Imagine being stricken with something that you not only don’t understand, but can’t even see. Something bothers you so much you start needing to imagine you’re someone else, someone better. Soon you start to think those fantasies are actually real and you forget the wound. You thought you had it together and build an entire worldview on sand. Until something reaches out of you, a big grey claw, at an inopportune moment to assault that worldview and embarass the living daylights out of you. Maybe this happens when you’re at lunch with your boss and let slip a pointed insult at him, jabbing him in his most sensitive area. He looks at you stunned. You quickly glance at him and then back at your plate. You can feel your face growing red. Yes indeedy… that comment came straight out of your mouth and none other.

No one else can see it either, even the people you’re paying to help you. They only encourage you talk about it, maybe offer to pump your system with Prozac and Xanax. You talk and talk and talk. For years. Talking relieves some of the symptoms and offers perspective. At times you believe you’re really “cured” when you feel better during certain periods, maybe when you’ve fallen in love or have found a good workplace environment where you can work at home a few days a week.

But in fact your issues can never be cured. They’re built into your operating system, and to get rid of it you’d need to get rid of your brain. So deeply embedded is your sickness that the only closure you’ll ever get is temporary relief. Many moments of your existance will be filled with discomfort, pain, and fear.

My blindfold

Personally it took me till middle age to even begin to frame my problem. Slowly I’ve come to realize the utter pervasiveness of it, how is saturates every pore of my perception and skews my understanding of the world. It’s a problem the scale of which I could never imagine.

How can anyone cope with such a problem? You know, even as I need to focus on my issues in order to better cope with them, I feel a great longing for relief sometimes, a little break from my discomfort (that’s what my artificial worldview was shielding me from, an existance of low-grade discomfort bordering on nausea). Sometimes I tell myself it’s ok to focus on something else, like work. I need to function. I have a family and am responsible for their financial well being. It’s not just me in the mix.

Now that I’ve ripped off the bandage via this blog and self-therapy, I feel discomfort more or less all throughout the day. When I focus on other things, my pain recedes but doesn’t disappear. It recoils into the pit of itself but it’s sitting in my belly. It doesn’t let me forget it - and I don’t want to forget it anymore. It’s an important part of me now, a tremendously heavy load that I can’t even carry but will try anyway. It makes me a very responsible and sad adult now, who knows that everything will eventually end and that actually, great things aren’t possible.

I had ambitions once of being successful. That was part of my artificially constructed personality, sure, but at the very least I wanted to do something interesting and fulfilling in life. Now I know this will never be the case. Avoidants aren’t successful if they have to derive that success from or with others. That doesn’t rule out success entirely though… J.D. Salinger got famous because he wrote “The Catcher in the Rye.” We all know that bookwriting is a solitary affair, and an avoidant like him actually became successful.

In my own life I tried strenuously to escape my fate but didn’t succeed. In high school I had ambitions of becoming an engineer and going to the Naval Academy. Ha ha! I should have known better. By my thirties I started to realize that all my efforts failing or not working out werent’t a fluke. At the end of the day I had put in more effort than others and got less results. I resented this but couldn’t put it down to anything solid. Was I dumber than others?

Now finally I have an answer. In the Bible there’s a famous passage in Genesis that I like to think about. Because of their sins, Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden, which was guarded by a towering angel with a fiery sword. My condition means that I am similarly not allowed to pass through that gate like the rest of the humanity, but will always stay outside while others can file straitht through. No one can surpass their own mortal limits. (That’s God talking.)

All this gives life a shabby and disappointing quality, almost like there’s nothing to look forward to. Perhaps that same God who kept me out of paradise should have at least stripped away my ambition so I wouldn’t give a shit. Really, there are a lot of people out there with no ambition, who don’t want to make anything better of themselves. Why couldn’t I have been one them?

Removing the blindfold

Sleep and semi-consciouness are great ways to experience one’s true feelings. The mind is unguarded in those moments, and can speak freely. Since starting this blog I’m greeted every morning by a sense of being overwhelmed. What that “something” is I can’t describe fully, but only know it’s my perception of my condition.

Imagine driving down a wet, grey road in a forest one rainy morning. As you turn the bend, you come face to face with an absolutely gigantic mac truck. You’re about four seconds from smashing into its gritty white front head on. What are your thoughts in that moment? (Besides your reaction to swerve away.)

I actually imagined it this morning as I slowly woke up. The truck in the rain. Perhaps it’s a poor analogy. My thought upon waking up was the sheer magnitude of my inability to cope with this world as I am. It was like I was born without a layer of skin. A slight breeze generates unimaginable pain. That’s what I am facing. How do you go through life without skin? Someone can wrap you in bandages but it’s not the same. Doesn’t feel right.

This is why I need to be blind, need to go through life with my eyes barely open (concerning my plight). The lamp I carry must necessarily be turned very dim to only barely illuminate the rocky walls around me. Being with others, especially strangers, is an unimaginably frightful experience, one I’ll never learn to cope with. Yet I need them.

I cannot explain my reality in any conventional sense. It’s all puzzles and riddles. My life is a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma (to paraphrase Churchill). I am incapable of explaining the thing that afflicts me and no one but me can really understand it. I can only try to understand it but it’s amazingly difficult.

It reminds me of a retiree I read about one or two years ago. He had this strange, inexplicable allergy to WiFi radio waves, and could only sleep in places that didn’t have any. Such places are getting few and far between, obviously. What a plight, to be born with such a condition. Was he made for the world he lives in?

Postscript If all this sounds dreadful I am sorry. But just to be clear, I have no adverse thoughts concerning my own life. This is all an exercise for me, much like Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” My goal is to get better, but I need to face this stuff.