16.09.2007, 1:35 pm
Not making a decision is also typically a decision unto itself. Not preventing something from happening is essentially the same as allowing it to, and keeping one's mouth completely closed can be a statement of resounding magnitude.
I am living in a state of perpetual limbo, totally alone, because I am the only person I know who appears to be residing here. Some visit, some communicate with me from the outside, and some just like to observe. It is a life completely devoid of passion, of motion, of aptitude, and all hopelessly frozen in place. Time passes but I do not evolve with it. A lacking sense of purpose creates questions but never any answers. Fantasies but never any realities. Some effort, always, but never to come to fruition.
When I was younger I was an easy target because I kept quiet. A quiet baby, a quiet toddler, a quiet adolescent. Only as an adult did I begin to develop some sense of identity and the will to assert it in a social context. Only as an adult did I determine the importance of asserting oneself as though the onus to justify one's existence befalls on the individual. That we have to prove to others we are alive by really living. That no one would see me unless I asked them to. However, by the time I realized this was true I am afraid it was already a bit too late in many respects. There are many things about myself I cannot undo.
Since I was very young, as I've written about, I've endured mistreatment on multiple levels. I never said anything. I was too quiet. You could hit me, touch me, scream at me, break things, and I would say nothing. I would suppress it completely and totally and seal myself off from the world so that nothing could enter or exit my mind. I would reach a pivotal point, a threshold, where one more inappropriately placed hand or reach of a fist or broken object or loud, intrusive word would cause me to completely lose all control of functioning. I could feel it rising within me, filling me, pushing my tolerance to the absolute brim.
So I would completely close. I was quiet. I said nothing, I did nothing, I wouldn't let myself care.
Of course, eventually the immediacy of the event would end, and I would still be filled to the very brim with anger and fear and hostility and self-hatred and disgust. I had to let it out, but let it out in my own controlled fashion and in my own private space and at my own hand. Rather than react with words or violence, as I was treated, I would react using self-inflicted physical pain. I would sit in total silence, in private, with a rag and a razor, and I would just cut myself over and over and over and over and over again in the same place until the absolute absurdity of the immense numbness, and the visual of it, wound around one another in an overwhelming crescendo and I would just burst into tears. The adrenaline of my bottled-up emotions was intense. So I would cry and cry and cry, until I could actually begin to feel the cutting, then I would stop. Then I would clean myself up and be at peace. No one saw the physical manifestation, as it was as private and personal to me as my emotions themselves.
My self-mutilation aged out. The last time I engaged in the behavior was a few years ago, when I cut my face and my neck. It felt useless. I felt stupid. I was frustrated. I had no release as it was no longer effective as a means with which to do so, and I have never known why. I was forced to cope with my anger and frustration in a strictly cognitive capacity.
Over time, and through dysfunctional familial and romantic relationships, I had to continually suppress it all with no release. Never any release. It would grow and mutate and infect and crawl through my mind until it settled itself in a subconscious state and became a part of me forever. Tears would come, periodically, and they would be powerful...but I prided myself on maintaining a strictly calm capacity. I was quiet, as when I was younger, but I didn't realize it. I believed I was living out loud, but I was not, because these moments of pain and torment only appeared to subside. They never truly subsided. They just burrowed deeper within me and sit with me still today.
I lived so many years of my life refusing to just open myself up, not only to allow things in but to release them, that I now struggle to do either. I cannot process pain. I absolutely refuse. I get so overwhelmed by a well of emotions that fills but never empties, that sometimes I think I was born only to feel. To feel but never understand, to take but never give, to reflect but never absorb, to mediate the pathway and vibration of every single brainwave that enters my frontal lobe. To control my own mind so severely that, in the process, I completely lose all control. To be a slave to my own defense mechanism developed to protect me from the outside world. So afraid, so inept at mental processing, so dysfunctional...made dysfunctional by dysfunction.
And so I live here in limbo. Devoid of passion, of motion, of aptitude. Frozen in place. It is a constant battle between total lack of concern, lack of care, and the pulsating and exponentially developing malignant pain. Pain of sadness, of fear, of regret. Sometimes I care far too much, and sometimes not nearly enough, as though it were a struggle of epic proportions involving the switch turning off and on and off and on again. My mind isn't free to experience the world because it is bound and incapacitated through distorted perceptions marred by experience.
I have not lived a bad life, but I have lived a good life poorly. For this I am afraid I will continue to do so through the unforeseeable future. I did it to myself, but I never realized it. I was too young.
I'm afraid I will always be this way.
