Being saddled with mental illness ain’t fair. Life isn’t fair, never was. It’s what we do on the trail that counts. Sometimes all the lines alongside that trail get smudged or covered over. It’s part of the deal. Finding one’s path, being brave enough to make another trail, well that’s the hardest part, isn’t it? And also not fair. There’s no way to know what you’re getting yourself into. And so, you have to pay for mistakes and you have to endure mistreatment.
Part of life.
Ain’t that right?
But what if you’re an asshole, and you know you didn’t get that way on your own? What if you were made into one, like something Victor Frankenstein wouldn’t even dare face, once the deed was done?
And what if, after escaping from the lab, you keep on being an asshole, because that’s all you really know?
And what happens when you’re such an asshole that you end up hating yourself? What if you can be treated by a shrink, but need counseling and you can’t get it, and every day you just hate yourself more, in spite of believing that some people might actually love you, and most of all, God in heaven?
What happens when that’s just not enough?
I can’t answer things like that. I’m sorry that nobody can answer those kinds of questions, and that untold numbers of people have died by their own hand because no one doctor, no cocktail of medicine, nothing, absolutely nothing can help everyone. And there’s a book, euphemistically called the “bible” of psychological disorders, and every year some point or other gets argued over, and some maladies of the mind have been removed or recategorized because too many people claim disabling disorders. The political right hates that.
I haven’t written much about this, but this summer I haven’t written much of anything.
This certainly ain’t been because I was busy.
I think I hated myself so much that it caused, and is still causing, a different person than who I was to take over.
Still a friendly neighbor, still kind of heart, and still sympathetic, but…someone…different.
In some ways tougher, more callous about evil jerkoffs, wishing I could fuck them up for hurting others.
In other ways, dissociated from other things I hated about myself.
I just changed the path I was on. I didn’t do it consciously or deliberately; I just became someone else. This probably is because of a dissociative personality break. Plus, I’d have to add a bit of a psychotic break as well. The process began when my daughter died. It accelerated when my son died. It became a matter of survival: I could kill myself or be someone I could like, if only a little bit.
I believe it’s still in progress. Personality changes don’t just exist in made-for-TV movies of the 1970s. They’re all too real.
When I began to believe that I had been lied to and preached at, I said things that caused a friend to “unfriend” me in real life. Months later neither he nor his wife speak to me. Not even so much as a “hello”. This doesn’t hurt me; I had it coming. And I learned a new lesson.
That lesson is, not even neighbors who are Christians and pastors want anything to do with a cruel man.
I want to say that I won’t let it happen again. We both know it’d be a lie.
The new me tries to sleep at night now. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This me has a deepening and pervasive southern accent. It was always there; my Maryland experience just got me to mask it with what others sounded like. I can’t make it go away, nor do I want to even try because it’s useless. Before we reach the end of the trail, we always end up back where we began. If not in location, then perhaps in our battered breasts and stricken minds.
I think maybe that’s okay.
But I’m still an asshole.
Memoirs of an American Asshole 