1. I thought I might start listing things that are absolutely incontrovertibly horrible yet for some reason my mind is not lighting up in full red alert terror that they might happen to me.
2. Also things that don’t cause me to feel empathy so disregulated that it’s as if they were happening to me.
3. And just to be clear, empathy, concern, and opprobrium are good responses. Abject terror, despair, and a sense that the world is ending, well, they don’t help anyone.
4. And now I feel ashamed to list them so they’ll stay forever in my mind.
5. But here’s an exercise: find the things that do not terrify you, then wonder if the things that do terrify you are not so dissimilar. And if they are not, why do similar things fall on different sides of the terror spectrum? What else is going on?
6. And maybe just maybe that other thing that is going on? Maybe that can heal.
1. Talking about the terror with my analyst is like dissolving a large stone stuck at the top of my esophagus.
2. Terror put into words and heard by another is less terrifying.
3. Terror festers in the isolated mind.
4. We revisit early places.
5. We tread the same dark floors and now she is with me.
6. She tells me it’s okay to lose my shit with her. She tells me I don’t have to be stoic or brave.
7. She tells me the bodies of children.
8. She says “children.”
9. She says I see you.
10. I am scared of this country.
11. It took few months of me even being here for the mental health center of my university to take a restraining order against me.
12. Never been violent a day in my life.
13. Never thought of myself as anything but kind.
14. It took them a year to lock me up in a psych unit for the sin of being in pain.
15. I expected help.
16. They promised me help.
17. At my intake interview the nurse was icy. I knew, then.
18. At my second interview I smiled and the person said, icily, it’s not funny.
19. My third interview was at 3 AM. The psychiatrist banged hard on my door and said Let’s go.
20. That was the last time I slept.
21. Can you survive five days of absolute terror and no food or sleep?
22. They told me they would help me.
23. My friends said, Trust the doctor.
24. I had never been so misjudged, so disbelieved, so humiliated and summarily abused before.
25. By everyone.
26. I counted for nothing.
27. I was a nuisance.
28. No one helps anyone here.
29. They violate you they tie you up they punish you and your sin is you were in pain.
30. I hurt no one.
31. I did nothing bad I swear.
32. A poet calls her time in the psych hospital “totalitarian fear.”
33. I didn’t grow up here. I know this is not normal. I know this happens nowhere else. I know there are places where those with power are humans like you. I know it’s the majority of places.
34. This country is founded in blood and the tying up of brown, black, occasionally white bodies.
2. Once someone said to me she lives with terror all the time so she understood me and my terror entirely and I said well the kind of terror I feel could not be lived with all the time because it is literally unendurable.
3. She became angry that I was invalidating her terror.
4. When we endure the unendurable we die and the person who keeps living is a dead person.
5. My therapist has started seeing the dead little girl and she has started taking to her so maybe there is rescue yet.
6. I wonder how much terror I gobbled up as a kid. Must have been a lot.
1. Many of my friends are scared. I am scared. We have a terrible, cruel president who portends more and more pain, insecurity, and death for all of us.
2. And then we have COVID-19, and a government that will make it all but impossible for an epidemic to be managed anywhere near decently in our country.
3. Already people are charged ridiculous sums of money for COVID-19-related hospitalizations. Already, we know, people won’t come forward for fear of enormous bills, lost wages, lost jobs, deportation.
4. And then there are all the captive populations, mostly poor, mostly minorities, mostly abandoned (we still have concentration camps; we have bigger concentration camps; they are places of genocide and torment).
5. In the early 2000s I felt great despair over Guantánamo. Guantánamo is still there. Its population will die out, unfreed. Guantánamo is now all over the US. Children are in it. We are too exhausted and too frightened to do anything.
6. Analyst A gave me a mug once for my birthday. I have loved this mug. Last night the mug broke. I have put the broken mug, its two broken pieces, one inside the other on the shelf in front of me.
7. Life breaks irreparably but then we all — all of us find ways to be happy, at least sometimes, after the wreck. We find ways to be happy. We may not always be happy, but sometimes we are happy.
8. Maybe if we count all the moments we are actively miserable and all the moments we are actively happy, they even out.
9. How can therapy help when the world is so horrible?
10. First, you ask yourself how much of your pain is pain you are actually feeling your own self in this moment and how much is pain you feel because of uncertainty about the future, empathy toward others, or fear of what might happen.
11. Fear has deep roots. The capacity to feel the pain of others also has deep roots.
12. I go back to a time when I was afraid and no one helped me. My parents had no capacity to reassure me in any way. My parents could not even see me. My fear was annoying, negligible, or funny.
13. You learn to keep your fear to yourself. You learn to be tough. You never learn to modulate it. One day, tough is no longer enough and fear spills over the confines of your body and inks the entire universe. You float in terror.
14. No one ever helped me develop a containment system. I don’t have a decent one. My therapist and I have to start from scratch.
15. When your emotionally remote parents experience pain or distress, these feelings become yours.
16. Except you are little and your parents’ troubles are too big and scary and everyone is going to die. Pain evades the confines of your body and inks the sky.
17. You try to help your mom and dad.
18. You cannot help them.
19. You become a child of sorrow.
20. Therapy takes me back to when these injuries happened. My therapist looks with me into the wounds and the chasm. Then we have a do-over, the two of us.
21. Scary things are realistically scary when the confines of your body hold.
22. The pain of others, just like yours, is marbled with good days, resilience, even joy. It is not yours to carry. They are not carrying your pain.
23. You talk and talk and the past loosens its grip on you. Your body grows stronger confines. You hold the pain and worry in small places you can leave and distract yourself from.
24. You allow yourself joy. You allow yourself life.
1. It is a feature of rough times that one feels one should do something.
2. Often this something is precisely what we cannot do,
3. yet feel we should be doing.
4. Because having a rough time is our fault, isn’t it, and if we just did something — namely the things we cannot do — the rough times would go away.
5. Here are some of the things I feel I should be doing, that I cannot do, and that if I only managed to do would (so the story goes) pull me out of this rough time:
Read that one specific book I am finding very hard to read because it’s so fucking bleak (another book won’t do)
Watch films (TV shows don’t count)
Draw on paper (drawing on tablet doesn’t count)
Sleep in the afternoon (dozing without full sleep is a pathetic substitute which shows what a failure I am).
6. The harder life gets on me, the harder I get on myself.
7. Telling myself to ease up on myself doesn’t work. The adult in me, the internalized mom, is very ill-formed and unable to talk to the child who is suffering miserably.
8. This is why I need analysis.
9. The best I can do right now is tell myself to patiently put up with doing nothing and wrestle the day passively (I cannot wrestle it actively) until nighttime brings respite (which itself, I realize, is a huge blessing).
9. The best I can tell myself is that it will pass and just grit it till then.
1. In two weeks it’s my birthday, the saddest day of the year.
2. Tonight Biden won in SC and the media are calling it a landslide but when Bernie won the previous three primaries I don’t recollect them calling it a landslide.
3. I think everyone may be relieved that Bernie didn’t win, but I am not. I prefer Bernie ten times over Biden.
4. Still this is the Black vote and who am I to question the Black vote?
5. But I do, because we don’t need Joe Biden anywhere near the White House this time around.
6. I am sad that the Warren campaign may be over. A Warren presidency would be a dream. Bernie would be good too though not a dream.
7. This is all I have to say tonight here.
8. Also books. Books give solace and wisdom and a look inside the marvels of the human mind. There is nothing like books.
P.S. I just saw that #BidenHarris2020 is trending in Twitter and this is dreamy!
1. How much trauma is too much trauma? How do we heal?
2. I just read in the Guardian a beautiful extract from a forthcoming book written jointly by the family of Greta Thunberg. This particular bit is written by Greta’s mom.
3. Healing takes a village. It also takes patience. It also takes luck.
4. I feel I have a village and I have patience, but I need a bit of luck.
5. I am a Christian but it’s hard for me right now to think of God. God is for many such a source of succor. For me now he’s a source of anxiety and also rage.
6. God, I cannot deprive myself of anything for Lent because my life could not be more pared down. If I deprive myself of more there will be nothing keeping me alive.
7. God, why do you keep letting me down?
8. Should I “deprive” myself of hopelessness? Is it possible? What will life look like without hopelessness? Should I try?
(Many apologies because I have not being able to provide alt text for images lately. It’s an unforgivable omission but I find it utterly exhausting. I’ll catch up as soon as I can)
inside(r) psychoanalysis 