There are times I feel alone and I know I shouldn’t. I’m aware this is more my fault than anyone else’s, and it’s born of the fact I feel so unnatural that there’s a gap between me and ‘normal’ people. I can’t bear being around people because it reminds me of that gap. A fundamental failure.
There’s a growing, wild part of me that just doesn’t understand why I should bother when I’m so different. It asks, what’s the point, functionally, when at the end of the day they won’t really understand? I KNOW that’s not good. Humans are social creatures, blah blah blah – regardless, that’s the crux of the thing. At the end of the day, everything else rotates around that gap.
That feeling of being separate, of not being associated, has made it so I do this where I can be there in physical form but actually mentally living in some other space in my brain. I’m not talking about daydreaming or something like that. It’s also not that yawning empty where feelings are supposed to reside but don’t, which is another emotional cosmic horror to unpack another day.
This is different. A blankly lucid space where I can just be for a moment and not be touched or feel or anything. An unending room of nothing but plain grey and me. Present and absent. Schrödinger’s girl. Nothing and me all at once.
I just slide right out, into some recess in my brain, leaving some other part of me to respond while the emotional center of me is actually in some sort of liminal space. Two realities, one brain.
It’s like some tragicomedy thing with me – tragic because I know there’s something just off about the whole “me” thing – comic because I feel like no one else notices and maybe they should? Because, of course, the deal with Schrödinger’s cat is one of observation – it is both dead and alive because the result is unobserved. Is this some function of me feeling unobserved, when often it’s what I want most?
But then it leads me to questions. Like, wouldn’t you notice if someone would just slip out of the door in their head while talking to you? I’d like to think I would. The second I think someone feels bored I change the conversation to something more engaging, the trauma response from having to be the entertainment or the big ‘or else.’ I can sense when other people glaze over – disassociative girl recognizes disassociation (film at 11).
Maybe I expect too much? Maybe when I use the word empathetic and others do it’s a different thing. When I use it, I mean to be I’m able to imagine what someone is feeling so profoundly I can taste and see and smell and feel through them. Sometimes the gap makes it so empathy is the only mechanism I can use to something real.
It’s why I’m struck to my core watching someone else. It’s why performances – movies and TV and stage and video games – are so important to me, why the only real moments of release can leak out while I’m watching other people. Because in those moments, I can connect to what they are feeling in a way I can’t connect to what I should maybe be feeling. It reminds me of this passage I wrote once a while back – a zombie-human hybrid practicing blinking in a mirror so she could pass as human. The not-quite-girl in a girl skin tries to learn to blend in.
It’s not that I’m cut off from my feelings. I feel them. I understand where they come from. I’m more than painfully aware of where my body keeps the score. I can analyze the ‘right’ of them – that this leads to that and A leads through B to C. It’s that it doesn’t matter as much to me when they’re mine. I still just think of myself as this wandering roving thing, some outsider to the entire ordeal of it all. Given it all, receiving none of it. I was taught that, in a way, that I wasn’t worthy of the air I breathed and my existence was some weird anomaly that came down to ‘[my mother] was a whore.’ On this endless repeat until I got out at 17 and figured out the best way to never go ‘home’ again (and I never really have, because what is home, anyway, really?).
That space of liminal lucidity is how I can smile so big and say “But I’m filled with rage all the time,” in what feels like the ultimate expression of inappropriate affect. This strange faucet of simultaneous feeling and numbness that is always open. And after I feel that way, living this quiet, inexpressibly ultimate truth, it leaves me feeling drained. Not empty, just drained and like I’ve been filled with something else. Disdain? Disappointment? Dissatisfaction?
Some sort of dis, I think. Disquiet, perhaps. Maybe it’s just that. That I’m the restless one, wrestling my own rest. The answer, if knowable, if it matters, is somewhere. Maybe I’m searching through languages trying to find that word, trying to pinpoint that experience, a massive a-ha moment where I can recognize these strange un-feelings and pathologize them and in doing so finally understand what was done to me to make me that way. To finally glimpse inside that darkness that even I’m too afraid to look too long at because that abyss – it would surely swallow me whole and maybe I’d never crawl out of that. I’d just be stuck forever in that past sadness, unable to escape and do anything at all, and too overcome to do anything but tremble from the truth of it. Maybe then I’d be still instead of struggling forever against a void that might actually be truly inescapable.
