For the new year

Never, until a moment from now, have I paused to consider how there can be such a contrast between the bleakness and fatalism of my psychology and the positivity and sanguine warmth of my sessions. It’s not as simple as someone’s “knowing we’re all going to die” yet being high on life.* I believe our psyche is essentially a curse, where the inevitable early injury is almost never healed and becomes the crooked, painful ground – the feet – of our adult life, our significantly pre-determined adult life. Whenever we cease to muscle ourselves forward – cognitive and physical muscle – and away from our deeper history, we are again in touch with our incomplete childhood, all the losses that leave sadness, fear, anger, craziness and emptiness in us.

But I believe we don’t need to make up bright thoughts or appeal to some truistic realism (“it’s not all bad”) to lighten depression or feel a clear, good path. Instead, we can reclaim the deepest, and maybe smallest, indestructible kernel of love-force in us, inherent in our first cells. This is something all people – but for the born psychopath – have. We start out “pro-life” – a fact, sense, and the root of hope that can’t die, most evident, paradoxically, when we suffer the deepest existential pain.

What “spooky action at a distance”** can reach that kernel? It could be smelling a flower, music, feeling love, sometimes just waking up and the kernel has floated to the surface during the innocent night, before it descends again. For me, one source is the presence of a person who wants help in my room. That’s a personal thing. My entire childhood, after age eleven or so, was anxiously, dissociatively shut away from people. For decades after, I was never present with anyone. Now, broken out of this shell, to me people are a startling phenomenon. It’s as if one has given a child a pirate’s treasure chest of absurdly magical toys and a map to Neverland. Almost as if I were born at each encounter, I am jolted by the existence of another human being. And while being jolted is not entirely positive, my room is made to receive only the best part of this “birth” experience: the hopeful, the caring, the mysterious, the tangible and intangible.

This is how “the pessimist” rolls.

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* Bertrand Russell quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/28449-i-believe-that-when-i-die-i-shall-rot-and.

** Einstein’s objection to quantum mechanics – https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427174/einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-paradox-older-than-thought/.