When stranger meets strange

Just how does one start anew in the middle of some middling crisis years in the making?

I’m half convinced I am the perfect candidate for split brain consciousness. I am fascinated by Colin Wilson’s myriad takes on the bicameral mind:

A Criminal History of Mankind, page 148

It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common – and undesirable – consequences of ‘unicameralism’. Boredom is a feeling of being ‘dead inside’; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings. Experiments with EEG machines have shown that when we become bored the right cerebral hemisphere begins to display alpha rhythms – the rhythms that appear when the brain is ‘idling’. Robert Ornstein, one of the pioneers of split-brain research, discovered that this happens when someone is doing mental arithmetic. It happens, in fact, during any activity in which we are not really interested. But if the right brain ‘idles’ too much, it goes to sleep. The psychologist Abraham Maslow described a case of a girl who suffered from depression and a sense of meaninglessness; she had even ceased to menstruate. He discovered that she wanted to study sociology and was being forced – by financial necessity – to do a boring, repetitive job. When Maslow suggested that she should go to night school and continue her studies of sociology, her problems promptly vanished. The boredom had caused her right brain to spend most of its time ‘idling’; as soon as she began to think in terms of purpose and motivation, she also began to feel great again. 

 

I awake the same way each day on the same side of the bed. I follow the same morning rituals of stumbling into the bathroom, deciding on just how awake I need to be for the day. How much reality will I let in like the light hitting me in the face just a little bit more cruelly than the day before? And just how far down am I willing to sink today? Will I be the failure, will I be the selfish child or will I pretend to be a winner? Just to see what that would be like for a lark?

Remember, I’m the next big thing in loserville, I thrive on making the possible … impossible. Each and every day.

I’m the pretty girl turning on herself, not realizing until it’s too late, I’m doing everything I can to become ugly. Match the inside out, turn everything upside down and make all those chances and wishes hard and shriveled regrets.

When was the exact moment I began to hate myself in that secret, sad, quiet way of mine? Was it when I first blurted it out loud to the neighborhood kids when I was ten years old and mother was on her way to the hospital, not for the first time?  

I hate myself. I hate myself.

No, you don’t.

Yes, I do. I hate myself. I have always hated myself.

Ah, so perhaps I always felt that way? I can’t pinpoint a precise moment of this feeling, this crawling feeling of dread and self doubt and black moods that’s been peering out from within.

I thought for years I’ve lived the life of an individual. I am free. I do what I want, when I want. I have little ambition. I cultivate small pleasures and life experiences. I am such a dangerous thinker. An outsider. I’m not afraid of the dark. I feel electrified in the heights. I will not be held back by the conventions of the all American suburbanites.  I refuse to worship another human being posed as the latest guru or any God for that matter. 

But to be perfectly frank I am my own worst enemy’s bitch. Because I lay at the feet of my own bad instincts. I scrape and bow before the bad thoughts, the crappy self image I pretend I don’t have except in moments when I lose my cool and can no longer hide behind the stoic face I’ve carefully built. As a child I learned how to figure out if the day was going to be good or bad by the mood fluctuations of my mother. Later I brought my human calculator into my difficult friendships and tumultuous romances. They were all difficult, they were all tumultuous. I was forever gauging my whole life’s meaning into the next five minutes with whomever I chose to love madly, deeply, terribly, at any cost.

I didn’t necessarily go for bastards or abusers, but I honed in on any sharply intelligent charmer with cold fish tendencies who saw me, who wanted me. The men weren’t so bad when I look at them collectively, but the (platonic) girl friends I’ve had were the viperous, controlling women I never could be, I didn’t want to be, but I never failed to befriend the biggest bitch in the room. The mass seducers, the women who fucked like men, the superficial, confident liars, the glittering girls who drank too much, who tried drugs, who annoyed me, who tired me, who taunted me. Oh, I got rid of them all eventually, but the damage was done. They added to my self doubt. They were the anti-me and yet they appeared to be far more successful in this mundane life stuff than me. I was ultimately the loser in the fight. And yes, it was always a fight. Every friendship, every boyfriend was a war to win or lose. And I always lost. That was the one constant in my life. A girl will grab onto whatever safety net she can get her hands on. And trust me, I needed all the safety nets I could hold. 

What is my biggest safety net now? Is it other people? Or is it a far scarier proposition? Is it chaos? I have somehow managed to build a large chunk of my life with a new family; my husband, his family, some of my extended family, a smattering of friends (not enough) but better than nothing, I have a university degree, I have travelled, I have a few middling talents, I finally found a talent I could possibly make money off of if I could ever get my confidence and focus to work together, I have a beautiful house, a job I like and financial security… I have love! But look at me, I compartmentalize my life. A “large chunk of my life” is filled with love and support?! What, not all of it? I must always separate myself somehow. Separate myself from the good and from the bad. Viewing life, viewing myself as beyond good and evil is the only great equalizer I have for perspective. Because I can’t seem to connect the dots to all the elements in my life. I mean I’m hardly living the life of Jean Rhys, more like the life of Riley… but in trying to lead an uncomplicated, surface existence I am in fact layering complexities in the form of neuroses. Everything is built up just when I want it smoothed out. I have no tools to deal with all this emotion. For feeling so out of control, so angry, so sad, so disconnected. The pain comes quickly now and it no longer digs at me, it tears. It rips. It leaves marks. I can’t erase the past as much I want to escape it, to forget it, to not be of it, from it, because of it. So I am writing about it in splintered posts, mixing memories with the impressions of now. Because trying to forget is second nature to me. And it’s what’s doing my head in. It’s the sabotage of the perfect victim.

I should have known by now I can’t hide from myself. My greatest frenemy. The biggest bitch of them all.