Content Warnings: Death, Child Abuse, Mass Shootings
I think about death a lot.
If this wasn’t apparent last month, I imagine it will be soon. And I’ve been that way ever since I was a child. For as long as I can remember, the concept of death has always preoccupied my mind.
Sometimes it’s expressed as a fascination with the macabre, like my love for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd film adaptation or Bryan Fuller’s Dead Like Me or Hannibal TV shows. Other times, it comes out in my dark sense of humor, which can probably be a bit too cavalier or direct about topics willfully ignored in polite society.
Most often, however, it comes out in my general fear of… Well, everyone and everything.
I live acutely aware that any action taken (or not taken) is a choice that could go wrong in a million different ways… many of which could lead to me or my loved ones being permanently harmed or killed. In the same vein, any person I see on the street or in a store is someone who, if they so chose, could probably hurt me or end my life with relative ease. And the increased prevalence of mass shootings hasn’t really helped this anxiety, providing real world evidence of the possibility these fears may one day come true.
As you might imagine, this obsession often makes people feel uncomfortable. Most don’t like being reminded of how frail the bodies keeping them tethered to this world really are, nor the inevitability that everyone they know and love will eventually become food for worms, fish, flies, or microorganisms. (Or, hey, if they’re feeling ritzy, maybe they’ll become a coral reef, lol)
But honestly, I can’t blame them. It’s not like it’s a comfortable experience for me either. I’m the one who can’t look at an adorable puppy or a cute baby without immediately thinking about its eventual demise.
Part of this, I imagine, comes from the same place as what I discussed last month: I struggle with endings, and death is the ultimate ending (at least for an ex-Christian, agnostic atheist like myself).
But I don’t think that’s all.
Since 2018, I’ve been on a pretty intense journey of self-exploration and self-improvement, and the work I’ve done has helped me to recognize just how fucked up my upbringing was. There’s a lot I could talk about, but the aspect most relevant to today’s discussion is that my father is someone I’d classify as short-tempered, vengeful, and merciless. And his preferred form of discipline when I was growing up (for animals and tiny humans alike) was corporal punishment.
Since 2018, I’ve been on a pretty intense journey of self-exploration and self-improvement, and the work I’ve done has helped me to recognize just how fucked up my upbringing was. There’s a lot I could talk about, but the aspect most relevant to today’s discussion is that my father is someone I’d classify as short-tempered, vengeful, and merciless. And his preferred form of discipline when I was growing up (for animals and tiny humans alike) was corporal punishment.
As I recall, I received extreme physical pain from him on a fairly regular basis when I was a child. All while being told he was morally justified in exhibiting those acts of violence upon me because of my supposed failings. I remember feeling truly terrified whenever he told me to “come here” in a certain tone of voice because I knew what it meant I was about to go through. And I would hope and pray to the god I believed in at the time that whatever I’d done wasn’t bad enough that he’d finally finish the job he started so many times.
When he said, “I brought you into this world. I can take you out,” I took him deadly seriously.
Back then, I didn’t have the tools or knowledge or support to adequately process what the hell was happening to me. Or how wrong it was.
On the other hand, what I did have was a powerful will to survive by any means necessary in a dangerous environment, an environment where my natural responses to impending pain were just as likely to trigger further violence as whatever “wrong” I’d supposedly done in the first place.
So I learned to overpower my fear, smothering it and forcing it deep within me where it could no longer stop me from submitting to my father’s whims.
But as I have learned since, suppressed emotions don’t actually go away. They just express themselves differently, silently influencing one’s behavior from the shadows, or coming out in unexpected and often unhealthy ways.
And so the child trained to hide he was terrified of pain and death became someone unusually obsessed with those same topics.
I’m not implying that everything about my fascination with death is bad, but I have been thinking about the downsides of where it came from lately. Over the last couple months, I’ve been watching my way through For All Mankind on Apple TV+ (an alt-history, sci-fi show about how U.S. space travel might have developed differently if the space race never ended), and something one of the characters said stood out to me.
You know, my old man… he was the toughest son of a bitch I ever saw. And the horrors he endured in that war. […] I never saw him back down from anything. Till the cancer. I’d go and see him. He’s laying flat on his back in his bed. He’s gasping like a fish out of water. Eyes big and wide, and he’s so scared. […] I don’t know. Maybe the fear was in him all along. Deep down. He was just too weak to fight against it anymore.
For All Mankind, Season 2, Episode 4
This quote, along with a similar story I heard recently from a family member, started me wondering what life will be like for me as I reach the end of my time on this planet.
What sort of person will I be when I’m facing death in the eyes for the final time, lacking capacity or energy to keep up the mechanisms I developed as a kid to protect myself from the world… or the world from me. Because I know how much effort I still exert on a regular basis to keep the panic from taking control of the wheel. Or how often it feels like I’m trapped within my own skin, clawing at the insides of my flesh so I can escape.
If anything, I guess this is yet another motivator for me to continue down the path I’ve been on for the last five and a half years. If I want to break the cycle, I have no other choice but to put in the work. And I have to put in that work every… single… day.
Until I breathe my last breath.
And I don’t just mean the introspective work of trying to figure out why I am the way I am, which can so often dominate the mental health conversation. I’ve done a ton of that work already. Sure, I occasionally still remember things I’d forgotten or learn something new about trauma or how brains work, both of which add to my understanding of what happened to me, but I’m mostly playing the hits at this point in this arena.
Instead, I’m primarily referring to the work of actually doing something to change the way I am, internally. The unsexy, boring, time-consuming, and exhausting work of meticulously retraining my brain… through experimentation, failure, patience, and repetition.
And it fucking suuuuuuuucks.
But with the hand I was dealt as a child, it is the best way I know for changing my luck for tomorrow. And as I said last month, I am so incredibly grateful to already be seeing today the results of the work I’ve put in over the last couple years, so fingers crossed for what comes next.
To quote neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett from her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain,
Everyone who’s ever learned a skill, whether it’s driving a car or tying a shoe, knows that things that require effort today become automatic tomorrow with enough practice. They’re automatic because your brain has tuned and pruned itself to make different predictions that launch different actions. As a consequence, you experience yourself and the world around you differently. That is a form of free will, or at least something we can arguably call free will. We can choose what we expose ourselves to.
My point here is that you might not be able to change your behavior in the heat of the moment, but there’s a good chance you can change your predictions before the heat of the moment. With practice, you can make some automatic behaviors more likely than others and have more control over your future actions and experiences than you might think.
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, p. 80
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