I guess I know now, what it takes. It took 4 weeks of quarantine to get to this. It was 6:30pm last night, no blog written. I wanted to go to bed, devoid of any short-term will to live. Thats when I started watching the Tiger King. I watched it for 4 hours, until my head hurt from trying to wrap it around so many levels pure, crystal crack cocaine, whatever I don’t do drugs, psychosis. I slept fitfully, afraid to sleep fully because of…. well tigers obviously.
When this all started I was so smug. I was like, “this is what we all need to realize our shit, you know really do the self-work, to be better as a society.” Of coarse abstractly I believed that that included me. But I possess the remarkable ability to disassociate and feel absolutely nothing for long periods of time, especially when shit is at its worst. Its why its been tough for me to relate to people through this. Like “oh chaos and complete uncertainty, welcome to my world. Look at this cool trick I can do! Bye!” Its why I haven’t felt much about this whole thing, except relief. Relief to have complete freedom to be completely alone, which is where I feel safest. And it really wasn’t until I had that, for a solid month, that I realized, again, like I do over and over, just how unsafe I feel all the time.
I react to chaos and uncertainty by shutting everyone and everything out. It is habitual, automatic and I don’t even realize I am doing it. It is not just to protect myself but also to protect the people around me, and maybe in an effort to preserve our relationships which is also in an effort to self-protect. It is very easy for me to get scared or hurt, to put it all in a box and, like the Tiger King, strap it to the body of someone I blame and blow it up. I’ve done it a lot.
Its hard to write about this stuff. Its hard to keep my butt in the chair and not get up for another cup of coffee. It tempts me to pour bourbon into my mug and smoke until I am completely out of my mind. Its uncomfortable at best; my organs squirm when I stop pretending everything is ok.
In the back of my mind, when this is happening, when I am disassociating, somewhere deep down, I know something is not right. Ill feel insecure, void of memory, unable to make decisions or plans. I can’t hear my comedy voice. That was the big cue for me, this time. I began to miss comedy and I couldn’t hear my voice. How is it that could so quickly abandoned the thing I love to do the most? This is why I am terrified to have children.
In the Tiger King, the least scary things are the tigers. They just sort of lurk in the background, a sad, hungry reminder of what happens when you try to contain something so magnanimous. The people who own the tigers, all of them, are bat shit crazy and fucking terrifying- tigers in a cage themselves. I can relate to the need to create your own world, where you feel powerful and in control, even if it is an illusion. Shit I have two cats couped up here and sometimes they act unpredictably. But seeing myself in the tiger king or the other psychos is just a product of our collective condition. Honestly after watching that show for four hours, the conclusion I came to was- “yup, thats just the result of a lot of unprocessed trauma.”
The good news is, after writing this, in recognizing it, and connecting with another childhood trauma survivor turned comic, I feel like I am breathing again. She reminded me of what my therapist has said before and something I forget, or I try to forget- this is something I am always going to have to manage. When I remember, it makes me sad and mad all over again, and completely disappointed in the world we live in, in which I feel pressured to pretend like everything is ok. Because if I try to talk about this with anyone else, they just stare at me blankly. They don’t get it, and they don’t believe it and it makes it worse, forces it back. There really is no middle ground, besides this maybe. I don’t know how to help people understand, does it even matter. Am I the one I ma trying to convince that this is real? Am I the one who needs to believe?
I remember how to breathe, take it moment by moment. I remember that there is egg salad in the fridge, cat liter to be scooped, the sun, the birds, the cats. Oh yeah and more Tiger King.