“Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything - real feelings, true happiness, real joy. They can't get through that fog. But you lift it, and buddy, you're in for the ride of your life.”
-Bob Diamond, Esq., Defending Your Life
I probably shouldn't have commented the other day about how I haven't suffered lately with a restless mind in the last couple hours before sunrise, a bane of my existence since at least the pandemic. Maybe all this clean living is paying off.
Or not, because last night it returned in force when P arose and padded in her lovely way to the bathroom at exactly 3:35. I was up, and there waiting for me was the adversary with whom I share space in my head, shuffling papers at counsel table like a prosecutor about to present his case. Perhaps this voice is mine as well, or perhaps it's the appearance of the "adversary" named in the Hebrew Bible as Satan.
On this particular morning, long after P crawled back into bed and started the cooing that's about as close as she gets to snoring, the Adversary had gotten to work. He didn't need to speak, not at all: the evening's presentation consisted almost entirely of vignettes, scenes I really did not want to see, narratives I've carefully blotted out to keep from going mad. The purpose of the exercise, I suppose, was to induce shame, anger, grief--any sort of emotional pain that might shut down my ability to feel all the good of this moment, here with Peg curled up next to me in a place we both love.
Where does this come from, this calculated attack? It's like somewhere in the recesses of my brain lies the anti-resume, the nonachievement list that annotates every failure, every shortcoming compared with others and with what I could be if I lived up to potential. This voice finds the document, blows off the dust, and with paralyzing force enters an unspoken closing argument that is simply damning in its force.
That it effaces to the point I can reflect on it now may provide an answer. At 3 a.m. the rational part of my brain, the neofrontal cortex and its ancillaries, are all busy creating and storing memories. It's my own brain betraying me by strolling through that library where the anti-resume lies.
Or is it? I can't help thinking that a lot of what's happening here is that the subconscious layers of being and thought finally have the run of the space between my ears, and at some level all that fear and anger that are tamped down by the rational bits take over the projector for the evening and show me things I assiduously avoid seeing when my rational brain holds sway. Part of the reason ("reason"--see, there's that left brain at it again) for this hypothesis is that I can pinpoint one other time in my waking hours this happens--on the golf course, as things start to unravel. It feels almost exactly the same, and I find myself humiliated at the temper tantrums that follow. There's a link in all of this, manifestly.
And years ago I went through a period of a few weeks, in October of 1988, when the fear and self-doubt became so overwhelming that, after graduating near the top of every flying training regimen up to that point, I could do nothing right in the Eagle. I lost sight of my flight lead in formation just as we engaged the simulated enemy, took bad missile shots, suddenly couldn't land without bouncing down the runway. And the worse it got, the worse it got. Until, after maybe three weeks of sustained buffoonery that left some wondering how I'd made it into an operational fighter squadron, it stopped. Not long thereafter I actually upgraded to flight lead early, and held that role during the shooting war that followed. How'd that happen? My squadron commander at the time, Bubba Parker, pulled me aside to tell me in his own colorful way that it hadn't gone unnoticed to him that I was f*cking up, but he'd never had a lieutenant fail out of mission qualification training, and he wasn't giving up on me no matter what.
And the voice stopped, almost right then and there.
But there's no Bubba in my world these days. I'm old and wrestling with this creature on my own. What to do? How to isolate and eliminate an adversary that seems bent on ruining everything good?
Intuitively, and this is a fraught exercise whenever we're poking around in our own head, I have to treat it as a being, an other, a something-other-than-me that lives in my head and busts loose at inopportune times (But when's an opportune time for this sort of experience? You're too in love with big words and stock phrases, Donk). Next time it arrives, I need to respond with something along the lines of "Oh, it's you, here to bust my chops again while the big ole thinking brain is off doing something else. Why not shut the f*ck up?"
That last part sounds more like a command, but how does one order another (it's not me, after all) to do anything? The Hebrew Bible, like a lot of ancient traditions, tells us we gain power over someone else through the act of naming. There's a reason the angel in Genesis renames Jacob as "Israel"--it's the only way he wins a fight that's gone on all night (that, and he dislocated poor Jacob's hip).
But when that thought occurred to me at about 5:15, that I should just name this beast, I felt this sense of dread at the notion of naming the accuser in my head, as if the accuser himself wanted me to sense that this was a very, very bad idea. Weird. I'll go with my gut on this one, however, and leave this unhappy citizen of my otherwise fairly happy noggin unnamed for now. Maybe one day I'll get the upper hand, dislocate the SOB's hip, and name him whatever I choose.
Enough of this lunacy. I need to squeeze in a quick trip to the gym before my day filled with phone conferences and a hearing covers over those spaces on my schedule where I might otherwise get a little exercise.
Yekcid. Is the name .