It occurred to me this morning that we become fully human when we are capable of seeing and owning all the areas of our psyche in which we experience pain. There are rooms in all of our souls where things lie gathering dust, decade on decade. And the detriment to us is that, unseen, these rooms crowd out the possibilities of the ordinary day; they blunt our joys, by feeding our covert fears. They allow us to sleep more soundly, to feel less, experience less, LEARN less, be less, and finally to do less. This, in any event, appears to be my own situation.
In my view, no one else can mute your fears or dull your pain, finally. You can use people in various ways–sex, conversation, distraction–but they can never carry your cross for you; or to the point, help you put it down as unneeded, since you have learned its lesson.
Nor can they feel your joys for you. These, too, you can finally own, once you have cleared the dust from the windows of your soul, and let in the light. This is living.
Finally, I was sitting in my bar last night, alone in a sea of noise as I often am, utterly lost in the sort of trance I go into, and it occurred to me that the solutions to pain have to be specific. There is a barmaid at this place with a pierced nose–the African looking thing that goes through the cartilage separating the two nostrils–and who has apparently decided to stop washing her hair indefinitely so as to grow dredlocks. She is an attractive girl, and I wondered why she is doing this to herself. Why do we see so many “suicide girls”, as I have seen these girls with the piercings and tattoos called?
As I see it–and I have to run and don’t have time to delve more deeply–all of these self inflicted wounds serve the role of helping them feel their pain. They are unhappy. Many of them have likely been betrayed by lovers repeatedly, been demeaned without being offered any emotional sustenance in return. Some have probably been molested. Some had narcissistic parents who inflicted many internal wounds, wounds which they cannot diagnose, which hurt them without any possibility of combating the pain and fear without truly understanding what happened.
So they hurt themselves. They more or less cut themselves in what have been publicly accepted ways, just as Kurt Vonnegut once called smoking a socially acceptable form of suicide. And the tattoos and piercings multiply. The temporary relief gained has a soothing and thus addictive quality.
In my view, though, the only true cure will involve going back and consciously experiecing EXACTLY what led to their pain in the first place.
This is what I was doing last night, for myself, seeing how I was crushed. As I look at my life, I will be candid and admit it is a miracle that I have survived as a more or less psychologically normal human being. It is only thanks to a very strong will, and a very adaptive and agile mind that I survived.
As I process things, I get closer to being a bit more open. I expect some interesting changes this year. I have some good ideas, I think, and it is getting close to time to try them out.