In my experience, among the most surefire ways to ruin something is to speak about it. Over the past several months, I have been instituting certain changes to my long-standing routines, adjusting quantities and methods of food intake, modes of transportation, views on sleep, frequency of spending time with others, and attitudes toward small-talk and similar forms of casual conversation. Along the way, I keep running into brick walls put up – I suspect – by the various strata of my ego. To a degree, I recognize these buffers as screens I had erected in the past to try to protect myself from or provide treatment for emotional damage. (True to the nature of such things, these buffers now cause more harm than good, instead of lessening past hurt increasing present confusion and frustration.) Curiously enough, I can sometimes remember vividly the reason and justification for having erected a barrier, the moment it went up solidly embedded in deep memory, tactile, olfactory, and auditory sensations flooding back to transport me all but bodily to the situation in which I had been injured originally.
At times, these sensations are so strong that I find myself re-justifying the buffers' existence, convincing myself anew that they must stay in place, that the potential for additional damage resulting from their removal would be greater than the benefits gained from taking them down. Sometimes, I allow the ego that rules a given buffer to keep it in place; other times, I am able to widen the cracks that have been made in my emotional Maginot Line by time and shifting circumstance and sidestep the now-superfluous protections or even break them down fully, states of mind long kept dormant coming quickly back to life in the sudden brilliance of unbuffered exposure to life's perpetual risks. As far as examples of these barriers go, my often excessive and usually compulsive consumption of food is more serious and frequent than the rest. If I am not careful, I will overeat, become too full to think clearly, and punish myself for hours – silently and continuously – for not only consuming more than my allotted daily ration of, say, oatmeal, but also for giving in to the urge to do so. The very act of over-consuming seems to serve as a buffer against subtle, massive emotional states that then tend to recede back into the shadows once I surrender to the urge to feed
What all of this building up and tearing down of buffers comes down to, I think, is a propensity for self-abuse that more often than not originates in the act of consuming substances in hopes that they will change the modes and frequencies of my thinking: imagining that things will be better after a few beers, alcohol only makes me sad and robs me of the ability to control my destiny; hoping that the tricky leaf will change the contours of my soul forever, it instead tethers me for but a few hours to an artificial view of things, after which I find myself justifying bad behaviors such as overeating and sloth with greater ease and less consternation. In all, I find that my recent attempts to lead a more productive and healthy life have been bearing fruit, although I'm not quite sure how long this period of fluctuation normally lasts. As it goes with most such things, I suspect my ability to control my own actions will wax and wane as my behaviors settle into their new channels and I – at some point, somehow – dedicate myself fully to a happy life devoid of selfishness, discontentment, and desire. Until then I shall try to adhere to the lessons of Ana Forrest, who urges us to replace admonition with acceptance, self-loathing with self-love, and the damaging behaviors with ones that bring us comfort, and joy. Onward, then, and tally-ho. Mahalo.
mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥
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