Meet Dave
This was honestly just a very strange movie premise—dare I say high-concept. I have no recollection whatsoever of when I watched it; I simply know that I did.
I had a really meaningful conversation over dinner with a friend yesterday. She's been one of the key supports in my mental health journey these past few months because she really does get it in a way that most people don't; to have that perspective as I've been navigating new and scary emotions has been incredibly valuable to me. In particular, our recent conversation opened the door to a moment of real insight during therapy today, and I guess I just wanted to take a moment to process it.
My friend told me an anecdote about her own childhood friend who explained to her the day-to-day experience of living with PTSD and depression. According to the friend, it was like being a porcelain teapot that had been shattered and glued back together many times, and after each repair, she'd become a bit more glue and bit less porcelain. Something about this analogy resonated with me: while I couldn't fully vocalize it at the time, I realized that I too felt like a teapot that'd been broken and put back together, and I no longer knew if I could still fulfill my function as a teapot. Moreover, I was afraid that if people found out just how broken I am, they'd discard me without a second thought. I tried to tell her as much, and that realization kept brewing in my head.
Then, when I couldn't sleep later that night, as has become quite commonplace, I went to the living room to work on a different blog entry about the first person I ever dated—I was feeling particularly wistful. (I've elected not to publish it because, well, it's a lil' embarrassing in a somewhat juvenile way.) To make a long post short, I expressed how I'd felt as if that person had seen me for who I actually was, in terms of my personality and inner world but also in terms of my still-budding adolescent identity. And I realized that he was one of the few people—perhaps the only person—who'd truly seen me at that point in my life. To some extent, I think he still might be the only person who's ever entirely seen me. What a precious thing. He was someone who'd comprehended the glued-up teapot I was, but instead of discarding me like refuse, he drew me in closer. He was willing to be my best friend and first love even though he knew I was broken. His compassion still means a lot to me even though we haven't talked in years.
Since my ex was on my mind, I started my therapy session today talking about him. My therapist asked why he mattered to me. Why was I thinking about him? What would he bring to my life if we were still friends? Why did being seen and being accepted mean so much to me?
Well, I said, he cared despite the fact I was gay, and gender non-conforming, and just straight-up nerdy and awkward. And in another sense, he cared about me unequivocally in way I don't think I'd ever experienced, and I'd never felt un-alone like that before, and he cared even though I was really just a husk walking around, pretending to be human but hollow inside. Like Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave—a person-shaped spaceship with little tiny aliens inside watching the camera feed and piloting it with their best impression of a real person. And he saw that part of me too, that fundamental non-humanness, that inner nothingness, and yet he cared about me and loved me anyways. Because even though I was on the other side of the glass with the rest of the world so utterly distant and antithetical, he could still reach out and touch the real me through that impenetrable barrier. Or so it felt. And really, it comforted me because for the longest time—and I've, I've felt this way for as long as I remember, and now too—I believed, I believe that if someone... if someone saw that inhuman, hollow part of me, if they saw the real me, they would be disgusted; they would find me diametrically opposed to what is good and loveable, they would hate me, they would leave me, t-they would abandon me—
I began to cry.
I'd never vocalized anything like that before. Not to anyone, not even to myself.
I still don't understand where I got these feelings from. The familiar emptiness that emerged in my adolescence and formed a gnawing cavity behind my ribcage, the sense of differentness and disconnectedness I'd felt for just as long, the persistent feeling that something was deeply wrong in my life even though I could never put my finger on it. They scare me as much as they did before. But at least my therapist had a word for some of it: dissociation.
The feeling of being outside looking in. The feeling of shrinking deep into the unreachable recesses of your mind. The feeling of being Eddie Murphy with little alien people in your head who control your thoughts and actions. But also the ability to completely shut down when someone raises their voice—or to conjure a gentle, detached inner voice to guide you through a crisis even when you're completely debilitated by terror, shame, or anxiety. A survival mechanism.
What other survival mechanisms do I have? Some are obvious to me, like the stabs of fear I feel when I hear footsteps outside my room or see a particular expression on someone's face. But some are less obvious. And I still don't know where I got them from. It has something to do with my family and my personality. But surely my upbringing was normal. My parents had their flaws, but I turned out okay, and my life is okay. So why, why do I still feel so irreparably broken?
Why?
Why can't I be human? Why can't I find a place in the world of the living? Why, after all these years, do I still feel like a tiny, helpless child, like an unlovable failure, like utterly nothing at all? What is wrong with me?
Why? Why? Why?
My next therapy session is on Friday, so I guess we'll find out then. Stay tuned!