It seems there are important things I should explain to myself. For instance, to my two-year-old self: face cream is not edible, no matter how much it looks like frosting. To my four-year-old self: eating pepper will not cancel out the ludicrous amount of salt you just ate; it will only make your mouth taste like salt *and* pepper. To my ten-year-old self, who buried a letter in the backyard asking if Mom and Dad were still alive (after a long list of questions about dogs): you have a deeply unhealthy obsession with dogs. Normal children do not make their mothers time them as they crawl through a canine obstacle course on all fours. They do not growl at people. And no, Murphy is not still alive. He was a dog, and he is dead now.
My childhood was a series of intense, single-minded quests. When I was four, my mother baked a cake for my grandfather's birthday, a glorious creation slathered in frosting and topped with marshmallow creatures. I knew, with an existential certainty that consumed my entire being, that I had to eat that cake. My mother, aware that a single taste of sugar would transform me into a sweetness-seeking black hole, spent the day hiding it. But I was relentless. When she finally locked it in a back bedroom for its own safety, I discovered the window was open. I clambered up the side of the house, pushed out the screen, and ate the entire thing. I spent the rest of the party in a hyperglycemic fit, regurgitating a rainbow of semidigested success onto the carpet, a god in that moment - the god of cake.
This pattern of building an identity on a single, questionable act continued. At eight, I accidentally demonstrated a mild fortitude against spicy food, an event my father exaggerated until I was pitted against his forty-five-year-old coworker in a hot-sauce-eating challenge. I won, not through any special ability, but through a sheer refusal to accept the shame of defeat. Suddenly, I was a hot sauce savant. My family gave me bottles of it for Christmas. Relatives I barely knew defined me by it. For twenty years, I maintained the lie, pretending to love the fiery agony simply because it was too late, too weirdly embarrassing, to admit the truth.
My adult life is governed by a similar brand of flawed logic, a chaos I have inexplicably chosen to amplify by adopting two dogs. The first, whom I call the simple dog, might be slightly retarded. She cannot figure out stairs and believes throwing up is a magical power that creates infinite food. The second, the helper dog, is a psychologically destroyed dog-monster we adopted from the back corner of a shelter. She hates everything, especially the existence of other dogs, and spends her nights staring at us from a corner, rigid as a block of wood, waiting for the neighbor's dog to exist so she can scream-growl and run into the sliding glass door.
For a long time, my own mind felt just as broken. I woke up one day feeling sad for no reason, and the sadness wouldn't leave. It was a purposeless, apathetic state that robbed me of the right to self-pity. Trying to will it away didn't work; it was like a person with no arms trying to punch themselves until their hands grew back. So I turned on myself, becoming a bully who narrated my every action with a stream of abuse. “Look at you,” I'd think, watching myself sit on a pile of laundry. “When you were a child, is this what you dreamt of becoming? A sad person sitting on laundry?” The feelings began to shrivel up, until I couldn't even feel the self-hatred anymore. There was just nothing.
The invulnerability that came with the numbness was a relief at first. I'd always wanted to not give a fuck, and now I couldn't. But my experiences flattened into a soul-decaying boredom. I couldn't connect with anything or anyone. People would try to help, pointing out how beautiful things were, but it was like they were trying to find my fish after I'd explained the fish were dead. “Let's keep looking!” they'd say. “I'm sure they're here somewhere!” Eventually, I found myself staring at a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator. Something inside me snapped. I was overcome with the most confusing, uncontrollable, debilitating laughter I have ever experienced. My brain, it seemed, had been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months and had decided to unleash it all at once.
I am still governed by a crude skill set of fear and shame. Motivation is a horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while actively avoiding it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to. If I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. I want to believe I'm a hero, the kind of person who would donate a kidney without a second thought. But deep down, I know I'm someone who has to actively resist the urge to throw sand at children. I am a fundamentally horrible person, and I'm constantly thrust into my own face while I'm trying to be better than I am.
The struggle is constant. Sometimes, I am an eight-year-old lost in the woods with my mother, trying to scare her into finding the way home by reciting the plot of *The Texas Chainsaw Massacre*. Other times, I am trapped in my own living room, fending off a wild goose that has decided to claim my house and all my belongings. But there is hope, I think. It may not be the comforting, Hallmark kind of hope. It's just the possibility that there's a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And when you're facing a miserable, boring wasteland, not knowing feels strangely like enough.
