Persona

 Who i present isn't that far away from who i am.

You see, i've been doing shadow work since i was a teenager. I always knew i was different, off axis, unusual and in some respects, peerless.

If i'm being honest i knew even sooner then that. Kindergarten even.

In the 3rd grade i wrote "I am an alien, that has mastered human speech."

I was 7 or 8 years old, and i already knew.

I tried to learn about what being a human was. I tried to emulate those around me, as kids do, to try to find a peer group. I fell in with the bad kids and the weirdos because of the things i ACTUALLY was, poor, weird, into video games and street basketball.

That was all you needed back then, when you were small. A few frivolous commonalities were enough.

Then the social years begin. Jr. high. High school. That is when the persona really needs to begin to emerge.

It matters a little more what YOU are like, not just WHAT you like.

I learn that somehow in jr high, i am very uncool. I talk strange. I get called a faggot in the school halls and by passing cars. I get bullied, beat up, picked on and generally fail at social encounters and education as well. I am a decade beyond my peers in writing and reading, but i fail all my other classes or barely pass as i have no interest and lack the ability to feign interest in a convincing manner.

I achieve renown for a few small deeds. I walk into class one day for a test in a class i know i am failing. I sign my name, and walk out of class and walk home.

I was 11 or 12 then, and i saw no point in wasting my time in performance.

Most of my attempts at crafting a persona were failures anyway. My grandmother bought me one of those APEX jackets when they were trendy. She bought me a nintendo and at least that bought me some "friends." really just other boys who wanted to play my nintendo. I even remember some of my bullies at a birthday party my mom tried to throw for me. I ended up just watching them play games in my room.

I felt STRONG in the moments i was myself. When i walked out of that class. When i asked honestly when a teacher or therapist asked me a question. My answer always seemed to frighten, or impress, or both. I tried to code switch with kids my age. Slang and similar language. Simplifying myself in an attempt to fit in.

It never really worked. I am, and was, always, a mutant with entirely different architecture in my brain. I could learn the words and do the dance, but it always seemed "OFF" to them. They always knew.

In high school the persona was more or less at its apex i think.

I was this tall striking oddball with long hair in a dead mans long black coat, 15 years old smoking cigarettes' outside during lunch at my school. I was across the street by myself as 200 or so kids stood on the other side of the street, some smoking, most looking at me.

A short girl named amy walked over to me and asked me what i was doing. I said "smoking. this is my first day. I don't know anyone."

She dragged me across the street and introduced me to a few people.

Without that experience occurring, i think i may not have spoken to anyone for my entire high school education.

I had already learned that being myself was off putting to others, and my mother had said if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all. I had taken that to heart.

Here i was, on my 1st day of a new school, having arrived surviving years of abuse and even being hospitalized in a mental institution having to pretend i was just a normal kid. What a complete fucking farce.

So began my persona. I joined a band. I wrote poetry and went to local readings. I worked at a record store, an all nite diner, a comic book store, and still went to school. I built a reputation for being this "cool, tough, artistic" guy by just being myself and doing what felt right. That became my persona. I think who i actual was, was closer to a severely traumatized kid managing suicidal ideation, severe depression, alienation and crushing poverty the best i could without parents to support me. Without anyone really to support me.

My shadow was a swirling black mass of crushing gravity churning under the surface. My shadow my this inescapable sorrow that i felt leaking out from ever seam and crack that light would otherwise bleed from. I was painfully lonely, mournful of my plight and completely powerless to influence any change. The friends i made in high school were really the last friends i was ever going to make with ease. They were all well heeled kids with parents and support systems all going to universities with cars of their own. It was easy to see that when high school ended, so did i. My last protected happy place went with it. The years that would follow would pulverize me into paste and i would limp through my life, often fantasizing about my own death. I didn't have a plan, i just hoped, often, that i would not wake up. That something would take me out of this place, that i could get what i had wanted as a child.

"What do you want to be when you grow up Erik?"

"Happy."

Soma

"I'm all by myself

as i've always been

i'll betray myself,

to anyone, lost, anyone but you."

Time keeps on crawling towards me, and i keep on shoving my mind into a box of puzzles to avoid it.

Not even avoid it. It's not a refusal to acknowledge the entropy, the gradually inevitable dimming of the star, the decay of this once vibrant bright powerful thing that i was.

It's just that engaging with that reality brings me nowhere.

It does not bring me joy, or new forms of enlightenment. It does not resolve the puzzle in a novel way, it does not create some ephemeral moment that will help me transcend the soulful sadness that is the decline.

Not even just the decline. I have always felt this soulful sadness. It has been my worn weary traveling companion since i can begin to remember myself. As a boy, rejected by his peers, as a young man, briefly spellbinding and star lit before alienating everyone once again, and again as a man, alone in small rooms while those i imagined as my friends went to name brand university's and i went to community college out of sheer desperate to answer the question,

"what can i do to survive for the rest of this life alone?"

I never got the answer i wanted. I wanted to find something i was good enough at to be able to live and die alone, as was prophesied for all those who are truly strange, autistic, poor, disabled AND gifted. Ruined and luminous.

The answer i got was that i CAN'T survive alone. Never could really. I could handle the mental strain, the loneliness, but i couldn't endure the mask, the grind, the lying, the suppression, the things one has to do to work a job with normal people with the majority of your free time. I tried my heart out, never knowing why i was failing, always formulating an idea and trying again, only to fail in a similar way, with just enough things changed that i thought it was a new problem.

The problem was always me. I was always too different to be in the world, and i tried. i really tried at everything. I even tried to die, several times, but doctors brought me back. The world brought me back. A undiscovered compartment in my heart opened up, hardened the exterior and made a declaration.

"You will not let them win. You will not pack up your shit and leave. You will be incompressible. You will remain a monument to yourself, for yourself, and fuck everyone else."

That is how i lived for many many many years. I sometimes still feel that i live that way now. That my safe place is self belief, in a world full of people that never believed in me.

Suicidal ideation they call it. Disassociation sometimes. Mine usually took the form of fantasizing about dying. Falling off a cliff. Being hit by a car. Being caught in a cross fire. Rarely did i think enough about it to make a plan, and when i did i knew that i needed to do something.

Nothing ever really helped though. Not meds, not talk therapy, not joy.

I always felt like a burden to those around me, and embarrassed at my inability to weather the mundane world of work the way everyone else could.

I had thought of myself as this tough, unkillable warrior motherfucker. I beat death, I fought back against overwhelming odds as a person and in my real life. I fought bullies with superior numbers, i fought the system that wanted to see me die. I always won. Eventually. And i always had the stamina to drag myself for the long starving months it took to get from the fallow times to the finish line.

I could OUTLAST everyone else.

Like a cockroach. Living in the trash and dim light, Skittering on the margins of society in my dead mans clothes with unshakable wide shoulders. The power of my mind to buoy my frail body.

IN HERE I AM STRONG.

IN HERE I AM WORTHWHILE.

IN HERE I AM INDESTRUCTIBLE.

Out there, i was a bum, unable to work, unable to earn, unable to get a job with 3 degrees from my shitty community college education. Unable to be normal, unable to talk to girls unless they talked to me first, like everything, pinned down and passive, waiting for others to validate me before trying to do anything at all.

I was a shitty vocalist in high school. But i sang in a band and had fun, and we were pretty good. I was probably a shitty poet to. But i read in quiet moldy rooms of people much older than me and was encouraged, congratulated, and told i had a gift. Told i was worthwhile. Told to keep writing.

It never made me any money. I could never do it to support myself. I was never going to be famous or known. That was my gift. The gift of knowing that i could not keep myself afloat, but beneath a hail of arrows, i could keep walking, no matter what.

And i did keep writing. Maybe not in the way i was supposed to. Maybe not in a way that could make me money. But at least in a way that keeps the legend of that once great warrior alive in my mind, for me to remember when i am looking down from a bridge as a walk to think,

"Not today. I have too much left in me to say."

What is intelligence?

 Intelligence is not easily demonstrated.

It is not demonstrated by sterile memorization and recitation of dry facts and figures.

It is not learning the names of all the element, completing a rubix cube, knowing your multiplication tables or naming every state. 

Intelligence is ADAPTIVE.  It is the ability to find understanding and pursue exigence in the face of minimal information or compounding and confounding inputs that are muddy,  unclear, inexact elements and data points. 

Intelligence is solving a novel problem, in a novel way. 

When intelligence is unavailable people often fall into patternicity,  a term invented by Michael Shermer.  This term describes what often occurs in the minds of simpler people,  where they struggle to produce understanding from sources they cannot derive understanding from and that causes them to SEE patterns where there are none.  In a desperate attempt to MAKE SENSE out of what may indeed be senseless they CREATE truth out of gibberish,  signal out of noise, and this is all done in service to ego.

The human ego DEMANDS this make sense, DAMNIT.  and if it doesn't, then i will MAKE SENSE OUT OF IT.  If i cannot, that must mean i'm stupid, and i can't live with that truth. 

No one wants to be stupid.  No parent wants their child to be stupid.  At one point in social being stupid really was that proverbial scarlet S that no person could bear the shame of.

That time is gone. 

You see, patternicity is common in conspiracy theorists.  That makes it useful to despotes  and propagandists.  That makes the simple minded effective tools for spreading misinformation, nonsense and imagined signs and signals from the sea of random noise.  

Intelligence is suspecting your source could be wrong or compromised.  Knowing that that data could change as new information is discovered.  

Intelligence is knowing that you cannot, do not, will not, EVER know everything.  

and having the lack of ego and the wealth of understanding to be confident enough to live with that. 

No one cries for the man on stage.

 I would like to be different.  I would like to FEEL different.  I am tired.  so tired of all of these patterns that funnel downward.  Each time i briefly think, "well, i tried everything i could.  i was honest, i was sincere,  i can't control how other people respond to that."  

And that might be true a few times, for a few people in your life.  Everyone has conflicts, if you don't, your a pushover or a people pleaser and likely spent much of your life being taken advantage of by others you want the approval of.  

I understand that.  I've struggled as an autistic man to know what the right road to travel is, should i mask, keep all my connections to others very shallow and surface depth, or should i unmask, and be my sincere entire self and hope it does kill them?

see, i knew in my 20's for certain i was not like others,  and came to think of myself as radioactive.  People would ask me for my insight and i would warn them not to ask me.  If they kept it up i would tell them. I would tell them all i saw about them, about the issue they had, answer their questions.  Most of the time that would just cause them to break.  I was a mirrored surface reflecting the deepest fears and insecurities they had, and now they knew that i saw them.  Tears usually followed, or brash flailing attempts at strength, a defensive reaction,  "Who the fuck are you anyways?  What the fuck do you know?!"  I'd heard that response so many times it became a running joke for me.  Not a funny one mind you, just  another dagger sticking out of the flesh.  I'd become accustomed to being abused, being kicked, being bullied, being shit on.  I walked through my landscapes like something scarred and mangled survivor protagonist from mad max.   There's so much more to tell but you get the jist.  

Radioactive.  Or gravity warping.  Those in my presence for too long tended to get poisoned or crushed.  They had to flee for their own safety.  

It's still the same today.  

I meet people, get invited into a group briefly, get comfortable, keep the mask up, and underneath it's disguise i am cool, confident, charming, interesting, a sparkling stone and gifted conversationalist, a gem, and standout, i breath life into things.  When the mask slips, things turn. I can't really explain to you in a way that does it justice, honestly.  It's happened so many times and in the same way that i can't even really understand it anymore.  I've come through the entire thing and out the other side in such a way that the data stream makes perfect sense and then becomes gibberish again. 

They love the mask.  The Thing that lurks underneath,  not so much.

You see eventually, this creature that i keep in writing, infinite lives in millions of lines of text have poured out of me like endless rains for decades.  The man i AM comes out in these words, but remains a glinting shadow behind my heterochromic eyes.  Perhaps one hides my self, the other projects my mask outward.   Sometimes that man breaks free, and speaks.  He speaks his feeling in run on sentences that baffle and confuse.  He casually says things like: "It's as if the 3 fates decreed "whatever suspicions you harbor towards people will always come to pass"  and  I must sit alone for eternity under Cassandra's curse."

and people grow still.  The entire chat thread ends and never resumes.  People leave and start a new one with him.  The calls stop coming.  No one knows what happened, or why, but they are upset, they are disquieted.  They want it to stop.   My honesty, my vulnerability, causes unease, and confusion.  

Confused at the notion that THIS is what i really am.

Not cool. Not superhuman.  Not confident.  Not charming.

I am desperate. Lonely.  Alien.  Spilling out over the sides and scrambling to keep it all in.  Sadly, i am earnest.  

I always imagine some idealized scenario, wherein i am embraced, that the others will show empathy and find my honesty and vulnerability brave.  They simple find it tiresome.  They didn't want a feeling, breathing, living, thing, 

they wanted a bright shiny toy to impress them and their friends. 

Watch him astound with language and stories and singing and light, enjoy the show and go home to your comfortable life.

No one understands what it is like to be dehumanized quite as well as someone who can't only PASS as human for a few moments.  For someone who lives such a singular and strange life that no one can seem to muster the effort to attempt to relate.  They just take what they can, and move on.

"All eyes turned up to the hero
Worn out self-abusive circus freak
There's one thing that you might not know:

There'll be another messiah right here next week"  

I'm finally there everyone.

I just want to be normal. 

What do you want I.E. what IS a problem?

 

What is, or isn't a problem, is sometimes a question of perspective.

Not always, mind you. If you have an abscessed tooth, getting it fixed is not something you can practically reframe to reduce the discomfort you are experiencing.

However, if you want to have a lot of friends, and you have tried and failed, you might think of this, as a problem. What do we do with problems?

Well usually, if we are of sound mind, we try to devise ways to solve them. In doing so we are adopting the most logically course of action, right?

Problem---solution- resolution of problem yes?

Maybe. First ask yourself, WHY is this a problem?

Okay. So following the example, why is NOT having friends a problem? Well, you could conclude that you will be lonely without friends, that your employment opportunities are reduced without friends, that you feel left out of the world without friends.

However, what about the fact that you feel a reduction of self esteem from rejection as a result of attempts to make said friends? Or that most people you meet you find to be judgemental, dimwitted, self centered slack jawed cowards that are unable to express themselves with anything approaching sincerity due to social convention flatting the landscapes of communication into a series of "acceptable topics" that reveal little to nothing about anyone or anything?

See? Perspective.

Maybe you are chasing friends because the world you live in prizes them, and you live in the world so, you emulate the people in the world you live in and pursue the things they pursue. That is what we are taught to do as autistic people right?

Craft a mask by stitching together strands of normality from the world and people around you into some LESS ominous MORE normal facsimile of a human being. But if you have to don a mask to make friends, are you really even MAKING FRIENDS? Aren't you making people believe you are someone else?

Wow, who is that guy will all those friends?? Impressive right?

Again, Perspective.

Humans AND whatever i am share some common features. One is that perhaps we are bad at understanding what we want, and also bad at separating what we want, from what we really need.

Stoics, absurdists, nihilists, Buddhists, they are all searching for meaning with different language, but the same goal. One is why worry, everyone is fucked. Another is why worry? it won't change the outcome. Another still is why worry, we are on a fucking rock in space and everything is arbitrary and made up, lawl, and one more is why worry, how will that help you to help others and return to the great rushing stream that is everything?

There are choices,

they are vast,

The track you think you are on is in your imagination and you can get off of it,

whenever you want.