adearjohn-blog

[adearjohn-blog]

chauvinist piglet

For my sixteenth birthday, my mom took me to New York City for a weekend. Walking back to the hotel from dinner, a man catcalled us. He was directing it me, the young girl trying hard to be adult in high heels and a dress as a season of summer evenings was starting to bloom. I don’t remember what he said, just that I was taken out of the moment of walking with my mom and made very aware that I was a sexual object, and I felt embarrassed by it. My response was to slap my mom’s butt. As if he had been talking to her, like get it girl. More than anything, it felt like a reflex. Like an action without thought, it just happened. I acted just to say to this stranger that I got his message loud and clear -- we were sexual objects. 

If you’re cringing hard at this story, I am too. It’s a super weird thing to do. And in an instant we all three were humiliated by the exchange. If you considered the possibility, as I had, that he didn’t know she was my mother when he catcalled me then let me clear that up for you too. This man called me out and said, that’s your mom -- that’s messed up!  Yeah dude, I thought, it is. My mom and I never talked about, because it was just one of many, many conversations that was so inconceivably uncomfortable to have, especially since it tiptoed around the edges of sexuality and what a young girl perceived as appropriate or not, it was just never going to happen. I still feel bad for objectifying my own mother in order to be seen as cool by some pervert on a street corner. I mean come on -- obviously. 

There were lots of moments in my life where I did things because I wanted to be seen as special or cool or able to hang with guys who thought I was just a vagina that talked too much. I don’t know what the word is for the shame you feel in degrading yourself in these ways. That feeling didn’t always sink in right away. Years later, looking back on much of the more unsavoury parts of my life, I’m aware of all of the times that I felt that objectifying myself and other women was something I believed would help me garner that reputation most coveted by insecure young women: Not Like Other Girls. 

It’s deeply unsettling to come to terms with the fact that you believed on some level that women are inferior to men, and that men are stronger physically and mentally and if you want to survive in this world then you just do as they want you to do. These thoughts are not really at the level of conscious realization, they just fester under the surface until you do things that reflect that on some level you hold these beliefs. 

I still feel a great deal of shame about this moment with my mother on a street corner in New York City. It’s just so inappropriate on so many levels. But I’m also a bit sad for that little girl who in just a moment had to peel apart some pretty adult layers to learn a simple lesson I wish I’d already been taught: you get to chose whether to be complicit in your own degradation. 

[adearjohn-blog]

paste

A year ago my whole life was ground into paste. At first bits flaked off like drying clay. I was angry but didn’t know why; I attributed it to minor annoyances in my day to day, such as my partner wanting to sit close to me -- I didn’t stop for a moment to consider how my reactions didn’t match the circumstances. 

On February 9th I panicked during sex. I felt his hair brush against my chest and the weight of his body on mine and I stopped existing. I felt myself become extremely brittle. I asked to change positions so he wouldn’t see that I had turned to a hollow eggshell, so I could will myself back into my body. It didn’t work; he was displeased and in the end asked me to leave. The eggshell broke. 

On February 11th he sent me a text. ���Hey. How’s it going?” I was sitting in a car looking over the lake at the city skyline. It was night, I had chamomile tea in my lap. The windows were fogging. I thought I could put the pieces back together and no one would notice. I texted him back. 

On February 14th a friend sent me roses with a card saying, “I’m sure this is not how you thought this day would unfold, but someone as special as you still deserves flowers. If he can’t see that the quite simply he is a fool.” I told my partner Valentine’s day didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to be with him. I hugged him. I remember pressing myself against his body, wanting to curl up in his soft sweater. He was limp next to me. Dried, broken pieces of myself crumbled off.

On February 24th it was all laid out -- not from me, since I was too proud to admit my mistakes, too cowardly to stand judgement, and too confused to have any explanation. But it came out, certainly in a more painful way than was necessary. It didn’t help the situation that I was not a person but rather a pile of rubble. 

On March 4th he offered me the opportunity to explain myself, which I of course could not. I had not stopped crying since I’d left his house, but strangely in front of him I felt numb and no tears came, even though I wanted him to see how sorry I was. I couldn’t really think because my ears were just full of a deafening rushing wind. We had many such conversations over the following weeks and months, each of which I initiated. I’d like to say I’d handled the dissolution of a relationship with poise and dignity and grace but that is certainly untrue. Each time we met the rushing wind just blew the rubble to dust. 

On May 8th he asked if I wanted to get together. We got ice cream and sat in the park. I cried because I was humiliated by how I had handled everything, and I cried because I was humiliated I was crying in front of him. I didn’t feel that I deserved sympathy or understanding, but I desperately felt I needed it. I told him I didn’t know what was going on. I forced myself to sit up straight and aggressively wiped my tears away I said, “I’m not sure how to talk to you. I’m not good at boundaries right now.” He hugged me and said that he could be in charge of boundaries for now. Though I told him many times in the preceding months that sleeping together was unhealthy for me, we often did. I left feeling like rain-soaked soil, heavy and musty. He was not a good keeper of boundaries either. He stayed over. The next day we went to work together in a coffee shop. It felt strangely normal, even though I knew he still hated me. I talked in broad strokes about how I was feeling. “Can we not do this? It’s kind of heavy,” he said. I stayed quiet. The dust settled all around in thick layers. 

I didn’t see him again. I cried every single day. I cried at home, with friends, in coffee shops, on the subway, walking down the street. I cried over the dusty landscape; soaked dry earth until it was mud. I became paste. I had no shape for a long time. I didn’t know who I was, what I looked like, what I wanted to be. I felt formless, some state beyond broken. 

I knew it didn’t have to do with him, either. I knew I had felt this way before. I knew I had been brought up in this environment, oscillating between states: a dry, cracked earth, a chaotic dust storm, a soaked plane, a muddy paste. I’m slowly putting myself back together. I know that an important part of creating the shape I want involves understanding the limitations of the medium. I can’t will paste to have form. It takes millennia to create rock. 

[adearjohn-blog]

reflection and refraction

I distinctly remember wanting to look at myself in the mirror when I cried as a kid. What did I look like? Was I a sympathetic looking character? Did I look like someone that could be loved? What did other people see? 

I looked at my reflection and saw the colour of my eyes, the red of the blood vessels and pink eyelids. I saw long eyelashes clumped together with sticky tears, I saw moist tracks down my cheeks, I saw in high definition the pores of my skin, the minute tremble in my lips. I was mistaken in believing what I saw in the mirror was what other people saw. I didn’t consider that being observed changed things. 

I didn’t see a girl who couldn’t meet your gaze. I wasn’t aware in those moments of how I try -- though often fail -- to cover up my true feelings to spare others the embarrassment of seeing me like this, to pretend like everything is OK so that we can soldier on, to pretend that this was not happening so that we could avoid an unpleasant conversation. I didn’t see the person who would be so angry at being seen, not because I didn’t want to be but because it overwhelmed me with emotion and that could only come out with raw fury directed at the nearest person. In this was I was my father’s daughter. Maybe I still am. I think back then I wasn’t ready to allow myself to be sad in front of others. There was nowhere that being sad was really OK. At that time, being vulnerable was only ever a weakness to be exploited. 

It’s hard to look back on those years and have compassion for that young self, even if I think that’s what a child should get. She is still in me, trying desperately to unlearn the ugly things she believes. I think she is still afraid that somewhere she will find the real truth of the universe is that she deserved the bad things that happened to her. Why did she want to know what she looked like when she cried? I think she is afraid that the luxury of being seen, being understood, does not belong to her. Maybe she looked into the mirror for a glimpse into a world where it could belong to her. 

[adearjohn-blog]

before it had a name

Before it had a name, it was just overwhelming feelings. It was anger with no discernible cause or solution. It was the deep sense of humiliation I felt for existing, it was the push and pull of simultaneously desperately needing to be seen and wanting to disappear completely. It was a sadness with no bottom, whose depths scared me because I knew I had been here before but couldn’t say exactly when or why. It was the kind of raw, overpowering emotion venerated by poets and directors of art house films and fetishized by those suffering from existential ennui.

Before it had a face it was me. It was the disgust of being. It was the knowledge that I was not good enough and never would be. That everything before was a lie; this is who I am, deep down: I am repulsive. My boyfriend had a thing for feet, and when I was away I got athlete’s foot from the shower in the hostel.  I refused to let him see my feet and felt so dirty that I couldn’t tell him why not. I felt humiliated. This example feels almost too silly to even give, but it was an early clue to something I would only slowly and laboriously piece together: I felt that I had ruined something of his. I felt that he owned every part of my body, and now I was a product that had been tainted. I was ashamed of this, and I was mad about it -- I didn’t want to be a product to be consumed. But this didn’t have a name yet, either. 

Before it had an explanation, it was confusing sensations in my body. The experience of breath catching in my chest for no reason. The feeling that I couldn’t or wouldn’t take in any air, that I was choking. Sensations and intrusive images of being flayed, of cutting open the skin on my arms and legs with deep lashes, and most deeply the feeling that I deserved it. That the only thing that would make it feel better was to suffer some deep physical harm. The feeling that I had no body, and then I was so aware of having a body that I felt trapped in, claustrophobic. 

Before it had a name it had some ideas. The exceptionally clear idea that I was losing my mind. I felt afraid of what I was capable of without meaning to do. I couldn’t understand how it could be that a person felt so out of control of their own actions. How do you explain to someone what is going on when you don’t know? They are impatient for a cohesive narrative; and truly you feel that they deserve one, but you have nothing to offer. 

I have often wondered what kind of person fights for such a complex explanation for something so simple. I suppose one for whom the truth is complex. Truth as an idea had not really been fleshed out until this experience; to tell what is true and what is not true is something that has often been difficult for me. It’s hard before it has a name and no one will validate what you’re saying. When you’re told you’ve just got an active imagination, you’re exaggerating, you’re being dramatic, you’re being difficult. 

When you are desperate for validation, you will call it by a different name even if you know it to be untrue. I will say the sky is green if it means I can be included in what everyone else is experiencing. This is the way things were for so long that many things have the wrong name. It’s difficult to know which things are named correctly. I feel like I have to start again with everything so that I can know that I have thrown out all of the lies. So here we are again, before anything has a name. 

[adearjohn-blog]

assessment of self

My greatest fear and greatest desire is to be seen honestly. I feel incapable of sharing the truest parts of myself with others, as I’m paralyzed by the belief that letting someone know me means giving them license to own me, to manipulate me, or to use me. I’m afraid of being rejected, but maybe even more afraid of being told I’m crazy, since these thoughts seem so plainly crazy on an intellectual level.

I have this dialectic relationship with being seen by others, and I think that is sort of an extension of it being the nature of my relationship to myself as well. So often I feel unknown and unknowable; so much of my memory of my personal narrative is hazy and my motivations and actions, though they feel like they are carried out with conviction, often surprise or confuse me. 

Self awareness is generally commended, I think, as a skill and useful tool that takes time and effort to hone. For all the time and energy I put into developing my self awareness, I’m not sure if it allows me to be any happier. I think my self awareness is warped by the profoundly confusing circumstances of my early life. It’s hard to know what is real or what is true for anyone, but maybe I struggle a little bit more because truth did not live in the house I grew up in. Truth was a gift I tried to give myself only in adulthood.   

Perhaps the real truth of your life is not something that anyone else can give to you, but neither is it really something anyone can take away. Really the only person that knows what is 'true' in your life is you. I guess ultimately it is about learning how to recognize your own truth. But I guess we all have to be scientists and logicians in our own lives, believing in ourselves but not settling for easy answers, always being willing to revise our theories and seek out disconfirming evidence. 

I feel like to be seen by another gives them the ability decide the truth of my life, since my version is so unsteady. I’m afraid to be honest with others because I’m afraid that whether they believe they have power over me or not, I will. To learn how to depend on others without becoming dependent is something I dream of but don’t know how to walk myself towards.  I’m afraid of needing someone. I’m so afraid of the power it gives them over me that sometimes I think I will die alone in an arrogant act of self-reliance. This deeply held belief has proven very difficult to uproot -- no matter how I try to weed it out, it flourishes given even the smallest opportunity. Still a lot of work to be done. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

When I was 12 my dad put a hex on me. “You’ll never had a good relationship with a man if you can’t have a good relationship with your father,” he said hatefully. I don’t remember what prompted this; I had been upset about something, and I had probably yelled at him about it as 12 year old girls do. I had seen enough after school specials to suspect that this was wrong, something he said to be hurtful more than a real truth of the universe.

In the years after my mother left, he routinely "disowned" me, saying I was not his daughter and not welcome in his house anymore. Often it was because I’d called home to be picked up if he was drinking, though sometimes because I’d failed in some less obvious way to uphold his ever-changing ideals of loyalty. It never lasted: he didn’t hold a grudge, but an apology was not forthcoming. Most times he seemed to have forgotten it even happened. He was never aware the next time we were due for visitation why I might be standoffish. 

The first time this happened I must have been 8 or 9 and if my feelings were hurt it was, according to him, evidence that with the onset of puberty I would become just another moody teenager that hated her father. Puberty was still years away for me and hormone fluctuations, it turned out, would have very little to do with my complicated feelings toward my father. Still, these kinds of things made me worry endlessly about the threat of growing up and what I perceived to be an assault of changes to my body and mind that would make me even more ‘crazy’ and less likeable. I wouldn’t have the cover of childhood to garner sympathy, understanding, or compassion. I would be on my own, with no reasonable expectation that someone would help me.

I pushed these uncomfortable feelings away. I just wanted my dad to like me, the way he liked my siblings. I wanted him to know that I needed a father, that I depended on him to take care of me and not the other way around: the de facto status of the parent-child relationship. I resolved that I would not be a moody teenager that hated her father, I would be a good daughter and he would love me. He would say hurtful things and I wouldn’t let them get to me. I thought I had a thick skin for the kind of exchanges I only realized too far into adulthood were abusive. 

But the notion that I’d never have a successful relationship with anyone cut deep. Even the after school specials couldn't buffer the fear entirely: I also knew girls with 'daddy issues' were plagued by intractable problems, misunderstood and looked down on, or worse: pitied -- a humiliating caricature of the indignities of femininity. I would do anything not to be one of these girls. 

Indeed, I spent almost all of my adult life denying to myself and anyone within earshot that I had any lasting ill-effects of these experiences. It felt like a mask I wore, poorly cobbled together from fragments of what I thought girls without baggage were like. I had always hoped that if I wore it long enough I would just magically become that sort of girl, but it was not so. Damaged may as well be tattooed on my forehead. It's become this perverse sort of game to see how long it takes before someone I've just met has that flicker of realization across their face. I mean, I don't think they look at me and say to themselves this girl looks like she was locked in a basement, but rather some more nebulous sense that there's something that's just... off.

I spent many years trying to prove that he was wrong, that I could have good relationships. But I have often mistakenly assumed that a ‘good’ relationship is the one you’re in. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve valued the existence of the relationship over the quality. I’m only now coming to terms with all of the ways I have been willing to sacrifice happiness, comfort, and self-respect for fear of being alone. I’m not trying to say I’ve been a martyr: I’ve cheated, I’ve lied. In all of this I have done myself and others a disservice by not being a person of strong character I know I want to be.

I guess, in a way, these are important things to recognize. You’d think that to see them now means that I’m able to work around them. I think these are things that I had realized before the events of the last few months unfolded in a steaming pile in front of me. And yet, they did not help me to avoid making a series of increasingly poor choices. In the quiet of the fallout, these realizations echo as if some cosmic gong has just been struck. Each thought you’ve had before in passing now reverberates around your skull until it fills your brain. It seeps into your bones. You believe with every part of you that you will never forget the hard lessons you have learned this time. But then you remember the last time you said that. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

Until recently if people would ask me, what’s your ‘type’? I’d say I didn’t have one. I didn’t think I had one. I don’t care what they look like, whether they’re successful or know how to cook or can be romantic. I’ve started to realize that I don’t care if they’re ambitious or smart or funny or even all that kind. I mean, these are things I want to care about. I’ve fallen for men with some or all of these things. It’s just that none of these things make me feel that thing. The spark. Whatever you want to call it, the thing that makes you feel like you want more of what they’re giving. 

I’ve come to appreciate that I do have a type, after all. I go for men who want some magic cure for the hole in them that I can’t possibly provide. I fall for men who see me as a means to their ends, men with glass eyes that look but don’t see me. I seek out a kind of man that wants to use me up and throw me away, who keeps this agenda well concealed under empty words with just enough promise to feed into my fantasy that I could be loved. They don’t have to give much, I have an active imagination: even the smallest bone can be a feast for the truly hungry. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

I think I’ve started to settle into a delicate emotional stability. I wouldn’t call it happiness or contentment -- not by a long shot -- but it is a sweet welcome break from the past few months of anxiety and self-loathing depression. 

This most recent depression has lacked the features I'd become used to in my early twenties, which was marked by a kind of heavy numbness that, for all the ways it felt suffocating, was quiet. This time around I became acquainted with a depression that felt different. This was depression of profound grief, but grief that felt like it was all around me with no focal point. This depression robbed me of a body -- I lost 20 pounds in a little over a month and have since painstakingly forced myself to finish all meals but still cringe at my reflection in the mirror. This depression sapped my will and energy to care myself, much less for others. It turned me strange, distrustful and afraid of people outside my closest circles. It turned a sharp mind dull, since all I could do was circle around the same loop of thoughts slowly eroding any trace of novel perspective.

For as much as it felt different, it also felt the same. It also felt like an old coat I forgot I used to wear all the time. I forgot I grew up feeling this way, because I lacked the words to describe it. I forgot how ‘right’ it felt to hate myself, because I spent the last several years in therapy trying to learn better ways of being in the world that didn’t involve a deep resentment of my need to be an imperfect person, to take up space, to just exist. 

And while I’m glad that some of these more intense feelings are fading to background noise, I’m aware they’re not gone. Now, maybe more than the last time I clawed my way out of the black hole of depression, I realize that this is not really something to have beaten but rather to acknowledge as a part of myself. Not to accept my fate as perennially wretched, but to learn how to effectively care about treating this on an ongoing basis. 

There have been several things over the last few months that I have read that really resonated deeply with me. In particular, the story of a recovered drug addict (among other things): “...what it took for me to change wasn’t one big vow made at one climactic moment, but a series of small and consistent daily decisions to behave in a more loving way toward myself.” I think about that a lot now. I admire the candour with which this is written. I read into it a kind of resigned frustration with having to do it every. single. day. but acknowledging that this is ultimately better and more realistic than some herculean feat to conquer all your demons in one go. I wonder if I will have the courage that she has. Even if these decisions are small, they are tough sometimes. The pull to slip back to these old, self-hating habits is incredibly strong; in many ways it feels like the default setting. 

What I have found over the last few months of exhaustively probing the depths of my emotions -- often incredibly publicly -- is that real honesty and acceptance is much harder than most people give credit for. In the past I would have preferred to talk around things, to stay oblique, often leaving both sides of the conversation confused and unsatisfied. Now I feel like I have so much work to do, there isn’t time for that. You start saying one uncomfortable thing out loud and you realize the reaction isn’t nearly as bad as you imagined. And as hard as it can be to do, the payoff is huge. My relationships with almost everyone in my life have strengthened as a result of being able to be direct about some uncomfortable truths. In some cases, people have surprised me with what they are willing to share about themselves when you have laid yourself out to be raw and vulnerable in front of them. Almost always the experience is mutually beneficial; we both find out we are less alone than we thought. 

I will not say that this has been a positive experience. But undoubtedly it is one of the most genuine I have ever had. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

When I am upset, I fantasize about being cut open. I imagine long cuts along my arms, legs, and torso, like seams on a doll. I don’t need to act on it, the fantasy is enough. Some people enjoy the idea or the practice of cutting as a way to tap into a focal pain when they are in a nebulous fog of emotional distress, some people say it makes them feel something ‘real’ when nothing seems to make sense or they are numb from dissociation. I don’t really have these inclinations. It’s about the idea of relieving pressure. I’m not after sensations of pain, though even in the fantasy it is a side effect.

In cases of extreme burns, the skin is turned to tough, inelastic tissue called eschar. If the burns wrap around the body, swelling from the injury causes pressure to build but nowhere to go under the inflexible eschar. The chest can’t expand and contract; breathing is compromised. Bloodflow to the limbs is cut off; if left too long, tissue will die. Doctors can perform an escharotomy, making long cuts through the eschar along limbs and around the torso to let the underlying tissues, harmed but still viable, have space to expand into as they swell. This is an extreme procedure, no doubt, but a utilitarian one -- elect to harm a small part of the body so the rest can survive.

Fantasizing about cutting myself from stem to stern is weird. This is exactly the kind of overwrought, angsty shit teenagers talk about, and I’m closing in on thirty. But it happens on its own. I get upset and flashes of images pass through my mind. I find these thoughts intrusive; they come uninvited and without warning. I find them overwhelming and confusing, but I’m trying to practice just letting them pass through and, as best I can, maintaining an active curiosity about what they might mean and where they might come from. 

It happens when I think about having done something bad, or something I feel ashamed about. It happens when I think about sex, which often makes me feel a lot of complicated things. It happens when I think about the fact that I have a body, when I think about the fact that I hate the idea that I have a body. Sometimes these thoughts feel more like fantasy of wanting to tear the body down, a desire to wreck it so severely that it isn’t wanted. Or to mark it as badly as I feel on the inside. I’m not sure. There are places where things get muddy and feelings stop having a real logic to them. I like to really think things to death, but some things just are. Still, I find it tempting to endlessly probe deeper: Why the escharotomy, what about it resonates? 

At the risk of drawing too many dubious parallels between distant parts of my life, I will point out that I have a complicated relationship with fire. When I was a child, the barn of the farm we lived on burned down under somewhat questionable circumstances. I was woken up in the middle of the night by a neighbour I didn’t recognize and carried out of the house. No one was physically harmed, thankfully. My father, who had been drinking, thought it was wise to teach me about the dangers of fire by taking me from my mother and carrying me over to the burning building. My memories of this experience are oddly devoid of feeling, like watching a movie without sound. I’m not sure which of my memories are real and which are post hoc constructions from the bits that came out in the months and years that followed as people slowly tried to process this event. I’m told I had nightmares for months afterwards, but this I know to be real. I still have the same nightmares to this day. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

I’m trying to turn the things I have been reading into actual, concrete steps forward. I try to follow the advice of my therapist. “Notice the feelings rather than letting them take over you.” I have no idea what this means. What do you mean without letting them take over you? Feelings just happen inside you. When you are feeling sad, you become sad. Right? So I don’t know how to do what she’s talking about. Not yet. Instead, I try to notice what I can.

Today has been a good day. I’m feeling good. I’m not feeling bad. I’m not really feeling anything today. For a moment I wonder if this means I’m numbing out again. It bothers me a bit to feel like I don’t know the difference. Just practice and you’ll get better at it.

If I don’t notice feelings, or don’t have names for the things I’m feeling, I try to notice the behaviours instead. I get home and decide my eyebrows are long overdue for some care. 25 minutes later I notice I’m still in the bathroom, now inches away from the mirror picking at some imperceptible bump on my skin. I notice that maybe I’m engaging in some compulsive grooming habit to feel better. I stop, and decide to do something more constructive. I will write. I’ll plumb the depths of these dulled feelings to try to figure out what is bothering me. It’s mostly guesswork. I pick up on the first thing that comes to mind and try to see where that takes me. 

I went out with friends and my sister came along. There is substantial part of me that is extremely jealous of her. I don’t like this about myself. But I am trying to notice it. 

Around the table we asked each other, “What are you a snob about?” Everyone is a snob about something. I’m a snob about pens. I think poorly of ballpoint. My sister is a snob about music. I like music she thinks is shitty and this stirs up some weird thing inside me about not feeling good enough. I notice it. 

I notice that I find her to be much cooler than I am, that I think she has better taste, is more inherently likeable than I am which I find especially annoying because I think I want to be likeable more than she does. I notice that I feel she is funnier, more well adjusted and prettier than I am and these are all little things that make me jealous. I notice that I really hate myself for being jealous. It feels petty and unbecoming. And I have so many unbecoming features to make up for already. 

I notice that there is some secret small part of me that worries my friends will prefer her company to mine, and that in fact it is a small worry of mine in introducing people to my family that they will see that I am the least cool, the least likeable, and the least well adjusted of all of them, and that being friends with me is a waste of time because I have nothing to offer. I notice that this feels awful, and that these are the ideas of a tremendously insecure person. I notice that noticing this only intensifies my self hatred.

I notice that this noticing game is often hard and often reveals things I don’t like. I wonder if spending so much time on the noticing and simultaneously having such bad feelings to unpack, that all I am seeing is negative. I’m trying to balance out all the negative noticing that I’m doing with positive things. 

I notice the way the sun feels on my skin or the warm breeze or the sound of people laughing together. I notice when the air smells sweet at the end of a hot day. I notice when people smile at me on the street. I notice when the barista asks earnestly how my day is, and I say fine even when I don’t feel fine. I notice I do this because she is happy and I don’t want to make her unhappy by complicating the interaction with anything other than ‘fine,’ but in fact just her being happy makes me happy. I notice that I miss my mom, that I text her to tell her I love her just in case she doesn’t know it. She knows it but I think you can never say it too much. I notice that occasionally, as an accidental side effect, noticing the good things can send me into fits of tears just as much as noticing the bad things. And for this the tears are different, but stun me with their intensity just as much.

I wonder if this is how to get through all this baggage after all, or if I should quit. Am I making myself crazy? Can I even get to it all? The well seems to run pretty deep. 

It feels like there is a world out there that I am supposed to be part of instead of being trapped in the past like this. I ask myself whether I can really even engage with that world yet. I thought I was good, I thought I was getting healthy, and look what happened! For a while longer I think I will have to watch the world go at a different pace than me. One day I’ll get there, right? 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

Today was a good day. 

This whole process is kind of mysterious. What strange forces come together to allow good days to feel manageable, and bad days to feel bottomless? It all feels much, much larger than myself. In general I think I want to move toward having more good days than bad but I’m OK with the idea that not all days will be sunny. I think having clawed my way out of emotional chaos once before I clung to ‘happiness’ with such ferocity that I strangled it. Peeking out from a break in the clouds now I see that what I had was maybe the idea of happiness, but lacked the stability and security of anything I’d reasonably point to as a source of real comfort or contentment. Today I don’t feel happy, but I feel good. I feel a bit more on even ground, a bit more comfortable in my own skin. 

I’m kind of curious how I got here. As far as I can tell, I just woke up this morning and I felt better than I had for quite a while. I could look at the events of the last few months and say: that was crummy. But it’s over. I’m here now and moving forward. I mean, it’s great that I can say this today. But if I fall off again, can I get back? 

As I go through the steps, so much of it feels like it could equally be attributed to hard work or to random chance. I often doubt whether I’m really even doing the right kind of hard work. Each revelation of my past feels like Sisyphus rolling the boulder to the top of the hill just to have to watch it roll down again. But rather than boulders, I painstakingly move grains of sand. Each one slow and laborious, rolling end over end on uneven facets chiselled by whatever random forces of universal chaos have worn it down since first creation. Once a boulder, I imagine. Before that, a great piece of solid earth cooled from hot magma of a just born planet. Before that.. who knows. But now just a grain of sand, bumpy and odd. 

My memories come to me in tiny grains of sand. Confused, fuzzy images. Distorted emotions whose names I’m not sure I know. Bizarre, uncoordinated sensations of the body. I roll these grains of sand around. I try to organize them and categorize them. I meticulously take notes and catalog them. I try to reconsitute the rocks they came from, try to piece back together a story of my life. Occasionally a gust of wind will blow through my life and I’m as lost as ever.

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

From childhood to my early twenties I frequently bit my nails down until they bled. I only vaguely recognized this as a consequence of my anxiousness, though I didn’t have that word yet. I was not taught about feelings, and many of them still had no names. I mostly thought of it as just a bad habit I had. Like much of my behaviour, I was told it was simply ‘bad’ to do it, but there was no concept that there might be some cause. The idea that an anxious person would express these feelings in self-destructive ways as some paradoxical method of self-soothing was far beyond any of the emotional attunement of anyone in my life, so I didn’t learn to speak this language until I started therapy. I’m still far from fluent. 

I simply assumed nail biting was a habit I had picked up from my father, watching him always picking at his fingers. It was impossible to say anything my father did was a habit developed for self-soothing in moments of nervousness; his entire being exuded nervous, restless energy that could never be soothed. I’m not sure I would recognize him if he were relaxed. 

I did pick this up from my father, but not as mimicry. He was very scary. Though he has changed a lot since he has stopped drinking, to this day he still causes me enormous anxiety. It’s difficult to notice any correlation between the stress at home and habits that harmed my body like nail biting or twisting and pulling my hair and, for a short period of time, cutting my arm: two parallel lines, always in the same spot so it did not look like that kind of cutting. It’s hard to notice a correlation because there was no break from it. There was no time when things settled down and anyone was willing to say, “OK, let’s unpack all this mess that we’ve put away for a time when things are less crazy.” And years later, when there was time, everyone just wanted to put it all behind them. 

I stopped biting my nails when I was around 22 or 23, when I decided to distance myself from my father in all acts big and small. I hated the things I did that reminded me of being like him. I painted my nails, the more care I put into them the less I would want to wreck them. I could replace shameful and destructive soothing behaviours with more constructive ones that I could be proud of. I might get cancer from all the chemicals, but it worked. 

For many years I took good care of my hands, and I valued the elegance of long painted nails and soft, neatly trimmed cuticles as proof that I was unlike my father. I had escaped the fate of gnarled, dry, and cracked fingers that I was repulsed to be touched by, of clubbed nails with long deep tears along the cuticles that bled from being constantly picked at. 

In the past few months the anxiety has gone from bad to worse as I start to unearth parts of my past I hoped would stay buried forever. One day, completely overwhelmed, I picked up this old nail biting habit. I couldn’t stop until my fingers were bleeding and I had to soak them in warm water to soothe the throbbing. I put bandaids on all of my fingers and felt like I was wearing weird gloves until they healed. 

I look at my hands now and they remind me of how broken I feel. No long, elegant fingers of a well put together woman. Instead, awkward, painful reminders of a past I keep trying desperately to get away from. Frustration about regression is understandable, but gets me nowhere. I keep the bandaids on and try to remind myself that all things heal in time. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

This phase of therapy is exhausting. I circle the issues but don’t really have access to them. I can’t or won’t fit the pieces together. I am frustrated with the lack of progress; I am angry and punitive towards the parts of myself that hold me back. What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just do it? Why can’t you be good? This is a carillon bell that rings throughout all corners of my life. As a human being I feel designed around the core organizing principle: Just be good. Failure leads to widespread system meltdown, as the past months have seen. 

I deeply resentment how damaged I am. The castigating part of me feels especially vocal today. My therapist reminds me that we can’t move forward if the parts that hold onto delicate and confused memories are not allowed safety and security. I’m told that as much as I want to cast off the flawed, sad, fearful, and uncertain parts of myself, progress necessitates that no one be exiled. Today is a fight for the legitimacy of different parts with competing interests. We have been here before. The process feels endless and circular and when the hour is up I feel hollowed out. 

I cleaned my room when I got home just to have something to keep me occupied. I finally emptied out all those long forgotten drawers that just house old crap I always said I’d get to later. The process is not straightforward; I organize and reorganize, take little bits from one place and put them in some other place they’re better suited to, then change my mind and move them back. I somewhat reluctantly acknowledge the pieces have no use for or I will realistically never look at or care about again and throw them away.  When I finish, the room as a whole looks the same. The irony is not lost on me. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

I remember walking down a hot alleyway in Muizenberg. I remember how still the air was. I remember thinking about how the sun, directly above me, was brighter there than anywhere I have ever been. I could distantly hear the ocean and kids screaming in the parking lot by the beach. I remember the smell of the hot asphalt, the taste in my mouth, how I felt like I might not be real. I might not be real. 

[adearjohn-blog]

This mental breakdown. 

It made some things make more sense.

And everything else much less so. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

Most of the time I choose to be wilfully ignorant of anyone’s physical attraction to me. To know that I’m being looked at does strange things to my mind. I hate knowing I can only do so much to control the kind of attention given by others to my body. Half feeling filthy and objectified, half feeling drunk on my own (real or perceived) seductive powers. I both love and hate it. I’m always walking a razor’s edge between being pushed into either extreme. When I was away I went too far one way: I dared to feel desirable and to like that about myself. Now I’ve come reeling back across to the other side. I feel guilty and ashamed of myself. I don’t like who I am. I’m punishing myself, but it’s never enough. 

Punish the mind; criticize the thoughts I have, dismiss the feelings, frame the narrative so I’m the bad guy. Not the bad guy, the worst guy. I didn’t make a mistake, I am just a shitty human being. This event is proof that I am garbage. Nothing else I have done counts. 

Punish the body; stop eating, stop exercising. Think of the discomfort in my body as deserved. Feel the contours of my ribs and feel disgusted with myself for losing so much weight, for allowing my body to reflect this failure on the outside. Can’t win for losing. 

Hate the body; wishing it to disappear. Wishing I didn’t know what I look like. Wanting to throw out all the mirrors in my house that remind me of the existence of this body. Think a lot about how if I didn’t look the way I did, maybe I wouldn’t attract this attention. Feeling like I bring it on myself. 

Hate the mind; resenting how readily my weak mind caves for men being attracted to me, to my body. Hate that I want the validation enough. Hate how it highlights all the ways I am ugly and small inside even while trying to build up the other parts of myself. All my successes feel worthless. I start to think of them as a brittle veneer I have constructed to try and hide away the very messy, blundering person inside. 

You called me intricate. When you said this I imagined an old clock with hundreds of tiny moving pieces. I imagined that right now that clock has been broken; smashed up and all the little pieces thrown into disarray. I’d like to fix it, and get things in working order again, but it’s just that I’m not a clock and I can’t open this up and take a look inside and figure out what goes where. So for now just trying to take some of the pieces out and get a good look at them. We’ll see what comes next. 

[adearjohn-blog]

Dear John,

What’s real and what’s imaginary? 

Imaginary is not really the right word. I have a hard time trusting my own judgement. I always want to consider all sides before making a judgement and sometimes that's just not possible. You drive yourself nuts and never decide anything at all. 

A good example is the cheating. Asking myself objectively how bad is it. Not being able to know how much guilt is normal, rational, or measured. And clearly going way too far with it at some points. In that sense my own internal measures of "badness" are poorly calibrated. 

That is almost certainly a residual effect of abusive circumstances in childhood and never having the opportunity to integrate certain very negative experiences. So as an adult I ask myself: what guilt is real and what is "imaginary"? I think in this example it's easy to see that some is real and some is imagined but exactly how much is not an easy thing to figure out and I will probably just have to settle for knowing that at least some of it is not in response to current circumstances. That said, as I go through therapy there are many instances in which the distinction is unclear. 

The memories are foggy or the feelings are confusing. With respect to potential sexual abuse its quite common for survivors to feel shame or responsibility when objectively and intellectually you can say that what happened was not their fault. For me it also shares the additional dimension of uncertainty of the events. I remember hand print bruises on my legs and problems with going to the bathroom and all this other crazy shit that if I were a parent to a kid I would be highly suspicious of. But I have no explicit memories of sexual abuse and I recognize what a serious thing it is to make that kind of accusation. So there are layers of internal struggle about what is "real." Or how to interpret certain memories. Knowing what I know about my life now and my experiences now... I guess I just have to settle for not knowing.