No Moral Here

Photo I took in 2017.

Did you know that overexplaining can be a symptom of trauma? When a person grows accustomed, over a long time, to being criticised and/or disregarded, they learn that if they just explain as much as they possibly can, perhaps, just perhaps, someone might at last listen. Truly listen. It doesn’t work though, instead people tune out if you talk too much.  

Did you know that oversharing can be a symptom of trauma? Profound loneliness breeds a need to be seen. Feeling monstrous creates a need to confess. It doesn’t work, though, because one day you realise you’ve exposed everything to everyone, not everyone should be trusted and your truth becomes weaponised. Then you become afraid of sharing anything at all.

Did you know that trauma is somatic? Even if you come to understand the why and how of something, as a dear friend once said to me “the body doesn’t speak English” and our nervous system is trained from childhood. Conventional wisdom says not to live in the past, mindfulness practices help us sit in the present, but what if the past planted something painful so deep inside you that sitting in the present can be a practice of sitting with a deep, aching and ancient feeling of loneliness?

Did you know that suicidal ideation can become a habit? If, for example, you’ve imagined ending your own life since the age of 11, these thoughts and desires create grooves in your brain so deep that you can’t imagine how it must feel to be a creature who only wants to live.

Did you know how pathetic it can feel to be climbing towards 40 and to still struggle with that sinking feeling that often makes going to bed a miserable affair and getting out of bed even more challenging?

Do you know how much work it takes to try to pep talk yourself into putting one foot in front of the other when the world is on fire? And as much as you try not to live in the future, this too is a habit so deep that you’re forever sitting at a point in time where everything hurts and everything ends.

Do you know how hard it feels to fit the shape of yourself into a world that rewards people with thick, callous skin? You watch all the ones you love struggle, you watch the world suffer and it seems as if the only ones who are able to pay their bills are the people eating others alive. How do the Jeff Bezos of the world live with themselves knowing they have the power to change the world for the better… but they don’t?

I want to leave this writing with something positive, something hopeful… but I don’t feel that today. As I age, I want to be wiser. As I age, I want to be stronger. But perhaps this isn’t how it works, perhaps we only build ourselves up for a time before we start to crumble. Perhaps the only thing we can do is practice self-compassion, communicate our suffering and offer each other empathy. The warmth of company as we grow, change and then start to fade like flowers, like stars, like the sun.

Perhaps the hopeful thing here is this: This evening, I saw a knife in the kitchen and flirted, for a moment, with the slightest penetration of my skin. Just a scratch. But. Instead of going further, I instead came here to write and you know what? Giving myself the space to express my emotions has actually calmed me down. I used to write in my old livejournal freely as a teenager and it helped keep me alive. Perhaps that’s a strategy that anyone of any age should be allowed, my inclination is to judge myself for being so angsty, maudlin and childish but the fact is that I felt utterly despairing when I sat down to write this and now I feel a little better and a little calmer.

Did you know that emotional dysregulation is a symptom of trauma? If in childhood, we did not have our emotions validated and were not taught how to process them, perhaps instead being told not to whinge or “dwell” on things, we may find ourselves as adults who are afraid and ashamed of our feelings. Feelings don’t respond well to judgement and shame, they need space for validation, compassion and healthy expression without the person feeling they are “wrong” for feeling what they feel. If, as an adult, we contain a wounded child who hurts as a child does, one of the most important strategies suggested by psychologists and Buddhists alike is to offer that wounded child authentic and heartfelt compassion.

So maybe there’s something positive to this writing after all: Life is full of misery and suffering, it’s ok to feel this, it’s ok to be affected by it and it’s ok to express it.

Then again, maybe I’m just looking for the positives because I feel as if I’m supposed to.

Fuck it. Morals are for fairy tales. I’m going to bed and, as with every night for the past 36 years, I shall not be killing myself. Not a bad track record, come to think of it.

Smash

Holding itself together is Life’s main job. We create ourselves out of the bits and pieces of stuff lying around and then spend the rest of our time desperately grabbing at the detritus of ourselves as time rapidly and indifferently happens and our bits and pieces crumble into dust and atoms that we can no longer grasp. It happens to us at different rates, those who have health problems in our youth perhaps witness the horror of our helplessness a little earlier than most. And sometimes there is an ugliness residing within those of us who have young broken bodies because we see the dumb bewilderment and despair on the faces of people who only experience physical suffering in their elderly years and our sympathy for them is tempered with the bitter knowledge that they never had the wisdom of experience to comprehend our own sort of agony when we needed it. So they are as alone in their pain as we are because we hate them for suffering at a slightly different frame rate to us. We are not as compassionate as we think we are and admitting that about ourselves is perhaps the most compassionate thing we can do. Hold my hand, tell me you love me, but don’t pretend you understand and I will do the same for you. Suffering is universal yet painfully solitary.

I am furious all the time. Furious at my mortality, furious because when I scream “help!” nobody can because that’s just not how it works, furious at myself for being so deeply involved in this, for not being Zen enough, Buddhist enough to rise above this. Sometimes I can sit with this. Often I can’t.

Holding oneself together is a full-time job, a hard job. Lately my edges have felt particularly crumbly and I haven’t been able to hold my consciousness above it, instead it is like I want to succumb to the violence of disintegration and in fact contribute to it, like I can no longer endure this laborious process of paddling my kayak upstream but if I paddle while going down with the current, it will be fast and glorious. But then everything will be over quicker which I don’t want because my belief systems have me close to certain that there is nothing over the waterfall but for empty oblivion and despite everything, I adore being alive. In fact, that’s what makes it so fucking hard, this goddamn mortal shell. This moronically limited mass of meat, fat, bones, genetics, electrical signals and emotional baggage. Biological machines are by their very nature imperfect, life has a desire to exist but there is no law of the universe saying it has to be easy.

Today is one of those days where I wake up sore. It’s perhaps been been months since I’ve had a proper sleep because my body is failing me again. I woke up with no fight in me, I would probably fall into one of those depressions where you sleep all day but for the fact that my body won’t allow that sort of escapism. So… I don’t know what have been doing with myself today. Drifting. Wearing my ugly grey dressing gown and filling the sink up with hot water to do the dishes. Trembling with frustrated fury.

I screamed in rage and hurled a glass at the ground.  What had been a functional object of substance, of density and mass, shattered into tiny fragments. For a beat, I felt horror and shame but one of the luxuries of being home alone is that you get to be crazy when you need to and so I started taking photos with my phone. Then I grabbed another glass, launched it at the kitchen floor and delighted in the eruption of my colourful cup from Kmart.

I luxuriated in the madness of it, of wasting resources, money, of creating the loud and ugly sort of sounds that might disturb the neighbours, of watching benign objects that I had comfortably lived with exploding into dangerous slivers that can get stuck under the skin and draw blood. It was the most fucking beautiful thing I had made in years. A moment of violent intensity glittering amongst the mundanity of domesticity. I broke two more glasses and then I stopped. A cacophony of clucking, the neighbour’s chickens must have been startled by the sounds. Maybe I smiled.

I felt better. The light and colour through the glass moved me and I took more photos, dodgy documentation that is not the actual experience. I felt better. I cleaned up. I resolved to feel no shame about this, to strive not to hide the ways in which being broken breaks me but to accept this non-acceptance as part of the price of existing. To write about these things and share these things and allow myself to fall into these things, do not be afraid of the mundane ugliness of it all but to find the poetry in the misery.

For a brief while I had a lover who used the word “catharsis” a lot. He understood something about that which has stuck with me. Broken glass is fucking beautiful.