Me, myself, and saving the world.
Monday, August 31st, 2009I don’t want a lover. The fact that I do not want a lover makes me angry. And as I review some past would-be lovers—people who threatened me with intimacy in addition to sex—I see that this has always been the case. In the past, I have pursued sex with extremely attractive young men to the exclusion of intimacy. Sex—the pretense of intimacy—took the place of the genuine article. Intimacy? Who needs it? I don’t want a lover.
This state of affairs (no pun intended) does not immunize me against loneliness. Indeed, considering all the risks involved in intimacy, if we could discard loneliness, then we would have no motivation to risk intimacy. Loneliness is a gift. Like hunger. Without hunger, we would starve to death without ever knowing what was wrong. And so it is with loneliness; it drives us to the essential.
We can survive on very little. I learned this when I first abstained from overeating thirty years ago. Then, I achieved a balance between a little hunger and a little food. Hunger, like loneliness, can never be banished. They both are ever-present, as they should be. They are not negative. They are not our enemy. But it is folly to pander to them. Excess is just another means of avoidance. If a child complains to his overwhelmed mother that he is too hot, throwing him overboard into the sea a thousand feet deep is excessive, and constitutes avoidance. On the other hand, finding a shady place on deck for him to rest, and gently mopping his brow with a cool cloth is far less extreme, and far more intimate.
I have discovered that the opposite of intimacy is avoidance. Therefore, like hunger urges me to eat, loneliness urges me to stop avoiding. Now, this idea of pursuing non-avoidance can be as slippery as a peeled grape. For example, confronting strangers in the street would be a type of non-avoidance, but it is, at best, a clumsy way to approach intimacy. Rather like attempting a tooth extraction using a baseball bat.
Long ago, I was told, and recognized intuitively, that a significant part of loneliness is isolation from oneself. If one is fragmented and alienated from oneself, one has no route to the other. This gets very existential-ey and bullshit-ey sounding, but experience bears it out as truth; it is only through the self that we touch another. Likewise, self is the conduit through which others touch us. Therefore, isolation from others, for whatever reason—past trauma, anxiety, fear—is most effectively accomplished by isolation from self. Cut-off the conduit, and I cut off all the perceived threats from others. I am as safe as a bug in a rug. Only I’m lonely.
Now, I can examine you quite closely. I can inhale your scent from the surface of your skin. I can explore the texture of your lips with my own. I can count your eyelashes from an inch away. Focusing on you is easy, but this focal point on the self is making me kind of cross-eyed. I can get close to you, but how do I get close to me?
Robert Ericson, a therapist who conducts a recovery group in Worcester for male survivors of sexual child abuse, says “In order to survive, the child has this sort of vertical splitting in the ego where they compartmentalize and seal off aspects of the self.” This fracturing in the self-structure is probably the most difficult damage to heal, says Ericson, and continues to cripple the survivor decades after the abuse has ended. He lists some problems which typically affect victims, “…a predisposition to all kinds of substance abuse, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, inability to trust, problems in relationships and intimacy, sexual dysfunction…” Victims are not only unable to trust others, he says, but unable to trust themselves – their own judgments and instincts.
That’s from an article I wrote, published fifteen years ago. What I have been doing since then is ignoring what I wrote.
Avoidance is an unrelenting erosion of awareness, like the sea against the shore. Giving in is easy. Fighting that tide is infinitely difficult, but the reward is great. The entire world has been lost to me because my contact to everything, through the self, has been broken. Reuniting with this thing I call ‘the self’ will result in nothing less than saving the entire world.