Me and my Shadow

My therapist is really good.  I think I've found my problem.  It's brought back a memory of an excellent short story that I read years and years ago by Jeff Noon.  It resonated with me back then, which seems to suggest that the problem that has now been identified has been my problem for a good many years:  I have a shadow.

Full disclosure:  I've had a bad week, and wrote most of this post while at work, for reasons which will become clear.




I've been struggling, even on this blog, to identify which part of me is real and true and how that relates to what I present to the real world.  I also struggle to keep my darker desires and behaviours under control, and I've consistently proved that my general feeling of helplessness and inevitability is entirely justified.  My propensity to retreat from the world and conduct 95% of my sexuality in isolation is another clue.  Put it all together, as my therapist did, and it looks like I have shut an entire part of myself off from the rest, completely.

I'm two people, cohabiting in one body.  There's the bit of me that performs, and can pass fairly successfully as a functioning human being.  I can have healthy long-term relationships, hold down a job and be a good father.  The other part of me is essentially a broken child that got stuck around the time when I saw my father failing and my mother brushing everything under the carpet.  It's the part that tells me I'm useless, and the part that sabotages me in its own self-interest.  It craves the humiliation and inadequacy of my early childhood, because it has normalised them into something comfortable.  This is also the part where I've put my entire sexuality, and on top of that, this is the part that I've labelled 'wrong'.

I'm calling it a shadow because of the Jeff Noon story.  You can read it over here, it's only a few pages:  ihavebook.org/books/download/pdf/22331/pixel-juice.pdf  It's called Somewhere the Shadow, and you'll find it on pages 114-121.  The language that the narrator uses to describe his relationship with his 'shadow' is pretty much exactly how I feel about mine.  You should read it.  Read some of the other stories too.  They're weird, achingly hip and more than a little self-satisfied, but some of them are really good.

It's also shadowy in the sense that it follows me around, wherever I go.  In the past I've tried to leave it behind, in old workplaces with old patterns and old habits.  Every time I've changed job I've tried to 'go straight', but I've always quickly found myself abusing the computer systems or fantasising about female colleagues that I've just met.  It's inescapable.  I fancy myself quite the feminist, and I would never look a woman up and down and rate her on how bangable she is, but in truth, I do look women up and down.  I do it to see if I would be interested in kissing her feet.  I'm still objectifying them, and even though in my mind I put them in a superior position, I have ultimately sexualised them without their consent.  I also do it with their personalities and their character.  If they're any combination of kind, rich, posh, girly, tall, horsey, feminine, intelligent or pretty, then I'll cast them in a maid fantasy.  I file women under 'boots' or 'sissymaids' or 'riding mistress' without a second thought.  I do this habitually, instantly, universally and poisonously.  I know it's wrong, and I feel that the part of me that does this, my shadow, is wrong for doing it.

But in some ways it's less like a shadow.  Another way to look at it is in terms of a needy toddler.  It demands attention, regardless of what my adult self is trying to do, and becomes increasingly whiney and wheedley if it doesn't get the attention it craves.  External things (like work stress and my father) can set it off, or sometimes you didn't get quite enough sleep, or you're simply having a bad day.  There is it, demanding your attention, becoming more and more infuriating until you finally crack and give in, knowing that you've just lost the battle and reinforced the attention-getting behaviour.

You know when you're trying to read a book, or do the washing up, and a tired and crosspatchy child comes climbing up your bottom?  You try and get the child interested in a book or a puzzle in the living room, to give you some time alone in the kitchen, but 2 minutes later they're back on your bottom, twice as noisy, and they know all the buttons to press.  You can devote all your attention to the child and spend the whole day focused entirely on them and that can often be fun, but come the evening, the house is a tip, there's no dinner in the oven, and no clean shirts for tomorrow.  It's exactly like that.  Exactly like that.

Exactly like this

Which is about as far as we got in the last therapy session before the Easter break.  Great.  There now follows two weeks of living with this new knowledge before I can get back to my therapist (who's really fucking good) and try and sort this all out.  Two weeks of seeing my family and having idle time near a computer.  I'm not hopeful.  I've already failed, quite spectacularly, creating an entirely new fantasy on Flickr last night.  I went browsing, saw a gallery with pictures of happy, well-dressed women holding certificates, and then managed to spin 6 good quality image captions from a standing start.  Clean Powerpoint file, set up the pages, fonts, styles and details of the fantasy situation, then wrote the captions, fussed over the order, and uploaded the whole set to Flickr:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/85105313@N08/albums/72157666134344811  It took me six hours, I went to bed past 2am, got up the next day full of guilt and bad eating habits, wrote most of this post when I should have been working, abused coffee on the way home and went straight to bed feeling very, very ill.  It doesn't help that I'm already receiving positive feedback, and a private message from someone I've dabbled with before, wishing to discuss my work.  Positive feedback is not helping.

I can see the triggers:  uncomfortable therapy, the prospect of time at my mother's house where I no longer feel at home (see uncomfortable therapy), the spectre of my Dad, work stuff, family stuff.  I feel that I could deal with everything a lot better without the constant background radiation of submissive fantasies and self-recrimination (I think they might actually be the same thing) that follows me around everywhere I go.  It would certainly help if I didn't have to drop everything and placate my shadow for 6 hours just because I'm having a hard week.  It might allow me to actually get to the end of a week without it being a hard week, something that hasn't really happened for a long time.

Still, at least I know what my problem is now, so that's something, I guess.  Seriously, read the story.

LMW