You sabotage yourself, you create problems for yourself, you distract yourself continually and call it ADHD (or at least the people in the seats in the offices do, but most people seem to me to be happy to “have” something like that), all in order to avoid seeing the Sun of the Primary Wound, the thing that you cannot see, cannot unsee, and cannot live with. Many of us–I won’t presume say say most of us, although that is likely true in some places, for example inner city ghettos–have a primary developmental failure. We have a scar from before we could speak. A terror, left over from a world when we could not walk, could not talk, could not reason, but were quite equal to the tasks of mistrust and fear.
My family mythology claims that I turned myself over at a week. This is not supposed to be possible. I believe it happened. I was trying to get the fuck out of there. I failed, obviously. Babies fail. That is what they do.
My work continues. I will call it here Ocean work. It is the work of the white whale. It is diving deep, deeper, and staying there, for a long time, and looking around in the darkness, and trying to bring light.
In my own particular case, I think I have reached the bottom, cognitively. I am still trying to process it emotionally, but I have a pathway. The way is difficult, but relatively open. I walk a stone path, but a path nonetheless, now. A direction is a true mercy. We all need it. We all seek it. Far too many of us fail.
Imagine a baby, a newborn baby, whose mother, the very first moment she lays eyes on him, feels disgust and repulsion. Imagine this baby is highly sensitive, natively intelligent. Oh: consequences.
For me, it is important to always be swimming whatever direction the world is not swimming. I have long watched lemmings will themselves to fall off emotional and intellectual cliffs.
This is not self pity, and it is obviously not a call for attention or the pity of others. It is an extremely interesting story, one I have been desperately looking for all my life. And there it is. There it is. It’s ugly. And it is fantastically beautiful.
I am alive, amazingly. I am alive, against all odds. I am alive, to write these words. I am alive, to speak new words, and to walk over that next hill. I am alive, when I was cut immediately after my first breath. I am alive, in a world of pain, to say and feel there is something else.
It is a miracle. It is marvelous.
This is an arrival. This is a celebration.