[833] Snip It Good

I want to talk about an incident from my childhood that I know I've brought up before and referenced plenty, but don't know that I've dug out all there is to say about it. I've found myself thinking about it a lot recently, I don't know if goaded by my slurry of thoughts while sick, or just because I'm starting to play my psychological life a little fast and loose with my presumed future financial security.

I'm watching A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood. It opens panning in on a picture of a main character which Mr. Rogers says is having a hard time forgiving someone who hurt him. The physical mark on the main character's face not the source of inflicted pain.

If you don't know, because it's one of my favorite stories, when I was a child my mom made me pick out one of my stuffed animals for her to gut and cut up. I believe I had accidentally broken something of hers, and it was retaliation. I remember being filled with dread, thinking it unbelievable. I remember genuinely loving each of them, piling them on to sleep with every night. I remember them as friends, from the oldest given to me by my grandma, to the new ones we might've won in a game.

I remember picking up and putting down my friends, trying to weigh what they meant to me. I settled on my most recent bear won from the claw machine at Fudruckers. We had the least history. Through heaving hollowed-out pleas, screams, and tears I begged her not to. I fell to my knees. She chopped off a paw. I beat the floor. She shoved scissors into its stomach.

I literally can't genuinely put myself back there without getting misted, every single time. It's the kind of “go there” place an actor might pick to sell a sad scene. It works. She regularly hit us with different things, manifesting as my flinch response until college. She'd scream and yell and pile on chores. But having me pick out a friend switched something off in me. It made me a murderer. It made me preside over life and death, and then to be forced to carry on like it was just desserts, eye for an eye, her thing therefore my “thing.”

In my adult life I've watched this “offness” manifest as a contradictory set of behaviors. I hated being touched, when it's all I want to do to be cuddled up or hugging. Comforting touch was so often betrayed, and besides, the things you're snuggled against can get torn to shreds. My relationships seemed rooted in that “useful thing” place. If you weren't good for something, you didn't exist. If I felt something for you, it was an irrational inability to cope with a flood of anger or otherwise. I was nowhere near in control. It's not that every good feeling or sense of care and belonging I experienced was overturned, but they could never settle into the same place. There was always the very real sense that it meant absolutely nothing.

This may sound unfair to the people who genuinely love me, but the thing about trauma is you can't really help it. You can work your trauma into a new scheme. You can teach your trauma to follow a different habit pattern. You can't make your trauma alter your feeling of it. I'm not going to regard the memory joyously one day. I'm not going to get back the years of feeling off and broken.

Today, thankfully after many years of writing, I incorporate my worst and most problematic senses about myself into a kind of instruction manual. (Arguably the only manual I bother to read.) I know you can read dozens of books on psychology and piece together the different slices of your mother's narcissistic and own poorly endured traumatic childhood. I can know which parts of the brain degrade so you become a batshit ideologue and the infinite ignorance that is being human which contributes to far greater tragedies than a lost bear. None of it contributes to my impulse to “forgive.”

I'm still a murderer. I didn't learn that through deep consideration in my freshman psychology class talking about the brain differences between personality types or those with psychopathic tendencies. I learned it like a child given a gun and told to point it at his family. It speaks to why I confidently say I'm likely the craziest, meanest, or some other extreme-est kind of character in a room. I know what's underneath as I'm telling a fun story, being hilarious, or otherwise mimicking all of the human things that make me get along in the world. I still feel, it's just “now,” when I think it can be trusted, before it flows over the generally cold indifference I hold for nearly everything and everyone when the circumstances call for it.

It's why when I designated “real friends” it was worth the navigating if that was a wise thing to do. The purpose was to help thrust me away from that, designate the examples I'd want any future friends to live by. I didn't take it for granted that everything was superficiality and incidental time spent in close proximity. It was significantly more idealism than naivety, as I already knew the cold and distance, I just thought if given the choice people would choose what I was after. I suppose when they get disgusted or complacent enough, they do.

It's why I'm steadfast in my posture regarding “I don't really change” as the world finds its reasons to be pissed off at me and keeps its distance. You know who else doesn't really change? My dad. He's there for me like I want to be there for people. I always refer to the “friends that stick around” who continue to keep an eye on me or like a post from time to time. Something there hasn't changed between us. Whatever that is, it's the pulse that I ride into all my future dreams about who I'm surrounded by or why I'd bother to create. You don't reduce yourselves to so many “things” as interchangeable space and time fillers. The murderer in you, I suspect, sees the murderer in me, and doesn't give me shit about it.

Forgiveness, as I've said in the past, seemed always about forgiving yourself. A self-serving piety for placating over obsessive thoughts that are causing you harm. Do I forgive my traumatized brain? Do I look every insincere instance from my past with some wizened sense about not knowing any better? No, not really. I learned that I could make that choice, and thus all choices, and never let the lesson take root. I abused my shitty relationship with my mom to drum up a lot of other antagonistic and shitty relationships with other people. I'm still a genuinely mean and shitty person just begging for the proper circumstances and excuses to be anything besides the soft-spoken mumbler walking you through your trash-person drama.

My push for wanting “the world” is about hopefully shaping it into something that doesn't produce the underlying pathology that is me. I want there to be “people with a temper” doing like Mr. Rogers and practicing patience and understanding, not “people waiting for a reason to kill you” barely hanging on but for blessed exhaustion and endless distractions. I want people who see the best in everyone, not just their little selfish cohort, after being empowered to recognize their place in concert instead of opposition. I want to subvert the naked animal that tears each other apart. Unrealistic? Probably. But I wish I could carry on without always thinking I have some atrocity to account for, some endeavor that needs to transcend me.

I've always been a draw to the depressed kids. I've always played therapist. I've maintained a kind of fervent or manic optimism fueled by the overwhelming darkness of my jokes and perspective. I've been lucky to have my brain motivated more to dig than destroy. I've been lucky to catch glances and good genes. To consider the world a swirling ball of people like me in worse circumstances is to not have to imagine much beyond what we're currently doing to ourselves. To be able to inspire in spite of that, to be able to create something that lasts longer, yells louder, and beats to death that which actually deserves it is an ultimate game. It's one I don't think you can play in the confines of what's seemingly normal or stable. I still play therapist. I still hold the candle for those who've couched their depression in memes and #lifegoals check boxes.

Maybe I've been too hard on my kid self. Maybe the only reason I have who I have in my life right now is the result of doing the best with the tools I had at the time. Maybe my construct-o-house, collapsing pool hole, and boundless puppy-esc enthusiasm are a testament to the method I've deigned as the madness required for moving forward.