Next layer

of the onion, that is.

So, peeling away here, in my layer-y fashion, I find guilt underneath the shame.

Guilt that I screwed up, guilt that I did something wrong.

Guilt that it's my fault that people go away, that they leave me behind, helpless and hopeless, terrified, scared witless, frightened beyond any capacity to cope or function.

It's astonishing that I manage to function in the adult world at all sometimes, given how often this mute terror grabs me from behind like the undertoad and sucks me into the watery emotional underworld of panic and despair.

I try so hard to find out what I did wrong, I tie myself in the most amazing Gordian mental and emotional knots trying to retrace my steps and play a sort of reverse, deconstructionist chess game trying to second guess what might have worked if only I had known.

But growing up with what I grew up with, there was never any going back, never any strategy for repair or mending of bridges; never any healing or consolement; only the icy cold of abandonment and neglect, the flat, featureless, frightening grayness of a world with no emotional color.

I remember several times when I was really sick (as a kid) and had been lying in bed for several days and it had been quite a while since anybody had checked on me.

I felt this leadenness overtake my limbs - literally, as if my blood was turning to lead while I was lying there and I couldn't move. "How curious," I thought to myself, fascinated (and terrified) by this further weirdness (the mind can go weird places anyway when you're already sick; this seemed like just another possible deviation that I hadn't yet experienced. Also, when you grow up reading Dr. Seuss and Rudyard Kipling and Alice in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe, it's really no wonder if your mind is more comfortable with the strange than with the so-called 'normal'. Really, I never had a chance at anything remotely resembling 'normal'. I now approach 'normalcy' the way a drag queen approaches her makeup: With a sense of adventure and excitement and a chill of the secret pleasure of having 'gotten away with something' when I manage, somehow, to actually 'pass'.)

Anyway - I'm thinking now, in retrospect, that the leadenness was the literal feeling, in my body, of cutting off, of abandonment. As if my very molecules, or something, were actually changing, somehow, to try to shut out the unwanted feelings that I was unable to cope with alone. (I wonder if that's one of the times I need to go back to somehow, to reconnect with having a whole body, a whole spirit? To remember what it was like before my feelings got split off?)

This leaden state I think was a precursor to true dissociation - I think I felt that first few times as a literally bodily state, where my body, with its horrible and noxious feelings - eewwww - became this wooden, disconnected thing. Not 'me'. Of course I didn't think of it that way at the time - it was more like a sort of disconnected feeling of watching myself disappear, of feeling my body become so immobile, from having lain still waiting forever in hopelessness for someone, anyone, to show up and perform the normal adult caretaker behavior of giving a shit.

But nobody ever showed up, and it became like that game where you hold your breath to see how long you can go without passing out. As I lay there, motionless, I began to lose contact with various bits of my body - as if I were paralyzed, as if my body had literally become lead and lost all feeling, losing even the physical sense (proprioception?) of where one's arms and legs are in space. I was just these disembodied thoughts, floating around nebulously like some science fiction creature. Nobody cared; nobody noticed. I think I may have tried to explain the feeling to my mom, but of course she wasn't interested - she just thought I was trying to 'get attention'. Fuck, yeah, you fucking moron - ATTENTION. Fucking PAY ATTENTION TO ME! That's your fucking JOB as a fucking PARENT, you clueless piece of shit! Stop trying to fucking GUILT me for wanting what EVERY NORMAL CHILD TAKES AS A MATTER OF COURSE, AS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT.

Fuck. Did I say that already? Let me say it again: Fucking fuckity fuck fuck FUCK. Fucking stupid-ass pieces of SHIT. Is it too late to send them back, to exchange them for some real parents? Some parents who actually CARE????