Soul Therapy

I’m writing this so that I may remember how it feels, and remain grounded to the reality that shapes me.

I was always a very observant child. Reading people’s faces and analyzing their speech. After a while I started to mimic the interesting ones, often with inappropriate immediacy. People must have thought me an arrogant child, so readily mocking them! But they were just very interesting to me because there is so much to see in the subtlety of human behavior if you pay enough attention.

The details one can observe through our senses deeply intrigued me. Textures, smells, sounds. I was enthralled by the apparent and curious about what lies beyond. Once I became aware of the difference between sincerity and untruthful behavior in people I started noticing more and more unspoken, hidden details. It was like a vast chasm had been cracked open, and I could take a deep dive in the inner workings of people’s minds. Behind the scenes where all the secrets lie, all the pain, all the love and suppressed bubbling joy, all the dirty jokes. People’s words no longer formed the screen and lime light of their communication to me. I couldn’t ignore the puppeteer inside, trying to stage the show it thinks people want to see.
Since I was little I was stricken with visceral sensations of pain whenever confronted with other people’s injuries or sorrows. It is involuntary, of a nature that simply takes over all present mind, like a cringe injected with stinging pain, burning sensations and what I would like to call literal heart ache.

As time progressed I found myself holding my breath in public places so that I don’t have to smell people walking past me. I began to avoid eye contact so that I wouldn’t have to see the things people simply can’t hide. I’d rather fixate on the grimy lines between floor tiles and hum a tune so that I wouldn’t accidentally hear people say specific things. It was like one’s mind has tentacles floating around and it proved difficult to keep them from latching on to things in the vicinity. My brain has been hungry for information, but too often what there was to learn carried too much sorrow, too much sadness. There is so much veiled suffering in people! Sometimes it is too much to hide and you start to look like a trapped animal. The feelings are too strong to cover up with pretense, too much to smear away with a laugh.

Before I learned to cut myself off from this endless abyss of data, there were times where it proved overwhelming. Periodically, deep sadness would take over and I would cry, a cry that welled up from my belly. It was like my soul was vomiting. There is too much to see and too little I could do about it. By the time I was 8 years old, me and my sister – who had just started Grade 8 – had both been taken out of school. We were to be home schooled, and this had severe consequences. We embarked on a journey of spiritual discovery as a family. We went from conservative beliefs to extreme charismatic in a few years. We became part of a rather strange religious community where people started calling me a prophet. I was just a boy. This was dangerous. My normal interests came under scrutiny. My interest in cars was criticized for being a distraction from my calling. By the time I was 10 years old I dismissed all of my best friends. They were intent on being cool and following trends, while I had a mission, and couldn’t let myself be distracted by them. As mad as it may have been, I didn’t know better, I was committed. The following 6 years were to be defined by regular breakdowns, and problematically alternative development relative to my peers. The breakdowns were so regular that it became normal. They were amplified by the endless stream of ideas my mind kept generating. Ideas I didn’t know how to manage – which ones to dismiss and which ones to act on. There have always been so many, and I knew it would be impossible to get to all of them. Anxiety set in as I mourned the unborn babies of an overly fertile mind. Time is not my friend, and there is precious little I can do about it. Time and time again I sat on the floor with tear soaked sleeves, trying to gather the pieces that formed the last iteration of me. That and cleaning up all the snot that came with it. I was deeply alone. The pain didn’t make sense often enough. The explanations weren’t clear enough.

I had better be clear that I’m not retrospectively conflating rightful punishment with emotional disintegration. I did my fair share of naughty things and got due punishment for them. Life is simple enough a game to tell the difference between the basic rules and the grey areas where our mandate simply starts to dissolve into strange incoherence.

By year 13, a new family entered my life. They are now my family too. But for the first while I was driven to save these godless people. That was until I realized, if anyone was to be saved it would be me, which is what they are here for. They changed my life, saved me from an outcome I’d rather not consider. In a sense I owe my life to them, a piece to each one of them. They never needed me, but I needed them, badly, and they never faltered. I could only hope to be a little more like them one day. However, I was to walk further into the darkness. By year 15 I could no longer take the destructive cycle that life had become. My older sister had her own reaction to it and made her share of catastrophic mistakes. In the light of that I couldn’t allow myself to be a burden, or give any leverage to a family I no longer trusted. I had enough of bearing the guilt for making our family vulnerable to evil attacks by neglecting my relationship with god. I couldn’t stand the notion of being responsible for the imminent threat of us losing our house and all our possessions. The religious systems that governed our lives were full of valuable truths that nobody seemed disciplined enough to adhere to. It wasn’t enough to solve our problems, that much became clear. Slowly my faith disintegrated, until I started to pull it apart. The loneliness inside only grew. There were big problems to solve, so many of them! And nobody was doing anything about it. So I would.

Depression had already seeped in through the cracks in my mind. I had already rejected any notion of being special, gifted or god ordained. Such notions disgusted me, and they have played their own filthy role in marring my faculties. It was me against dark forces that were soon to become rapidly devoured by a new beast. This time one of my own making.
Gradually I learned how to redirect the streams of data flowing in. I had no choice but to process it as best I can. Obsessively I took down one problem after the other, at least in my mind – until I could find a way to implement solutions from what I’ve learned. I used to have a speech impediment that manifested as a kind of stutter. It was as though 5 things were steeped together at the threshold of my mind, and whenever a relevant conversation took place they would want to come out all at once, and I simply didn’t know how to let them out. If they were ideas related to something I felt strongly about it only put more pressure on this mechanism, rendering me more useless than before. I recognized the same thing in my mother one day and knew, if I didn’t do something about it ASAP I would be screwed. It was immensely frustrating! If I get confronted about a personal matter it still happens. Before it reaches my mouth speech jams up and shuts off.

My little beast would grow. Eating any and all information it could in aid of solving the problems that seemed most pressing. I still didn’t have good control over it, but it was better than the pure onslaught of the past. I could use it, sometimes rather effectively. Soon I learned that part of my condition was due to an excessive amount of empathy. Something to do with an over active set of mirror neurons that inevitably capture more data from others wherever it gets the chance. More than one would normally say is necessary. I began to write down emotionally charged thoughts to purge them from the system in a sense. It helps a lot to keep me from going insane and act irrationally. Times when I neglect this practice the difference becomes evident. Beyond this I hadn’t the makings of a particularly healthy lifestyle. I drifted deeper into depression, and have since become very comfortable with notions of death and self annihilation.

Going back in time, me and my home schooled friends had a good time together. Aware of our strange position relative to the rest of society we naturally tried to justify it. We looked at school kids, especially all the rich kids in the gated communities, following all the trends, giving in to peer pressure, it offered useful contrast. We mocked them, and we took pity on them. We felt they were poor in spirit. They could have all those things, all those services at their disposal, but they didn’t know the joy of a basic life. It was like they represented the dark side, where there was no moral discipline, no internal compass to take them on their unique trajectories. They looked like a homogeneous crowd.
We painted our own houses. We did our own cleaning. We did our own gardening and planted our own trees. We played with simple toys and swam in rivers and dams. We made our own fires and made our own food. We built our own toys out of scrap. We played out in the fields and the streets from morning till the stars were out. We rode around on our shitty bicycles that we fixed ourselves until the bats came out and parents started calling us in for supper. Days were spent living outside, covering each other in clay, catching crabs, building new ant colonies, shooting at each other with slingshots and baking crappy bread in a tiny oven we built. We had chickens and ducks and rabbits and geese, we were in touch with nature and it’s things!
At some point I realized what peril lies in generalizations, and that all the things we thought of these school kids and rich kids weren’t necessarily true. As my days grew darker in isolation I began to wish that I could rather be one of them. A normal kid, someone who fits in. Someone with friends and trends. My fun days were gone, I had pushed my friends away, and I couldn’t just be a kid anymore.

I got a job at 16 and botched my final exams. Started saving money so that I could slowly sever myself from a household that didn’t offer the lifestyle I knew I needed. Things grew darker still, and by the time suicide wasn’t a romanticized fantasy anymore and became a practical exit from vague and inexplicable suffering, I turned. I had to change things. I was about to sever my brain stem by using the aid of gravity. It was important to ensure that the wood drill bit I had picked would go in all the way and finish the job. I didn’t shave my hair or anything, I was veritably numb, and nothing mattered anymore. I put my head down, and as the hairs in the back of my head twisted around the drill bit, and I could feel it enter my skin a rather comically timed life affirming notion entered my consciousness. “This is suffering. It’s an utter drag. To what end? Just nothing? Just.. death? If I’m to suffer it might as well be to a positive end. Let some purpose come of it!”
And with that rather pragmatic, utilitarian notion I pulled myself together and vowed to change as much of my life as I can afford.

I stayed on for a few more years and saved enough money to move to the Western Cape. There I was to integrate myself with society. Learn how to be social with my peers. Make friends. Negate the ever haunting loneliness. I thought it through and my plans worked. They did exactly what they were designed to. My little beast had become most useful. But the darkness wasn’t over. The little beast was the only thing I trusted. It had taken me places I wouldn’t otherwise have gone! But I was still too far from others. Isolated in a mind fortress, wrecked by ideas that came to rule my world. The beast was still preoccupied with notions of quality. It had been programmed with idealism at the core, and I started to doubt in it. With one hand still holding on to old parts and one hand opening up to help from other people, I made myself vulnerable in a way I hadn’t been before. I revisited my failed formal education. It ended in what people like to call an existential crisis. It wasn’t good. I did damage to things in places I really never wanted to. Desperation is an ugly thing. So I let go from the old parts and walked away from a self I had envisioned and tried to build on for years. “Who am I to want such high standards? I can’t offer much value to anyone! So why try and coax it from others?” I began to feel that my purity had not yet been sufficiently compromised to effectively level myself with normal others. I had not yet employed sufficient spontaneity and impulsive behaviour to properly and finally break the mold I was set in. Enough of the calculation! Enough of all the weighing of odds. Enough thinking and rethinking!

I moved back home. I could be of some use there, and maybe start something new. Exciting new events began to transpire, and soon, I was presented with a door to the dark side. I stepped through. My senses were indulged like never before. I had found something very specific that I had been searching for in a person. Suddenly old instincts kicked back in and tried to calculate a reasonable route through this cloud I entered. Visibility was poor, and I resolved to ‘just go with it’. It felt good. Very good.
It wasn’t long before I could see that many of the criticisms we had against the dark side held some merit. Perhaps not for all, but definitely for some. It doesn’t take the fall of a whole demographic to create a stereotypical tragedy. Rather, some people will come out of the dark side just fine. It is in the ones that bear the brunt of it’s downsides where the tragedy crystallizes. And that matters a lot.

My heart busted open and pieces of it started gravitating toward this person who now ushered in a new era of my existence. My lack of inhibition let the tentacles loose and they latched on to their new subject. Data started flowing in and soon, I was immersed. I didn’t keep conscious track of this shift in paradigm. A rather irresponsible thing to do, considering that I still had this beast inside just waiting for more data to eat. Freeing up the system that feeds it is an undeniable risk! But I did it. I went in, full steam. It tore through this person’s life without mercy. Dislodging whatever it could find. Every vestige of her life on the dark side would be illuminated and dismantled. I agitated and stirred without relent. It’s a fucking wonder she didn’t pull the brakes and get the hell out of this storm raging through the deceptively calm fields of her existence. She stayed.
Soon she became subsumed within me. My entire being is now drenched with her essence.

Meanwhile time was passing in an ever more consequential way. We are growing older in a sense that matters more than our young minds have hitherto accommodated. Something most of us are blind to until it hits. Along with it comes a set of priorities that appear to be of biological origin. It exists independent from and irrespective of our conscious designs. Reality was catching up with me and it rapidly became wholly unreasonable to persist with such self destructive, short sighted endeavors as the ones that now consumed my world. More of this romantic child inside has to die. A new responsible agent needs to be born. One that exhibits the grit life requires for an individual to become a self sustained member of society. The last 2 years caused the most beautiful, wonderful growth. It established something that I will gladly give my life for! Any day. Every day. It is the misfortune of my conduct and stubbornness that I realized it a little late. It has been quite the soul shaking reality check.

My anxiety is back. With every passing hour I can feel time breathing down my neck, mocking me. It hurts dimensions more than it ever did! As if a cosmic entity stands ready, kicking me in the gut to wake me up every morning. Kicking me in the gut to make sure I understand, and a spare kick every now and then to remind me of all the things I have to repair and turn away from. I cannot do things fast enough! I’ve exhausted my favour. Now I get to shut the fuck up and mind my own business. Run, run, and keep running. Maybe I will catch up. Maybe one day I’ll hold the hand my soul knows back to front. If I’m worth a shot, then this new dream is worth a shot. But until dreams come true, I’ll be running, barefoot, being silly.