You’re doing it wrong

I feel this voice, like a constant companion, which no matter what I’m doing–absolutely with no regard whatever to what I’m doing or how well or poorly I’m doing it–keeps telling me I’m doing it wrong.  Imagine a little person on your shoulder saying “you’re doing it wrong” at ten second intervals all day, all the time you are awake.

This is the “fire alarm” that Bessel van der Kolk talks about.

What can you do?  Some part of you learns to ignore it.  You have things to do, and this voice will never, ever contribute anything constructive.  But some other part of you can’t ignore it, since it is endogenous.  At the end of the day, the part that ignored it and the part that heard it have to reconcile.  That is when I get drunk. Or, if I don’t get drunk, the reconciliation is done through what I suppose I might term “night fighting”, where I get attacked by the part that absorbed all that negative energy, which is to say one part of me attacks another part of me, with the result that I shake, scream, and wake up thinking I am dying.

I feel this voice, now, which means it is slowly separating from me.  This is good news.  And I ponder all the years I have lost, being unable to make this voice go away or manifest in a way which I could deal consciously with.

The only thing that makes this loss seem reasonable is the thought that I can build a template for others to avoid my fate.

That, and that flowering bushes and trees, beauty, may be in my future.