I see now that both would have allowed me to keep my shell. Both would have rewarded me hiding behind an unemotional, inauthentic facade. Both would have more or less demanded I hide all my emotional wounds permanently.
Some part of my unconscious seems to think I am still 20. I have lost so much of my life to dissociation. I just wasn’t there. I participated, and looked like I was there, but some part of me was absent.
All I have been able to think clearly all my life is “I need to get well”. I didn’t know what the problem was, but I knew there was a problem. It took me many years to even be able to think about it accurately. This is the problem with dissociation. You could have a figurative broken arm or broken back, but you can’t feel it clearly. Everything is numb.
And related, I think, is that I will sometimes find myself reliving video games I’ve played. I’ve asked this before, but will ask again: what is the quality of a life spent playing video games? What is the value of the lives spent in front of the TV? Whose memories come to you when you die?
It sometimes seems to me–and I will suggest this as a possible accurate general hypothesis–that our whole world consists in means designed to desensitize us, and that desensitizing basically amounts to induced dissociation. Dissociation, in turn, leads to depression, alienation, and all the signs our society is failing to accomplish the basic objectives of finding places for people, purposes for them, and emotional support for them. Families are failing.
Even many parents who do their best are competing with various dissociative events and competing counter-narratives. Violence in media jades their kids prematurely and disconnects them emotionally, and there are always kids on the internet who seem to have more freedom, more stuff, more fun, and just more, more, more.
I continue to believe it is a TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE idea to allow kids to have their own TV’s and video games in their rooms. I’m personally in the “no electronics before 12” camp. Age appropriate movies, yes, but mostly books. Lots of books. That’s what my own kids did, and it’s worked out well.
And if you want your kids to read, then read yourself. It’s no use telling any kid what to do, if you don’t do it yourself. If you’re telling your kid not to smoke with a cigarette in your hand, they will be stealing smokes soon enough.
But returning to myself, it seems to be the case that our brains contain many places to project narratives and stories. None of them, ultimately, are real. The task is to get behind all that, to find the Wizard running the show. This is all real spirituality is. I think.