The Slough of Despondency: “Never Experienced Such Darkness” –Gabor Maté’s Assessment

You’re right to feel it. Yes it hurts. But it IS what’s real.

***

Maté the Elder, as he almost always is, is Right.

And what he moves me to say is: I’m going to self-diagnose again, not as an autistic or as bipolar or even as an XXY.

My chief malady, as with many of us living in these dark societies and times, is Loneliness. It seems so glaringly obvious, now that he’s said it.

And I say to you truly: Don’t you fucking dare to think that this is a guilt trip I’m laying, even in part, at your feet.

I chose this life for specific reasons, especially because being alone and even lonely if necessary was still less painful than the vast majority of interpersonal interactions, from the grocery store to the workplace to the bedroom.

It’s always been a rare thing to encounter another person with the desire and ability to be fully alive, intellectually unafraid, and emotionally supple; rarer still that they are all those things AND simpatico.

It was never this rare though, back in the before times. Never before this hard to get by, in human and social terms.

Let me tell you what I intend to do about it.

I’m going to open myself to possibilities with people.

Not everyone, and in fact, hardly anyone. Because most of them are hopelessly broken and don’t even want to consider what fixing could look like.

They’re out there, hidden and probably just as scarred and scared as I am, but with hearts that still really beat just the same.

Step toward me my twisted exotic darlings. Just step once. To start. Warily is fine.

I will promise to do the same, and I am a man of my word.

Fuck the dead, whether they’re in the cold ground already, or stumbling around like average normal zombies in a rotten vanilla trance.

We have plans and ideas and spells and healing to discuss, out on the patio, under the covers, whatever, however, and wherever, and you know i ain’t lyin’.

***

Toward the end of what the Elder is saying, see also: the relationship between self-cutting and self-soothing, and other Temporary Forms of Escape.