Author: aintnoatlas

PTSD makes being around people too much work, always. But now COVID19 is making being around people an impossibility. Also always, for now. But I need people. I don’t want to need people. I don’t want to say I need people. It feels hippy, ridiculous, all those things I know are just distortions. But I don’t want to say it because I don’t want to open that door. I don’t want to be vulnerable because I know from experience that vulnerability and humans often mix potently. And we are a world that operates on empirical knowledge if nothing else.

We know the sun is going to go rise today because it rose yesterday and the day before. I know people, out of conscious choice, lazy misdirection, or subconscious intention are going to leave me feeling unworthy, invisible, or worse. It is empirical. There are people who are great in my life. I am lucky to have the best man I have ever known in the world as my significant other. Better than I would ever have imagine a man could be. But all humans hurt other humans, even in small, daily ways that mostly wash away. Minor abrasions from unintended, spur of the moment scratches when something is worded the wrong way, or forgotten. He didn’t do that today or yesterday. He was great. But there is no possible way for humans to be so close in contact, in any type of relationship and even parent-child, without expecting even minor collateral damage. We are humans and we hurt sometimes. Sometimes it is a hurt we do actively, creating it like a new force in the world. And sometimes it is a hurt we absorb into ourselves, taking that created energy and holding it in because there can only be so much negative energy in the atmosphere before the world rips. So we all become dehumidifiers, air filters, for the pain we as humans inadvertently cause because we are so very imperfect.

I started this out to say I am reading a great book about running and its way to combat PTSD or demons for people in the worst states of their lives who may or may not like running, maybe for people who have never been runners. But here I am with only a vague inclination of how I got here, which is pretty typical of life, talking about hurt. Granted, as the blister on the foot is silently screaming in its most angsty tone, running and hurt go together. Maybe that is why I am trying to become a runner. Because if I am their air filter for pain, I need a place to filter my pain so I don’t become a storage facility for the hurt I absorb from the world, the nightmares I have. Because as great as my significant other is, as safe as he is, as trusted, as much of a giant wall of security as he presents, he can never fully be the filter for all the fears and nightmares I slogged through before I knew him. I live in a house, for one of the first times in my life, where I don’t worry that if things get too heated a man will strike me today. Hell, I don’t even expect him to raise his voice even mildly at me (not that it wouldn’t be understandable given I can get heated myself and we should move past double standards as a society). But by nature as a human, he is permeable. I am permeable. My present is not inviolable to the captured senses of my past. Even on a treadmill, they will revisit me. Quick, blinding flashes that make me mind freeze in cringe and my spirit shrink in defense.

I always thought if I found my way to a good man, and I have, that all the things bad men did would wash away. The infections they caused have been soothed. But they don’t go away. As humans we hurt as part of our nature sometimes. We choose to heal but because we are not naturally emotional healers, our powers are limited. I am trying to run and become a runner not because I want to run away from those memories but because I want to run into them. I am tired of trying to seal myself up from them. It doesn’t work. I want to bathe myself in them, dispel them, make them part of my armor rather than assailants to it so that I can stop monitoring my percentage of vulnerability in any situation. I want to be my situation and threats, or recollections of them, are factors I am equipped to deal with. I want to get there.

As I slide my back hard against the barren tree behind me, some of its gnarled roots reach up from under its peaceful grave into the biting chill of the wind that cuts down everything in its path. The points of my shoulder blades poke the edges of the tree awkwardly and I become immediately sensitive to the fact that my neck is exposed as are the parts of my body that stretch wider than the tree.

Pressing against it, I had hoped to prepare. To have to suspend worry about one side of myself but now I know that was futile and carelessly foolish. An involuntary gasp for air shoves what feels like a block of ice down my throat and into my lungs, sharp on its sides and scraping everything on the way down, so large a burst of air I don’t think my lungs can contain it, my stomach ballooning out as I try to contain myself. Suddenly it is sucked out of my as suddenly it came and, only seconds ago feeling burden by breath, now I am desperate in its absence.

I form fists halfheartedly, noticing my knuckles have begun to bleed, having been dried by the unforgiving air. Relentless. It’s relentless and no matter how much I know the cold will always come for me, I am never prepared.

I feel pathetic, releasing my hands, knowing I’ve no means of defending myself. There are too many of them. I can hear them exchanging howls, feeding off each other’s excitement and the thrill of finally having a new chase. Each cry into the air more eager, expectant for the spoils that they will find.

I would be overwhelmed by them, devoured before I could let out a cry. I will be. I will be devoured by them. I’ve known my whole life that that would be my fate, my broken, unpromising, miserable, unavoidable fate.

I have chosen not to join them. I made an active choice to leave my pack in the dead of night while they were all curled around their meager fire, some tails ratted and others dowsed in spilled beer. I chose to leave their pack. Because it was never mine to own. It was mine to serve, no matter how dogged it might be after I had seen so many other ways of being through traitorous glimpses into the clouds. But only when they could not spy my gaze. Of course, I forgot their ears are trained to hear movement and their senses of smell overwhelmingly intense. I am exposed. They always knew I was looking. Felt it. Heard it. Smelled the betrayal dripping off my panting tongue, increasingly losing the stamina needed for our desperate drives into the forest.

How stupid and egotistical of me to think by gaining new senses, all of mine were elevated compared to their own. I never gained new senses. They just changed.

Maybe I could join them. Just, give in my juvenile dreams and fall in line–but I know it’s too far past that. I’ve been domesticated. Now I can never be wild like them. My mind is changed. My body language. How I see the world. I could never hide it. I’d be found out. As much as they have forgotten how to speak, drawn into the kill and the beastliness of the existence into which they leaned too heavily, their ability to feel, to smell weakness is as astute as it has ever been. They can taste my doubt hanging onto the cold droplets of air, miles away from where I wait to be taken down.

I’ve made my choice. And they’re hungry, having long over-hunted their tired terrain. It was only a matter of time before they would need to turn inward for something to eat, and I am so much a different creature now that it is no longer cannibalism. 

I can hear them and I know they’re coming. All that remains to be seen is which one will tear off the first piece of flesh.

 

***There will be a follow-up to this entry.

Photo Credits from Unsplashed (in order of display and with links to their pages)
@jaredrice
@liamcharmer
@shishilya
@evablue

 

 

We talk about the chicken and the egg in this trite, shallow way in which we try to determine the catalysts in the cyclical pattern of cause and effect. To have a chicken in order to have an egg, said chicken has to have at one point been an egg. And to have been an egg, that chicken would have needed another chicken to produce her. And for that chicken who produced her to have existed…and on. and on. and fucking on.

And we have these debates over and over again like they are the first fucking time and anything new is going to develop.

Sure. It’s an interesting question. But we’ve got the point and nobody fucking knows. And they’re not going to know. Not going to happen. Put two lawyers in a room–or two philosophers (how different are they really minus their motivations?)–and you can make a case for either.

Yet. We talk about this damn question like there is going to be something fucking novel and do you know what that whole question misses, like every other societal conversation we have, what happens to the fucking shell that is necessary for both the chicken and the egg to reproduce and to be born?

But that shell is an object. It produces offspring which can therefore be used for society’s purposes–likely against the awareness of the chicken who keeps reproducing because she is forced and that’s what chickens do. And that’s all we expect of chickens. It’s fucking simple. Vessel for an output we can use for economic gain.

Sound like anything familiar to you?

Soldiers? What do you need to make soldiers? Yet talking about supporting the troops is noble and talking about women’s rights is outrageous, shameful, entitled, and aggressive. Ultimately, I would argue, rich people don’t care about soldiers either–if mothers are the chickens and soldiers are the freshly born chicks, their future has limited options and is ultimately up to the man who chooses how he wants to use them, as consumables or as tools for gain. Farmers are pretty worthless without their seeds and their animals. Because they can’t create life from either. It’s the same thing for the fables rich men promote in society because they need people to work in their factories, buy their shit, and produce the children who will defend their rights and property. After all, who will go on to fight their wars so they can make deals on the seventh hole to have the government pay them to build supplies for military campaigns so they can have extra mansions and an apartment in the city where they can screw their mistresses because being a billionaire and having everything, including a beautiful family that wants your love, isn’t enough.

Why, in the seven circles of hell, do we waste our time talking about the chicken or the egg when we ultimately only care about the farmer? The chicken, the egg, and the shell are all just means to an end and that end is determined by a man who has no actually role in that process.

We only care about the farmer. Everything in this world revolves around what powerful men want and what they can do to gain more money they don’t need. And we call that pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and what a wonderful manifestation of the American Dream we have here, in front of us, on a white picket-fenced farm in Pleasantville, USA where a man lives harmoniously among creatures that are controlled, work for him, and can’t exercise any will of their own. And if they could, he wouldn’t want them there because there is no place for their will. The whole thing functions on them falling into line and serving the functions necessary.

Just like the broken, discarded shell that once gave nutrients and bore life is forgotten. It has done its job. It lays, shattered in a chicken coop, speckled in shit I am sure, if the chick is given the chance to be born. It is used to hold this innocent, defenseless chick (an incredible feat if you think about it) until it can care for itself and then we forget the very thing that would not provide us with the chicken or the egg should it not fulfill its obligations.

We don’t talk about what’s broken. Because we have no use for broken things and in a world where you can get everything cheap to function just as long as you need it and get a new one for cheaper rather than restore it, we trash things. And we trash and discard people. You see it all the time in universities, organizations, everything. Once your utility has met its limits, you are no longer viable.

And, worst of all, shells don’t form protective double-domes because they are holding our breakfast (and don’t get me wrong, I love eggs but that isn’t my point). So what happens when we take that shell, break it open for our uses, and consume its contents? We throw it away and, a little grossed out by the snot-textured inner walls, we go to wash our hands.

Sure, animal rights are important. But as we talk about birth control and abortion, I can’t help feel like the shell, not the chicken or the egg. Because I am a vessel. Meant to carry something. Should I be permitted and able to carry it, I will give life. However, should somebody pluck me prematurely from my warm, idyllic nest, and crack me open because of what is inside me, I could potentially have no more choices than that shell. Somebody else decides they want what is inside of me, how they want it, and when they want it. They take it for their own purposes, be it the production of life or enjoyment of its contents, and move on. They speak about the treatment of the defenseless chick, which is worth discussing but never consider what it might be like to be taken against your will, broken up, and consumed. Fractured beyond repair, once strong enough to sustain and protect life and now too structurally weak to hold itself up.

We break shit. That’s what we do. We all break shit for our own gain or turn our heads to the people who are broken because we have no more idea what to do with broken people than we do with broken shells. Garbage dumps are littered, I’m sure, with broken shells because we have nowhere else to put them. No longer in any form to be used for utility or decoration.

I am so sick of being that shell and so sick that we aren’t human enough to talk about those fucking shells who walk along us and beside us every day. I am tired of waiting for somebody to crack me and inevitably throw me away. I want people to care how fucked up it is that these broken shells did not ask to be shells. They did not ask to be appealing to farmers, or, probably more accurately, hunters who are hungry and looking for something they can take. All we can talk about is the chick or the food that emerges from that shell afterwards. We don’t care so much about what carries them. It is in its nature to be cast off when we are through with it. If it’s no longer a part of the process after its utility, who cares where it came from and where she went? It has served its purpose. Onto the next shell.

You should start that playlist before reading. Everything is better with music. Let’s be honest here. At least this particular post is.

It’s ironic that the same thing which heals me–at least as much as I can be healed–is the same channel by which I’ve been damaged and thereby needing to be healed. I don’t think this is what Mufasa was talking about. But maybe it was.

Think about it.

We are born, we come from the ground; we learn language at an early age. We are nurtured by it, formed by it. We use it to figure out how to navigate the world and it is largely the foundation for the processes which form our personalities. If we are so fortunate as to hear predominately positive (or even just neutral) words as young children, words are part of what builds us up so that we can face everything we will need to be able to withstand–

Like when words turn on us. Benevolent, haphazard spears carried by impulsive people around us. It can take us down. Damage us temporarily. Or destroy us, whether mortally or metaphorically. And there is your circle.

Then you factor in that we’re all walking around with broken edges of spears inside us while we carry around spears ourselves, poking some people by accident, and some on purpose (I’ll be honest–I’ve poked some people who really fucking deserved it).

When I picture it, I think about what would happen if you took my wonderful but impulsive and hyperactive six year old nephew, gave him a steady diet of mountain dew and adderall, cloned him by the hundreds of people a person might know at any time, and then set them in a room, all running in circles like chickens with their heads cut off, poking each other and being gored but, nonetheless, compulsively carrying on to poke and be poked again. Not to mention that sometimes we just randomly turn around and poke ourselves–sometimes to see how it would feel and other times by accident and still others because on some level we think we deserve it.

All that logic together and it really is what Mufasa was talking about–words make us in a lot of ways, sustain us, take us down and return us to where we began, nothing. Problem is nothing short of something psychotropic is going to Hakuna Matata that shit.

And that’s why it is both so understandable and so nonsensical but also rational that words would be what heal me. Hair of the dog. I get it in the form of books. Mostly music. It probably isn’t healthy as I sometimes would rather hack off the appendage–that has a bit of spear diving into sinewy muscle and bone and fat and so much blood–and throw it out or lock it away in the vault of my subconscious because I can absolutely feel it if I let that spear sink in. If I let myself feel those words at their full power and not in incremental doses like sometime vile you choke down, I could be putting the most defenseless pieces of myself out, on a damp, mucky, muggy, gravelly and aged sidewalk just after it has raining. All at the foot of somebody who could get the sudden urge to curb stomp what they see as waste, something somebody meant to throw out. Or absolutely obliterate in a way I would feel every second and centimeter of myself being incinerated while having the most acutely painful wounds I have ever incurred to be collectively doused in acid.

Humans are fickle beings. I love them. They are capable of some wonderful things. But they fuck shit up as a result of their fallibility and constantly evolving weakness. And so often the collateral damage of all that fucking up is other people. That’s just who we are. It is a terrible and beautiful thing. You can’t hate them for it. You can’t even be mad. It’s like when you’re standing one minute and somebody puts their hands into your chest and in one firm motion shoves you over so you land on your ass, somehow managing to incur damage at your tailbone, knock the air from your chest, and take a chunk out of your skull that, each time, turns the solid protective cave covering one of your most precious possessions into a tethered and ratted sheet at the mercy of the elements, the intentions, and the goodwill of all those around you. And sitting on the ground, ass stinging and feeling your brain scan like lasers down every inch of your body to search for damage, you look up at the person dumbfounded; because no matter how many times people do it, it is always the first time. All of those wonderful, unpredictable, sometimes awful human beings.

I’ve had the most vulnerable parts of myself at the mercy of some particularly awful or clumsy words a few times in my life. And if I think of them for enough consecutive seconds, I can feel the acid crawl up my esophagus, threatening to cover the rest of me in a rapidly spreading, festering rash that burns and blisters my skin until I can’t tell what is pus and what is the water in which I have doused myself for some relief.

And that’s where I don’t always give my depression the credit and gratitude it so deserves. It’s like those bulkheads, watertight walls in the fucking Titanic. It senses that its system has taken on substantial damage and it slams those metal, dangerous heavily walls down with a deafening thud. It isolates the damage and focuses on saving what it can in hopes that by sacrificing the one unit it can keep the rest of the ship just above water enough that it can breath and tread water.

And that’s what depression does for me. And maybe I have gotten it so wrong thinking of it as a curse all these years when it is my savior/superpower. I sense damage and I can’t entirely feel the hurt because it doesn’t give me time to let it flood any parts of me besides those which were the site of impact. It slams that shit down and, when the echoing rings of metal colliding and a change in air pressure you can feel in your bones finally settles, I can feel in the most hallow way through those walls that there is trouble. Some fucking unit is in smoke or has been impaled by a particularly formidable and unexpected spear tip of ice. There are alarms going off somewhere as a crew scurries about in futile efforts to plug the holes and stop the blaring that makes them wish they would just have been vaporized rather than forced to take on the agonizing and awful feelings of fixing something they know cannot be fixed but the survival systems are relentless and unflinching in the face of the realistic.

Through those walls, if I concentrate just enough, I can sense the mania from my old cold, quiet, frozen chamber. Maybe depression does for me what I cannot do for myself. Maybe that is my fail safe in some fucked up way. And it knows it sucks to feel the way depression does when it hallows you out with one of those damn shitty scoops we use to scrape out pumpkin guts–but it also is more capable of respecting that reality is merciless and something has to have the strength to lance the hopeless, infected woods to stave off decay and destruction.

I cling to my walls. I put my head on their cold, dark metal when I need to think and allow the smooth, frigid spot to serve as the antenna for the absolute fear radiating in my body, drawing and pulling it out and swallowing that poison for itself because all things toxic have to go somewhere and they certainly never go away. I hate those walls because they are what make me so lonely but those same walls know the price of connection and can gauge when sometimes it is worth it and sometimes too costly. And in that way, because I can’t entirely ever hug another human being without knowing that I could be poked by a spear while caught in an embrace–whether premeditated or spontaneously, unintentionally, or even unknowingly–I cling to those miserably cold walls like blankets. Security blankets in so many ways because they are my constants. They don’t feed or nourish me but they give me shelter which gives me time to figure out how I can get water without letting the floods rush in with their arms around me, choking when they planned to hug.

You get more fulfillment from the comfort of humans but the potential cost incurred makes the comfort of cold metal good enough for me.

 

This photo was taken by Tim Mossholder and you can find it (and his other work)  here.

 

No less, in a time where there is no excuse to be ignorant because the very device you are using to write willfully ridiculous things allows you access to all of the right information if you just type less words into a search engine than you did into your post.

Maybe these people need to take their own advice and suck it up, as in accept that the world may be more complex than their minds can currently handle because they haven’t pushed themselves beyond a rudimentary explanation of any sort of critical thinking…because it’s uncomfortable to think hard.

And it’s also uncomfortable to have to have the same, validated, research-based, empirically supported conversations with somebody whose knowledge of the brain doesn’t go beyond the partial understanding they have of their own.

I’m tired of it. No excuses. They need to grapple with the scary and overwhelming reality that maybe the world is a little more complex than their lazy processing can handle and they need to either suck it up and say nothing or suck it up and learn something.

I got heated and now I’m not going to be able to sleep because I’m going to be cataloging every dumb thing I have seen somebody say about mental illness, learning disorders, disability, race, gender, etc. While they are different topics and realms of experience, let’s be honest, the problem is the same on all of these topics. People aren’t too lazy to proselytize incorrect information to the masses but they are too lazy to do so much as Google three words and click on the first hit.

Anyways, this is the quote that got me started. It is from Driven to Distraction by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey. It talks about recognizing and adapting to ADD, as well as celebrating the gifts that come from it. It also talks about people who have had it all of their lives, were not diagnosed until well into their adulthood, and have other health and personal issues because of it. I would strongly recommend you read it if you have ADD or somebody you love does. It’s enlightening and liberating in a lot of ways.

“For some people [the idea that ADHD is the caused by a neurological condition], this was, and still is, heresy…at the height of the moral model beats the conviction that willpower controls all human emotion, learning, and behavior. Under this model, the cure for depression is to cheer up. The cure for anxiety is to suck it up. And the cure for ADD is to try harder. While trying harder helps just about everything, telling someone with ADD to try harder is no more helpful than telling someone who is nearsighted to squint harder. It misses the biological point.”