On A Misfit’s Emotions And Experience of the Divine

I think I’ve touched on some of these ideas elsewhere but I think it’s always worth revisiting these things from a fresh perspective.  In a way it’s therapeutic; it’s like a film that you’ve seen before but you can always watch it again and notice something you didn’t.

I was thinking of the emotional numbing I’ve experienced as an adult, and how I’ve struggled with understanding what I really want now that I’m free to pursue it.  Now that I don’t have people in my ear all the time telling me what I should want, it’s something I have to learn if I’m going to get anything out of the rest of my life.  But I keep relapsing and falling back into old habits whenever I allow myself to think that I’m somehow over it.  It’s frustrating, and it holds me back. I have to keep confronting it because ignoring it always leaves me vulnerable.

I was always a very sensitive child, but I think because I was assigned male my sensitivity was pathologized.  I dare say I was less sensitive than my sister, but she got away with it because she was a girl and girls were expected to be fussy.

Instead, when I showed too much emotion, it was always a sign of something wrong.

My mother was one of the first points of reference I had for the idea that it was wrong for me to show emotions.  I think I’ve recounted here how the song “Lavender’s Blue” would put me in tears (lots of songs with a lot of sappy violin would, but that song was an instant weeper for me; I suspect it was a song Jane had sung to Jack when he was a baby back in the late 1870s).  My mother assumed that this was because of sensory processing issues, the sound of the violins somehow hurting my ears, but that’s not what it was.

In this case, I even told her (with the sparse vocabulary of a 2-3 year old) that it made me sad but she couldn’t fathom how something that didn’t make her sad could make someone else sad.  Mom always had trouble understanding people when they didn’t feel the same way she did.  And when her erstwhile son, deigned to be the male heir of our modest share of the yeomanry, proved more sensitive than she was, I think it confused and scared her.

There was another moment that I think made me desperate to keep my emotions to myself.  I believe I’ve also discussed this moment before.  I had an obsession with centenarians and supercentenarians when I was young, and at the time, living in Charleston, SC, there was a venerable old man purported to be 121 years old by the name of Willie Dueberry.  He was the very last person in our community- in fact our country- left from the 1870s.  I was very sad when I heard he had died, so much that my mother worried and insisted on making me talk to my psychologist about it rather than having some time to think it over myself.

My psychologist drew it out of me uncomfortably, and I tried my very best to explain what was really bothering me with my seven-year-old vocabulary, but I couldn’t.  I came off sounding very immature because I couldn’t formulate the questions or concerns I really wanted, so the psychologist ended up reading me a book called “Why Did Grandpa Die?” Which only left me feeling awkward and like nobody understood what I was really thinking.

The thing is, I understood concepts like death and impermanence from a young age.  I would have brief moments of utter existential terror as a child knowing that my days were already numbered.  I also understood how ephemeral things like balloons were and it really curtailed my enjoyment of them.  I understood on a visceral level how fleeting childhood itself was too, and any talk of how much I was growing became extremely stressful because it felt like a countdown toward being tipped out of a home where things were safe and certain into a world that didn’t care whether I lived or died.  I understood all of this, at the tender age of six or seven when it would be fifteen years before I actually had the vocabulary to describe what I was thinking, and it was absolute hell for me.  I often wonder how much of this may have been carried over from past lives because I haven’t met many other people who had that innate and terrifying sense of impermanence as children.

When my third and fourth grade teacher decided he was going to try to break me down and rebuild me, he described me as “depressed” and “weepy,” which eventually got me put on Lithium, a medication which did nothing for my emotional condition and caused me to gain weight (I still struggle with my weight to this day).

By high school I had learned to hide my emotions a little better.  I was proud of that, proud that I could hold back the tears when I was being hazed on a daily basis, because whenever I cried my sexuality was relentlessly questioned at a time when I was already questioning my sexuality and feeling weirdly disconnected from maleness.  I got called “gay,” “faggot,” “pansy,” and “queer” pretty often.  Mom still thinks the name calling is what made me queer but the fact is it actually made it harder to accept myself because I had something to prove by playing the role of a straight man.

But sometimes it wasn’t anything this serious.  Sometimes it was just my parents- my mother in particular- making an effort to show concern and try to console me.  But that infernal question always came up.  “What’s wrong?” would usually be the conversation starter.  I can’t help but think that I must have internalized those words, because it seems like that was pretty much how any sign of sensitivity I showed in my childhood and teen years was treated: as something wrong.

I suppose in that light, the innocent question “what’s wrong?” takes on an inquisitorial tone, the sort of tone that made me practice hiding my emotions at home too.  Sometimes, something would bother me a great deal and I’d get very irritable and snappy while fighting the urge to cry.  I couldn’t help it; I wore my heart on my sleeve.  And of course they would see something was bothering me, and they’d ask about it, and I didn’t want to talk about it because of the probing or even hostile tone they took when they asked.

Or, quite often, they didn’t ask.  They would just assume I had a bad attitude for no reason and I’d get spanked, or sent to time-out, or just generally be treated to a display of parents yelling, slamming doors, stomping on floors, driving erratically, and carrying themselves so aggressively that I was afraid to talk to them.

The damage has definitely been done.  Not only have I not been able to live up to my full creative potential because of emotional blunting, but I’ve had some substance dependency issues as an adult; part of the reason I became a hard drinker a few years ago was because for a while, alcohol let me cut loose and not hold so tight onto these emotions, but it became less and less effective with time.  Cannabis has actually had good results but I’m having to wean myself off because it’s limiting my job prospects severely.  I’m hoping to give bupropion another shot but the mental health system in this country (and in Oregon in particular) is so broken that it’ll be April before I can see a nurse practitioner who can write the prescription (I’d have to pay out of pocket to see a real psychiatrist).

Still, I wonder what more I could do to help myself?  I have an extremely hard time meditating because my mind tends to race too much and the more I try to concentrate, the more distractable I become to the point where one seam on my jeans being too tight is enough to throw me completely.  Cognitive engagement with the problem helps a little, but I have a hard time confronting/expressing what’s wrong when I’m in an especially strong state of emotional dissociation.  I’m a weird collision of some unspecified neurodevelopmental pathology and emotional damage, and untangling it all might take the rest of my life.  The trouble is, I feel like I don’t have that long.  I feel an urgency to get my life back together because I’ve got bills to pay, errands to run, and so many responsibilities.  There’s no safety net for someone like me; I can’t take time out to recover.  I have to stay in the game while I’m barely holding myself together.  I’ve come pretty close to ending it a few times because I’m under immense pressure to perform and I keep choking.

Also, this is related more to the whole idea of understanding things when I was a child that other children didn’t, but there was another realization that I think somehow feeds into all this because it made it very difficult for me to adjust to the expectations of childhood.

I understood from a very young age that adults could be wrong.  When my peers believed what parents and teachers told them unquestioningly, I openly questioned things.  In part, I did this because I knew more about things like animals, cars, and geography than most of my family.  And I was often praised for being smart.  I had a snazzy little desk they bought for me, kid-sized with drawers for pencils and paper, a space for my globe, and even my own set of Children’s Britannica (incidentally, the very last paper encyclopedia my family ever bought).  And being designated as the smart kid was pretty much my only outlet to feel good about myself so I defended it fiercely.  I took slights to my intellect very personally and, of course, I thought nothing of correcting adults when they were wrong about something because I never really understood why I should trust and obey someone when I knew they were wrong.  You can probably guess how much trouble that caused for me (I think I’ve waxed on that elsewhere too, come to think of it).

I also understood from a young age that adults could lie.  In a weird twist, my mother- a person of deeply legalistic and literalistic faith- didn’t raise my sister and I to believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny because she didn’t want us to doubt that God exsisted the way she did when she discovered her mother putting presents under the tree one night.  Instead two things came of this.  First, I was introduced to the idea that an adult could tell a lie and second, I lost all affection for religion as a set of received principles accepted with total submission without some direct experience of the divine to allow me to internalize that truth.  That, I think, is what drew me to the Gnostic path.  I held Gnostic ideas before I ever knew what they were, or had the experience to act on them.

I often wonder if the emotional blunting I’ve struggled with didn’t keep me from getting to the point where something like the start of gnosis clicked in me sooner.  At least, I feel like the emotional crash from my gender dysphoria may have been somehow related to all this inasmuch as it stripped away 20 years of learned defenses and left me completely raw and vulnerable.

I think the emotional blunting related to gender dysphoria was only one of the factors; I’ve alleviated that quite a bit and I’m much happier as a woman, but it’s clear that correcting that aspect of myself was only the beginning of a much longer struggle.  I still have so much I need to sort out.

I can only hope I can continue to eke out an existence with the meager stipend my father sends me as long as I’m making an honest effort to sort myself out, the paltry sums I make from my writing, occasionally buying and selling antiques, and a pittance I make from selling Cascadia-themed stickers in my Redbubble store.  At least, I hope I can continue until I’m stable enough emotionally to be able to balance earning a decent living and pursuing the path toward either a Master’s degree in history or toward priesthood in my church.  Or both.  I want to be able to juggle things like all the other great over-achievers who live these amazing lives.  I want to- but it’s so hard for me.

Still There…

I’ve noticed a pattern now.

Whenever one thing goes wrong, I immediately expect a windfall of bad news.

I was recently told that someone thought I seemed like a paranoid prepper type because I’m always feeling like any day, we’ll wake up in a 100% totalitarian state and I’ll be carted off for re-education or extermination for my socialistic tendencies, or there will be a major war on US soil (either an invasion or a civil war) and I’ll be dragged into it somehow.

Well, I’m not a prepper.  I don’t sleep with a loaded gun next to my bed, I don’t stash ridiculous amounts of food and water, and I don’t have a “bug out vehicle” parked outside my apartment.  I don’t read Above Top Secret, I don’t listen to Alex Jones, and I don’t have a Gadsden flag flying from my balcony.  But apparently, I think like a paranoid person nonetheless.

Then again, once you’ve seen the world go to shit all around you after a domino effect of bad decisions, it kind of becomes natural to assume that the world could go to shit just as easily the next time.  You become attuned to entropy all around you; you begin seeing it, noticing as relationships, objects, plants, and animals grow old and decay over time.  You come to understand time as a function of entropy; what we perceive as the passage of time is merely the steady decay of the isotopes in our bodies.  You can become so attuned to this entropy that you begin to expect it at times when it’s not even coming.  After a while, it casts a permanent shadow over you.

This is the same anxiety Phil felt…  I sometimes wonder if I was really him or if we aren’t simply complimentary aspects of the same archetype.  But it feels like a good bit of this came unbroken from John, and the horrors he saw in 1915.

Incidentally, on Friday a doctor told me that because of the life I’ve lived, it’s hard to pin down a single source of trauma.  On that technicality he can’t diagnose PTSD; however, he did say that I had pretty much all the classic features and that if the DSM actually included Complex PTSD, that would have fit me 100% (for now it’s officially “anxiety disorder NOS”).

Obviously, I did discuss the past life memories with concerns that I might also be psychotic (around the time I thought I might have been Philip K. Dick this became a concern), but I’ve been reassured that I’m not losing my mind.  It should go without saying, I had no expectation that memories of a battle that happened 69 years before I was born would be considered by a serious psychiatrist as a defining event, crazy or not.

Sometimes I wonder if the emotional abuse I went through as a child was really as bad as I remember, though, or if it wasn’t made worse by an existing trauma much older than I was.

It Feels Real Again

I seem to run in cycles where at times, these past life memories seem like a bizarre self-pitying fantasy and at others, they seem like a very real and painful part of myself.

These cycles aren’t unique.  A number of others I know who remember difficult past lives have reported cycles like these; sometimes you feel like you’ve mastered it, and sometimes it comes back with a vengeance.

I’m back into the cycle of it feeling very real once again.  The dream I had was what did it; I knew nothing of mid-19th century floating maritime chapels until that dream, and it’s the first detail of any life before John that I’ve confirmed.  But it also made John’s life feel more real to me because that dream of Yeovil came completely out of nowhere.  

I’m once again feeling that same fear creeping over me, remembering how short his time on earth was and thinking about my own life.  I have a hard time sometimes imagining that I have much of a future; beyond one or two years out it just seems like a vague blur.  While exploring this feeling today I realized what this is: it’s called “foreshortened future,” and it’s often associated with PTSD.  John’s memories aren’t the only trauma I have, but they didn’t help with my intense feelings of vulnerability.

Usually, when I start feeling like this, I have a period of nasty memories followed by a period of healing where I integrate what I’ve remembered.  By and by, I become more wise and insightful every time I go through the cycle, but it’s a baptism by fire every time.  I wonder how many times throughout my life I’ll have to ride the storm before I’ve purged myself of all of my worst memories. 

Rambling About Life

I’m now officially being treated for emotional trauma and have been recognized as displaying symptoms similar to those of PTSD.

I attribute this mainly to a number of things that have happened in my current life; if anything, my therapist and I seem to agree that by the time I was having disturbingly accurate memories of the First World War, I was already traumatized by other events in my life.  Actually, the initial trauma goes back to childhood but it’s been compounded by untreated triggering by numerous setbacks, constant targeting by narcissists, and a severe lack of emotional support for most of my life.

I had been led to believe by certain people in my life that I was simply born with a defective brain, and was very often diagnosed with learning or development disorders that were out of line with my actual functional abilities, in part because there were certain people in my life who had something to gain by taking care of a “disabled child.”

My therapist has reassured me many times that I have not had a psychotic break, though I still wonder what to make of these apparent past lives unearthed by more recent trauma.  About the time I first had these memories, I felt like I’d just had my being blasted straight through into a deep, old, and very raw core of trauma that felt as natural as any other trauma in my life.  My therapist says it doesn’t really matter since it seems to be helping me work through my problems one way or another, so I talk freely with her about it.

My confidence in the admittedly wild idea that I have remembered past lives wavers as always, and has remained in constant flux the whole time; some days it seems the natural thing to believe, others it seems like I can’t get my mind around the absurdity.  Perhaps I should be worried if I become rigid in my beliefs, but for now that would take nothing less than a sign from the nearest god that these were indeed past lives.

At any rate, the good news is I’m apparently moving along in the healing process.  The bad news is, it has done a number on my ability to function for the time being because I’ve had some incidents recently that triggered me (along with some unrelated medical problems that will take some months to resolve).  I have taken medical leave from my university until next semester.

This is not the first time I’ve attempted to recover by resting, but it is the first time I’ve had a professional recommend that to me.  This is a huge relief and by January, I’ll be ready to start a new semester and I’ll probably be back to making A’s like before.

While I’m resting, I’m going to put some energy into my writing.  The book I’m working on currently blends medieval intrigue with science fiction, including themes like virtual reality, future settings, and past lives.  I’ll go ahead and finish that while I suss out whether or not I want to continue being a genre fiction author or if I want to try to push my contemporary literary fiction (of which I have written one poorly-received novel).

Here’s hoping for better times.

Not Again…

Long story short, Mom’s not taking the gender transition thing well, she said some things that were deliberately hurtful to try to bully me into not “replacing her son,” and that put me in a very bad place emotionally.

On the plus side, her reaction- written, for once so I have a paper trail now- has pretty much proven that she has an abusive personality and likes to manipulate people by knowing exactly how to hit where it hurts, and that I wasn’t just blaming her for my problems out of a moral failure like she wanted me to believe.  Granted, she’s not the only one; I’ve had coworkers, roommates, ex-friends, and even a college dean pull the same mind games on me in just the last five years alone.

On the down side, I’ve been triggered again.  I feel that same anxiety building in me day by day, and I’m starting to go emotionally numb again.  I’m not sleeping very well.  I can’t focus on coursework and my hearing is really acute, which makes me jumpy when I’m out and about because every sound makes my fight or flight response go wild.  I feel like a wild animal, I can’t trust anyone.

The past life memories that often come when I’m triggered nowadays are a bit troubling, and a new development that is hard to explain since I’ve been having this same basic type of meltdowns since I was in grade school, but never with a sense of having had past lives.

As I see it, there are only two ways to explain this: either I’ve actually had such horrific trauma that I’ve blasted through to past lives or some collective consciousness of pathos, or I’ve had PTSD much of my life and I’ve been triggered so badly and so often in recent years that I’ve begun to lose my grip on reality.  Fortunately, enough details I’ve recalled about John’s life matched verifiable facts about him that I can give myself the benefit of the doubt for now.  Unfortunately, that means that whatever these memories are, I have to live with the prospect that there may be more of them, and worse to come.  I’ve already recalled such horrible things…  I don’t look forward to these flashbacks at all.

Hopefully this is a sign I’m finally getting to very old past life traumas, and not a sure sign I’m going crazy.

John experienced much worse than I ever did, by the way, and I feel ashamed saying I had a bad life when I think of his life.  And yet, I can’t ignore that 29 years of being invalidated by someone is enough to make anyone disturbed.  Comparing traumas is the trap I fell into when I first started having these symptoms again and refused to recognize them as PTSD because I felt like if I claimed I was traumatized, I’d seem like a spoiled child of privilege overreacting to hurt feelings.  I didn’t want to feel a bad Millennial stereotype of a self-pitying brat, so I tried to play it off and work through it, but it got worse and worse.

When your emotions get so out of control that nothing in the world changes your downward spiral, it is a bad sign no matter what.  I should have known that and not assumed it was just a deflated ego.