What is wrong with me? Mid-30’s, no home, no friends, never had a long lasting relationship, and can’t keep a job.
Why am I writing this? I have to try and understand myself. A human psyche exists as a voice: an inner voice. However, a voice only exists in relation to an audience. It is the conditional feedback from the audience that both shapes, defines, and proves the existence of that voice. Without a responsive audience the personal self dissolves. We are terrified of loneliness precisely because the absence of an audience is the disintegration of our voice: our existence as a psyche: the dissolution of our sense of self.
Who is my audience? Should I imagine a compassionate public? Or an ideal hero or a listening God. I have no one – so I write – into the aether, like prayer, and read my own narrative with impersonal compassion. Mystics say there are no 2. That the very idea of self and other is ignorance. So be it, let me listen to myself with a loving heart.
As an exercise, I understand writing will help gather together the fragments of discordant desire, resistance, and emotion into a coherent sense of self. I’m fragile, fragmented, and quick to disassociate. After a moment of blankness: of total loss of sense of self, I have to recover some idea of who I am, but it hardly matters because there is often another instance of blankness and I have to start over – regaining a sense of self. I read writing can help knit together left and right hemispheres of my brain by rendering into linguistic consciousness prelinguistic internal sensory information. And, out of an unstable inner world, build a bridge into the light of clarity, integration, stability, wholeness.
I also want to share myself. Share of my inner life with others. That is the self-centered desire of a lonely man. However, as a movement beyond myself it is better than stagnation. Exchanging energy and information, but also consolidating the construct of my personal self identity in relation with other. Something a good childhood does for a soul, but that I will have to pursue with this endeavor. Yeah, I’m trying to understand myself. To name and dress the inner winds and ply them all together into a coherent continuum. For a line can end in a point, but smudge just fades and spreads.
On the deepest and more important level, I know that I am not my mind, nor personality and its numerous defects – that these things happen in and to a more fundamental level of being-awareness. However, enlightenment is a luxury you can only really pursue after you can fulfill and regulate more basic physiological and psychological needs. Once those things are stable, and don’t require self-conscious effort to maintain – only then can the conscious-ego relax its reflex to self-identify, intervene, and control.
I think. I think a lot. Too much. To shift from the voice, into that absolute audience: to become a compassionate and impersonal audience to your own inner life. I think in writing to yourself, in the re-reading of it, there is a letting go. Like pouring dry sand out of your hands, you become empty of it.
I’ve always experienced an invisible barrier to the depth of human connection I am able to make. I have to work very hard to just pass as normal and not simply be immediately rejected as irregular. Perhaps I grew up with no one listening to me. So, without an audience, my inner voice spoke and developed in relation to an emotionless absolute: a listening impersonal and objective silence. So, now as an adult, my inner voice: my personality, as it is expresses through my speech and behaviour, is received as rough and strange to the audiences of the well-adjusted and socialized human psyches that lay claim to be society itself.
There are a few factors I can discern into why I can’t make human connections:
- Many and numerous significant early infancy and childhood abuse and neglect has left me emotionally numb so that I am not overwhelmed by trauma – while also nurturing socially unpleasant coping mechanisms.
- Toxic and emotionally unhealthy parents in a violent and abusive family constellation.
- I wasn’t raise well, important chunks of my childhood were spent in international transit where I never stayed any where long enough to make friends or learn social skills or how to connect with others.
- I am misanthropic and basically resent being forced to live in a society. I was put in a mental hospital from 15 to 18 and had to learn to appear normal and be vigilant for and guard against my own nature. Tardive psychosis and Schizophrenia.
These points aside – significant and life-altering though they are – I have tried for decades to break through this invisible wall that seals me off from human connection with the hope that I can re-train or heal what is wrong with me. Maybe it’s desperation or laziness but when my psychiatrist suggested epigenetic autism I felt that sad as it is, I could finally rest – because it’s a permanent disability… so all my frustration and desperation could just ease away.
As alluring as giving up is, especially after years of excruciating and exhausting therapy, is it really autism? I have contempt for all human constructs. We’re just apes with synesthesia, and linguistic consciousness can only compress reality into representative packets of data. So no matter what we say, our concepts can only be models of data coherent – or not – unto themselves rather than mapping something objective. So fuck autism. What do we know?
This mind and it’s limits may be the context and relative situation of this life and body. However, if human connection is off the table, maybe there is something deeper to go for. After all, all is the one presence expressing through its many and varied forms. What I am reaching for is already within, right?
Under-developed Orbitofrontal Cortex
When a baby isn’t taught social-emotional regulation by being emotionally regulated in the context of a loving symbiotic parent-child relationship with an emotionally self-regulated adult their orbitofrontal cortex never developes. Without that critical feedback of responsive external inputs from a care-giving adult, that infant brain never learns hows to self-regulate. Like the famous case of Romanian orphans who aside from being fed and cleaned were left alone in their cots, I too never developed the ability to tune into others or myself. There is a unfeeling numbness which makes self-regulation difficult and emotions generally are ignored until they accumulate into a deluge.