how does one develop the courage to feel? in clay shirky’s “gin, television, and social surplus” he suggests that each generation has a kind of social lubricant, an opiate of the masses, if you will. this shifts with the zeitgeist. maybe it’s the alcoholism of the dry age of prohibition. in my youth, shirky suggests, it would have been tv sitcoms, and now maybe TikTok and other social media sites, keeping us afloat during yet another age of anxiety, facing a new threat of a total global cataclysm. in this context, how does a person develop the courage to feel, in all of its mortifications and starkness and terror?
for myself, there’s a sense that so much has gone wrong that i have lost the ability to properly “go through it,” feeling instead all the little bits of grief shedding off of me after one bout of chaos or another. as such, i have felt the tragedy of my circumstances without grief. i feel like my social lubricant is — and probably has always been — disassociation.
i am a secret robot.
nobody knows it, but i’ve always been this way. when i was little, i would pretend that i was part human part machine, perhaps more properly — i am a cyborg. i wonder how else a person could be a human in the environment where i grew up. my relative just told a story at a family barbecue about shooting up a raccoon with meth. i don’t feel a lot when i hear stories like this, not really surprised. i just shake my head and sometimes laugh, if not actually at the humour, at least by laughing it loosens up the shock and dismay and sends it scattering around like the tinkling of bluebells in the face of a monstrosity that feels impossible to recognize.
i find one of the key differences in growing up in abject poverty, is the comfort you develop with the darker aspects of mortality. you don’t have the means to escape hunger, desperation, avarice even. i often joke about how we weren’t wealthy enough to have pride and again, those bluebells send the shame tinkling with laughter at the mortification of being poor. i think a lot about this kind of thing now especially, now that i am crossing the poverty line, where eking out even a modest living feels like an immense privilege. i’m the kind of person who can buy juice and crackers now. i have arrived.
at the same time, i have just gotten over one of the largest hurdles of my life, which is also weird to talk about because i don’t like to complain. i feel like it’s a sin to complain when you’re facing down a life of struggle. the priority is survival and you can’t prioritize survival when you’re focused on your problems. just like pride, suffering is a privilege. i don’t necessarily connect to the narrative of resilience because it’s never really felt like an option to me, more like an instinct. i don’t choose to be resilient, i have to be resilient. my strength, the strength that i was able to have pride in, was in being able to withstand my circumstances without complaint and this is what allowed me to continue to live amongst intolerable circumstances, because i was strong enough to take it.
recently, i got a scan to check on the progress of my chemo, uploaded to an online portal where you can read and be confused by the medical jargon. i looked up the meaning of a “complete metabolic response.” it turns out that my scans were clear, but because of the complications i had, i am being referred to a radiation specialist to see if i need a follow-up treatment to prevent future recurrence. that means radiation every day for a month. it’s not a sure bet either way, just more waiting and waiting is something that i have been practicing. i am good at tolerating pain and discomfort. i am a pro because when all is said and done — i am a secret robot.
so, while i know that i am free of cancer, i don’t know if i can look forward to health just yet. i am waiting and reflecting, trying not to feel any particular way because it seems hasty to feel anything at all. and not feeling anything is something i am good at because after all — i am a secret robot.
my experience of this moment is one of surreality, the primary cause of which is a sudden return to health, almost as though the past six months were a fever dream. it seems barely real, even now. i can’t feel two of the fingers on my left hand and when i touch my chest, there is no sensation there either. the topography of my body in that place is forever changed, now foreign feeling, but i can breathe normally. i feel full of energy. i feel better. yet, the difference is an absence, an absence of feeling.
there is still so much to process, so much about my life that feels like that fever dream. cancer was the most recent trial, but in a life habituated to chaos, it was one amongst many. yet, i find that when you’re rocking on the precipice of a very different existence, so much about you found important before seems so meaningless now.
dr. gabor maté in “when the body says no” suggests that there might be a personality complex that corresponds to diseases like cancer, one of extreme self-denial and repression. whether or not you believe in his theory — based mainly on anecdotal evidence and observation — i think to myself about the way that i have been holding myself all these years and i wonder. what are the consequences of resilience?
i learned not to feel as a child. i was encouraged to keep family business in the family, which is a common experience of those growing up in poverty, where your family members might be singled out by law enforcement for something as simple as smoking pot. i couldn’t talk about the deprivations of my home life because i never found the words and so i began to develop in silence, an absence that has caused me to slowly implode. i haven’t had the luxury of either suffering nor pride but i think i might indulge in it now. i think i deserve to suffer after the ordeal i experienced, which extends far beyond the cancer.
just before i received my diagnosis, when the tumour was growing unimpeded inside me, i got a call in the middle of the night from my partner who had ingested a bottle of aspirin. i hadn’t picked up the phone, but he left me a voice message making sure that i knew his death would be on my head, telling me he had left a message for his family, barring me from his funeral. a few days before, he had left me a message faking pancreatic cancer, which i hadn’t responded to. it caused me to have a cold feeling that spread throughout my entire body and that lasted for three days. i couldn’t get myself warm but i also couldn’t fully process what had happened because there was chaos to contend with. suffering is a luxury.
after the suicide attempt, he began to barrage my email with messages that read like hateful poems, about how he wanted to save up all of the ire he felt for me, which he would release onto my soul on the day of judgement, pouring pure hatred into me at the end of time. i guess i read the letters out of morbid curiosity, or fear, or somehow (and even after everything) missing him. the chill in my bones made me wonder if he might kill me. i was diagnosed with cancer just after that.
a friend of mine contracted a very similar type of cancer after living through a toxic relationship a bit like my own and it made me wonder, is there a kind of love that can turn your body against itself? how much neglect does it take before your very cells begin to destroy you? why did i let it happen to me again, after all the work i had done, after all the other times i had left and thought that i had finally saved myself?
i feel like the mask that i have been wearing has left me vulnerable to exploitative relationships. i remember being so dissociated that i would look at myself in the mirror and have this feeling of foreignness, looking at a person staring back at me who did not feel like myself. i watched my life like a spectator, so numbed to sensation that no one could touch me, nothing could touch me, no one could make me feel. i became so good at compartmentalizing, that i could be cowering under a table, my body huddled against itself and the next second, i could pull myself together, smiling and acting like nothing had happened. it was a skill i had been practicing since childhood. i was very good at making it appear as though i was okay when i was not. i was good at hiding what was happening at home because, after all — i am a secret robot.
people often comment on how calm i seem and i laugh and joke, saying “it’s all an illusion.” i seem calm because i am consciously maintaining calm as an underlying process that takes a massive amount of energy to maintain. for over thirty years, i have felt like screaming at the top of my lungs but instead, i slowly breathe.
i found an outlet in my art, where i would do these performances where i would give myself permission to let it out. it felt cathartic to embrace my body, to let out the intensity that i was hiding. i remember a friend once asked me how i access such an intense energy and i also remember the look on his face when i told him i always feel like that.
it’s funny because people say to ask for help, to reach out, but they don’t really understand that the people who need it the most often don’t have anyone to reach out to. what would you do with an extremely traumatized child, who can barely articulate the abuse that they’ve experienced? what would you do with a friend who was functionally so disabled that they couldn’t work? how would you help? there is a very real threat of institutionalization when you’re too much for the people around you to handle and so you try to become easier to handle. i had seen what happens to people with resistant cases — drugs, cycling in and out of withdrawals, electroconvulsive therapy, forcible confinement, instability, even more poverty.
i want to dispel the thought that i was somehow the manufacturer of my cancer because of my repression. i didn’t want to be repressed, i had to be repressed in order to survive. it would be ironic if this was the very mechanism through which i became sick yet it wasn’t my fault that i had to hold these feelings inside. i was poor. my only options for healthcare were medications that didn’t work and that threw my nervous system off balance, that caused life altering side effects that took me years to recover from. i reached out over and over again through the proper channels and did not receive care. i was treated with disdain by mental health professionals because i didn’t have the words to describe my experiences. i was so hungry to be seen that i allowed myself to live in a situation of extreme stress for years on end, just to have even a reasonable facsimile of human companionship, even though it also made everything worse.
do you know what actually helped? what actually allowed me to heal? someone offered me a job — a real job, a job where i could feel confidence in myself, where i could be accepted and valued for who i really am. that was the moment that things began to change for me.
even still, it’s taken years to unwind the knots, to extricate myself from an environment of fear. cancer felt like plucking a string resonating into the spaces kept trapped within me, tearing down all of the layers I had built up and making it impossible for me to wear this mask, pretending that everything is okay, because it’s not. because, after everything — i am not a secret robot. i am a human being.
it’s still difficult to stop, to stop pretending to be untouchable. don’t get me wrong, i love to laugh. it’s helped me to cope for all these years but i’m also exhausted. i’m tired of laughing at the body horrors inflicted on me due to my poverty. i am so tired of laughing that i think it’s time to cry. i’m too tired to live with a person yelling at me and calling me names. i’m too tired to be gaslit, to be constantly questing my reality and fearing for my safety. i’m tired of not having any privacy or any freedom. i’m tired of pretending that i haven’t been broken by it all.
i’m still scared to let go and to really be myself, in all the chaos and glory that entails, but it feels like i have an opportunity now, to maybe live my life in a way that is less exhausting, less desperate, less filled with secret pain and i really really want to let go of all of that. i’ve been given a real chance to be something different, someone different. I’ve been given a chance to indulge in the luxury of suffering and i want to make the most of it. i don’t want to be numb in order to live my life. i want to feel it, every little bit.
with everything we have been through over the past couple of years, with all the things that we are facing, i think we all might need an opportunity to suffer, to stop, to break, to stop being resilient. it might be time to dismantle the machinery that keeps us trapped inside of our masks, to be the person that others can reach out to and be too much, too sad, too broken, too big to contain. i don’t think the doctors are going to save us this time. i don’t think our minds are perfect machines that can be fixed with a drug. i think the future is going to be full of tinkling bluebells and plucked strings, resonating into the cavernous spaces of our silence. i think it’s time to scream.
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