Wow, I'm only on my seventh post, and all I can think right now is that I'm not exactly sure this is the seventh. Someone in my head says "I should go check."
"Open a new tab!" he cries out with urgency
"I can check it later and change it if necessary."
Wait, who said to open a new tab? Who are these characters? How can I explain the experience I have in my mind? I'm trying to map it. I have to find a way to understand my thought-life so that I can tolerate real life without being dependent on distractions, addictions, or, worst of all, vulnerable people who will love me even when it takes a toll on them. I don't know what I'm doing here with this blog. I don't know what I'm doing in life. So, bear with me while I try to figure out how my head works.
People in my life often say they don't know how to take me. When I started getting honest, those comments increased. I often choose to reveal myself in some confusing mix of indirect vagary and blunt shock. A recent television show covering my story invited viewers to question whether I was a sick actor or the tortured soul I claim to be. I think I'm both. . As a child,I had learned, or tried to learn, to display and express the feelings, thoughts, facial expressions, desires, and attitudes that adults expected from me. The confusing part for me has been that I never knew these things about myself until very recently. I'm just starting to discover why I've struggled all my life in social situations and in feeling comfortable in my own skin.
All my life I've lived out a facade, hardly looking within, trying so hard to be the kind of person everyone else might desire. As a kid I learned to be an actor. Deep down, I always knew that I was playing a role. I just couldn't spend too much time thinking about it and risk exposure. I imagined that everyone else had life figured out, and that they would condemn me if I did not appear like them. Even wise sounding advice like "just be yourself" was processed in my mind as "just act like you're being yourself." I've always looked outside of me for who I should be, how I should act. I'm just now starting to see what's sick about that. I wasn't able to look at me, so I wasn't able to be "me." "Be yourself" always came with the promise of feeling whole, natural, comfortable. I've always been myself. I've just always had a discomfort with seeing myself or feeling like my natural self. So, I've been an actor. The sickness is the tortured soul inside of me that could not heal as long as I could not see him.
In my childhood, I looked outside of myself, to Jesus, for peace. Religious faith was helpful sometimes, but also kept me stuck. I held onto Jesus during times when the me inside might have been completely destroyed. On the other hand, I held onto Jesus at the expense of seeing and acknowledging the real me. I allowed my internal self to suffer at the hands of others, mainly my dad, because none of it was hurting Jesus. As long as Jesus was intact, I could go through anything.
After my father died, I gave up on Jesus. At the age of 36, I had finally suffered enough, lost enough, destroyed enough, that I was ready to stop following this outsider to myself. I talked to a few Christian friends about my decision. One said to "be still and know that he is God." They seemed to think I was making a horrible mistake in leaning on my own understanding. I reasoned that I couldn't give a thing to God that I had never had in the first place. I had to find myself, apart from my dad, apart from God.
The last seven years have been messy. Christians teach that we have some sort of hole inside of us that God fits into perfectly. They will also acknowledge that, if God is rejected, people may try to fill that hole with drugs, sex, abusive relationships, money, basically sins of all sorts. I did. The world is full of things I can look to while refusing to see the tortured soul inside of me. It's painful to see myself, especially in light of all the sick acting I've done over the years. I feel like I've whored out the hole left by my hidden self to everything but me. Me has sat in the dark, alone, unseen, while my brain runs my body through life, coping, recreating, rationalizing, but never finding peace.
Recent events in my life have opened my "mature" heart like a set of surgical tools, revealing my life-long problem of self-avoidance. I fell in love with a young woman who may be more damaged than me. I tried to fix or save her, not realizing that I was, again, simply trying to dodge seeing myself. Ultimately, realizing that I was not fixing her but causing her more pain, I had to face that it was my pain that I needed to address. As the charms of our romance wore thin and our pain began to emerge, our fights became more regular. And as we fought, I began to see, over and over, that what she was saying to me seemed like something she could have said to herself. And, after I judged her for that, I began to see that all the things I had been saying to her, including my judgments of her projecting onto me, were things that I should have been saying about ME. I had not been seeing me. Seeing her was just my most recent and most tragic stand-in for seeing me. Her pain touched mine in a way that finally allowed me to admit that I had been avoiding myself and acting like I wasn't, all my life. I would say that I love her, but I think she would have been better off without me.
I'm seeing that I've hurt people throughout my life, albeit in more socially acceptable ways than my father did. But what progress have I made if I'm just causing damage, blind to myself, in a dialed-down version of his blindness? I've set out to write this book in desperation. I've known I was suffering, known I needed healing, but writing about my childhood experience has highlighted my life-long reluctance to feel the pain in my soul, the soul I've ignored all my life. I haven't wanted to face my pain. I've felt like I couldn't bear to see myself, so I couldn't face that I was using everything and everyone, including my false representation of me to avoid actually feeling my own pain. Now I have to face the hurts in my childhood soul as well as the hurts I've inflicted on myself and others in my adulthood.
My life may look boring and unsuccessful on the outside, but I'm taking myself out of the acting game to see my sickness which is nothing more than the game I've been playing. I've been playing the game of anyone or anything but me. Now I'm just facing how I feel about it. Looking at the real me involves facing all my childhood fears, the reasons I learned to deny me in the first place. It feels like the most epic risk to simply sit with myself and feel. You might see me sitting on my couch right now, making my typing face, flexing my toes. The real battle is in trying to feel comfortable here without calling a friend, checking my social media, watching a movie, or seeking escape through sex or drugs.
Just here, I sit. I breathe. I feel a little bit sick, but I am ok. I think I can do this. I think my blog entries are about to get real....
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III
