Almost human.

The following essay is a compilation of personal journal entries from 2015, when I was at my lowest point. The words are striking to me now, a very intense and urgent reminder of just how deeply I believed my world was coming to an end. I am in recovery, no worries. But I feel it's time to put this out there. Living memory. And yes...I literally journal like this.

***

Guillermo del Toro once tweeted, “We come into this world just to shout/scream/laugh – declare who we are before fading…and hope it echoes in someone’s soul.”

So of course that’s what it is. He echoes in my soul.

Obviously that wasn’t his intention, he came without intentions, but we can’t predict or control the effect we will have on other people. We don’t know most times who’s hurting or vulnerable or codependent, and we can’t stop them from one day seeing us as if for the first time and believing in their broken heart that we can save them.

I’m not sure if we have true souls, but I think there is definitely a part of us that transcends the ordinariness and banality of the strictly material. Maybe if, fantastically speaking, someone went in and excavated my soul, and if they placed their ear to the wall, they would hear the echoes of this experience – the highest and lowest feelings, the dreams, the tattered hope, and all of it would be called by his name.

Am I doomed to his echo? I think I am doomed to putting a face to desires that are never satisfied, to hanging on to the smallest fragments of what it must be like to be human, and cared for. Sometimes I feel very, very deeply that attachment is blindingly simple, that love waits just beyond another day or two of staying here; sometimes I could swear I feel it right next to me but separated by a plane of existence, able to look but never touch. Is this a manifestation of a yearning so long and so unresolved that it is self-aware, that it needs to understand why it would exist only to scatter in the darkness like ancient starlight? That’s one way to put it, I guess.

It’s enough to make me feel like a mistake. I mean, we’re all mistakes, we shouldn’t even be here, but working with what we’ve got we attuned ourselves to the possibilities of love, and within that framework I’m the mistake of mistakes. And I feel like a fool. Far enough removed from it now, unmoored and drifting further every day from my little island prison, I see more objectively what an idiot I was to believe in such things. I went through all the machinations of infatuation – happy, confident, expectant, the world all bright and new, etc. etc. Maybe that makes sense for other people but not for me. Real, solid, foundational happiness – not contentment, not joy, not peace, but happiness – will not have been a part of my experience in this place. I’m a shadow passing through the world; no one can see me.

It’s actually a bit frightening the way that, even apart from how others can determine our own identity, our mind dictates our experience of reality. When our eyes are on the prize we are blind to anything that doesn’t support the grand idea, and we are hostile to truths that would dismantle it. Is it so important that we hold to it? No, the chemicals in our brain merely dictate the necessity. We are slave to the interchange, the increase and the lack, and only if equilibrium is restored do we see as clearly as one can see, laboring as we do inside the equivalent of an illusion.

Last week I realized how linked my creativity is to my desires, and my obsessions; how he shows up in so many of my internal wanderings and creations, almost spontaneously, as though the stuff of which my inner life is made is intricately infused with those things of him that I loved most. I wondered if all artists experience this. Maybe all artists, once they reach a certain point, find their body of work is just a retelling of their single most important pain, and as such, I’m afraid everything I create until the day I die will wear his face.

 ***

Why are we afraid to die? Perhaps because consciousness on the level of humans is untenable. We did not get to choose birth and sentience, but here we are, and we all must face the reality of the retreat back into nothingness. We are thrust onto this rock and forced into awareness, to stumble through circumstances not of our choosing, to watch the concept of meaning wither, and then at the end to face obliteration. Annihilation. Everything you thought and loved and wanted, disappearing into the great chasm. Where will we go, we ask? Nowhere. What must the darkness be like? We will not be conscious to comprehend it. Even to the end of eternity when time is at last exhausted we will not experience so much as a flicker of the awareness of it, having so long ago diminished into a nothingness ever so much deeper and more profound than all present notions of death.

The lack of eternal consciousness thus robs our ‘lives’ of meaning; but is it really a theft? Meaning was not given to us in the first place; there is no wizard behind the scenes working to make sure that the accident of consciousness draws to a purpose. The lack is merely a fact, one that we should never have come to comprehend. We should not know we are here. All the same, the poignancy and defeat that comes with the realization of eventual annihilation will not linger with us in what does not follow after death. If we are afraid (some aren’t), it is only because we can be aware of our own fear. The sadness and fear of death only exists on this side. For that, we can be thankful.

And you know what? I will not lie. Until my very last day my lingering wish will be to die and wake up in a safe, warm, quiet place in perpetual autumn under an eternal sunset. To not only be at peace but to know peace. What will actually happen is I’ll die and all will fade to black, my consciousness will cease, and all memory of this wasted life will be obliterated. I accept both, and I know only one is true. What for so long seems frightening to contemplate can, if we commit ourselves to the reconciling of ideas, be its own kind of peace.

We want heaven—a carrying on without regret or punishment—because otherwise none of this is fair. Brought here just to die? To lose everything and not even retain the pain of loss? So what if some people eke out good days? The fact that only some do is the very disparity. Billions of people have suffered through pointless lives. There was a time, I think, when it was normal to acknowledge this, when deluding oneself was a pastime one could ill afford. Our constant modern self-delusion is no psychosocial evolution. It is the measure of our desperation.

It does no good to soothe ourselves with the idea of creating legacies. In a godless universe the only true immortality is in having your achievements live on after you, but even that is an empty solace, because the day will come when humans can no longer be found here, and a day too when the earth and her sun are but remnants. Our legacies, our achievements, will have no home amongst the thoughtless stars. All will be forgotten, will be as though it never was. Without an eternal consciousness to house the memory of everything, all is meaningless. Our current striving to create happiness and love against the backdrop of an unfathomable void has cosmic value equal to the human race joining hands and walking together into the sea.

 ***

I vacillate constantly between the ideas of the guy I left being sad, angry, indifferent, sentimental, totally unaffected. I have to settle once and for all on either indifferent or totally unaffected. Got to shake off those rose-colored glasses and remember how weird he could be, how after a while I thought maybe he was always shitting me for a laugh, how I was never considered when I didn’t need to be considered; how he could forget me. I like to think that my leaving relieved him, set him free to orbit a new star. I think he felt obligated and was perhaps too nice to say ‘I can’t fix you, I’m not what you need’ and therefore he’s glad to have it behind him. I need to choose to believe that my leaving what was we both needed.

Sometimes I imagine what I would do if I heard from him out of the blue. If the little notification chirped on my phone and I picked it up and saw his name. Always my immediate and visceral response is to cry out and throw the phone. I’ve tried imagining a different, saner response, because freaking out seems a bit unkind, but in my gut I know that I would need to put that distance between us right away.

Today I again probed the fantasy and at last understood that it is not him I fear, but the monster of obsession that made such a mess of everything. I fear the monster who derived such euphoria from so little, who reduced her whole world to one distant person. I am not confident I could keep chained such a straining, hungry creature; I believe she has the ability to toss me right back down into the darkness where all that matters is his attention, where the only choice is to waste away on an impossible ideal.

In this brief scenario in which he finds me, calls me home, the monster binds me to certain death. It isn’t that I am terrified of or disgusted by him – I didn’t want to leave him but we had stopped existing independent of this dark thing long before. I can no longer distinguish between the good in him and the good that I had to believe was in him in order to feed the obsession. He was sacrificed for an idea of him the moment he crystallized, and blind to it all I continued playing house with the corpse in the rotted depths of that sick, sad part of my mind; alone in the dark with a dead fantasy.

This is what, I think, has given me the strength to stay away. There are plenty of practical reasons, including that he simply may be uninterested in the idea of me after all this time. But the truth is, I cannot risk waking the beast.

 ***

The last few days have been really depressing because this time last year –

This time last year I was feasting on scraps. Treating every drop of kindness that fell on this barren life like rainstorms of affection. Undoing the locks, opening the doors, clearing a path for the happiness I could never claim to pour out from me like the first light of the universe. I was ready to feel, to connect, to rest my broken, weary self in relief on someone to whom pure sweetness came so naturally. I anticipated a future. I felt beautiful. He occupied the parts of my mind that have been tormented for decades and made a soft space for us. I learned almost instantaneously how to need him, how to dream new dreams, and I was totally alone in this.

So just remembering how it was – the miniscule bits I gathered up in my arms in a desperate attempt to heal this life; the utterly laughable hope that love could grow in a one-dimensional void – is very difficult. Even now, here right now, a part of me wants to run back to him, to say here I am! It’s not too late, is it? To which he would reply oh no, of course not! I’m so glad, I have really missed you!

I wish, I wish, I wish I could visit that pitiable girl of a year ago and remind her that everything in her life turns to meaninglessness, and I would instruct her that when the day comes, and so much sooner than she could ever expect…when the day comes that he lets go, don’t hold on. Don’t keep straining to see what was never there. Save yourself.

Stuck as I am here and now, though, it’s too late for all of that; he has ossified. Into a singular epoch, a curated collection of words, a handful of smiles; an unviable idea born too soon, mourned, and gently released back to the place where such dreams suffer no limits. He is taking his place in the constellation which hangs forever above me in my dark universe, his mythos complete. He is the god of everything that cannot be, and like all gods he is untouchable, unknowable, unreachable.

This is the danger of letting go. A part of you never leaves that place. You do not get to choose which memories survive. And while you purport to heal he becomes stone, sculpted by the pain of the loss of that which you most desired; forever the best of him, forever beautiful, forever loved.

 ***

What is it that we really want when we desire love so badly? We say, ‘I have so much love to give.’ Is that really true?

When someone says love is merely chemical dependence on a person, it sounds cynical and pessimistic, but perhaps that’s because it’s an uncomfortable version of the truth.

In Shulamith Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex she says many wonderful things about the nature of true human love, including my eternal assertion that who a person is to you renders the social value of their physical appearance meaningless. On the process of love the important point is this: “the self attempts to enrich itself through the absorption of another being.” She moves later to quoting Theodore Reik (who, for all his drawbacks, apparently could reach an apt conclusion occasionally): “He notes that love is a reaction formation…it is preceded by dissatisfaction with oneself, a yearning for something better…the bliss love produces is due to the resolution of this tension by the substitution, in place of one’s own ego-ideal, of the other…” Ironically, it seems, love is simply selfish.

We may be looking for that special someone to enrich us, to fill our empty spaces, to restore our perception of our own value. And what does that have to do with the other person, that is, how does it presume to be love for them? If they are getting the same ego needs filled by you in return, then that is simply what Reik calls ‘twin narcissism.’ Can you blame one for being cynical?

I’ve written about codependency and love addiction elsewhere, and I believe these insights have taken my understanding deeper. What kind of person are we when we go looking for (or dreaming of) love? Have we accomplished learning what it means to love ourselves? Or are we seeking someone to do it for us?

When I wanted to say ‘I love you,’ what I truly meant was ‘I want to be able to love myself,’ and I know that now.

What, then, might real love look like?

Perhaps it is – preceded by a satisfaction with oneself, a deep comfort in all the filled spaces (the histories, the choices) and the knowledge that you already have all the raw material necessary to fill any empty ones. If you find someone who similarly has learned to love himself, then at last it is possible to experience what Firestone identifies as “not only the incorporation of the other, but an exchange of selves.”

As long as we continue seeking a shortcut to this in favor of romanticism and emotional intensity, our lives will continue to be scattered with little deaths and destructions.

With all that being said, there’s no denying that we have a fundamental, inextinguishable need to meaningfully connect with another person and people. We also have the same need to reproduce, out of which seems to have sprung the entirety of our collective experience with intimate relationships. When I specifically feel a desire to attach to someone, to engage in physical contact, to be chosen above all others, what is it that I truly want, that those connections would assure me? That I’m not invisible – I do exist. I know I am here because I see the result of the forces I exert on you; the feedback is positive and your reactions encourage me to continue, which not only reinforces the fact that I exist but tells me my existence may even be impactful, worthwhile. My existence may have meaning.

Thus the connections assure me that I have value. If the species can only perpetuate through intimacy (no matter how primitive), then perhaps the purpose of humanity is to be intimate. If we are not chosen for intimacy by someone, if we find our capacity to make a meaningful connection stunted and impotent, then we have a crises of meaning and value. Am I human?

When I desire human connection to the point of despairing, I’m simply asking, “Show me that I’m human. Prove that I exist.”

So we engage in numerous acts that bring us that feeling of human connection, of being valued, of no longer being alone; no matter how ultimately destructive the behavior, the temporary benefits and pleasurable feelings will always be easier and always seem to outweigh the importance of loving oneself first, and then moving toward a mature and psychologically healthy connection with someone who is similarly ready.

This is why I so often despair of the irresolveable problems of humanity. If we were willfully created, it was done in a way which ensured we would never run out of ways to destroy ourselves.

When things changed between us (i.e., evolved naturally, grew in new directions, which I could not interpret) I tried so hard to salvage it because I was so close – almost there, I almost made it – I was almost human. He was, I thought, the link to my own vitality; fear of losing him was fear of my own kind of annihilation; without him I would be returned to the deep abyss of non-existence.

When I had to choose to leave him, it was like choosing to kill myself. The emptiness and nihilism that followed were a grieving of my own death of meaning, after which I have set myself the task of being reborn of my own volition.