The Feeble and the Damage Done

“The Nightmare” by Henry Fuseli, 1781; Institute of Arts, Detroit: http://bit.ly/1f7JY1Y

Another day. Familiar affirmations.

Shut up. Nobody wants to hear your whining.

You’re such a baby. Get over it already. So you had a bad childhood. Boo fucking hoo.

A real man keeps this shit to himself and sorts it out on his own.

Bill Clinton had a shitty childhood! What’s your excuse, you pathetic piece of shit?

These are just a few of the arguments my brain throws at me before I write here. It is the part that tries to undo me. It is the part that houses the addict, the embarrassment, the shame, the self-punishment.

It knows, first and foremost, that if it wants to run things, it needs to isolate me. Alone, I am nothing more than a cheap, faintly ticking alarm clock, feebly marking time until a familiar voice in my head tells me matter-of-factly: “It’s time.”

Nothing more. Nothing less. When this part of my brain decides it’s time to assert its dominance, it does so quietly and with all-encompassing power, a power earned over years of protecting me from things I couldn’t stand to see, feel, or remember.

“Why can’t you see I’m only here to help you? Why can’t you see I’m only trying to protect you?”

It isn’t a violent process, because it isn’t a fight. The black, cerebral, chloroformed hood that is gently placed over my head from behind feels so familiar, so comforting…it used to mean that the pain was going to end now, the exhaustion was going to end now, the stomach-turning, bewildering terror of a helpless child with no recourse in the face of endless violence…it was going to end, for a while.

I fully understand this part of my brain had to evolve, and that it had to do so quickly. I owe it my life. It was the vessel that took the damage I could not bear, year after year, coming up on two decades. The amount of sheer blackness it had to find a way to absorb…what happens to all that blackness?

It doesn’t just go away. It does not remain tucked away, neat and tidy and unobtrusive. This mechanism that saved me as a child became, as an adult, the mechanism that would prefer me dead.

It makes sense. It isn’t evil or even ill-intentioned. All that it wants is to never feel what it had to feel for so long and has had to stuff down, harbor, deal with, ever since. There’s one sure way to make that happen.

But I’ve never been suicidal, not for one scant moment. As I’ve written, there was a time when I could neither see a way to live life without alcohol and knew I could no longer drink alcohol, but all I felt was bone-deep sadness and utter befuddlement. Desperation, but never the conscious desire to stop living. That part has never seemed like a choice to me, and I don’t know why, and for that, I am endlessly grateful.

Still, this other part of my brain “knows” a few things for absolute certain: Life is pain. Life is taking one long beating. Life is hell.

That’s not true for me anymore. Not at all. But trying to communicate that on a holistic level to my subconscious self is like trying to explain to the addict that we can’t drink anymore. It’s arguing religion, politics…it’s pointless and I’ll never change its view of reality. The lensbias it has is real, dark, and permanent.

We all have some sort of voice that stops us from doing things we know we should do. A lifelong friend (who I’ll call Jaoquin) recently had a run-in with his.

Having posted some of my writing to his Facebook wall in the hopes people who might be helped by it would see it, Jaoquin then watched a struggling friend die an alcoholic death.

What more could I have done? Should I have been more assertive, more direct? Did my desire not to have a difficult, awkward, potentially friendship-ending conversation stop me from reaching out more forcefully?

On the heels of this, Jaoquin has a brief email exchange with another friend (who I’ll call Philip) he hasn’t seen in a while, trying to make plans. Looks like any other. All breezy exclamation points and excitement. It rapidly tapers off to nothing.

Jaoquin emails Philip again. Philip confides he’s in the midst of a depression that makes it so he more or less never leaves the house. And he’s drinking.

My guess is some version of the following went through Jaoquin’s head:

This is none of your business. Ask him if there’s anything you can do, if he’s trying anything. Then leave it alone. Respect his privacy.

A quick aside, here. This last one is poison. “He is a private person.” “I was just respecting his privacy.” It is the flimsiest bullshit, and it makes me angry. It’s the pinnacle of suburban, external-presentation-as-what-matters weakness. That’s right, two-faced, fair-weather folks, don’t get your hands dirty and make sure to minimize your association with someone righteously struggling for their life, because it might be embarrassing or inconvenient to you. I’ve seen more conditional friendship, conditional love exposed for the nefarious con jobs that they are in service of this copout than any other.

“Respect for privacy” is what allows abuse to happen for years right under your nose.

For someone fighting addiction, depression… privacy is a euphemism for isolation. “He’s an isolated person.” “I wanted to respect his isolation.” Which is better said as “I’m too timid/fake/concerned with what the neighbors think to respect my friend or myself, so instead, I’ll respect the pain/illness/death by degrees that’s trying to take him down for good.” Fuck that. Be better than that.

Joaquin was so much better than that. He emailed Philip back, at length, and explained the loss he had recently experienced. Jaoquin copied me, linking to some of my blog posts and referring to my similar experiences. Jaoquin went out on a limb and risked his friendship by being forward and bold.

He had no idea if Philip would be receptive, offended, what have you. But he was willing to feel the awkwardness, the discomfort, in service of honestly trying to help in a real and substantive way.

I’ve been in touch with Philip, who was so strong as to reply to me, a total stranger, in the midst of what I know feels like weakness, which is the last thing any man wants to reveal to another man, let alone one he doesn’t know. And I know where he’s at: AA hasn’t worked, nothing seems to work, and it’s scarier every day.

I don’t know what will happen from here. I do know Jaoquin created a lifeline for Philip out of thin air. Because he was willing to start the conversation nobody wants to have.

Especially the person who needs it most. When depression and addiction really start to take what matters, when the fat and muscle are gone and they dig into bone, they take away more than our ability to help ourselves. They take our ability to ask for help.

The next time you feel you’re “overstepping” or committing some other ridiculous, innocuous social faux pas, you just might be saving someone’s life. Someone who is silently suffering and effectively paralyzed. Someone who is wishing that someone, anyone, would have the courage to step up, reach across the chasm, and let them know they are loved.