When I was very little my father took it upon himself to force-feed me the foods I refused to eat. Described to me later in life by the two witnesses at the table – my mother and older sister – these episodes apparently played out like some twisted suburban torture scene.
My toddler self sat strapped into a highchair refusing to acquiesce to his captor’s demands to eat. Furious, my 6-5, 230-pound father would stride over and force open my mouth with one hand and jam the offending food down my throat with the other. Inevitably, predictably, I would vomit, further infuriating the man who’d christened me with his own name.
My mother would beg him not to do it and to stop once he’d started. My sister (perhaps 5 at the time) would later tell me, “That’s when I came to really hate him.”
On subsequent occasions, when I sensed more of the same was coming, I’d start to bawl like the baby that I was, almost vomiting before the finger and the food were even in my throat.
Ultimately, my mother put an end to this particular mealtime ritual with a skillet to the back of my father’s head. But while the literal force feedings were brought to an end, the figurative kind would stretch on for the remainder of my father’s life and his interactions with me.
My father died last summer. Maybe 30 minutes after he died I was there, kneeling by his body, still warm, still reeking of the shit that spilled from his bowels when he was unable even to crawl to the toilet. I helped bag his body and carry it to the van. I scrubbed the shit from the carpet. The blood too, which was seeping from the innumerable wounds caused by his leukemia. Truth is I don’t know whose blood it was – he’d stopped producing his own months earlier and was wholly dependent on transfusions.
Bad blood. I was never able to hate my father. Others did – or at least steered a wide path around him. I didn’t, couldn’t, really. I think there’s a syndrome of some kind where the abused come to pity their abuser. Maybe. I don’t know, I just could never hate the man.
I suppose he was my Dr. Frankenstein. He created the broken, sad, anxious me who has spent a lifetime plagued by thoughts of unworthiness, self-consciousness, doubt. Like the tinnitus in my ears, I have never not known the background anxiousness that flavors thoughts of me and the world around me. When I rise to pee at 3am, the anxiousness is there, waiting, every bit as much of my consciousness as the need to pee itself.
This is the part the shrinks and self-help types and other well-intentioned souls always get wrong. They mistakenly imagine that there’s this core ‘you’ that simply needs to have the bad parts excised or rearchitected into good ones. Or maybe some pharmaceuticals to create new channels for the thoughts and their associated bodily juices to flow.
But see, I AM the broken thing. There wasn’t this healthy, whole Doug Jr. to whom bad things were done. Doug Jr. was engineered that way almost from the start. The conscious part of me obviously doesn’t remember being force-fed or the other nasty stuff done during those early years. But that little brain, the one growing at hyperspeed inside that toddler skull, it registered and recorded and remembered.
Even before I was five I started to suffer from terrible migraines, and from a recurring dream of being squished between the thumb and index finger of a giant. The mind that would become ‘me’ knew.
Over the succeeding years, as more and more of that me came online, the emotional and occasional physical abuse continued, so those early seedlings didn’t just take root but were nurtured and fertilized and reinforced. There was no escape from the inevitability of me becoming me.
The point being that regardless of who you are or the circumstances of your childhood, if you’re planted as corn, you’re going to grow up to be corn and as the years unfold you’re going to look for – and latch onto – evidence that supports this initial belief, and ignore or overlook anything that runs contrary to it. We take for granted our physical destiny – height or skin color – but don’t apply that same logic to the mental self lurking within that shell.
Which explains why some of us spend our lives beating the shit out of ourselves for being worthless and stupid and incompetent, some spend our lives celebrating how intelligent and caring and superior we are, and so on. We are simply performing to the outcomes called for in our engineering.
We are driven half-mad trying to ‘show’ people a particular behavioral/thought pattern we see in them, and are blissfully ignorant of the same in ourselves. Marriages and friendships dissolve, wars are waged, and all of human existence is plagued by the seeming refusal of billions of human beings to recognize they are the inventions of parents, siblings, peers, teachers, neighbors, cultures, societies.
Why do we humans so tenaciously defend ourselves against criticism of any kind? Because we cannot see beyond our own engineering. It is like asking someone to see, but not to use their eyes to do it; or walk, but don’t use their legs.
I am an invention of a mind that was itself invented. There is no me in the sense that I’ve concocted it. I am marching to an ‘I program,’ nothing more. Naturally, the mind – aka the ego – resists this.
Unless….
If this imaginary I is fortunate, there comes a grace, an illumination, an understanding that forces a crack or two into this me thing. This little snippet of understanding starts to nag at you, to peck away, to force its way into the steady-stream of ‘I thoughts’ – the only thinking you’ve ever known.
This grace is perhaps more common in sufferers for the simple reason sufferers are more likely to question the source of that suffering – their own thinking and its origins. The confident amongst us – both the authentic kinds and those who are busy faking it under a manufactured optimism – are too busy outwardly repeating their story to themselves and the world to bother looking inward. But the sufferer has no stake in this world, wants out, wants an escape from the thoughts that plague him or her.
How to attract that grace? I suppose it might be as simple as ‘ask and you shall receive.’ Recognize – or maybe the right word here is ‘admit’ – that you don’t know shit about you, where you came from, what you are. And then use that same tool inside your skull to surrender a bit, to give just a little bit of ground to whatever the hell this existence thing is – the one that makes the cells in your body divide and the planets to spin and the thoughts to pop in and out of existence. Ask this unknown source for a little help. Acknowledge you even need remembering to ask for the help.
But then again, what do I know?