Unstoppable Forces & Immovable Objects: Diaries of a Reluctant Addict
Part Eight: On exile, embracing contradictions, refusing normalcy, and the unintended social consequences of self-destructive behavior
1.
I keep thinking about how there is no such thing as self-destruction. No matter the lengths you may go to reign in the damage, that dense, incalculable, ambient energy will always make its way onto those around you. Silent suffering creates a vacuum in the space between you and the other. All the pain you spend your limited resources trying to hide seeps into that space and touches whoever comes close. Around your skin grows another skin made of cactus. Spines surround you and you become sealed off from everything, collecting water in the middle of a desert you dreamed up.
I remember my various hideouts over the years: the hillside overlooking the city where donkeys and coyotes wandered. The small town in West Virginia where I said hello to the same ten people every day. The redwood forest where I went inward to find all of my shadows. And now, Los Angeles, one of the biggest cities in the world.
Here, I hide in my apartment and venture to the rooftop where I can watch things from a close distance. I tell my secrets to the birds. The sadder and heavier my heart, the more they surround me. This morning they wait outside my window, singing. I drift in and out of sleep and dream of a crow beating the edge of one frenzied wing against the screen, trying desperately to get in. It sounds like a saw buzzing through wet tree bark. I want to push the screen out and allow it to enter, let the chaos ensue. I reach up and my bedroom dissolves back into my bedroom.
Later, a Youtube video autoplays, a random gift from the algorithm: it’s an examination of prophets and figures from the Bible, who, at one point or another, were forced into exile in the wilderness. Sometimes they were gone for days, sometimes for decades. Some immediately received miracles, care, nourishment from angels; others waited lifetimes in the empty, stale air of God’s silence, wondering what it all was for.
I feel as though a part of me has been living in a forest somewhere inside myself my entire life. She is sleeping under tree trunks, foraging for berries, looking up at the dome of the sky above, the theater screen of my inner world. Upon it, she witnesses various scenes projected; a livestream of the world my body inhabits and moves through. This feral girl is in pain, hungry, tired, and lonely. She can barely speak. Her sentence of solitude has become a chosen one; her only true act of agency.
I sit with this part of me while the video describes the time Jesus went into the desert to face temptation. The devil offered three bargains to the starving, tired prophet. Use your powers to turn these stones into bread, he commanded. Jesus said no way, man. So, the devil took him to the top of a mountain and said, okay, well this world is yours if you would just worship me. Jesus refused. Finally, they flew to the roof of a temple a hundred feet above the ground, and the devil told Jesus to jump and let his fall be caught by the angels. Jesus was like, I’m good, thank you!
Contained within this parable, specifically within the details of the three temptations, is a narrative we are all familiar with: starting out with nothing (stones), turning nothing into a resource (bread), gaining power and prestige, and then finally, falling from the great, big height you have reached in your pride. A tale as old as time. Jesus refuted every aspect of this narrative and was fed by angels.
I am not anything like him. I even wrote a haiku today about how unlike Jesus I am:
BREAD OF STONE
The visitor offered me food
in exchange for my magic.
Starving, I let him in.
I feel like I would do almost anything to survive at this point, except for being a normal person.
In my early 20s, after a year of daily panic attacks, I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. One night, while I was knocked out on sleep meds, another patient climbed into my bed. The nurses came in and woke me up and promptly told me I was being removed from the facility. I was groggy, dizzy, and didn’t understand what was going on; I started crying and having a panic attack. The only words I could get out, which I repeated over and over, were, “You said you would help me please help me.” Despite this, the nurses called the police and told them I was threatening to harm myself; a convenient way to make me someone else’s problem. I was handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car at 1am, cold metal around my wrists, the rough plastic seat pushing into my bony body, contorting me into a strange, slumped shape. I’ll never forget what the cop said to me as he started the engine; he half-turned his head, looking slightly past me, and in a shockingly casual tone, remarked, “Why don’t you just get a normal job and be a normal person.”
I’d like to think I’m not this petty, but I have to admit: when I heard this, a voice in my head whispered something like, “Over my dead body.”
Seventeen years later I am still alive and have never, ever, once been normal.
There is a cost to my inability to function like other people. Rooms I cannot enter. Conversations I’ll never be a part of. I watch much of the world through glass.
Sometimes people feel drawn to my strange ways, like maybe through me they could find permission to let go of the game and live life out here on the tightrope where precariousness alchemizes into art. But then they eventually realize I really am just crazy. This isn’t a persona or an art piece. The persona is who I am at readings and public events. The art lies in the shapes I create from experience, these words that speak for the chaos but can never actually be it or contain it.
Meanwhile, the truth of me is out in the woods dreaming of silence.
2.
People don’t really want you to explain yourself. Think of your parents. When you were a kid they would ask, “Why did you do that?” and when you’d go to answer they’d say, “No excuses, just sorries!” People don’t care about reasons, or even about “accountability;” in truth; they just want satisfaction, which is another way of describing an extraction of energy. They want you to feel shame and then perform it for their pleasure. We eat one another’s pain and call it “justice.”
I want to increase the amount of grace I have for others and for myself. It’s a struggle; the more grace I show myself, the more irate I grow toward the lack of grace others give. The more grace I show others, the more I excuse the lack of grace I am receiving. So I give extra grace to myself and the cycle begins anew.
I feel far removed from the ocean of social relations. I don’t trust people. I am afraid of them. I want to give everything to them. I need them.
When I was a young child of about eight or nine, I had this book of “brain teasers”; it mainly consisted of lateral-thinking puzzles based on some kind of mysterious or uncanny occurrence; a man lies dead in a locked, windowless room with only a pool of water nearby; someone tries the albatross at a restaurant and then runs into traffic; etc. The most memorable puzzle for me was not as bizarrely violent as these ones, however. It simply asked the reader, “What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object?” I remember obsessing over this question, trying to imagine in my mind some kind of beautiful shining comet whirling through space and coming upon a stark, glistening black wall of jagged stone stretching upward and downward into infinity; what would happen when they collided? Would it create an impossibly enormous black hole? Would the universe fold in on itself and turn inside out?
When I read the solution, “disappointed” didn’t remotely begin to describe the feeling. “There is no such thing as a universe in which an unstoppable force and an immovable object can both exist,” the answer drolly read. “They are, by definition, exclusive of one another. For, if a force can be described as ‘unstoppable’ this precludes a reality in which something ‘immovable’ can exist.”
Fucking semantics!…oh, how I hated that stuff. Just overeducated middle class nerds playing self-congratulatory word games, making shapes from the shadows in the cave for their own amusement, unwilling to explore what might be outside…no imagination at all!
I am full of unstoppable forces and immovable objects. All of us are. This is why we rage at ourselves, at each other, this is why we consume pain. We know there are truths beyond those performances of truth we register as the columns of our constructed reality. We sense something more, something that might resolve the contradiction. But the more we speak of it and think of it and attempt to contain and define it, the further away from us it seems. So we drink. We abuse substances. We make the wrong decisions on purpose. We are forced to live as these individual, singular, consistent selves while we spill over with contradictions that preclude the possibility of the existence of a single self.
The truth is, the unstoppable force and the immovable object don’t contradict one another at all; in fact, arguably, one could not exist without the other. What I mean by this: the very concept of unstoppability would not matter enough to name if the unstoppable object has always been unstoppable. Unstoppability only matters enough to name because of the concept of immovability, and vice versa. So, if something is to be unstoppable or immovable, it can only be labeled so in relation to the other. As one meaning contradicts the possibility of its opposite, it simultaneously enshrines it. The answer to the question of what happens when these impossible forces meet has already been answered: they named one another.
There is no such thing as “the universe.” It is not one thing. The rules that govern the world we see contradict the rules that govern the world we don’t. Religion, science, philosophy, art, these all gesture toward an understanding of this impossible truth through the means by which they seek to reconcile it.
“Reality” is not a cohesive body, like an ocean. It is full of rivers, tributaries, deltas, dams, floodplains, meandering, various structures and interventions both natural and constructed. You can’t map it, because it changes as you move through it. It changes you as you change it. Everything is always in flux with itself.
I keep fighting the current, clawing my way to the shore so I can rest, but there is no shore, only more rivers, and sometimes they lead underground and I am lost for weeks on end. The people who care about me wonder where I am and they grow worried. I am not eating their pain, I am not even aware I am capable of causing it, but it’s there.
3.
I read about various categorizations of my particular constellation of mental, emotional, and physical symptoms. I learn about learned helplessness. I research the differences between Complex post traumatic stress disorder and “covert narcissism” because I’m worried the way my pain presents itself might make me a terrible person to others. I read about the differences between Complex post traumatic stress disorder and Borderline personality disorder, and I wonder, is “borderline” just a word for women with particularly bad CPTSD? Is any of this even real? What the fuck am I? Am I one of the good traumatized people or one of the bad traumatized people? Am I unfixable? Unlovable? Evil? Do I have a true disease of the mind, or am I just a hysterical woman in need of a good talking to? What the fuck is actually going on here?
I am not averse to taking responsibility for the things I do, but, try as I might, I just don’t know how to change who I am at my core: damaged goods. Maybe this is what I have in common with the narcissist; I am stubbornly set in my self-destructive ways. Functionally, this means I might not be a good person to be around. I question every failed relationship…was it me? Am I the problem?
I don’t know how to be good to myself and this hurts the people who love me. The solution is extremely obvious: start being good to myself! But, I don’t have faith I can do it, so I stave off the inevitable collapse with alcohol and empty days. I lock myself in my room like a werewolf in order to limit the radius of my pain’s fallout. I don’t want to hurt anyone with all my craziness! I couldn’t stand the thought of it. So I just hurt them with my absence instead.
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Read last week’s entry here:
it's crazy how hard shit is man