The Cerebral Mum

I don’t even know what to do any more. And I don’t even want to write this. I want to be doing a million trivial things but I can’t get a grip on any of them. I am physically restraining myself, sitting here, but I don’t know that I would be able to get these bees out from under my skin even if I let them go.

I don’t know how to deal with this. It’s different. It’s not like in the past when I had big, big pains too large to be held in; pains that I released in writing, that I cut out of me, literally and figuratively, that I starved and binged and purged myself to control. All of that made sense and none of this does. And it was so long ago. And nothing I learned seems to fit.

More and more, I begin to think that there is something “chemical” going on. It is not outside the bounds of reason, considering my previous lifestyle and a pregnancy. Maybe it is that simple. Then again, what is simple about that? I don’t like things I can’t understand. I don’t like feeling as though something is out of my hands. It makes no sense to me, philosophically. I can’t unify the knowledge of the biological nature of human thought (what little we have) with the metaphysics of it all.

I can’t let go of my ultimate responsibility, but I can’t avoid the knowledge that I cannot be right or be wrong. I cannot make a moral choice. So this is checkmate.

Oh, I know that the two are not sliced so cleanly. I know. Normally that knowledge comforts me. It removes the basis for all those ignorant hatreds in this world, removes the rights and lefts and radical oppositions. But it leaves more difficult philosophical questions in its wake. The same questions, yes, but the paths extending from them are multiplied and too entangled to unravel. Has anyone unravelled them? Are there any philosophers left?

I read an opinion the other day which I objected to.

A woman is not born a woman. She becomes one.

It pissed me off, this cheap sloganeering that insulted women while pretending to make them free. I did not even recognise it as a quote from Simone de Beauvoir, whom I respect. It was out of context, certainly, but it is also out of it’s time. This brilliant thinker has been reduced to an anachronism.

I know when I was writing Polar seasons… the other day, I wrote lengthy passages about genetics and society’s poor understanding of it and the ridiculousness of the nature/nurture dichotomy given what contemporary science is learning. (I think I removed most of it. I’m not sure. I couldn’t proofread it clearly, and still can’t. I don’t know what I was saying. I am worried that I said something offensive.)

I truly believe the line between biology and experience has all but disappeared, that each part has a powerful effect upon the other, that what we are and how we live is so closely intertwined that we can no longer see these things divided.

But I don’t know what that means.

I have strong views about individual responsibility. My concept of it is the foundation of all my principles. I loathe what Kant called our non-age. I loathe what Sartre called bad faith. I loathe what I call abdication. I rebel against “the unreasonable silence of the world” and strive for meaning anyway, strive for Truth in spite of what will be my ultimate and necessary failure.

Biology confuses all of this.

What about this is the product of my behaviour and thoughts? What about this is illness? How much has illness created my thoughts? How much have my thoughts created illness? These questions cannot be answered.

Some people are ill. Some people know that they are ill, and they are qualified to judge. Some people are too ill to make that judgement and someone else makes it for them, rightly or wrongly. Some people make themselves ill and absolve themselves of their responsibility. Some people have a greater potential for illness but remain free from disease their whole lives. Some people set off the chain of disease by their choices. Some people are made ill by events in their lives which they have no control over. Some people…

No. No answers can be found there. If I am ill because of my own action, I must take ownership of it. If I am ill because of my biology, I must disabuse myself of my responsibility. Everything in between is unsolvable.

I cannot untangle it.

I cannot.

I cannot.

I cannot.

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The last 48 hours have been relatively busy and I was going to talk about all the things I’d done, all the things I’ve yet to do and all the benefits of the new site for me and for my readers but I’m too tired to make administrivia sound interesting right now. Even though it is interesting (to me at least). So I’m leaving that for another day and what I’m thinking about is this:

How on earth do we know when things are real?

I’ve spent the last couple of days moving this blog, which required a certain amount of commitment and energy which I purport not to have, and chatting and joking on Skype with people I don’t even know while we worked together to get things set up. I felt normal. I think I even seemed normal. I almost felt likeable. I almost felt human.

And then I got a message from a long-lost friend, the closest friend of my teenage years, and I sent a happy, chatty message back. That felt kind of normal, then very fake.

I was genuinely excited to hear from her and I would genuinely like to see her again but I was also scared of the mess in my head and hyper-aware that if we were to find a time to catch up, I would be stricken with anxiety and feel overwhelmed by the process. I have to ask myself, is a computer a place to hide or is it a safety net while I find my feet again? And I don’t know the answer. I really don’t. Maybe it’s both.

A few people have left comments, and sent messages, appreciative of my candour. Am I candid? I think I am. I try to be. But my mask is still on when the conversations are closer to home, and away from my homepage. Part of me thinks this is good: It is nice to be reminded that there are actually human beings in the world that I can interact with, it’s nice to feel like myself, but then I’m challenged as to why I don’t feel that way when it becomes face-to-face. Worse, I’m challenged as to whether this depression is just a figment of my imagination, something I’ve made up. Maybe there is actually nothing wrong with me. Maybe I am one big faker. Maybe I am not being candid at all.

In the cerebral part of my brain, I can untangle it all, see that none of this is black and white. I can reject the false dichotomy: That’s logical fallacy 101. In spite of that, I just cannot seem to find solid ground to stand on.

Why do I feel that ominous sense of guilt for momentary pleasure? Why do I feel that ominous sense of guilt for being depressed? Why does everything I do or feel make everything else seem like a lie?

The truth is - I know this is the truth! - that we all have many faces. We all play many roles. How honestly we play them is dependent on us, but we play them nonetheless. Why do I not feel at home in any of them? Being sad feels wrong, being happy feels wrong, being alone, being with people, being quiet, being intense… It all feels wrong. I want to feel comfortable in all my faces again. I want them to feel real.

I need to shake everything up. I need to rattle me in a dice box and just see where I fall. I need to somehow create something to work with again, something to hold on to.

In the past, often I would do something sudden: Move house, change jobs, shave off all my hair, anything just to see who I was. At the moment, I can’t even move the furniture. It’s not my furniture. I am living in borrowed space in borrowed time. Time borrowed from living that can never be paid back. But I can do nothing suddenly. I have created too much of a mess. I need to strip away everything, all my labels, all my things, all my burdens, and try on new faces.

I need people.

I think I require a stage. I think the only set-decoration should be me. I don’t think I can do it in this vacuum. I don’t know how to get out of this vacuum. Am I too scared to get out of this vacuum?

The other day, chatting with my Mum on Skype, I called her Mrs. Plod, an affectionate insult that she is not insulted by in the least. I would be highly insulted by it. Is it slow-and-steady that will win this race for me? I am not slow and steady. I am fools-rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread. With nowhere to go and no way to get there.

Tomorrow, I will rearrange my room.

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I think I am too drained to write.  So I’m just starting.  I don’t know what will come out.  This might be it.

Unsurprisingly, I have become weepy since starting on this course.  Weepy of the stupidest things.  Yesterday Big Sis was going down the street and I asked her to pick something up for me.  I gave her my money and she said, “Fuck, it’s all silver”. So I cried.  Today my mobile phone rang and I didn’t want to answer it and I cried.  I haven’t checked my voicemail for 2 weeks.  I should check my voicemail.  I hate voicemail.  I think I’ll delete voicemail.  But that would involve me using the phone.

I don’t know what I am talking about.

I’ll start again.

Today, I made lunch for Caspar and me and I wanted to eat together while we watched a dvd.  I couldn’t find it and that upset me.  Big Sis was using her computer so I couldn’t burn one.  So I tried to find something else but none of the real dvds would work.  My dvd player only likes .avi files.  So that upset me.  And Caspar had eaten half his lunch without me while I flapped around feeling broken because it seemed so little ask, just to watch a dvd.  I cannot organise myself.  I feel confused.  My lunch was cold.  I didn’t even want it anymore.  Then Big Sis came out with a burned copy but she wasn’t sure it was the right one and I tried to organise my thoughts and figure it out but she just backed away as fast as she could while I struggled for words, distressed over nothing.

She doesn’t handle other people’s emotions well, my Big Sis.  She shuts down.  She gets out of there.  She knows this and I know this.  But that closed door left me feeling wrecked for hours.  Rejected.  Nobody can deal with me.  Nobody will be around me as I am.  Nobody will help me.  Why does everyone leave.

Later, we talked.  And I cried because I can’t seem to do anything else.  And she is there for me and isn’t rejecting me.  And I know that she tries her best to make room for what is going on.  And we both know that no-one can fix me anyway. “That’s the depression talking,” she says when I try to explain how I feel.  I feel abandoned.  I feel like a child.

She is not kind to my friends.  She has no respect for the people who say that they’ll call or say that they’ll visit or say that we’ll catch up some time.  “They’re not your friends,” she says.  There is truth in that, maybe.  I make excuses for them.

I have other friends.  Better friends, but they are far away.  I don’t have the energy for gargantuan efforts to see them briefly.  I want to be around people.  Just daily people.  Who talk in nothings.  Nobody shares my nothings.

How silly and inconsequential this seems.  I would like to stop crying now.

I have a counselling appointment for the 22nd.  The woman who called asked me questions, took down my doctor’s name, my pension number, my Medicare number.  I truly hope she is not the counsellor, she had an awful, harsh voice, even though there was nothing wrong with her tone.

I wanted to think about the clock, and what that meant.  I don’t understand the clock.  I feel like I should put backlinks in these posts so what I am talking about makes some kind of sense.  I don’t have the energy for that.  Making sense is not the purpose.  I should put a note on the sidebar, maybe, for strange visitors.

The clock.  The clock makes no sense to me.  A clock I hated, that made me feel burdened and overwhelmed, that would make sense.  But a clock that stopped me in my tracks, that made me want it to be the first thing I saw when I woke up?  I read somewhere that a clock can be a mandala, a symbol of the self, but I am struggling to read at the moment.  I cannot concentrate.  I skip whole passages, whole pages.

I think I need to work out why, at my lowest lowest point, my cry is always that “Nobody ever takes care of me.” I think that is true and untrue.  I think that is true and untrue for everyone.  Why do I reduce to that little girl voice? I’m going out the back to eat worms?

I thought I should read about The Orphan archetype but I don’t have all my books.  And the web is useless.  I think Jung is really helpful, but he does attract the crazies.  And he’s not easy.  Everything gets simplified and misinterpreted.  Jung is buried very deep in the psyche of the internet.  I can’t find it.

And my eyes are stinging.  And I am tired.  And I am stupid.  And I want so much to write something useful to myself and this all seems so useless.  I don’t think I will read it.  I will just post it.  I’ll read what I said tomorrow.  I guess nothing is useless.

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I am trying to extricate all the puzzle pieces.

I am thinking about archetypes and the shadow and the ego and the persona and I cannot entangle one from the other, if I even recognise them at all. I have an inkling that my masculine side, a strength I grew, has gained too tight a grip on me. I feel, but I feel in principle. I feel and express those feelings rationally. I manage them. As I write this, it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. I wonder if it is?

I wrote this excerpt not very long ago, a part of a post I did not finish which meant to make a comparison between Big Sis’ and my way of dealing with strong emotion…

My mind works in a way that conceptualises, intellectualises my emotions. My emotions are filtered cerebrally. I am not without passion though, and if my emotions pass through these filters (clearing the debris of petty, narcissistic, self-aggrandising or self-destructive ones hopefully) I express them. The principle I work on is this: It is either important enough to be addressed or it isn’t important enough to hold on to.

Obviously, this kind of negotiation within myself involves trying to determine the motivations of the person I am responding to as much as trying to understand my own. In any given situation, another’s intentions or needs may be more important, even if my feelings are justified. For me, relationships are an endless cycle of these types of negotiations. I have no expectation that people should always behave toward me in a way that suits my needs, but I chose to act when a line is crossed. My intention is not necessarily to change the other person’s behaviour; it is to make them aware of how their behaviour effects me. At worst, I then learn that they don’t care. At best, I succeed in communicating.

Is there something wrong in my thinking? I think perhaps it is that “thinking” has too tight a grip on me, that my filtering system is making parts of me feel voiceless.

The possibility of that is painful. Because I think (I cannot stop saying I think…) that this rational strength, this reasonableness, was the boon I brought back the last time I went into the dark wood. How awful that I have corrupted it. Just… how awful.

I have to ask myself, all those years ago, did I not grow at all? Did I just change modalities?

Last night, when I wrote the word connection, something I wrote in my novel came to my mind, but I could not find it to quote. As I was searching, I realised how unpalatable my protagonist seemed to me - although I love her. I realised that I did not want to reveal her here, in this context. I realised that she engendered shame in me. As a literary character, I am proud of her. How does she stand in relation to me?

The shadow embodies all that is repressed, pushed aside, locked up, forgotten-not only the seven deadly sins, but also the introvert’s extraversion, the intuitive’s sensing side, the thinker’s feeling function, and the emotional person’s thinking side. The shadow contains what we left behind in childhood, our wishes, and our dreams. _{The Third Eve}

Once, I considered her character a shadow, and I learned from her as I began to write her story. She is a far, far from evolved person. She struggles with her identity as a woman, a daughter; she seeks power and is destructive toward men, she drives one man to suicide, aborting her child, acting out in opposition to the mythology of her childhood. She is the Shadow in control.

I’m sure in the beginning, I identified with her in some ways. After all, she came from within me. She did not appear out of thin air. I remember that not long after I gave those first few passages to my boyfriend to read, our relationship began to circle the drain. I always thought the two events were connected.

She frightened him.

It was obvious at the time that she frightened him. That he felt emasculated by it. I made strong arguments about the distinction between a character and an author, yet his visceral response remained. Perhaps his instincts were correct. When I look back at that relationship, I see a story being acted out. I played the fey maiden needing to be saved, and he played the role not, as he thought, of the knight in shining armour, but of my loyal page.

I used him as a mirror to show me my Self as beautiful. I used him to make me feel safe and with that safety, I grew. My growth shifted the power structure in that strange play of ours, until he was faced with the untenable fact that his role was not the one which supported his ego. So childish was our bond; it could not be sustained.

But where did that Shadow go? The one who was first beautiful, then strong, then frightening? I think I danced with her for years. Perhaps I never really incorporated her. Perhaps I just chose parts of her that I could shape at will. With my rational mind. If so, perhaps she is roaring again.

Perhaps my “protagonist” can provide me some clue as to what is going on beneath the surface of my world. I don’t like that now, in my virginal state as Mother, I will need to dig symbolically into my relationship with the masculine. But I think it is that screaming Lilith and that remnant Persephone who have been restrained for too long.

Maybe. I wonder how clearly I’m seeing. Everything is blurred. Dark and blurred. I think my eyes are white. I think I am blind.

STORY

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
and unlock the shape of me

I thought it was you who sat at my head
held my mind in your white-vice eyes
and called me child

I thought it was you who kept me fed
drank my tears and never told lies
and called me child

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
and unlock the shape of me

I wanted it to be you who made me forget
who lost my age in a glass palace cage
and called me child

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
help me dance across the keys
and unlock the shape of me

And a voice says…
I saw you once upon a time
when your skin was still green
and your hair was still gold
and I cradled my voice in the
flame of your hair but I
can’t untell you child…

My head is held
I can’t untell you child
My head is held
I can’t untell you child
Call me child
I can’t untell you…

I need a blind man.

[Original Lyrics - 199?]

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I’m trying to figure out where to start this journey. I think I’m thinking too much. Then I think I need to think it all out of me, first. Once there are words, I can have a conversation with them.

What are my brains prejudices and assumptions? How does it filter the world for me? How does that effect my behaviour, my choices, my life? Where do they come from? Should I be thinking about specific events in my life? Should I be mining the past? Is that a map? Is that a mire? Is thinking a way to make a story for myself? I mean, a fictional story? Am I deceiving myself? Am I regressing? Am I finding other ways new ways to trap myself here? Am I wallowing? Should I just go walking on the beach and stop thinking? Should I just “behave” my way back to myself? Well, no to that last one. Reprogramming might look good on the surface, but I’m not Pavlov’s dog. I need to go inward. Or is that wrong too? I need to go outward as well, put myself in situations which will throw light.

I don’t know. I am thinking of these things: Reading old scribbles and dreams; just writing lists of words, whatever words come; feeling my way through archtypes to see which ones resonate now… Oh, I don’t know.

I wonder if I am twisting this process into another burden. I wonder if I am procrastinating. I wonder if I’m anywhere near the darkness. I wonder if there is anything in there at all. I guess that counts as a fear. That’s a big fear, actually. What if there is nothing there? What if I really am nobody? What if my remembered self didn’t contain all those potentialities I remembered? What if I have no convictions, no sense of purpose, nothing to say, nothing that is mine, or makes me me? What if those people who love me are wrong? What if I have no character or qualities that draw people to me? What if there is actually nothing about me to like in myself? What if I am just one big fake?

What if I am faking this? What if I am just trying to seek attention and make myself seem more interesting? What if I am just playing the victim?

But the victim of what? That doesn’t make sense. Why would I play the victim of myself? Wouldn’t that be circular? There is no question that this depression is my responsibility, so what is there to gain by crying, woe is me? Isn’t that circularity of thought evidence that there is some defense mechanism at work, something inside of me, that doesn’t want me to ask questions? Self-doubt is a form of protection.

Protection from what?

Am I scared of people? Why am I anxious? Do I want to be liked? Why would I desire to be liked when I know that is such a negative desire? Do I want to be seen? It’s my job to see myself. Do I want to be seen through? Do I want to be perceived as I perceive others? Do I think that is a gift everyone receives but me? Do I want to be understood? By someone else? But it is my job to understand myself, not anyone else’s responsibility. Why would I want that? Do I just feel disconnected?

Why do I feel disconnected? What would make me feel connected?

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