Beltway Psychic Broods Bitterly upon the Finale of a Frigid Year

I doubt any of my followers/fans/catfishing specops stalkers realize how intricate my antipathy to social media actually is. I am not, by nature, an anti-social person. I earned my aversion the hard way.

Connecting almost always leaves me cold. And yet, this algid response has its genesis in a conscious choice. I am much too easily moved by the emotions of others. I feel their feels without even wanting to. It's strongest for people I am closest to -- my husband and my daughters -- but it can happen with almost anyone. It's not reliable, but it's real; by which I mean it gives me statistically unlikely results even though I don't believe in any explanation for it.

I'm an empath. Which is not to say I'm a nice person. One of the (obviously not clinical) tests I perform is to focus my attention on another human in a public place. Someone I can see, who cannot see me. I focus my rage and fear at them. More often than not, I make them uneasy.

Deeply unethical if you think about it, yes?

I'm a broken being. Sure, all of us are. Sanity -- peace -- is an illusion people share. The main difference between me and Them has always been that I never shared it.

Increasingly, as America collapses, humans are shifting towards my perspective.

I don't know how to deal with this.

Redux

I recently found myself making what was, for me, a rare decision: deleting an entire thread on my Facebook timeline, due to the toxicity spiraling among some of my relatives and friends.

I’m no stranger to toxicity. There is much that is toxic in me. My social ethics are unrefined, little more than a basic rubric: try to be more generous to others than I am to myself.

Yes, I’m aware that this ethos may be construed as masochistic. But the reasoning behind it makes as much sense as anything else. When I’m hurt, it is always because I am the only one who can. No one else on this planet is allowed to damage me. I’m nobody’s fucking victim.

I feel an ephemeral sense of guilt for abrogating my friends’ 1st Amendment rights. I’ve been working on guilt lately; I think it’s a trap, a social construct with good intentions that doesn’t actually produce good results. I am in no way a no-platforming advocate; and yet, this was all happening on my timeline, my very own garden patch in the moral wilderness. I was deep in my downstate, jaded not-quite-close-enough to numb.

For anyone who’s followed my posts or read my blog, the context should be obvious: #metoo.

Very likely, my willingness to be hurt derives from childhood sexual abuse. The traumatic experiences of my childhood automatically confer upon me unquestionable victim status. WHICH I EMPHATICALLY REJECT. I was damaged before I could formulate any rational response. My father honestly believed that being cruel to a child would make it stronger. He channeled Nietzsche without ever actually reading the bastard. (They shared syphilis though). And, to be fair -- I did emerge stronger than I might have otherwise. Just not in any way he envisioned, or was even capable of comprehending. Very early in my life, I cracked. I broke. There is great strength (power) along faultlines. But it’s an unpredictable strength, unwelcome, chaotic. I saw -- and eventually said -- so many things I wasn’t supposed to.

All this is why I’m so conflicted when I see women coming out everywhere with #metoo. I always knew you were there. But I have never expected sympathy or sisterhood from any of you. I don’t even know how to process those concepts. And the cynical, anarchist side of me sneers at your addiction to the trending norm. I have spent decades brazenly sharing the brutal truths of my life. Not to acquire sympathy (as I’ve said, I can barely stand it) -- but to prove to myself that I am not a coward. Not a victim.

I’m not posting this to attack anyone. As a natural empath, dissociated from society -- a survivor with hypervigilance and sensory processing disorder… I could be SO much more evil than I am. If I gave in to the temptation to channel the vengeance of the victim.

I refuse that path too. Yes, I listen to my intuition. I’ve spent decades training my conscious mind to communicate with my subconscious, struggling to understand an unruly talent for psychological insight. Skepticism and self-awareness have been true friends. Free will isn’t a blessing bestowed upon you at conception by a benevolent omniscience. It’s a skill that must be learned. An achievement that must be earned.

Which isn’t to say that those who have acquired it (to whatever degree) are superior, objectively, to those who haven’t. People who have mastered auto mechanics or Latin or football or astrophysics or waitressing are not morally superior to those who haven’t. We are all thrust into being without consideration of our will, into arbitrary circumstance. Radical contingency. I figure the best response to this (absurdly shitty) deal is universal compassion.

How I Failed To Be Carrie

Millington Central High School, 1989-1993. Home of the Trojans. Adolescent educational center of mid-Southern Americans: an unconventional admixture of Navy brats, the rural poor, and bused-in African-American youth.

I was an outlier, in so many ways. My parents were impoverished Navy brats whose idiotic conservative worldview ineluctably encouraged me to sympathize with "other" demographics. The story would have ended there, except for the fact that I was born too sensitive for my own good. So sharp I cut myself, time after time.

My firstborn daughter Eris will be starting her senior year at Robinson Secondary School next week. I gave birth to her when I was the same age my bipolar mother gave birth to me.

I was Eris's age when I first read Stephen King. You have to realize, I was a "gifted" student -- I took every AP class my high school offered. All 3 of them. I was an absurd intellectual snob who only indulged pop culture because of the soul-destroying pre-Internet information desert.

SO. Senior year, rural TN, 1993. Less than a month before Homecoming. Elite football quarterback found himself disgraced due to personal scandal: according to all & sundry, he had physically struck his girlfriend, precipitating a scandalous, dramatic breakup.

Quarterback boy happened to be in my Econ class. He actually talked to me. That year, 1992-93, was the frigging height of my social life ever -- everyone was aware that I'd ranked high on national math tests, aced the SAT, and was applying to Stanford, Harvard & Yale*.

I wasn't even surprised when the football star, who'd lost his status in a too-soon-maybe #MeToo moment, decided he had nothing to lose by asking the genius chubby chick to the dance.

Even now, 25 years later, my hypnagogic half-dreaming mind contrives occasional hallucinations of killing him -- and everyone else -- at Senior Prom. Fortunately for the world, I have excellent impulse control. I just said no to bloody vengeance.

That moment of generosity has colored all my life choices ever since.





*Thank DISCORDIA I wasn't accepted; high-status universities are fucking full of fratboy rapists, after all.

Cromwell: A Cautionary Tale of Love and Loss

Date: Autumn, 1995. Physical place(s): Northwestern University, Evanston IL; UVA, Charlottesville VA. Ethereal location: alt.angst, Usenet.

The year I ventured past my comfort zone into cyberspace.

Free internet access and an email address were complimentary perks associated with my acceptance into one of the nation's top colleges, the moment I registered as a freshman in 1993. This was back in the days when dialup AOL charged by the hour. Back then, I was a neo-Luddite -- opposed to technology on sheer principle, out of a visceral mistrust of power: a consequence of my parents' miscalculations raising me. It took me two full years of spiraling despair to achieve the desperate courage to apply for my email address. To seek out new life, new civilizations. To boldly go...

Split infinitives aside, eventually I decided that being aggressively alone did not necessarily constitute a virtue. I tuned in, turned on... but felt no obligation to drop out. I did, however, find myself connecting with a VERY weird group of people.

I'd known, from early childhood, that I was irrevocably weird. My mother was bipolar, my father was an abusive drunk. My brother has heard the voice of GOD telling him to kill his son. Schizophrenia is poorly understood by humanity generally, but I suspect (as a skeptic) that it is an extreme version of our innate ability to recognize patterns, coupled with a yearning for meaning which is rooted in the fact that our consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. We all want to believe we are real, that we have meaning independent of anything we ourselves create. 

So. In 1995 I signed up. I sought out the other weirdos. I found alt.angst.

I shared my story, for the first time ever. I crafted poetry that still blinds me with its truth. I told the truth, despite every instinct telling me I shouldn't. Couldn't. I was so deep in despair, I didn't see anything else. Lies were so utterly worthless; I knew that, whether or not I knew anything. 

Cromwell came to me as a savior. He came to me in pain and sorrow, a victim of the American South and its Puritanical worldview. He came to me as a soulmate, as a light in August, as William Faulkner and Walker Percy. I shared hours and hours of expensive phone-time with this young man, David Bjorlin, who convinced himself I was the semi-schizo heroine of The Second Coming.

What a letdown. What a disappointment! For him. When I spent my father's borrowed money to meet him in 1996. I was 5 foot 9, and a size 14.

It took me more than a decade to realize that being too short is the equivalent, in males, of being too fat in a woman. All I saw was his all-too-explicable rejection. It never registered for me when David Perry told me that Cromwell told him, "She was bigger than me, what can I say?" All I could register was that I was wrong. Unfit.

I'm posting this, ostensibly, as a cautionary tale. Against seeking soulmates in cyberspace. People are weak. They are shallow, not by inclination, but by design. The design of the ruling class. 

None of us deserve to be pawns in class warfare! 

It IS possible to elude. To avoid. To circumvent! The paradigm. It is possible to reject those who seek to program you. But you'll never achieve that following the path of Cromwell. Truth is messy. It's complex. It's not an ideology. It's the fucking reality behind your perception, and there are (potentially) as many perceptions as there are perceivers. JUDGE YOUR FELLOW HUMANS AT YOUR PERIL.

How Does Your Light Shine, In the Halls of Shambala?

Spring Equinox, 1975. Doctors told my mother I was a dead thing in my mother's womb.

Susan Phyllis Keir Faucher was a reluctant flower-child hippie in mid-70's Memphis, TN. Her father, Stephen Duncan Keir, was a WWII veteran officer who had volunteered to venture into Vietnam. Susan's classmates at Millington Central High School had denigrated her as the daughter of a collaborator. A daughter of The Man. Peer pressure led her to personal drug experimentation, which led her to a "rehab facility," where she met William Franklin Faucher. Like her, Bill was the son of a Naval Air Force veteran. His family were lower-class; his father never achieved officer status. Both families were children of the Great Depression, and in terms of 70's socioeconomics -- the rehab-clinic military connection was more than enough to constitute a fresh start. A new beginning.

"Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain

With the rain in Shambala
Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame
With the rain in Shambala

Ah, ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Everyone is helpful, everyone is kind
On the road to Shambala
Everyone is lucky, everyone is so kind
On the road to Shambala

Ah, ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

How does your light shine, in the halls of Shambala?"

I was born in the spring of 1975. Family lore tells me my father cried that day, because my mom had had 4 previous miscarriages. I've no evidence of this, but it makes sense, given her history & lifestyle. Susan was the child of a Yankee military father and a Southern belle mother. She was born in 1951 on a military base at Chincoteague, VA (famously home of feral horses). A crucial part of her adolescence was spent at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.


My father (who may or may not have raped me) was born in San Diego, CA in 1953. His father's (unknown) people came from Orange County, Massachusetts. His mother's came from rural TN. Somehow, Bill & Susan ended up in the same rehab clinic in Memphis in 1974. Just in time to fall in love... and merge to make ME.


I was a dead thing in Susan's womb, corrupt and weak. I should never have been born. Against all odds, I stole my first breath on 23 May, 1975. Bill and Susan wept.


I am sharing this to explain what an improbably angry hippie I am. Poverty tends to nix IQ scores. Performance is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status. But there are exceptions.

I myself am "exceptional."

I consciously chose (free will? maybe?) to mate with an exception. Therefore, my offspring are even more consciously exceptional, even more self-aware, than I am. I'd caution you, except I'm hoping they'll take you all UNAWARE.

Why I Married Sheldon Cooper

Well, okay. Not literally. Sheldon Cooper is a fictional character, and while I myself am likely an illusion, my empirical husband almost certainly exists. The parallels between my darling homunculus (a pet name for him, which I posted online years before Penny used it for Leonard) and the character of Sheldon will be obvious to anyone who has watched the show and encountered Jonah Thomas online. Obvious at a glance -- to me suspiciously obvious, even eerie -- including details like Jonah's published plan to solve the conflict in the Middle East, which Sheldon also offers in "The Jerusalem Duality."

(As a person whose family history includes bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, I must take care when confronting coincidences. I don't have the luxury of the layman, whose magical thinking passes unnoticed, deemed harmless. My creativity is real and it has claws.)

Nevertheless. It doesn't take much of a mental leap to see similarities between "high-functioning" people on the Spectrum.

People like my husband -- people like Sheldon and Sherlock -- are almost always portrayed in fiction as outside the realm of normal human intercourse. Their relationships with others are characteristically few and atypical. There is a recurring motif of insensitivity, as if rationality is somehow incompatible with empathy. One cannot avoid the implication that such a person could never connect with someone who is emotionally vulnerable.

In my experience, the truth is utterly the opposite.

I was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused as a child. As a toddler I learned -- instinctively -- to trust no one. No one at all. As a naturally emotional individual, I secretly yearned to be appreciated and understood, but the extreme wariness I acquired from my dysfunctional parents prevented me from connecting with anyone -- until I encountered the internet.

For all its flaws, the internet is a place where strangers can meet safely. Strange people who would never have connected with one another in the course of ordinary "real" life. I was a mathematics student at Northwestern University when I first encountered the man I would marry: he was trolling the Usenet group alt.angst, a place I posted prose poetry.

(My children still can't overcome their incredulity that I married an internet troll.)

Why did I marry him? Why have I remained his partner for almost 18 years?

The answer lies embedded within the theme of this blog: "Reflections on the Myth of Sanity." Assertion: no modern human can claim sanity. On one level or another, we are all insane. Human intellectual achievement has eclipsed our biological evolution. Our brains can't cope with what we do to ourselves on a daily basis. Our brains lie to us all the time. My hypothesis is that people with "Asperger's syndrome" exhibit superior objective clarity to those who prefer self-delusion (which includes almost everyone, even myself).

Therefore I submit, as a pragmatic suggestion -- that persons who have been abused should seek out persons who fall within the Spectrum. These people can be trusted where others cannot. They will not soften their words to comfort you, which means you will have to be strong; nevertheless, they will not casually lie to you. They will not manipulate you. My Asperger's husband actually enjoys sex more than I do. Yet he is okay with my boundaries; he knows that my aversion to physical intimacy has nothing to do with him personally.

Sex & Self: Identity and the Illusion of Agency

For a long time now, I have puzzled over the question of why humans are so messed up about sex. Why is human sexuality everywhere so fraught with shame, denial, even loathing? Why do human societies impose so many rules on acts of procreation and/or pleasure? No other species on this planet behaves as  self-conflictedly, as weirdly, as we do when it comes to sex.

Our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees, exist in two forms; two distinct subspecies of the genus Pan: "regular" chimpanzees and the bonobos. Separated by the formation of the Congo River around 2 million years ago, these subspecies are similar physically (99.6% identical DNA) but differ drastically in their social behavior. Especially when it comes to sex. Chimpanzees are led by an "alpha male" and maintain social order through aggression; bonobos are matriarchal, far less aggressive, and actively keep peace via sex.

Both chimpanzees and bonobos are highly intelligent social species. Both have evolved a functioning social structure. In terms of the physical manifestations of sexuality, humans are more similar to bonobos in that human female fertility is "hidden" -- there is no obvious physical change that signals a human female's fertility. Yet our behavior more closely resembles that of chimpanzees.

The discipline of evolutionary psychology is relatively new. And (for obvious reasons) subject to controversy. I am a mere amateur, a layperson curious about the human condition. Therefore my musings are offered freely, bearing no real weight.

Ancestral humans diverged from chimpanzees somewhere between 13 and 4 million years ago. Specifics are difficult to measure given that the fossil record is so scant. Nevertheless, it is manifest that modern human brains are ~3x larger than those of our earliest human-like ancestors. Our cognitive abilities, our capacity for reason, have eclipsed every other trait we possess.

(I have a personal theory that intelligence has evolved in almost every phyla -- from slime molds to plants to octopus to birds to elephants and dolphins. Which is neither here nor there, with respect to my point in this post.. yet I find it telling that our "efforts" to engage intellectually with other species mostly have involved great apes).

MY THEORY: our brilliant brains have, inadvertently, proved to be our downfall. Excessive self-awareness is too painful to contemplate for the vast majority of human beings. We fear our lack of free will, our helplessness in the face of who we are. We invent stories that grant us agency where none honestly exists.

I was sexually and emotionally abused as a child. Those experiences stripped from me a basic trust that most people take for granted. Like Cassandra, I see -- so clearly -- disturbing truths. Where others cannot. I see what we don't want to see.

For example: sexual attraction is not something we necessarily choose. I see it as being like breathing. A semi-autonomous reflex. You can control your breathing to an extent; you can even consciously stop breathing for a time. Yet ultimately, breathing will happen (if physically possible) regardless of your will.

My primary evidence for this is anecdotal. I think it bothers us. Seriously. That we do not actually choose our attractions. I have never been able to enjoy sexual intimacy. Even kissing leaves me cold. I have a libido but it is only useful in terms of fantasy; I simply can't enjoy normal sex, despite being partnered with someone I completely trust. I was imprinted wrong.

Despite my active dedication to self-awareness and logic, it's been difficult for me to accept the fact. That I am sexually broken, through no fault of my own. My schizophrenic brother believes a literal demon inhabited the house we grew up in. It's hard for me to deny his claims when I know his "madness" comes from the same place as my creativity. It's a matter of sensing patterns -- Starbuck's pebbles. I see my conscious, at-cause self as a person in the ocean: I have the power to swim, but the ocean is inevitably bigger than me. Its currents will pull against me. Things living in it will try to consume me. I am at an automatic disadvantage; claiming I'm not can only harm me.

St. Jennifer-of-the-Knife Groks the Zeitgeist

I think the thing that bothers me most about the farcical travesty of this Inauguration Day is how personal it feels. I am a reluctant citizen, inclined by nature and nurture to regard with skepticism the social contracts* so cherished by those who portray themselves responsible adults. My parents, though they possessed strong political views, never voted, and did little to inculcate within me anything resembling a sense of civic duty. My father, especially, held to the opinion that voting was pointless, because everything was rigged.
If you want to know what my father was like, think Archie Bunker, just a little more drunk and abusive. Maybe a little smarter, probably a little less ethical. It's the intelligence and lack of ethics that concern me here and now. Passed down as they were, from him to myself.

If I was the person I was supposed to be. If I was the person my father tried to teach me to be. I would be delirious with delight right now. Ecstatic at the overturning of an age of corruption. Giddy with seraphic glee, I would welcome this turning of tables, which I had predicted from the moment Donald Trump announced his candidacy.

Alas. While the prediction was precise, my sentiments are.. dubious? Unconscionable would be a better word, and yet... I will not deplore that I feel the way I feel.

It's taken me a long time to acknowledge. To accept. That feelings are valid, in and of themselves. Right or wrong, they are real and have to be faced. It's been difficult for me to come to terms with the truth that emotion and logic are both so strong inside me, and that they in no way negate one another. I've found no convenient cancellation,  so perforce I face the paradoxical predicament that is self-awareness.

As I look at our nation, at the choices we've faced during this past year, I see.... myself, flinching from a mirror. In one hand, a shard of glass. Poised to slice the other hand's palm.

As a veteran of self-loathing, I assure you: the reason matters not. Excuses are empty. What matters is that something's wrong, Anything's wrong, everything's wrong. I am wrong, and my penance will purge. Will make this right.

Whether we admit it or not, we are one people. One people, forged from conflicting fires. Fires coruscating with strange colors which all eyes may not see. Pristine purity and unscrupulous avarice are no more incommensurate than fierce compassion and relentless reason, after all.

We are one people and we hate what we are.

So much of history remains untaught. So many voices remain unheard. We see the same world, from more perspectives than there are stars in the sky. It's no wonder (to me) that we destroy ourselves, again and again. I wish I could have warned you in time. I wish you would have listened. But I was brought up to believe that I'll never be believed.

*But really, who wouldn't be skeptical of the very concept of social contracts, after learning how one of the most ardent and enlightened proponents of such spent a large part of his career attacking colleagues in an attempt to square the circle? What a tyger burning bright, in the forests of the night!