recovery

Understand the Concept of Love

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Narcissistic abuse is recorded as a specifically cruel, emotionally devastating and terrifying phenomenon that millions of children experience and live with; these wounds do not heal without ever being addressed, and for all of the victims currently experiencing it or trying to recover, it’s vital to create and share resources. It’s also vital to provide a space where all of us feel safe to discuss it and out all our abuser’s crimes. To say to these survivors and victims that narcissistic abuse isn’t real, or to not talk about it, is not only gaslighting but implying their entire lives didn’t happen, they imagined their own torture, and to take away the option of recognizing and fighting this type of abuse.

[…]

This is where we come to the goal of these specific attacks on survivors; the point is to stop us from creating and sharing resources because their pool of victims of abuse shrinks once all the signs of abuse are easily recognized and shared. Narcissists don’t like victims realizing they’re being abused, and leaving. They don’t like not having a lot of possible new victims who wont be able to tell they’re predators. They especially don’t like being held accountable for their actions or experiencing any consequences for it. This is why they find it perfectly acceptable for them to attack and threaten into silence survivors of abuse, in my case to the point of violent threats, rape threats, suicide baits and smear campaigns.

Furious Goldfish, Tumblr post, November 26, 2020

This quote from Tumblr is specifically about parental abuse, but it gets at the only real conclusion I can come to for why my last abuser would (dark-hilariously) threaten to sue me in the event I ever spoke about my mental health problems in public. The big problem for them seems to be, if they fail to control the story and exchange of information, it all starts to fall apart.

I don’t know where I would be now, if indeed I would be anywhere, without help from a few of my friends—some of whom kind of tried to warn me for a long time before those final events. but, I was just so used to being wrong about everything. I was so used to giving people the benefit, I couldn’t see it. My imagination wouldn’t stretch that far.

Lately I’ve really begun to understand that one of my key problems is less innately to do with me than it is that for my entire life, starting in my formative years, I’ve been victimized by people who don’t understand the concept of love. People with complete control over me, whom I’ve just accepted for who they are, because why would you not—while they do anything to me. Take out all their insecurities and grievances, project all their problems on the person least able or likely to object—until such a point as it reaches a threshold, something happens, and something snaps. And I’m forced to wall them away for my own protection, all the while still blaming myself for failing to tough it out. If only I could have, if only they would have—

But, you know, not everyone is a monster. Most people aren’t. What I faced, what I learned to expect from others, that’s not healthy. It’s not sane. Nobody should have to live with that. Nobody should accept being treated the way I was treated.

I’ve been set up for so much failure in life, for so much fear, needlessly. I’ve been lied to for decades about what people are like, about what’s normal. And it’s all kind of profane.

And unlike my abusers, I think I do understand love. basically. I know it better than most people, in some ways. From what I see of people, Love is much more of a constant than I had been led to understand. People are kind. People are helpful, affectionate, accepting, concerned. Not everyone, but in general. And—I’m still learning, right, but i think i’m getting better at seeing through all of this. At seeing the world for how it really is.

Bit by bit. all this training that I never received. it’s kind of… i’m sorting it out. slowly.

We’re In This Together Now

  • Reading time:5 mins read

When Trent Reznor sings “you,” in most cases he’s talking to the other part of himself—call him, Mr. Self Destruct. After Reznor’s own downward spiral that bottomed with a near-death experience on his Fragile tour, his 2005 album With Teeth is largely about recovery. 2013’s Hesitation Marks is about that battle’s return after an age, his musical avatar’s id reasserting itself and the struggle for control resuming with a little more self-awareness this time around.

With Teeth in particular is to me one of Reznor’s most fascinating albums. The whole thing exists in this dazed, sober limbo where Reznor seems to gaze around him, notice how much time has passed, and wonder exactly how he might function as a real person after he’s missed so much along the way.

“Only” (2005, With Teeth)

As fatuous as “Only” may be—the subsumed comedy to so many NIN songs a right up front this time—it’s also weirdly affirming as a recovery anthem. The music holds this uneven smirk while Reznor asserts that, no, that person doesn’t exist; it’s only him now. It almost needs to be as silly as it is, to undercut the drama of the old persona that he means to peel away. “No,” the song says. “You don’t get control here. I’m allowed to mock you.”

The chunky 2/4 backing serves as a loopy funhouse mirror of “Closer.” The lyrics quote “Down In It,” then twist the lyric into a reflection on his behaviors that led him to this point. Musically, Reznor seems to be taking a step back and going, “Yeah, that… that whole era of my life was pretty absurd, huh. Christ, that wasn’t me; that was never even a real person. I can’t let that affect me anymore. Well, I’m here now. It’s okay. I’m fine. I guess.”

You take Reznor’s (character’s) sort of ongoing dialogue with the other unwanted aspect of himself, and pair it with his curiously persistent themes of transformation or becoming—when I say that NIN often feels really super transy to me, this is what I mean. It’s a starting point, anyway.

“Everything” (2013, Hesitation Marks)

That concept to “Only” sort of comes back eight years later in “Everything.” This time, though, there’s a dark undertone. The assertion here—I survived everything—it’s less triumphant than it sounds. There’s a shade of denial; of pushing down that unwanted persona away as it threatens to bubble back to control—pretending it’s gone while it sits, waits.

You never really recover from mental illness or addiction, right. That’s not how it works. You just learn how to cope and manage better. The scars will always be a part of you, lurking as part of your base code. Being so incautious as to say, ha ha, I’m better now; it’s fine—you’re setting yourself up for problems.

There’s this interesting sequence to Reznor’s albums. His big opus that he’ll never live down is of course 1994’s The Downward Spiral. And that’s both the anchor and the weight that affects everything in its wake. That album has at least three direct sequels: first comes 1990’s The Fragile, then With Teeth and Hesitation Marks—each replacing the previous one and telling a slightly different story. The “Downward Spiral” theme from throughout that album keeps reemerging in odd, distorted forms as Reznor tries to escape its shadow—the seeming implication in Hesitation Marks being, for all his growth and change, he will never escape either that legacy or the damage that its story represents. There’s a part of him that will always be Mr. Self Destruct.

That push for recovery, it starts as early as “The Fragile”—weakly, helplessly, almost as a plea, as the album traces its own roller coaster of emotion. “We’re In This Together” strikes me as a particularly curious read, when you take what I say about Reznor and “you.”

“We’re In This Together” (1999, The Fragile)

Once you accept that most of Reznor’s music is about his own mental health struggles, in particular his relationship with his self—and then once you notice how very transy how much of his music feels, one gets some kind of a vibe from lyrics like “You’re the queen and i’m the king/Nothing else means anything.”

None of this of course is to impose any particular reading on Reznor himself as a person. Whatever his deal is, it’s his own deal. I’m not his therapist; I’m not in his head (thank God). I have no interest in projecting anything on a real person. I’m just noticing the way that his art hangs together, and how well it lends itself to reflect a certain set of ideas that… I guess always made an unspoken sense to me.

Never Read Vertigo

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Christ, I’m looking at pictures of the person I was two years ago and I don’t even recognize them. Their features look all strange to me; they look a decade older, and so haunted. Even a year ago, I’m like, who the fuck is this and why do they look about to shatter?

This is making me uncomfortable, and I’m not inspired to continue with this spelunking because holy shit, but, uh. I get what my therapist was saying, even at a glance. I have a long way to go, lots of things still suck, and I can’t hold more than one idea in my head per day, but damn if there hasn’t been progress.

I’ve often mused about how age has been catching up to me, how for half my life I’ve looked sort of vaguely 20-ish maybe, and up to a couple years ago people kept assuming I was still in college. Now this body is 42, and I think it looks about that. That’s fine. It is what it is. But holy hell, in fall 2018 that person looked like they were one foot in the grave. It’s just so alarming.

It’s not just an abstraction. I think my former situation, it was literally killing me. Now? I’m actually alive. For the first time. It’s just a start, but—better late than never.

Full Spectrum Broadcast

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Whoa, fucking yikes. Social overload. Just spent two hours talking to people I don’t know over video conference. I feel so tense right now. Presumably this will get easier? But, the grad student I have been paired with for one-on-one is cool. Aside from voice, she asked about my interest in other kinds of communication and signalling, like body language. And. Yo.

Autistic, right. Nobody ever taught me this for any gender, so I never picked it up. I’ve always felt very strange in face-to-face interaction, and people often feel weird talking to me, because I Do Not Signal in a way that makes sense to neurotypical people. Which sometimes is awkward. Sometimes is absurd. And sometimes it’s dangerous. (E.g., cops, security.)

But, on top of working on the voice: posture, body language, gestures. This is beyond a gender thing. This is a Being-A-Person tutorial that I’ve never had.

She also framed makeup as an element of non-verbal language, that she could help with. And. I’m going to have to steep on this some more, but. Yeah, okay. I hadn’t internalized presentation as communication, with its own grammar and symbology, but of course that’s what it is.

So… we’ll see how this goes.

Mitigation

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I remember when I lived in Oakland, people would invite me out, and I couldn’t go. Part of it was masking exhaustion or poverty or any number of other things. But just as often, I’d have, say, a pimple on my neck, or my hair looked weird, or there was some other minor problem. I’d sit there for days and days, sometimes weeks, until I felt presentable enough that I could tolerate someone looking at me. But I had so many other anxieties I didn’t really know how to process this one in isolation.

Part of it’s a more general problem, but I’m seeing how many of the standards I’ve applied to myself have been gender-related. Like, the things that freaked me out about myself tended to be more masculine. I’m never been very masculine, which maybe makes them stand out more.

The pressure to present masculine was both largely impossible and unwanted. Yet I didn’t feel like I really had another option. I tried to carve out this curated semi-androgynous space that was just me. But it was fragile, and it wasn’t quite right either. On top of that were all the more general repulsive bodily things that nobody is fond of, and that there are so many industries devoted to making an even big deal out of, but that weighed so much harder considering the shaky balance I was treading.

And you know the killer? Almost none of this was entirely conscious, to the extent that I only now pieced together what was going on. It was just some low-level voice whispering in my brain in a code without words: you are gross. If you can’t mitigate, you can’t go out like that.

I did not have a good childhood. My parents were absent and neglectful on a good day, on a day I could relax and enjoy the silence. But the way they had about them when they chose to compliment my appearance, the things they chose to focus on, it skeeved me. Made me feel worse. Like, I don’t know how many times I was sent to tears when they tried to comment on me, only for them to turn to a rage as a result of my response.

I know I’ve talked about how I’ve wound up sort of cloning my early abuse scenario in later life situations. My ex-spouse was hugely controlling, over every aspect of how I presented myself. I got so much shit if I refused to change for them a fourth time before leaving the house. Now that I’m developing a better handle on my gender issues, that dysphoria has moved up through the layers of consciousness so I can get a better grip on it. But it’s not necessarily any quieter just because it’s out in the open, and applying to something I can easily point at.

It’s better to be able to say, okay, I don’t feel in control of the way I’m presenting today and it’s freaking me out than to be crushed by this overwhelming wordless swirl of oh god I am gross everything is wrong what is happening that sends me back under the blankets. But by also coming out of stealth mode, it’s almost scarier in a way. Like, I have this specific daunting thing relating to a much more obvious and visible-to-anyone issue. I can’t mask this like I can mask my autism. Neither of which I should be masking, ideally. But it’s scary.

It’s all masking—the unhealthy side of queerness, of neurodiversity. All about presenting in a way as to make other people comfortable, to avoid standing out, even as it kills you. And once you learn that survival skill, it’s hard to force yourself to stop trying to survive.

It’s a long road to find the courage to simply be and assert who I am, and stop trying to fawn and appease people who either don’t care about me or don’t care about being appeased. I’m… safer, now. In so many ways. I need to get that into my head. I’m gonna be okay. I can let go.

(Now as to how all of this interacts with my aroaceness… cripes, that’s a whole thing. I’m almost reluctant to spell it out, given the nuances that would entail and how easy it is to write off asexuality as a real, valid thing. But, it surely gee-whiz does factor in!)