cw violence, bad symbols, alienating experiences
so it works like this: occasionally, suddenly, and for reasons i cannot discern, i will "feel" "as if" something catastrophic was "being done to me" and "others"/"the world" looked on/shrugged/laughed/condoned, and specifically by "something catastrophic" i mean terms like rape/torture/torment, yet i cannot point to what could warrant this dramatic experiencing, including in the past. i am not plagued by specific memories, images, or resentments towards specific people or specific experiences. it's free-floating. it is not an experience of generalised anguish or sadness, but it is a social emotion (do social emotions exist? i mean by this:) i "feel" victimised, violated, attempted-to-be-destroyed (<- lacking a verb), attempted-to-be-annihilated, "done to", tinted with horror.
but what does it mean to "feel" this, lacking actual reference in actual experience? what can you possibly make of this? you can go soul-searching and memory-fishing. i have, of course, at some point decided that some experiences i made might at least be adjacent to rape, i also know what it's like for people to take pleasure and satisfaction or organise for the sake of your torment, so are we speaking "flashbacks"? but even allowing for the most sympathetic reading of what i am doing here, my experiences were/are simply not that dramatic, nor do they anyway particularly upset or horrify me, at most, i might feel some faint embarassment, a humiliation, but i know these are very small experiences, small slights in a sheltered little life. are we then speaking "psychosis"? something intensely experienced that is not "actually" "happening" "for real"? yet even a psychotic experience is a real experience, no, in that it leaves its mark, comes from somewhere, has meaning? is it cultural? rape and torture are culturally used as symbol for little woes and power struggles and a host of other things all the time, is this what is happening to me? small entitlements "translated" into a more dramatic story? but if that is true of me, why, and is that fair to me? if that was me, wouldn't i be more thoughtless and less anguished? but how to defend myself against this interpretation, when it is me?
since this social emotion causing social harm is not, in fact, "real", what social redress is even possible? i cannot expose a perpetrator or a truth to the world, because that is not how i feel/think about my actual experiences. i cannot act as witness demanding to be heard and cry out my truth as lamentation or call to action, because if someone was to listen, i'd have nothing to say. i cannot advocate for people like me, because i don't know who people like me are (personality disordered entitled assholes who steal/lie/appropriate stories? but is that fair?). what to seek for?
faced with this absurdity, but also the intensity of experience, how to survive it? most or all social solutions seem to worsen the problem. because of the unreality and twistedness of the experience, the social bids and communication will also be tangled and confusing. i might end up the whiny asshole. exhaustingly selfish. nitpicky pedant. "playing at" something that those with wisdom and self-preservation would respond to by wisely removing themselves from it. i end up socially worse off.
the best solutions then are asocial and with the years, i have gotten more skilled at a variety of them: -> movement and/or repetitive exertion, during which experiences might get ordered and then leave -> 'ugly dancing' where bodily disgusts and the press of in-body-horror gets 'expressed' and then leave -> 'vent art' as they call it, lots of it using bodily representations of wounding but also dismemberment or violences 'as symbol'?? 'inappropriately'?? on paper shifted 'out of me' and partially 'made real' (though not really) -> 'snapping out of it': an inner effort where i shift out of "it", though doing this might lead to waves of back and forth, usually. or might cause other casualty as a deep betrayal and disappointment will remain -> writing stories where the "feelings" are made "real" (the character is such violated and socially failed as well as socially failing; depending on what i am responding to or in communication with, lots of different possible takes on this story, depending also on the texts that i am writing for/about. sometimes, not always, i revel and wallow in this, and so it is transformed into pleasure). this one is socially different than the others in that i might share it, and, maybe, readers might 'feel for' my character (for my experience) or 'understand' something i am saying (which is nice). all of these might need time and space, which i might not have. all of this is fraught, since the problem of impossibility/absurdity/patheticness/thieving/lying/disconnect/nothingness remains. i always yearn for explanations of this experience or, at least, even one person who shares it, for this being part of the world for others and not only me. i don't think i have yet read of this.
