Yelling into the storm- a protest against mental agony

Trying to convey what it's like to fall apart

In the past, I’ve written about Harm OCD, now I want to convey what it is like to breakdown with it.

Sometimes, when I’m breaking down and the OCD gets too much, I start mentally re-enacting the book of Job. I yell (usually telepathically) at God. I plead. I imagine God’s presence in a whirlwind, and then I think of God’s response, issuing from the storm:

Now brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall inform Me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who fixed its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched a measuring line across it?

Sometimes I think, in virtue of my unworthiness, I should argue with Job instead of with God. Job is quite different from myself. Job was sinless, or all but. Job did not start by asking God to make it better, he started by trying to understand. And Job, unlike me, believed in God. I want to speak with him almost as much as I want to speak with God. I want to argue or ask for his secret or let him berate me. I’m unsure what I want, but I want it and I want it.

There is something profoundly troubling about not believing in providence. Even the ancients who believed in a providence that could be evil- in the Fates or Norns- took a certain comfort from that providence as well as dread. But when you truly grasp that you don’t control your own life because no one does- that’s scary. I don’t think humans are meant to live with that understanding. We’re not built for it. We quickly substitute in a kind of providence- the self-directed providence of a self-help manual. You control your own fate. Or, in these more anxious times, we retreat further into stoicism- you at least steer your own soul and actions. But even that compromised, limited humanism is false.

How much hurt is done by the lie that we control our own lives. It’s obvious you don’t if you don’t delude yourself. Did you choose the context in which you’d apply your talents or fail to? Did you choose your talents? Your parents? Has any more well-worn line of argument been less well grasped? How many fortunate people are hurting unfortunate people because they’re scared that, if they admit that the unfortunates don’t control their destinies, then they would have to admit that they don’t either; they would have to admit are in terrible danger because fortune could turn against them too. We treat others harshly to try and demonstrate to ourselves they’re different from us- if we didn’t we’d have to admit we are like them, and fortune might gift us similar indignities.

Perhaps you think you’re above this, and you’ve grasped how little control. No, you’re not immune to deluding yourself about your control. Even if you concede you don’t control your financial destiny, perhaps you think you have a much closer grip on your moral destiny, or your reputational destiny, than you really do. Perhaps you think you’ll always have your talents or intelligence, or your friends or influence or beloved. Fortune could take away any of these, indeed, it’s really just a race between fortune and death to see which will snatch which first.

Now compound this with the thought that not only do you not control your own life, but, paradoxically, if you did you “control your own life” you still wouldn’t control your own life, because you don’t really control yourself.

You are not a you- there is no crystalline sphere of ego/intention/will, just a succession of moments, myriad. Your name is legion, but you lack the usual discipline of a Roman army. Even if you have, broadly, good intentions, there is no guarantee you will always act as such. Worse- that you have acted such. What sins might lay forgotten- or at least forgotten by you? Memory is short and fuzzy, life is long and hard, judgement is a shattered mirror. So many mistakes hover around us like furies still shrouded in darkness, but cawing. How many sins did you not know even as you committed them. You contain multitudes with the capacity to sin. Life rushes on and on frantic as if trying to break forward away from its heavy past, but it does not escape itself. I am haunted by half-memories- possibly unreal occasions of sin. In some sense I have lived such long horrors stretching down unknown futures and half-real pasts that, crisscrossing the present in impossible spacetime vectors. In a sense I am already dead of old age, I’m stuffed full of unreal life, or I am Sibyl or Tithonus.

The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.

What kinds of evil daring might lie in the forgotten or the yet glimpsed?

Consider a boat on a storm. Inside that boat is a large ocean (it’s larger on the inside), that ocean is in storm, and on that storm floats another boat. Like a boat we are tossed back and forth between circumstances beyond our control, and within ourselves our ego is tossed back and forth by mental changes beyond our control.

It is dark. The decision is made. I am vanquished. By terror of life. Except you’re not vanquished, you just- I dunno. You just keep going. Defeated but still defeatable.

And what of a limited sovereignty- doubtless all we can cling to- of the present moment? The ability to determine what we do second to second? Sartrean or Stoic freedom. Why did I dismiss it earlier? Certainly, cling to it as you can, and be the hero of you own story, by all means, but who can say that she rules the meaning of her own actions? You can tell whatever little stories you like about yourself, but such stories will be flim-flam to history. We’ve all read biographies of history’s gentry- and their actions, with the benefit of hindsight, are wholly alien to their maker’s conscious intention- moved by forces beyond themselves both within and without. It’s not just that your actions are alien to what you thought was their intention from the outside point of view- if you were wiser you’d see their alienness too. The vanity of the little meanings you put around them like ribbons. The moral tangles you stumble into unknowing following epiphenomenal Will-o-wisps of self-justification. You can’t escape that and become morally self-determining just by yelling “Invictus” or yabbering about your “unconquerable soul.”

All I can say with any conviction under the storm is this. Try to be gentle. It’s hard. Your roughness- my roughness- is itself a reflection of the storm. But if you cling to one thing, one principle, do try to be gentle. Almost always, you can fight without cruelty.

The feelings begin to drain out and leave me like lumpy fluid from a lanced abscess. Even as I write this, I grasp for the soggy-amorphous memory of pain. Not only do we fail to grasp the pain of others, but we can’t grasp our own pain from the past. It slips away from us. Our language for conveying pain is inadequate. Our memory of pain is inadequate. While it’s not a competition, this is, I think, especially true of mental pain. It’s so hard to remember, to really remember, how bad it was.

Even the rough, folksy philosophy I wrote all that in isn’t the real language of mental pain- it is, if anything an attempt to escape pain in itself- the real language of mental pain is whirring buzzsaw of thoughts, a stream of knives with no higher or philosophical sense. To philosophize about it is already to try to escape to a life raft.

I suppose, what I really want to convey is that this is all wrong. It’s not meant to be like this. I’m not meant to be mentally screaming on a train at a God who may or may not be listening. This is all wrong and we must fight to make it better. Being a person is meant to be better than this. All people deserve to be happy. And in my arrogance and hurt, just once I’d like to hear a voice answer me from the whirlwind and explain. Or even, as for Job, refuse to explain but at least assure me there is an answer. I must strive, I must keep yelling into the storm.

But if it can’t all be better, if I have to take my complaint against God and make it something thinner- a complaint against “society” let me say this. Anxiety and depression matter in a way ‘society’ doesn’t get. They don’t just matter when they impede functioning. They don’t just matter when they fray social bonds. They don’t just matter when they cause suicidality or other self-destructive behaviors. They don’t just matter because they have ‘stigma’. They don’t just matter because they make it hard for your family. The problem isn’t just that there’s a lack of awareness. The problem is the agony itself.

Don’t let anyone tell you it’s character building. I’ve had plenty of character building pain, and this isn’t it. Maybe it was once, but now it is just the unimaginable, monotonous repetition crisis after crisis. The discovery of new terrors which, once found, never wholly leave the skin. An unwinding of the self or its interpenetration with metal thistle spines.

This is a fundamental lie that our society tells all the time about pain. That pain matters insofar as it affects other things. It’s a conspiracy of capitalism and folk positivism. Folk positivism complains that pain can’t be properly measured (it can, that’s a lie) and so urges focus on concrete outcomes- unemployment, suicide, sick days and the like. Capitalism is only too happy to manage health in this way for obvious reasons. This has led to a medical, scientific and governmental establishment that doesn’t regard pain, but perhaps especially mental pain, as an emergency. Increasingly, in places lucky enough to have a public health system, public psychiatry consists in: 1) Posters telling you You Matter and to Have Awareness and Beat The Stigma 2) Underfunded services resourced only for the acutely suicidal. Pain? Pain is so far down the list it’s scarcely on it. Meanwhile psychologist and psychiatrist associations lobby against any measures that might help with the supply issue. I am furious.

Among other factors, this apathy about pain is why drugs like Psilocybin and Ketamine have taken so long to experiment with. Certainly the major barrier was the war on drugs, but the reason there wasn’t enough force to breach that barrier was because we can manage depression and anxiety “well enough” with SSRI’s and related. There’s no emergency! So long as we can keep the pain blunt enough to stop the sufferer cutting loose grasping a noose from a job everything is under control and “more drastic” measures wouldn’t be warranted.

But it is an emergency. Pain, of this form, is evil and we must abolish it. We deserve better.