The Unhoistening

It was fairly late in life for me that I finally had a relationship (as in a romance) where I felt I left the person better than I found them. Which is what you want, I’d think. Or no, not what you want since you shouldn’t generally enter into a relationship with the intention of ending it. But if you are to split up with someone, then ideally it was amicably and you both have grown in good ways and there aren’t any hideous scars etched across your immortal souls to forever screech like jockeyed records, even past death in those baby blue caverns of the spirit realm. Right, nobody wants that.

Well, after all this time of reading about the experiences of other people, and scrutinizing their faces for clues, and watching way too much television (and way too intently), I’ve come to geez that the intense loneliness and constant paranoia of my early life was not exactly normal. Most people are lonely and paranoid to a certain extent, or at certain times, but I’ve decided my case was indeed a bit unusual in its incessancy. I’ll describe in more detail. I do want to say I don’t think my case is the most extreme example, not a one in ten billion. Probably more like a one in a hundred thousand. That means in the living population, I’d expect eighty thousand to be somewhat familiar. (I don’t know, maybe that’s off.)

Even as a very young child I had this desperate and solitary mentality which I now recognize to be, I don’t know, unhealthy. Deranged? I was more than convinced I was alone in the world and always would be. It was a cornerstone. I was always bracing, which means emotionally preparing for the worst. I thought one or both of my parents could at any time die or worse than that, decide to cut contact. The verb “ghost” didn’t really exist in the 90s but I think that captures what I believed would eventually happen. Friends were a parallel joy, a stolen one, a scurried delight to be had while the giant yet slumbers. So when I saw people homeless on the street or in the subway I would think to myself that one day I will definitely have to do that. Or reading about the less fortunate in other countries, other eras. When I saw characters on screen in the worst circumstances. That could be me, easily could be. I might be in that same situation, and logically, it would be better to get used to the idea sooner rather than later. I figure most people have a certainty of a secure future, or at least believe it’s the most likely outcome for them, or at the very least they earnestly want it for themselves. For me, I sometimes pretended but if I get real, I never saw it as a serious possibility. I was always just waiting for my miserable future to finally arrive.

To an extent it made the present miserable as well. I remember being very gloomy when I was by myself, which was a lot of the time. And when with others there was a lot of pretending going on. I did periods of pretending to be happy and other periods of deciding that this was somehow disrespectful (and so defaulted to being transparently gloomy) and then other periods where I thought the appearing gloomy was the more disrespectful one, or at least imprudently conspicuous. During the best times I somehow found a balance between being a Nancy about big Life and merely being a Nellie during everyday life. It was a constant question though, am I the only one who feels this way. Is it something everyone is covering up and they’re great at it. The truth I think is not a yes/no but more of an alloftheabove. Of course, I’ll never know for sure because, like, The Other is unattainable and we coexist only as eternal strangers amidst these illusory signs. But no, “I get it,” I think I do, as much as anyone can.

It wasn’t all bad. Constant paranoia makes life interesting. It’s actually really fun, like genuinely fun because it’s exciting. Things matter. In my experience swaddling yourself in conspiracy is no contest preferable to the private winter of apathy. Every little thing matters. I remember being aware of every moment of the day, recalculating the smallest interactions to maximally prepare for my life after I’d fallen off the limb. While taking public transportation I would make no indication whatsoever that my stop was coming up until the last possible moment, just one way of practicing inscrutability. I kept my hands free as much as possible, and my feet light. It was important to always add slight alterations when giving testimony or recounting stories, so that if I later heard the same changes from a third party, I’d have more data about potential existing lines of communication. I took on no hobbies that wouldn’t survive losing all my possessions, or a place to keep them. I’d evaluate all my belongings by weight and had clear rankings about which to prioritize over others in an emergency. The same with people. I’d practice sleeping on the floor or taking naps in public. There were a number of “super spy” made up games I trained in. Still to this day I can remember a passing license plate for up to a few hours afterwards. The constant mental tasks were to maximize my acuity so when the time came, I could get by with just my mind. Nothing else, not even limbs, could be counted on. Yes, I also practiced eating with my left hand at least one meal a week.

One positive consequence is that I became very compassionate very fast. Not to brag exactly, because now of course you know it comes from a self-serving place of anticipating that I’d one day have nothing more to rely on than the compassion of others. But even self-serving and calculated, it had some cute results. As a young child I would eat only a handful of Halloween candy and then try to give the rest away. In high school, I made a point of taking the worst of selections or being self-righteous and servile with my friends. The martyr, they’d joke. I was proud to sacrifice for others, to support underdogs, to shake my fist at injustice. Because I saw myself as the lowest of the low. I was the very opposite of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire.” I was a temporarily solvent hobo. Later in life this would of course become an affinity for such hopeful ideologies as communism and socialism, and even anarchy. It wasn’t stock contrarianism or counterculture to what I grew up with. I believe very much that things like fortune and health are solely the result of circumstance (and thus not virtue), so therefore outcomes are never deserved but merely happen. In other words, I don’t believe in karma as a cosmic force at all. I believe that human compensation is the sole progenitor of justice, that all good things come about only through rebellion against the inevitable. It is the task of society and individual will to mitigate the storms of happenstance. Otherwise we leave it up to, essentially, an omnipresent evil. If there is a God, it is an enemy we are forever doomed to suffer by. This seems quite the digression. Compassion is intertwined with a kind of metaphysical pessimism? Let’s move on—

Another thing is no one can savor a good memory like me. In a way it’s probably very pathetic and sad, but I see it as a necessary mechanism, to gainsay the meagerness of life. Honestly, I think it might be my best quality, that I appreciate things, really appreciate them. Grateful is not a word I wear readily, but it’s accurate in the pious sense. Every single time I’ve been happy I really thought it was going to be the last time, and I really thought it wouldn’t last. This very often became a self-fulfilling prophecy which to most people might sound like a refutation of the mindset. The thing is, self-fulfilling prophecies are fairly reliable. If you trust in very little then that can be worth a lot, or enough. If you can count your lashes, you can count on them. Perhaps I believed uncertainty to be the only truly torturous and unmanageable thing. As someone who anticipated one day being imprisoned or tortured, I’ve accumulated large amounts of likely inaccurate beliefs about being in such a position of powerlessness. My understanding is that it’s the uncertainty that really gets your gun going. The point being, I’m one of those hopeless people who’d rather lose predictably than ever win at all. But on the flip side, when I love something it is never half-hearted. That choice bite, that sunrise, that jinxed laugh, that quirk of character which might go unnoticed, I see it, I live it, I take it with me into the gutter, the cell, the noose, and it lives on repeatedly in me, retraced into a kind of night light for the soul. I think some people find it flat creepy, but to others it can be moving, and I’ve found some slice of people actually crave it in a worrying way, like no one else has ever paid attention to them. I’ll revisit that thought—

Why am I writing this though. Well, it sometimes happens that I feel life has gone on far too long. I already felt that way as a teenager. You spend all this time preparing to fall off a cliff. I suppose I write it in relief, no, frustration, no. I suppose I write this partially as a reprimand, that I’ve grown too complacent. I have spent the past decade dulling my mind, sort of like a deboning or safety sheathing. I had come to see myself as a potential danger to myself or others, a radical element, too taut to not one day snap. Was this self reflection—why am I like this-—no no no, that I know. Child of divorce, schizo genes, isolating society, and each step of the way I remember. Why the re-reflect. Why actually write.

I suppose honesty is sort of the point, admitting it. If you have a history of paranoia, you don’t talk about the paranoia because to be paranoid means not trusting anyone, so you can’t very well publicize it. Strategically it would make no sense. Maybe I am feeling a calm before the storm, and soon it could be time for my personal catastrophe in whatever form it takes, time for it to finally take me by surprise. So I am imparting this final personal secret to—well not to someone in particular, jettisoning into the aether, to say goodbye?—maybe to admit that I was wrong. Maybe that’s what it is. I was wrong to live thusly, to exist only in suspicion and shadow. Has time proven me wrong. Has it been long enough. Can I see the sun yet. I realize I elaborated only on the positive aspects of paranoia because it seems to me the negatives should be self evident. It’s out there in spades in the grand garden of human knowledge. Everything you can think that can go wrong has gone wrong, when it comes to not trusting people, when it comes to being on alert even when I’m alone (because how can you know when you’re really alone), when it comes to ruts and mindloops. I even braced myself against the possibility of telepaths and aliens and Truman Show scenarios and crazier things, much crazier. The time damage, the emotional damage, the mental damage are all big time. Those sting. And I am lonely, but that is very okay. That was over-prepared for. The worst of it is the collateral damage, and there has been some. I don’t know if I can ever excuse that. Perhaps public self-flagellation is an attempt to pay interest on un-verb-able moral debts. It’s all these things though. Reasons only arrive in cocktails.

Also, lately I’ve been writing, on and off, this long piece centered on a paranoid character. It’s actually good, I mean I like it so far. I think there’s potential for something that could actually deserve the world stage, something amazing enough to hang a hat on. (Not really), but it did make me realize I think in these crazy paranoid ways too much, too well. And perhaps for sanity’s sake I should simply stop this line of inquiry. Like how I stayed away from oil painting, academic math, hallucinogenics. I’m predisposed to insanity so maybe give wide. I don’t have to be a writer. Why did I start doing this. Am I a craftsman refining a masterwork. Am I an artist, ungushed passions overflowing. Or am I merely a broken person in self therapy. I could just step onward, live until my time is fully drawn. Make friends, engage the world, Trust. Could I actually possibly. I have gotten so good at forgiving others. Can I gather enough feathers to forgive myself. Unhoist my own petard. Do I deserve to be a real boy by the end. Time cannot tell, my story too small to have been rehearsed, only me at the helm, in the hold, on deck. But I really I don’t rightly know how to say.