time. I never really got what the incentive was to fake a long, drawn-out illness. Did they really not believe I was sick? Why is their first reaction to seeing a strung-out, suicidal kid to invoke skepticism? Did they think I was so lazy that I would rather be an isolated pariah for all my childhood just to avoid doing my times tables? And say that I was… so? What are you, a shepherd for the disaffected?

Get the fuck over yourself.

It’s important to address the ego of the teacher here, because none of this would be necessary without the presence of self-importance. What a seriously sick child does is challenge the necessity of the teacher. The teacher comes into their job thinking that the kids need them to develop into full people, and consequently, they have the most important role in all of society. Then the seriously sick kid comes in, for which they can do nothing to help, but step back and do literally nothing.

Can you let these assignments go? I’m dealing with a traumatic brain injury at the moment, and I don’t want my life to stop on account of not doing Worksheet 2.1 in “Uno, Dos, Tres, Español!” I even passed your test. Can we agree that getting over my debilitating migraines is more essential to being a functioning adult than being able to speak Spanish like a deaf guy? As a matter of fact, why do I need you at all, sick or healthy?

My life would be so much better without you.

They don’t like that idea at all. I’m overworked, underpaid, and disrespected by my students, my superiors, and society at large. And now, this pre-pubescent twit, who can’t even pull themselves out of bed, is questioning my reason for existence? No, it won’t stand. The teacher then asserts themselves with all the hubris in the world, “If you don’t get this now, you’re going to have gaps in your knowledge that will come to haunt you later. Everything will build on top of this, and if you don’t have a stable foundation, you won’t be able to be a fully functional person. So either you can do this sophomore history class now, or you can repeat the class next year.”

Word?

Isn’t that a stock abuser line? “You would be incomplete without me. You need me.” As though they were as important as water, they would basically tell me that if I didn’t do what they said, they would pause my life for a year. Then they would dump a bunch of busy work (that they didn’t even want to grade) on my gurney to “help me grow into a fully matured person.” The teachers would insert themselves in my life, to my detriment, just to prove to the world that they were oh, so necessary. They couldn’t just leave me alone. I would be a delinquent!

What a crock of shit.

The allure of being a teacher is also the lie they tell themselves as they destroy kids for breakfast: “I’m here to build up the next generation of leaders and I’m important for the future. I’m a guide, leader, role-model, and support for the youth. I’m a good person.” They never asked me about my various recoveries because they actually never gave a damn whether I recovered. Much less would they attempt to support me. So much for helping the kids.

Part 3: One Size Fits All

The problems I faced for not being absent were underscored by the problems I faced while I was present. It wouldn’t be so insulting and upsetting to be held back for being absent if I didn’t know that it was patently obvious to the instructors that when I was present, I could easily understand their classes, and could easily overwhelm their teaching proficiency. I was always bored in class and would always upset the teacher when I would make it known. It always went something like this: I would ask questions that they couldn’t answer. It would reveal to the class that teaching me was a task that was well above the teacher’s paygrade. The teacher would then resent me more and more, and as I was continually having my needs unmet by this “guardian” who had grown to hate me, I would give up in the class and just fuck around. Maybe dissociate a little.

Talk, talk, talk, talk to whoever was sitting next to me about the incompetence of the lecturer because I had nothing better or more interesting to do with the material at hand. Whenever I inevitably was caught by the teacher, I would be sent outside as humiliation, an example to be made for anyone who thinks the teacher and their job is stupid. After a while, I just skipped straight to zoning out. Way quieter and way less abrasion. I’ll eat that C minus if I don’t have to deal with this type of shit.

If the best thing I can do in class is zone-out to avoid humiliation and coast to a passing grade with no effort, it’s the wrong class. If most of my life is zoning out to avoid being noticed and being judged as way dumber and less capable than I actually am, my life sucks. If my life sucks, I’ll kill myself. You see how that works?

It’s not an ego trip.

I really cannot stress enough the absurdity of the curriculum I was given, but it’ll be more believable with a few stories.

Reading Comprehension

In 4th grade, the school administration had all the students do a reading-comprehension placement test. According to their own test, I read at an 11th grade level. I then went back to class to group-read a 200 page book about an owl that was trying to eat a mouse. On the first reading quiz for that book, I got a 1/5 and was held back after class to explain myself.

I said, “It was tedious.”

The teacher got all offended. She went, “I don’t think you know what that word meant. Did you mean it was challenging?” I knew what the word meant. I didn’t mean to say challenging. But I was smart enough to take the hint. I wanted to go to recess and this Maoist word-cop wasn’t gonna keep me from eating my Quaker’s peanut butter granola bar.

MILO (read as if retarded): “Yes, I meant challenging.”

I got perfect scores on every subsequent reading exam, including the retake she had me do. Tedious, not challenging. Shut the hell up, Ms. Myrtle.

Crystal Violet

In 5th grade, we were asked to do a presentation on something that mattered to us. It was like our big passion project. My friend did baseball. The consensus “smartest person in the class (her helicopter mother bitched to the school to allow her to do geometry on her own)” did dancing. The spectrumy, future-tech bro did computers. My presentation was on “the selection and application of broad or narrow spectrum antibiotics as determined by crystal violet stain assay, in relation to gram-positive and negative bacterial strains and drug-resistant cultures, namely MRSA.” Remember, most of my life that year was spent being sick and wishing I wasn’t.

I had some help on the presentation for sure, but I knew what was going on. I remember having some sense of insecurity around exactly why dyes selectively bind to one membrane as opposed to another. I only knew that dye would determine whether the bacteria had one membrane or two based on whether it stained the culture or not. This would tell you which antibiotics would be effective, as they were differentiated by whether they were supposed to cross one or two membranes. As for the origin of drug-resistant bacteria, I was there to explain an evolutionary selection process that would be roughly explained in 11th grade. Weak drug only kills some of the cells. The cells that live are the ones that are resistant to the drug, thus the dominant strain becomes drug-resistant. Rinse, wash, repeat, until you have a public health emergency out of an antibiotic-bacterial arms race. (I’m giving you more information than you need to show that I haven’t just pulled this out of my ass to make a point.)

Cut to community college. I’m taking Bio 101 for the third time (once again, because of illness) and I’m running into it again. Our lab is about how to do a crystal violet stain. Eager to get my work done, I rush ahead of the class, because I kind of already know what to do. The professor calls me out in front of the class, saying “If you don’t listen to me you’re gonna ruin your lab results. I think you already messed up.” (My lab results were fine.) I tune into the lecture at the demand of the professor. Then, I ask a question that I once answered in 5th grade, and a follow-up question that I formulated in 5th grade. “What exactly is the application of a gram-stain? Also, how exactly does the dye bind to the membrane on a mechanical level and under what conditions does the dye not stain the bacteria?” Neither question is answered as they are “beyond the bounds of the lab,” and the teacher tries to make me look stupid for asking such a pinhead question and wasting her time.

Touché.

I finish the data collection for my lab and the professor asks for the write-up for last week’s lab. I turn mine in, with a computerized graph. I figure it’ll be fine because its the industry standard, it demonstrates that I have a useful skill, it’s cleaner, it’s more accurate, it’s more resolute, and to have hand-drawn a graph and data table would have taken way longer because I have dysgraphia. She does not accept the graph, because everyone else did it by hand and my scientific understanding is being tested more on if I can hand draw graphs than if I can represent data accurately with, again, industry standard methodology.

That was my last day in a class, and funny enough, I’ve not wanted to kill myself since.

Part 4: “Professional Help”

When someone finds another person and their needs to be unreasonable, annoying, or beyond their ability to solve, they always bring up “professional help.” Sometimes, it’s shorthand for calling another person insufferable. Sometimes, it’s abandonment. Sometimes, it’s just naïve. The idea of “the expert” is some mythological guru figure who can take all the broken and fucked-up people and make them whole. Failing that, they can at least sequester the really bad ones in hell.

Basically, they’re looking for Jesus.

Obviously, psychiatrists and surgeons are not Jesus, so it’s important to talk about what they actually are. The nuts and bolts of the care industry are more janky than we’d like to admit, particularly because there are some difficult people that we would otherwise hold responsibility for. The best way I can illustrate this is with some stories.

Structure

I hated school. I didn’t feel like I had peers that could relate to me. I didn’t feel like I had material that inspired me. I didn’t feel like anything I did at school mattered to anybody. I didn’t feel like there were any fulfilling choices to be made within the confines of school. I wanted out, but no kid is ever taken seriously when they voice dissatisfaction about school. In high school, I learned that even psychiatrists (professional listeners) wouldn’t listen to me about this one.

Here I am, talking to a psychiatrist about how I see no point in school, how I feel completely alone there, how my problems are never recognized there, how I’m chronically under-stimulated there and how it puts me in a dissociative state. They then refer to their handbook on sad people and go “Well, actually, people who are depressed need structure, so we’re going to recommend that you stay in school. If you don’t we’ll have to pull your meds.”

You know… a prison is also a structure.

First of all, if you find these medications so necessary to my recovery, and recovery what you really want for me, why would you put them behind a conditional? Second, if I say, “this makes me feel bad, this makes me feel bad, and this also makes me feel bad,” and you wanted me to not feel bad, it would make sense to avoid those things that make me feel bad, right? Why, in the name of the person who notarized your bullshit credential, would you force me to do things and be in places that make me suicidal, just to get my anti-suicidal medication? Why not just avoid the shitty stuff and not medicate me?

It’s not quite a Catch-22, but it is retarded.

Medication

To add insult to injury, the medication they were baiting me with was really more of a problem than a solution. Almost universally, the side-effects were terrible. Brain fog, tremors, hypersomnia, weight gain, kidney damage, spontaneous vomiting, the inability to experience joy, and the inability to stop walking. Also, erectile dysfunction sometimes. Did you know that all first-line treatment anti-depressants are physically addictive and have the potential to aggravate suicidality?

Eh… maybe I should have asked this before I accepted the prescriptions, but to what end are we doing this? Aren’t we trying to make my life better? Why do I have to be on Parkinson’s medication just to bear the physical side effects of a medication that isn’t even helping my depression? What have you done for me lately?

I’ve had insurance yank an anticonvulsive medication with no warning, putting me into what was effectively a week-long Xanax withdraw that easily could have killed me. I’ve had to take a 10 day stay in an inpatient facility to be tapered off of a different medication that gave me brain fog while I was on it, and gave me what they called “brain zaps” upon discontinuation. I’ve been put on anti-psychotics (as a sleep aid) that literally inhibited my motor function and blocked my ability to feel rewards. I’ve also been put on anti-psychotics (as a mood-stabilizer) that short-circuited my motor function, making me unable to stop moving and unable to sleep. I’ve had a lot of experiences with prescribed, psychotropic pharmaceuticals, but you know what I’ve never had?

I’ve never had any of these medications relieve my symptoms.

Inpatient Wards

The second you enter an inpatient ward, a few things happen. One, you are bound to confidentiality for the sake of the other patients. Two, your agency is relinquished to “mental health technicians,” who are basically orderlies with the right to drug you with needles. Three, your reputation as a lucid person capable of making accurate judgements is basically pissed on. So you are neither allowed to talk nor trusted upon being heard, you aren’t allowed to go where you want, when you want, and your freedom is totally dependent on the opinion of someone fresh out of high school. If they don’t like you, they can keep you around and drug you for fun. Protest all you want, but you are in a nuthouse. Crazy people can say just the darndest things.

What could go wrong?

Yucky people are always attracted to positions of unchecked authority over the vulnerable. It’s like having tenure as a predator. Ask the Catholic Church. Ask L. Ron Hubbard. Ask a pedophilic school teacher. Why wouldn’t they want to be in a position where their prey is unable to defend themselves.

Every time I was in one of these places, there was always at least one power tripper on staff. These people took no interest in making the patients happy, and on some level, why the hell would you take the job if you don’t care about helping people? They liked being petty with the patients. They liked the authority they held. They liked that it was basically a hostage situation.

I’ve seen them sedate a kid for playing cards too enthusiastically. Meanwhile, someone else in the midst of a psychotic episode talking about needing lethal weapons: no intervention. I have to believe that all of them can’t be there to help. Some of the staff are just genuinely shitty people.

Needless to say, these places are a hell of a stressful environment to place unstable or unwell people. There’s always an uncertainty or anxiety about whether they’ll ever let you out. There was always someone who had been there for months and never improved even a little, like an omen to newcomers.

I kept my mouth shut and got out as fast as possible, with as little noise as possible.

Other Snake-Oil

At some point in my treatment, I was requested to learn “dialectical behavior therapy” or otherwise have my medication pulled (now, I wish I just quit on the spot). The idea was basically that it would teach people to hold two different ideas in their head. Roughly: 1) This feels awful, 2) but I’ll be okay. There. I just saved you a few thousand dollars and a few months of your time. All your pathologies are cured!

There would be a group therapy session where we would learn “coping skills” for when we were upset. Whenever you find yourself in a fit of rage that may endanger any surrounding drywall, try to remember good things, like your favorite food, or a song you like. I found this really stupid.

I was under the impression that I was getting therapy to not feel horrible, not to learn how to feel horrible more placidly. I already knew how to be suicidal and alive at the same time. I really could not give a shit about the techniques necessary to weather a suicidal storm because on some level, why would I want to. The whole reason I wanted to kill myself was because the proposition of feeling bad in a reliable way just sounded like confinement. Great! I can now feel bad, and I can make it last forever!

It was also stupid because in this group therapy session, we actually were contractually bound to not talk about suicide because it would be triggering to the other members of the group. So, a therapy session where I’m not allowed to talk about what’s on my mind. I don’t go to therapy to hear about other people’s problems, and I certainly don’t go so I can practice buttoning my lip about my own.

I always entered these group therapy sessions annoyed and left these group therapy sessions with rage. How is this a relevant use of my time? When do I actually get to address the problem that I actually came here for. How is it practical to have therapy that makes people say less about themselves and pisses them off by wasting their time? Why would this ever be recommended to me? When I asked my “therapist” this, she said, “Great! You can use these group sessions to practice some of your DBT skills!”

I ended up using one skill: Remove yourself from unpleasant situations.

I never came back.

Part 5: Unmerciful Commentary

It usually doesn’t take long before someone new in my life begins to feel that something went wrong in my childhood. It really only takes a question:

“Where do you go to school?”

“Err, I don’t.”

They then think: He’s smart, he’s ambitious, and… he’s in retail? What the hell happened here?

About 60% of the time, they try to persuade me to go back to school, subtextually telling me to “get my life in order.” In their head, it’s like they’re saving a talent from themselves. (Or they just like posturing, but usually it’s not that bad.)

In my mind, people have a way of confusing the poison with the antidote. I left on purpose. It wasn’t a discipline issue. In my estimation, anyone with an iota of self-respect would be totally fed up with the bullshit I went through, and would refuse to touch institutions of learning with a ten-foot pole. Is it practical? Not really. But some people find it eminently practical to sell their lives away to faceless mega-corps that they hate—eminently practical to live a life they hate.

Schools taught me more through abuse than instruction. Schools had me locked up in psych wards cause they found me annoying. Schools made me feel hopeless. Schools made me feel empty. Schools made me feel worthless. Schools have discarded me over and over again. Schools hate my presence.

What’s so crazy about the idea that I don’t want to go to college? Why is it always reduced to something like infantile complaint? Is it at all possible that the life that college offers is actually a miserable life? We all get the lives we train for. What school had trained me to do was to block out my feelings, ignore my wants and needs, and conflate what I wanted to do with what my superiors wanted me to do. It trained me to be a tool for someone else. It attempted to erase me from myself.

Well, I don’t want that now, and I doubt I’ll want it later.

I’m being asked to play a status game that I no longer respect. While I’d prefer it if people didn’t look down on my for my choices, that’ll never change my convictions. I don’t believe status in American society tracks a person’s character at all. If it did, I’d bet it would be in negative correlation with goodness, passion, assertiveness, and/or empathy. Our conception of status is too closely related to avarice for me to comfortably live by it, and I find that people are most often judged on their attraction to money rather than their decency.

I have my reasons for not playing your game.

Conviction, unfortunately, is not the same thing as peace of mind. It’s a very rebellious thing to say, “I don’t give a fuck what people think about me. They can kiss my ass.” It’s also very sociopathic. I am not a sociopath.

It really hurts to encounter the negative appraisal that is sent my way for my decisions, even though I stand by my choices. When people don’t understand the choices you make, they presume that you’re wrong to make them. Consequently, I’m always hearing about how I’m “throwing my life away,” “making excuses,” “feeling sorry for myself,” etc., etc., basically belittling my moral constitution and any potential alternative perspective I have from the jump. Is it possible that I don’t want your life? That I don’t envy you? That I’m interested in a life that your advice would preclude?

I have my reasons… and yet, it still feels terrible.

Being misunderstood is not just that people think you’re weird. That’s actually kind of fun. What really has a caustic effect on the self-conception is that people have no idea how to appraise you or what you’re doing. What they see is that you aren’t performing the virtues that they understand. And they ape you for it.

The worst part is that the criticism choir is eventually internalized. I cannot, for the life and joy of me, shut it up. It’s so loud and totalizing. I’m constantly bashing myself for being unable to perform when I’m impaired by illness because I was taught that no quarter will be given to the sick. I always feel like there’s something wrong with me. That I’m doing something wrong. That I’m lazy. That I’m faking impairment. That I’m useless. That I might be better if I kept getting abused.

The robbery is that I’m not allowed to feel good while I’m being true to myself. There’s tumor in my head that saps the motivation to do any of the things that I actually want to do. It leeches. It paralyzes. It threatens. It demeans. It attacks.

It may even kill.

Part 6: In Defense of Pity Parties

pity (verb) - the feeling of sorrow and compassion caused by the suffering and misfortunes of others.

Most people I’ve interacted with cannot bear the presence of negative emotion. When met with someone else’s loss, most people instinctively insulate themselves with cheery, but mostly hollow platitudes. Sooner than accept the certainty of suffering, they would attempt to minimize the situation (“it’s not that bad”), deny reality (“it’ll be okay”), and ignore that pain is a perfectly predictable and healthy response to bad things (“cheer up”). These dead-end throwaway lines leave a saccharine aftertaste and nothing else, taking commiseration completely off the table. There’s a lot of bang for buck in these lines. They’re universal, they’re easy and they block out any bad feelings. It’s almost impressive.

The issue with this coping strategy is it denies everyone the compassion we so desperately need to suffer through our lowest points. They effectively stonewall the grief process of the other. If you’ve ever experienced any true loss, you’ll recognize how unsatisfying it is to be met with these Hallmark “get well soon” cards. You’ll know how thoughtlessly they were spilled out. How little effort was dedicated to crafting a tailored response to a grief you can’t imagine anyone else has ever felt. When you hear these, it’s obvious the person has no interest in what you feel. What they’re saying isn’t for you: it’s actually for them. The sole goal is to get your feelings off their plate as soon as humanly possible. It’s all for the sake of their own convenience, and ironically, it gets read as “support.” Attempt to wave the flag on this bullshit and immediately you’ll be derided as “ungrateful” and in search of a (pejorative) “pity party.” (Ah bon? Tsk tsk tsk.)

Why is it such a contemptible thing to wish for your pain to be recognized? I’m not saying that indulgent wallowing does not exist, but I would bet we are more emotionally neglectful than we are indulgent. While many of us dread work (Did you know that “Ugh, it’s Monday,” means that you fucking hate your life?), we aren’t really allowed to openly experience our dread at our cubicle. We bottle it up and store it away in our chest, and when the clock hits 5, we rush to drown it in booze, sex, narcotics, and/or entertainment (dissociation).

We’re so bad about talking about pain that you can sell an hour of professional listening for over 150 dollars, and we still have a shortage of talk-therapists. And because I feel some will to bypass all this, and just speak to another human being when I feel bad, I’m unhinged? No, it turns out that in the worst of times, when all hope has been degraded, nothing sounds as musical to the ears as a good, old-fashioned, pity party.

People think that “getting over it” is a process of time. It’s not. It’s a process of pain. Time is involuntary and passive. The pain of remembering, that’s voluntary and active. Believe it or not, there isn’t a duration you can set an egg timer to that would reliably mark when a rape stops affecting you. It just doesn’t work that way.

I think my mentor said it best: “Grief is the tax paid to experience joy.”

It’s not easy to grieve. As your feelings become more and more inconvenient for the people around you, you lose (so-called) friends. Your professional life grinds to a halt. People lose respect for you. And let’s not forget, it feels absolutely wrenching to revisit wounds of the past. Less money, less friends, and less respect and my end of the trade is… pain? For shits and giggles, would you want to stress-test my spine with a 9-iron too? For most people, it’s going to be a “no, thank you.” They’ll find their solace at the bottom of a bottle.

Still, we can hardly be free of inner conflict if we are constantly running from our own stories. It's not a good way to live. There’s really only one way out which is to actually feel what happened to us. One problem: it’s considered just a tad gauche to do that.

A Question of Forgiveness

The reason I’ll allow myself to “feel sorry for myself” is because no one else said sorry. And you know what? I feel like I was wronged a little. If I’m not allowed to recognize that many of the costs I paid in the past were unfair, I’ll constantly be deriding myself for my inability to meet unreasonable expectations. That is untenable. If somebody cannot understand that, that’s their problem.

It’s a question of forgiveness. The traumatized live with the berating judgement of every awful expectation held by their abusers until they allow themselves to recognize that they had been mistreated. If that truth is never processed, they’ll never forgive themselves for being human. People can never be good enough for the abuser, and that means that their victims will never be good enough for themselves unless they shed their old notions of responsibility.

I’ve spent much of my life hating myself for not living up to the standards that others held for me. I blame myself for having an illness that at one point left me bedridden. I blame myself for being repulsed by much of polite society. I blame myself for being reclusive. I blame myself for resting. I blame myself for being angry. I blame myself for crying. I blame myself for hurting. I blame myself for being fed up. I blame myself for being tired.

I have to take some of this off the table. Simply put, I don’t owe the world any of this shit, and I’ll never feel okay so long as I feel that I do. If the world wants to meet that with contempt, I can’t offer any better response than “Please, leave me alone.”