Early

I started therapy, describing my life with one word – Anguish.

It’s not a word that’s used too often these days. Sounds kind of archaic, speaking of a sensibility that no longer exists. Or, maybe, they use something else in its place. I wouldn’t know. Or if I do, I don’t care.

I recognized the black hole inside of me very early on. When I was seven? Perhaps. That number has become special to me. It was also the time when that consciousness (or was it hostile awareness?) became overwhelmingly palpable. It was as if I had fractured into a million pieces, each of who had a microscope focussed on the nothing* that was I.

I’ve spent most of my life – that I can remember – trying to escape this unremitting gaze of a shattered self. It had turned in on itself. Something that should have been solid at the core manifested as a panopticon on the shell around a void.

Raw, naked and open – to anyone’s gaze – was the sense that taught me to lie, very early on. I suppose healthy people lie for good, pragmatic and sensible reasons. I did – to shield my non-existent self from this obsessive scrutiny and the oppressive sense of being transparent to everyone. I must have hoped that I would learn to lie to myself. I never could.

Privacy wasn’t a notion I was acquainted with. Even when alone, it transformed into a sense of guilt and shame – as if I were hiding. The why/what was immaterial. I didn’t even know who I was hiding from. But I did, often. Or tried to. The sense of needing to hide – constantly – was oppressive. Enough.

Trying to find foxholes for myself. From my self.

In a sense, I was trying to escape me.

PS: Try to think of or imagine nothing. If your mind doesn’t boggle, you’re doing it wrong.