disjointed thoughts after days of little sleep

going to put them down, maybe attempt to stitch them together coherently later, maybe not.

Reading too many self-help books creates unrealistic expectations.

OC behavior is an attempt to create order and stability in an unstable, unpredictable life.

Families can be unspeakably cruel and heartless.

What does it mean to 'give your power away'? (Seems like more bullshit victim-blaming to me.)

Ok, so I grew up reading books, gravitating toward compassionate authors such as Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon (they weren't compassionate much toward women, but their stories showed a deep understanding of the experiences of others. Or so it seemed to me at the time. I especially loved Sturgeon's stories about circus freaks or 'carnies' [there's one really powerful one where a misshapen dwarf goes into the funhouse every day to look at himself in the mirror because there's one mirror that reflects him back as normal] - I think I related to these stories because I felt like the 'misfit' in my family [and yes, I recognize that everyone experiences some feelings of not fitting in now and then, it's human nature. But some of us get stuck with a worse 'fit' than others.] Vonnegut is the only guy, I think, who has that 'androgynous' capacity to write believably and sympathetically about women's experiences. Or at least I'm remembering one story in which this is the case, have to hunt down the title.)

Growing up reading books rather than interacting with others means you get this sort of 'flat' sense of how things are - it's like the way some people prefer emailing to phone or live conversation (and may be in fact why some people shy away from 'live' conversations): You had no practice in your formative years learning the give-and-take of bouncing emotions interactively off another person, so you basically don't know how. Which is incredibly stress-inducing, because it's obvious that understanding the emotions of others and knowing how to interact and effectively express your own emotions is critical to survival in the world. Regardless of how asocial or antisocial we have become overall as a culture (so that it gets harder and harder to know what 'normal' might be), we're still hard-wired to be social animals - our entire body chemistry and neurological system is designed to process emotions as survival information at very high speed, much faster than the (relatively glacial) speed of conscious thought. So next time somebody claims to be more 'logical' or 'rational' than you are, just recognize that they're missing an essential piece of relational software: Empathy. Maybe it's something to do with their mirror neurons that's gone haywire. (Mirror neurons are cool!) (and it occurs to me that all of our ways of 'understanding', aka science, etc., are the blind men trying to describe the elephant: They can never get it quite right, because they can never really see the whole picture. Like trying to get a fish to grasp the view from beyond its little pond. Or as a Pratchett story tells it, the sudden 'perspective' gained by a turtle who, in that few moments before being dropped to its death on the rocks below, hurtles airborne in the grip of an eagle and sees its formerly narrow world laid out below it in all its un-graspable hugeness and complexity. Huh. Just realized there may be people who have a similarly 'large' view, like the eagle. Which is maybe why I love Pratchett's stories! But still disappointed that his 'wide view' doesn't incorporate women in a way that satisfies my need to be seen, heard and reacted to as an actual person.)

(Learning out loud here. Being my own parent; posting this stuff on the blog allows me some 'distance', and I can come back later and re-read and wince, or admire, or challenge, or further masticate some incompletely digested idea. Pretty cool :-)

So I got this idea from my books that people could be kind, and I think I clung to this delusion as an antidote to the total emotional vacuum in which I actually lived. I fed off my books, desperately, like a starving animal. They were my life blood; they got me through. (In fact, I still do this, in times of overwhelm, but I've become aware that they are, emotionally speaking, 'empty calories', that fill me up without satisfying the deeper underlying need to be heard and cared for.)

But then, and I think I've said this before, I left the 'nest' where this adaptive behavior served me so well and took it out into the 'real world', where said behavior didn't work at all.

And of course I couldn't talk about it to anyone, because, first of all, I didn't know what 'it' was, or even that I had an 'it' that could be talked about. And in any case, even if I had somehow managed to know, against the odds, about 'it', I still wouldn't have known that you could talk about things with somebody, for fuck's sake - this would have gone completely against my entire life experience up to that point. I think I experienced much of my childhood as having a sheet of transparent but impenetrable glass between me and everybody else, and everything that went on 'out there' had nothing to do with me. Dissociation at work? That would be my best guess. (Just a word of encouragement - after 10 years of doing this exhausting, painful, one-step-forward-and-two back [not always, but sometimes that daunting], work, I'm actually making progress. I'm beginning to be able to have what feel like 'normal' interactions with people without constantly having to second-guess myself or hyper-analyze or even think much about them. If you've never experienced this, you have no idea how huge, how major a big deal this is. It's like the difference between life and death, literally - without that emotional connection with other humans, we are basically dead meat walking. It's just a matter of time til the biological system runs down from lack of emotional fuel.)

Images from that traumatized, terrifyingly dissociated childhood: I used to have this recurring nightmare (or maybe I only had it once, but it was so powerful and frightening that I never had it again) where I was in some place like a zoo or an aquarium, and there were these steps with big tanks along the side. Inside the tanks were people, floating - big people (so grownups, I assume? no idea how old I was at the time - seems quite young, but maybe 8 or so? not sure) who were completely expressionless, immobile. They weren't dead - they were just motionless, completely and utterly unresponsive. Like suspended animation or something, as if they were floating in a vat of formaldehyde. (Seeing this in writing, from a slight distance, helps make the obvious connection with the unresponsiveness I now have words for, but didn't as a child.)

I'd already read lots of science fiction, fantasy, mythology, horror stories and tales of the supernatural by this point (including Poe), so the images themselves didn't shock me. In fact, what disturbs me about the dream in retrospect is how little emotional reaction I had at the time. It's as is some part of me knew there was something horribly wrong in my world, but I had no means of coping with it in my child mind, so I essentially just checked out. Just shut down that poor, overwhelmed emotional system that had no support whatsoever from that world of so-called 'adults' who were supposed to be helping me with such things. Instead it turned into a nightly horror of nightmares, where I'd wake screaming and crying and terrified. Mom related the story once of me being about 6 and her coming into our room (my younger brother, who was three, and I shared a pair of bunk beds at that point) in response to hearing me cry, and seeing me sitting up in bed with my arms flapping and tears running down my face, sobbing, all while apparently sound asleep. Mom, in her classic cluelessness, laughed while telling the story.

How did I get such unfeeling, unsympathetic parents?

(alternating here between writing and reading portions of a Vonnegut story over on Google reader, Harrison Bergeron [from Welcome to the Monkey House]. Suddenly feeling sad, and stopped to cry, because always in the past [well, as I've been doing this 'emotion work'] sadness = uncontrollable sobbing for some unpredictable length of time. But now, rather than it being an absolute downpour, the sadness gets the beginning of that emotional overwhelm, but then passes quickly, like a cloud before the sun. Yay! I'm beginning to be able to feel even fleeting emotions! Isn't this fucking amazing? You have no idea how amazing this feels. Like trying to teach oneself a language from - what - matchbook covers and cereal boxes or something. And one day you find yourself, all unawares, able to construct a complete sentence without spending a whole day thinking about it. Or even having a simple conversation. Yow!)