I am not particularly forthcoming in matters of the heart or, indeed, the discussion of feelings and emotions. I tend not to confide in people and, presumably because I try to maintain a certain equanimity, people tend not to enquire. Occasionally I get the impression that people think I lack any great passion or strength of emotion; that I am simply there to occupy space like some great golem. The phrase, ‘it’s just James’ also rankles for some reason. Whether there’s any truth in these impressions, I don’t really know – I am prone to paranoia after all – but the truth itself is quite the opposite. Albeit, not in a particularly constructive way.
I consider myself, albeit in a childishly simple way, to be flawed, broken, and I swing from thinking I had an awkward and unpleasant childhood to realising that my parents did as well as they could considering the divorce and surrounding complications. I know the truth lies somewhere in-between and fault, I suppose, lies with each of us in a different way, but one belief will often hold sway over another and colour my thoughts accordingly. My awareness that not everything I recall may be true to events is frequently left neither here nor there and therefore, little solace when required.
In many ways I suppose it’s impossible to remember the truth of your childhood beyond vague impressions. There’s no great wisdom in observing that, but truth and memory can be difficult things, more outlines than solid facts, and to be able to pin down events and emotions accurately would be a boon to ease my mind considerably. It is, after all, easy to blame your upbringing for all of your faults and failings, too easy at times, but how much of whom you are hinges on it, and how much rides on the decisions made since? I would gladly trade all of my earthly possessions to know, without a doubt, what makes me me. It would answer so many questions that in this uncertain present I am unwilling to ask.
I live, for example, in constant fear of hurting the people that I care about. And I do mean fear. It’s a dark little thing that blazes hot like a sun in the back of my head and makes life … awkward at times. Some explanations, you’d prefer not to give, yes? Now, on the surface this is a ridiculous notion, but dig down and you’ll find that it’s spawned from the realisation that I have twice engaged in a course of action that, while potentially fatal for me, would have hurt family and friends far worse than I could ever have hurt myself.
Depression is undoubtedly a complicated issue, one that has thus far proved difficult to define in all of its guises, but I don’t think that I’ll ever shake the guilt of what I did or the quiet dread that one day I might find myself in the same situation, thinking the same thoughts, and doing the same thing. You hope for continued good health, of course, and you make allowances for the fact that you were ill at the time, but under all of that there remains a thick seam of self-knowledge, guilt, mistrust and a fear that makes your skin creep. Keeping that in check, living around it, is not particularly easy. At least, not for me.
This all sounds very melodramatic, I’m know, and I imagine that some people get past the self-recrimination quite early on. Unfortunately, I’m a decade in and still trying to deal with knock-on effects that, frankly, I never considered because my plan at the time involved my being dead and the world being a better place because of it. Obviously this was a rubbish plan, but hindsight is 20-20 and, more importantly, I’d have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.*
In all seriousness though, repression is an unhealthy coping mechanism, as much a problem as its cause. I know this; it’s a source of worry in and of itself. My problem, however, is that I don’t appear to have any healthy coping mechanisms in place to deal with what the majority of people find to be relatively banal problems. The most obvious example would be that, should I ease up on my vetting of each and every thought and impulse that I have, the default response thrown up in certain situations is to harm myself. I have no idea why this is presented as a solution, I’m not even sure where the urge comes from, I just know that it occasionally tries to depict itself as a good idea and has to be told to fuck off in a very literal sense.
Oh, there are other solutions that stroll up from time to time, but each and every one of them is as self-destructive in their way as scoring your arms with a knife. The upshot of all of this self-indulgent whining is, of course, that I run this risk of ending up alone and crazy anyway. Something which, while unpleasant, I still find preferable to hurting anyone else should I ever go up in a puff of smoke again. See, it isn’t that I’m not particularly expressive, or that I lack for fire in my belly, quite the opposite, it’s that I’m absolutely fucking terrified of going up in cinders and hurting everyone around me. Still waters run deep, eh?
* I jest; Scooby Doo had nothing to do with it. You might want to be wary of the Old Mill Owner though, very close-set eyes.
N.B. Today’s post was sponsored by the letters E, M and O. And the number 9, probably.
*hugs*