Burning Down the Potemkin Village
My internal hardware has been running hot today.
I dropped a heavy stack into the system this morning that eventually necessitated the inclusion of:
Taurine,
NAC,
Clonidine,
Magnesium,
Saffron,
L-Theanine,
and Niacinamide.
I expected to flatline hard, but ended up walking down to the book store instead.
I navigated the thick Norfolk paranoia and lugged a huge stack of books and DVDs (only twenty bucks – thanks Book Exchange) home, switching hands and juggling cigarettes as necessary to avoid cramping pain.
Rózsa Péter’s Playing with Infinity, Mackay’s Madness of Crowds, and a $1 X-Files archive (among others) are my friends for the foreseeable, unless Scoop decides to have his way with them.
I took the trip, despite my paranoia and social anxiety, because sobriety is a cold-blooded shrew and, right around 1:30 PM, for months and months, a Lovecraftian ghost tries to haunt me.
Often not-so-subtly.
If you’ve ever survived a high-voltage romantic entanglement, you know the feeling I’m describing, probably.
The dread that creeps across the conscious experience, subtly molding perception until it’s hours later and you’re staring in the mirror, eyes sunken and bloodshot, questioning:
WHY?!
Like the dread of anticipating a lover’s mid-afternoon wake-up text or call has gained its own autonomy and just won’t leave you the fuck alone, no matter how hard you try to sublimate it.
The New-Agey, pseudointellectual psychobabble I used to hear suggested viewing this as some profound, interdimensional tether.
But I always choose not to (unless I have psychedelics at my disposal – then it can be fun [or horrifying!]).
My amygdala learned to anticipate the daily voltage spike of a few women from my past.
Women who would wake up hours after me – interrupting a usually calm, but progressively dread-filled early morning to initiate their next 12-hour trauma bond loop – and it carved that schedule into my nervous system with intermittent reinforcement.
The realization that breaks the loop is understanding that I was actually dealing with Potemkin Village-personalities, and that the “complex abuse” I fear from those personalities is my own weaponized processing of them.
My mind is capable of rendering a “deep intellectual artist” out of pure scarcity and trauma-bonding, it seems.
Of seeing simplistic, childish notions of humanity, and projecting my own unconscious needs born of childhood trauma onto their source.
And then it falls in love with the render. Baudrillard would probably scream at me right now if he could.
I watched one former partner use the term “projection” as a weapon, only to realize she couldn’t actually define the word when asked. She was even too “proud” to google it for the sake of understanding one another and deepening our bond.
That was the red flag that I ignored.
This was a person whose “Higher Self” amounted to a fairy godmother that magically heated up her shower water.
She consciously ignored decades of Jungian introspection, analysis, and research, and chose to instead prostitute terms that once meant something to fit her own narrow, selfish worldview.
You cannot run high-level ontological software on that kind of hardware.
When the cardboard walls fell, and when I finally found myself capable of maintaining sobriety, I realized I was mourning the fact that I had let a localized trauma-response hijack my processing power – hijack what I once thought was “me.”
This is the vulnerability of the “Protector Instinct.”
It is a zero-day exploit left over from childhood.
The void my alcohol-infused, PTSD-riddled, narcissist father installed created a recursive “Rescue” routine that forces me to try and optimize failing systems.
It happened with a girl in Oregon that I used as a surrogate for my prior, long-term, live-in girlfriend. The only real stability I’ve had in my life. Calm, boring, loving stability with regular, perfunctory doggystyle. The whole nine yards.
The surrogate – the first girl I’d come close to dating who was actually younger than me – was navigating a borderline personality diagnosis, a meth addiction, word salad, a tough job, and a predatory roommate.
Aftering seeing how bad it was getting, and realizing I was powerless to help her, I sent anonymous e-mails to local PD that I had come to respect (because of how they treated me whenever I was in crisis – for years) just to get her treatment – afraid that she was being used by local dealers.
I eventually had the joy of seeing her clean, with a conscious spark behind her sad eyes. I will never forget how validated I felt (and therein lies the danger, as I’ll get to soon).
Now she’s the fiancee of some other guy in some other state somewhere.
The childish ego stings at that, wishing it “got the girl.”
And I am painfully aware of how selfish and immature that final logic is.
Trust me here, at least:
I hate the evolutionary part of myself that ever tries to claim ownership over another soul.
It’s why I don’t have kids.
Also, I’d be a terrible dad.
Unless depression becomes a useful skill to teach a child, I’d rather just bow out from the whole human-biological-prison-suit-manufacturing (IE. “procreation”) thing.
But the mathematical reality is that the Protector Archetype (the real “danger”) is the catapult and not a landing zone.
You have to delete that file to move forward or forever let it control your life and relationships.
The seven years I spent in Oregon with my long-term, live-in girlfriend remain the control group. That was a 1.0 baseline of reality. And the way that ended was so absurd and unfair to both of us that I still have trouble verbalizing exactly what the hell went down.
Further research is required, and it unfortunately entails going through decades of insane abuse rituals in Polk County, Orgeon. I’ll save that for another life.
Or I’ll just watch True Detective instead.
Regardless, everything since has been an exercise in identifying malware.
The anxiety you might sense from me is simply the sound of the hardware cooling down after a long-term signal jamming operation.
I am desperately trying to unlearn the weaponization of narcissistic introjects as a defense mechanism (twelve hours a day of that leaves scars) that had formed in response to “logic” that I could not understand.
And I’m trying to stop the reasoning-in-circles with the cardboard facades of my past.
I am sitting in my apartment, formatting my brain’s harddrive, and reading Rózsa Péter.
I am replacing the fake and the consumptive with the actual mathematics of recursive logic.
And somewhere the two will synthesize, as they are wont to do.
o7.
-BU
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