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.