Thu, 7 Jul 2022
Befriending the Predator
It's a funny thing, the inability to trust one's own mind. When every passing thought is suspect, or when the intrusive are indistinguishable from the desirous, one gets this uncanny sense that they are, in fact, two people—distinct in motive and disparate in sensibility. And because both inhabit the same body, sharing space with the same mind, both are confused, misappropriating the wants and needs of the other as its own. Even funnier when one becomes self-aware of the duality of one's own emotional reality.
Okay, maybe not actually that funny. But internal paradoxes are at least close to funny depending one’s sense of humor.
Regardless, I felt the presence of this duality long before I recognized it as such. I also remember the moment I caught my first glimpse of the split. I had long recognized aspects of myself, my personality, that would sometimes assert themselves and overpower me—they manifest as depressive episodes most of the time. But in this moment of first confirmed contact (consciously, at least), I saw an enemy. I saw an enemy and a predator within my own mind. An entity over which I had no conscious control and who, by all appearances, sought my demise. I saw him and we locked eyes. He knew I saw him, and I think he was glad to be finally found out—as though he wanted me to know whose handiwork I've been dealing with all these years.
Almost in the same breath as I had seen him, though, he was gone, vanishing into the recesses of my mind with an eerie parting smile. He changed his shape, shifting in form and method, but his motive was the same. And while his motive may not have waivered, something was distinctly different after that moment of first contact: I knew I wasn't alone, and not in any way one would hope.
My past recontextualized and familiar memories—wherein I once thought I was solo—suddenly revealed to me the enemy's presence. In some cases these memories were dramatic, and in others they were mundane, but in all cases, the insidious feeling that comes with the awareness of a parasitic presence permeated these newly unfamiliar and unsafe memories. I felt violated, hunted, in danger.
What follows is a lengthy excerpt from a journal entry of mine, for fuller context into what I’m describing. It has been edited for privacy and an attempt at brevity (yes, believe it or not, the original entry is more than twice as long), but all edits have been omissions rather than additions to preserve the original thought processes and leave them unencumbered by my present day understanding.
Additionally, you’ll notice an attribution to religion as the causal element, which may be largely true. However, I am no longer as convinced that religion was the prime mover here. I absolutely contend it was an exacerbating force at a minimum, but the root of this issue may be much more fundamental.
With that said, and without further commentary, here’s how I thought about that moment of first contact with the predator lurking within my mind (in my own words at the time):
I’ve always assumed everyone experienced the world in roughly the same way I do, albeit, arguably, with a little less severity. I assumed most people had that negative chatter constantly running in the background of their minds and that healthier individuals could simply tune it out better than I. [I was] swiftly disavowed…of this assumption…[and] I began to realize I had it all wrong. A crack formed. I saw myself through someone else’s eyes.
For the first time in my life, I saw how I viewed the world from a perspective not my own. I recognized it to be deeply, grievously broken in a fundamental way. I internally asked the natural next question: “Wait. Does this mean that most people don’t have a vitriolic voice in the back of their minds telling them how awful and worthless they are all the time?”
[I was told] the answer was no, most people don’t have that. I saw myself with compassion, true, honest compassion, which is something I have no prior memory of feeling toward myself.
Tears puddled in my eyes and streamed down my cheeks. I stared up at the ceiling…and saw my past without the jaded filter of my own personal experience. I looked back on times when I was at my lowest mentally and emotionally and I realized, again, for the first time, that I had actually been suicidal several times, I just never had a ready opportunity to end my life.
I viewed each of those moments differently this time. I saw the Grim Reaper standing behind me in each of them, and the only reason he didn’t take me was because he just happened to forget his scythe that day.
Suddenly, I wasn’t a mentally typical dude, a little sadder than most, but not, like, that much sadder. No, my mind was acutely broken in a mortally problematic way. Suddenly, I was a survivor.
Before tonight, I hadn’t understood how much mortal danger I’ve been in for a significant portion of my life. And even though I’ve never made an attempt to end my life, I’ve also had no sense of self-preservation for the better part of two and a half years.
I cried in relief. I was still alive. I could have died so many times. So goddamn many times, I could have fucking died. How often had I been on a run and crossed an intersection without even caring to verify whether it was safe to do so? How many times might I have hurt myself or worse if I’d actually had the immediate means to do so?
And as I cried, that relief quickly turned to terror.
I’m frightened of kelp. I hate how it disappears into the water. I can see it descend beyond my field of vision, and I know it continues further until it reaches the grounding anchor of the seafloor, but I cannot see that point of origin.
And now, all at once, my mind was open ocean and I was treading water in a vast kelp forest. And in this visualization, the tops of the kelp had faces. They initially appeared to be human faces, weird because they’re kelp, but still human, still familiar.
Tonight, though, one of those faces turned into that of a monster, and this entirely without warning. It came after me, but, in an example of deus ex machina, was cut from the forest and I was saved, saved by someone else, with nothing I could do to aid my own salvation. And after my salvation from one of those long, malevolent tendrils, I looked around the metaphorical waters of my mind and could see how many others there were in that kelp forest, where each of the formerly human faces now seemed to be monsters as well. Was this kelp, or a tentacled beast?
I broke down and sobbed…As wave after wave of understanding and perspective hit me, my body went into shock. My limbs tingled, my mouth felt dry, my breathing was sporadic and shallow…
Memories occurred to me, but colored by this new lens of relative objectivity rather than the lens of my own normalized self-experience. I subconsciously believed this negative self-chatter was just an ordinary part of the human experience, but that I was hearing it to a slightly greater degree, or, more insidiously, that I was weaker than everyone else and couldn’t deal with said negative chatter as well as could my peers.
Again, [I was] disavowed…of this immediately.
I was reminded of my first major depressive episode.
I thought of the earliest times I recall wishing I didn’t exist.
I remembered the first time I contemplated the possibility of suicide.
And the terror returned. I thought I had already been through this shit. Back in December of 2017, I saw the doctrine of Original Sin for what it was and I thought I understood what it had done to me.
But religion is so much more insidious than that. It’s not a poison; it’s a living thing, a virus, a parasite. Immediately as I noticed its malicious fucking little fingers operating the puppet strings of my mind, it retreated elsewhere, leaving that voice of shame behind as a decoy. That secretive retreat sedated me, made me feel comfortable, like I had won, like I was in control. Sure, I could still hear that voice all the time, but I recognized it now. I could see it for what it was and that gave me power, right?
In a sense, maybe, but shame didn’t leave me. As I focused on combatting the decoy, I didn’t notice the parasite was burrowing deeper into my subconscious, becoming harder to find, harder to eradicate. And it let me think I had won. And then it tried to kill me with a desire to die.
And now that mind virus has been caught again, but it’s a fucking hydra. I know it isn’t gone. It’s just caught and now has to change its camouflage again. It must burrow deeper, hide better. And how many times will I find it lurking beneath the surface? How often will it rear its ugly head to my own mortal peril? And what if I am not always able to spot it in time?
It’s fucking terrifying, knowing there’s an entity dwelling within your mind. I can’t trust my own goddamn thoughts; I don’t know which are mine and which originate in my religious programming. I don’t know what’s real. (Even now, as I write this after the fact, my mind is rationalizing everything and gaslighting me into thinking I’m overreacting.) I feel like the dude from ‘A Beautiful Mind’ when he learned that his friends and colleagues were pretend…
…I’m fucking scared. But I’m also hopeful for the first time in my life. I’ve never felt hope based on anything real. All the hope I experienced as a religious kid was predicated on delusion and then, when I shed religion, I didn’t have much hope at all.
And this is because religion fucked with my mind. It broke my sense of the real. It altered my fundamental understanding of myself, the universe, and my place therein…
…It’s late now, and I’m not going to solve anything tonight. I’m still processing. I keep recalling familiar memories to mind and seeing them in this new light, and while they used to feel vaguely innocuous, I now see them for what they are.
***
After that point of initial contact, I would see my adversary from time to time, catching glimpses here and there—not enough to know his general whereabouts to any helpful degree but more than enough to know that he knows my general whereabouts at all times, whether or not he shows himself. And I feel at once grateful that I'm still here and horrified that I’m in some sort of fucked up game of cat and mouse, as though this depressive predator is just toying with me until he gets bored enough to actually follow through on his threat, his promise.
This alter ego, this Hyde to my Jekyll, has (as far as I can tell) always been with me and asserts himself at my lowest moments, particularly in those moments of crushing and all-consuming loneliness or when I’m beleaguered by the voices shame and anxiety. When he comes to me thus, then or now, he appears more and more to be holding up a mirror rather than standing there before me. In those moments, his desires comingle with my own. The effect of this union cultivates utter confusion. It becomes challenging to distinguish any difference between the fear of heights and the urge to jump. Life holds no interest. Oblivion and erasure offer the only solace I can understand.
Recently, though, I've come to understand something else. This enemy, my adversary and foe, in truth he only wants exactly what I want: relief. He and I are the same, after all; we inhabit the same mind. His distress at witnessing my distress is overwhelming; he can't process it, can't handle it. All he wants is for it to end, but it never fucking ends.
It could, he thinks, it could end with just a little help. And in my more lucid moments, I know his conclusions are over the top in their extremity, I know the relief promised is just as much a false hope as the very idea of heaven, or the threat of hell for that matter. Dying won't fix any problems; it will simply end my conscious experience of them. In a way, that really does sound pleasant. But pleasantness in the absence of existential experience is a meaningless proposition, albeit alluring at times.
No, fixing my problems is what will fix my problems, dying can be my reward for a life well lived. And I do want to live. I have to remind myself of that. I want to survive. The very fact that I'm still alive proves to me that more of me than not wants to be.
This duality, I suppose, is not necessarily a source of animus as I initially assumed, but rather a methodological difference in service of the same goal. This predatory presence doesn't believe that he's wrong, and he's awfully convincing more often than I want to admit, but I hope I can open his eyes the way he's opened mine.
***
In case you were wondering or concerned, none of this is literal. There’s not an actual other entity lurking within me that is in some way distinct from me. That said, the cognitive dissonance borne of mutually exclusive desires and needs often comes to a head, causing expansive confusion at best and complete despair at worst.
Nevertheless, the metaphor is apt and pretty well encapsulates my experience of learning the extent to which depression has spread its malignant tendrils throughout my brain like a metastasizing cancer. I used to think I had it under control, but I very much do not have it under control. Some days I'm better able to manage it, and sometimes I have weeks of those days in a row, which is truly spectacular. Some days, though, the world caves in and I just want to fucking die.
It's a funny thing, self-preservation. Clearly, whatever biological drives that empower this tendency we humans have toward self-preservation are working overtime in my mind because I'm still here, which to me is a testament to the power of human resilience and elasticity—we can get used to anything. We can learn to cope with severely crippling realities, and even navigate them well enough to allow us the illusion that we're thriving when really we're just surviving (and at times only barely just).
Even though I don't feel a strong, conscious sense of self-preservation in any way that definitively fuels my waking decision making, there is evidently a primal need to stay alive, to remain, that is keeping me from smoking my own cigarettes, as Frankl might say. And that is the half of this dual existence I aim to empower.
I do not plan to give up the ghost, not of my own volition, but depression has a massive head start. What happens when I'm too volatile to trust what is and isn't my own volition? I have to work ahead and cannot lose the sense of urgency. Already, I can see this depressive predator fading into the obscurity of my mental fog of perceived normalcy. I have to find a way to befriend that force and reorient its goals to our mutual benefit. We ultimately want the same thing, after all. We both want healing.
If I've laid the right groundwork, I'll survive. So that's what I'm doing now: laying the groundwork necessary to catch up, to carry on, and—further—to want to carry on. That will take some doing, which is why I’m not wasting time.