“The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time.”
- Patron Saint Lucia Berlin
There’s this scene in Lynne Ramsey’s 2017 broken thriller You Were Never Really Here where Joaquin Phoenix breaks into the mansion of the leader of a underground sex trafficking ring, armed with a hammer, and rescues a little girl. We see the entire setpiece only through overlapping security camera footage while a 1960s love song skips and repeats and jolts in sync with the footage. It’s maybe my favorite scene in any movie ever. I’ll link it below, starts at 1:30:
Beyond the aesthetic self-awareness and the irony-poisoned needle drop (that same philosophy guides a certain ugly podcast about Epstein; Many were quick to point out that meme of a buried national trauma could be rather snugly retrofitted onto YWNRH) lies a complete detachment from space, from optics, from action, from time. The surveillance tapes push Phoenix’s hitman outside his body, the cuts away from gnarly acts of violence highlighting an inability to process the cinematic “present.” It is so natural to genre movies, themselves a form of societal compartmentalization, that it reads less as a subversive gimmick and more as a death wish, a desire to look anywhere but now.
This was the last movie I watched before I got sober. I watched it maybe six times that weekend, going off my log. I don’t remember watching it that many times. I don’t remember much. My mother found me that night barred out and high and I can’t remember if she cried or what she yelled at me about. I don’t remember the first time I used. Of course I don’t remember the first time I dissociated. I think it was probably a slow build, first the ideation, then the puberty, then ~trauma~, and eventually my brain decided to trip into disrepair. It started hitting me in class, in the middle of cross country practice. There were no words for what was happening and I claimed all the wrong ones.
Drugs didn’t stop the dissociation, but they gave me the opportunity to jump-start preemptively, make me feel a little easier. I know I lived as maybe six people but I don’t have enough to give any particular one an arc. I read so many books whose plots still swap places in my brain, watched so many movies whose color palettes I can’t name. I spent time at houses I couldn’t place on a map. I ate Reese’s Puffs by the handful. I tapped my face like my fingers were dancing. I lied, a lot. I hurt so many people whose names I don’t know. Mostly I did nothing. I could do nothing. And I don’t remember most of what I did. I don’t like to think about what I remember.
On Wednesday, I’ll have two years sober and I still have trouble with the whole memory thing. Funny I’ll be celebrating stuck in a room doing nothing, though this one’s a little less cozy than my childhood home. I want the half-decent print of Peter Blume’s "The Rock” above my headboard again.
The involuntary dissociation comes back in waves. It got worse after I got sober, scared the employees at rehab. It got worse again right before I came out, because yes, I hated being present in my body too. (After getting on HRT I realized what testosterone felt like for the first time since pre-adolescence, and it clicked into my head how consistently this had triggered my episodes). It’s bad now, of course, and I wish I had some simple words of reassurance. This is just how my mind works; I’ve built a subconscious longing to be braindead, my tendency towards wanting desperately to be a person with no manifestations. I am still getting used to being present.
My sleep’s fucked, and late at night, once I can’t focus on a book and Twitter’s UI has started grating behind my eyelids, I’ve taken to re-watching Mad Men. My favorite scenes are the ones where my kindred Don Draper wanders off alone into some sequestered activity. It is nice to vicariously live through a man whose past is a series of ellipses and empty half-truths.
It is so destabilizing to not remember. I try to be gentle with myself, that so many of my formative years are lost, and that they’re not lost to the people who watched me suffer, who I hurt recklessly. There are people who would prefer me dead. I want that version of myself dead too; It’d be easier to deal with its absence in my head. I try not that blurry remorse, that feeling of uncontrollable disappearance, define my life anymore. We are all stuck, right now, in a loop of familiar and traumatic days. It is a time I will likely block out, and I’m trying really hard not to. I just came into being, and I like it. And when this is all over I want to still be here. I want to have at least a little history to hold onto.
always with love,
Sam
song for this post: "When I Get Low I Get High" - Ella Fitzgerald and the Chick Webb Orchestra