“If it once was before, that’s a much easier place to find again, than something that never was.”
My head knows you’re right. There is a non-zero probability that I can become 25yr old me, when things were on an uptick, or 17yr old me before spending a year and a half helping my abuser abuse me, because in the 90s, everybody “knew” that a woman can’t SA a man. But I don’t know how to unscar myself. Both the nerve damage in my neck shooting down both arms (after two decades, I have a big enough tolerance to all of the prescription meds that might help me sleep) or the psychic damage of being an undiagnosed autistic in the orbit of a narcissist. It turns out that threatening suicide is a very compelling way to coerce people into SA.
At 50 years old, after my divorce from a different toxic relationship… I moved to France. Cheaper than flying here every summer, right? But… spinal cord damage = tingles down both arms = insomnia. I used to be able to touch people. Like, touch them at all, not just in a romantic sense.
If my life were a roller coaster, I’ve for sure passed the top of the first hill, and I’ve gone far enough past that peak that it’s clear I’m going to be headed downhill. So there’s a non-zero chance that I’ll somehow un-peak, just like there’s a non-zero chance that every molecule in my body will spontaneously and randomly all move in exactly the right pattern that they form a biologically immortal being who nonetheless remembers everything I knew but also is unchanged by all the trauma it remembers.
I left my wife because it seemed like she was just waiting to die. She wasn’t dying, and she seems like she’s fine with the process taking another thirty or fourth years. But she seems done with wanting to accomplish anything more in that time. I didn’t want to be that guy. I didn’t want her to be that guy either, but after a decade of trying, I accept that I have no power to change her path. And after six years of being divorced, two of which were spent in Paris, I don’t think I can stop myself from being that guy. The actual Olympics were here, just a couple miles from me. I knew it was going to be here. And then people brought it up like they thought I’d left my bedroom. My new anti-anxiety medication is good enough that I can leave the house every month to pick up another month’s supply. Which is better than the antidepressants. Turns out it’s really hard to tell crippling depression from crippling anxiety. Then again, I can’t tell when I’m feeling fear. In hindsight, I can usually tell that certain decisions make sense if I was afraid at the time. That’s the only way I can tell. But depression vs. anxiety… I don’t even really care, except that medications work on one but not both. And my tolerance to Xanax is high enough that a sufficient dose would kill me.
