Prepare yourself for more lengthy self indulgence.
The thing that has been bothering me over the last few months is the prevalence of people telling me that I’m always very happy and positive, it’s been happening all the time. For reasons of my past and the person I believe myself to be I always feel a hint of disgust when people say this to me and snap back with a disdainful comment or I just let loose with my distinctive maniacal laugh that drowns out everything in the near vicinity and leaves people clutching their ears and crumpling their faces.
I don’t know how this transition has come about, it seems I’m suddenly outgoing and sociable, fun and open; yuck. It appears to have happened over the last year since my split from J. I have somehow adapted to life as a singleton by learning to play the disgusting games of confidence, social interaction and the pretence of stability; although, I am still conscious that the whole time I’m playing these games part of me is laughing at how ridiculous I sound. An ironic participation?
When I tell people I’m shy and suffer from depression, they smirk and chuckle like I’ve just told some mediocre joke; ‘but you get on with everybody’, they say, ‘everybody likes you’. You might find this a bit arrogant, and possibly a little hard to understand, but this is the last thing I want.
Let me explain. When I was younger, people scared me, threatened me, infected me; at playgroup I didn’t join in with the other kids jumping around, shouting and playing with the many toys, but sat alone and isolated on a plastic chair by a radiator. My mind was populated by two sensations: fear that at any moment someone would try and speak to me or try and get me to do something and the sublime feeling of solitary rapture as I created new worlds out of precious little from the safety of my head. People were a threat to this vulnerable child sat alone on his chair and it is this image that has stuck with me all my life, I just couldn’t leave that chair, physically or metaphorically. The thing is this: I still feel like that child, aint nothing changed in my head, people are just as scary, stupid and unwanted as they always were.
Poor baby right? Get over it, right?
No, NO, NO. It hurts.
And this misses the point, it’s the equivalent of asking a paraplegic to join you on the dance floor, ‘for a bit of a jig’. This Thing is not something you ‘get over’, it’s a hard kernel buried deep in my deepest recesses, affecting every thought I have, it is not a consciousness but a ghost, a haunting, invisible, ungraspable, but there in every instant, exploding from my unconscious in my weaker moments, the reminder of my impotence. There is no ‘getting over’ this silence at the apex of my being, you may construct any number of cunning imaginary blankets to cover over that hole, but suddenly, bam, it’s right back there in your face.
Well I say this to that sly darkness: haunt me, provoke me, eat my thoughts out with your inky silence; I love that kid, that poor defenceless, insecure little brat, that crawls into a ball on his chair and dwells in that silence, faces it and becomes it. He is an image, a metaphor, the imaginary cause of my glorious torment. He is the sickness, infesting my ideas, words, actions; my life. I say to him come in, take a seat, have some tea, insult my hospitality then kick me in the head; more, more, more.
My happiness comes not from being told I’m a positive happy person; nothing brings more of a rush of euphoria to me than telling myself or others that I’m a useless, whining, antisocial, pathetic slab of flesh who is scared of everything and everyone and fears that if people saw this sensitive, needy, crying centre, they would laugh and crush me under their boot. Like a rush of mania, I am inhabited by laughter, like I’ve touched beyond, seen a insane truth; is this not the basis of all human personalities? I’m just more self obsessed and tragically addicted to the pleasure of prising open that wound, I consider it an honour to be able to live with this ability.
Positivity, in its present meaning, is a lie, the imaginary tale to hide the horrible truth, the self help books that tell you to look in the other direction, rather than make a friend of your horror. But this terrible Thing isn’t a negativity, it’s not a question of positive/negative, negativity is impotent too, I’m not privileging either side of the binary; this is my problem the two sides cannot contain me, it took me a long time to realise this.
The myth of positive thought is a laboured, overstated, vapid hag of a cultural phenomenon. It’s so prevalent it’s disappeared. I work in a book shop and spend extensive periods of time looking at pictures of twatty gormless men and moronic smiling harridans claiming their book can help you ‘harness the power of positive thought’. Unconsciously what the cover of these books are saying is:
Heal your wound yeah, it’s gonna be great, you can have everything you ever wanted, you’ll finally be happy; all you have to do is believe.
Don’t get me wrong I want to believe this is true, but it’s not and ultimately all they make me want to do is expend bile into their crooked, money stuffed mouths. Now where’s that paraplegic? I feel like dancing.
I spent years trying to train my brain to be positive, ‘if you think positive things about yourself, you will become a positive person’. I read all the books and I would beat myself up more for failing:
‘you’re an idiot, no you’re not you’re a cool guy, it just takes time, How much, god, I’ll never do it, yes you will come on, shut up you’re boring me, no I’m not I’m encouraging you, you can do it, bam, well don’t punch yourself, I’m not I’m punching you, I am you, no you’re not you’re some foreign voice that speaks inside me, bam, bam, get out, bam………………………………............’
Something like that.
Then I realised, with a crystal purity, shot straight into the softest part of my inner sanctum: don’t fight the negativity, it is your savoir. My situation is this, when I’m negative, it makes me happy, when I’m kicked I smile, when I scratch that wound I laugh.
My laugh plays a big role in my life and perception by others, when I was in counselling it caused me a huge problem, it’s also a family trait. Maniacal as it is, it is not a laugh of joy, but a laugh of tragedy, there is evil in its resonance.
For me its’ not as simple as positive/negative, because the latter pushed to the extreme becomes the former and therefore the former the latter, which all makes just about as much sense as this sentence. So for me to be negative means to laugh, to experience joy as much as pain and torment, it all swirls round in a big cauldron never settling into singular constituent parts. That boy on his chair is beyond tangibility, he is mere intensities, multiplicities, morphing in every moment into something new. I can feel his indifference, the truth is indifferent, silent, horrible, but something you must make a friend of.
Kurtz in Apocalypse Now? Mad? Unsound?
The indifference is inside, encapsulated for me in the image of the child on his chair, unsymbolisable, threatening, loved. In the vein of Camus’ concept of the Absurd, or Nietzsche’s Amour Fati, love your/our fate in all it‘s awful genius. And I guaran-damn-tee that you will never see me on the front of a self help book looking like a tosser and encouraging you to ‘harness the power of indifferent thought’
You may however see me on posters advertising my expensive monthly seminars, you’ll know it’s me because I’ll be the one dancing with a paraplegic.
So you see, this is why I take issue when people call me a positive happy person; The main point of all this is this: it’s not that I’m not a ‘positive happy person’, but that I have to believe myself not to be in order to be, obvious right?
MG
