Road Trip Diary: Connect the Fragments
a creative writing post (#37)
This post replaces the regularly scheduled Monday Morning Love edition, which should return next week, barring unforeseen circumstances. It is too long for most email clients, so you may want to read it at the Substack website by clicking on the title above.
Context: I made an unplanned trip to Brattleboro, Vermont. It was seven hours of driving, mostly to try to clear my head. The attempt was partially successful, as I made a few connections about why I’m having one of the longest and most intense disassociation episodes of my adult life.
Also a few connections about how close to dead the concepts of individualism and individual, personal responsibility really are.
I can feel a few more connections just out of reach, floating around my head, and am writing this in the hopes of making those connections. Which, if you’re reading this, I did.
Or perhaps I didn’t, but decided to publish my attempt anyway.
This post will quote from the lyrics of some of the songs I listened to during the drive, and link to YouTube versions of them. If you’d like to experience a bit of the same soundtrack that I did, you can listen along. It’s an odd mixture of both musical styles and emotions, from the sacred poetry of Rich Mullins to the profane poetry of Marilyn Manson.
Mostly classic rock of the 90s fills up the spectrum between the two, expressing attempts to find beauty, perhaps even insight, in sadness.
A Trip to Brattleboro
In Eleven Hours
I had a small adventure on Saturday, which involved all of the following in an eleven hour period: eight drawings discussed with a flirty waiter, seven hours of driving, six Google maps speed trap alerts, five compliments on my shoes, four Google maps stalled vehicle notifications, three toothless meth addicts, two brutally hot gay guys on a first date, and one conversation with a Roma fortune teller in a storefront…not a pear tree. Though her shop did have a drawing of what I’m pretty sure was a partridge in the midst of its eclectic art collection.
The sum of these parts was indeed greater: a medium-sized epiphany — about social media, about myself, about collectivism, about the death of individualism, and about the selfishness of despair.
This is that story.
And maybe, if I’m lucky, it’ll be the story of the power of writing to turn a medium-sized epiphany into a giant-sized one.
PTSD fragmentation is a very difficult thing for people to understand who haven’t experienced it, so if this essay seems to jump from pillar to post—to be scattered and all over the place—well, you’re right.
This essay is giving you a bit of the internal experience. That’s all.
If you find it discomfiting, well, thank you.
That means I communicated something truthfully, and perhaps even skillfully.
“You can’t fight the tears that ain’t coming, or the moment of truth in your lies. When everything feels like the movies, you’ll bleed just to know you’re alive.” —Iris, by Goo Goo Dolls
Running Away From Myself
There came a moment in the early afternoon when I was either going to get in bed and cry myself to sleep or get in my car and take the closest option available to what I really wanted—running away from myself—by driving far away from my usual surroundings.
My current disassociation episode, which has been far more severe and long-lasting than usual, has been wearing me down.
Disassociation is a type of psychological fragmentation, and the process of trying to clear a fragmented mind is very much the process of trying to find connections between disparate emotions, thoughts, mood states, and modes.
Crying oneself to sleep, and carefully noting one’s dreams, is one way to do that.
Driving a long way is another.
I’d just had enough of myself, and I’ve cried way too much lately, mostly from frustration.
So I opted for the drive.
“Now we’re grown-up orphans that never knew their names. We don’t belong to no one; that’s a shame.” —Name, by Goo Goo Dolls
I Occasionally Learn My Lesson
The last time I felt a desire to run away from myself as intense as this one, I drove far away, either found or stumbled across a bad man—I put it that way because it remains unclear to me whether or not I was looking—and made a stupidly dangerous mistake.
Like that time, I was very far away from being able to predict myself.
But this time, at least, I could tell.
So this time I texted Josh where I was probably going, and that I’d text him if I went too far afield from that plan. Partly so that if I got myself into real trouble he’d know where to start looking.
But mostly because knowing someone I respect would ask me about it later lowered the chances I’d fuck up too badly.
Besides, Josh would understand.
He wouldn’t say “I understand.”
He would understand.
And he did.
“I’m sorry ‘bout the attitude I need to give when I’m with you, but no one else would take this shit from me.
And I’m so terrified of no one else but me.
I’m here all the time.
I won’t go away.”
—Long Day, by Matchbox20
A (Possibly) Unsolvable Problem
In mathematics, there are impossibility theorems, sometimes called “negative results.” These are theorems that demonstrate that a certain problem cannot be solved, or that a particular kind of solution is impossible under certain conditions.
Recovery from serious and long-term trauma is something like unpeeling an onion.
One layer comes off.
Then another.
Then another.
Then one more.
These layers all hurt like fuck.
They contain defenses, both conscious and unconscious. Failures of understanding, and the consequences of those failures. Humiliating mistakes made from having no understanding of how normal people think, and further mistakes made in the pain of that humiliation.
For a few months now, I’ve been trying to figure out if one of my onion layers is so thick and overwhelming that I may have an impossibility theorem of my own.
In March, I had an epiphany about something I got wrong. A conclusion I drew as a little kid was very, very wrong. But I built so much of the sanity and survival strategies of the next two decades on that conclusion that by the time I figured out how wrong it was, the repercussions were devastating.
It made everything I used to believe tentative and shaky, subject to re-consideration.
My therapist did his job and helped me understand why I took so long to see the truth, why I clung to it so ferociously, and why I was so crushed by the loss of a false belief.
The re-integration, the re-assigning of meaning, the re-definition of myself — those are all things that are my job. He’ll help me with these tasks when I know how I want to accomplish them, but so far all I’ve managed to do is flounder.
Flounder, tread water, exhaust myself, distract myself with television and movies, seethe, and not sleep.
Mostly, not sleep.
I knew this was part of why I was disassociated out of my mind.
Part of it was social media bullshit that was making me far angrier than it should.
Part of it was a new level of seeing and understanding how warped my default settings are: how far from “normal” my head is.
And the rest was beyond me.
I had no idea what else was screwing with my head, or what had left me so far away from myself that I needed to make sure I wouldn’t repeat past stupid mistakes.
“God damn the people who left you in pain. God damn the father without face, without name. God damn the lovers who never showed up. And God damn the wounds that show how deep a word can cut.” —Before You Were Born, by Toad the Wet Sprocket
Failures of Theory of Mind
Josh is the only friend I have ever been able to share my theory-of-mind failures with—the ones stemming from childhood trauma, anyway—who responds with hearty laughter of recognition. He gets it.
I told him once about another friend, who lives far away, telling me I had a “standing invitation” to visit.
He laughed that wonderful recognition laughter, knowing that I would never presume to invite myself to anyone’s home. He holds my healthcare proxy, which means not that I “would trust him with my life” in the colloquial way that people say that about friends, but that I literally trust him with my life.
I have in fact gone to great and expensive lengths to formally and legally entrust him with the power to make life-and-death decisions for me. He lives one county over and a visit from me would require nothing in the way of cost, preparation, or going to any trouble.
And I wouldn’t even invite myself over to visit him.
That one was just kind of funny, an amusing insight into how healthy people think. A glimpse into the world of people who just assume that their damaged friends are capable of that much self-esteem.
That one made me realize how little most people actually know me, even the people who know me very well.
But there are other failures of theory of mind, failures far from amusing.
Failures that are troubling and even gut-wrenching.
One of the worst consequences of serious trauma is that it makes oneself a frequent subject of such failures, to oneself.
So I clung to hope—hope rooted in the notion that I recognized how easily I could make a stupid, stupid mistake, and reached out to someone who would, just by being available to me as a friend, help me avoid that.
“You can trust me not to think, and not to sleep around. And if you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.” —Hey Jealousy, by Gin Blossoms
Frustration Mountains From Social Media Molehills
A couple of recent social media incidents had frustrated me well beyond what I can handle easily, which is a warning sign in general. That I didn’t let go of them inside of five minutes, though, was genuinely alarming.
Out of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of block/mute/nasty dunk incidents on social media, before this week I could count on one hand the ones I remembered for longer than five minutes. Those were memorable not for the specifics of the individuals involved, but because they universally involved the need to take screenshots and prepare for possible law enforcement involvement.
And since leaving Twitter two years and two months ago (one of the best decisions of my life, by the way, and something I highly recommend to any and all who are on the fence about it), there had been zero such memorable incidents…until this week.
I got my first Google maps speed trap alert while I was thinking about the first incident.
That, in itself, sent me spiraling into a deeper cognitive dissonance.
When I got the alert, I expected to see a spot where a cop could easily hide and run radar. Instead, I saw the actual cop. At the precise moment I passed him, the alert changed to asking me if he was still there, with my car’s touchscreen offering me the choice to report that, yes or no, the cop was still there.
This was not a fluke. There were five more such incidents on this trip. In every case, a cop was physically present and running radar.
Google Maps now has some sort of real-time radar detection built in, which was convenient and wonderful—I wasn’t speeding recklessly, but I was driving a comfortable 75 in a 65 zone—and also terrifying. What the fuck?
A friend told me that Google bought another company, Waze, who was already doing this, so perhaps the speed trap part isn’t new, but it’s still scary to me.
Google knows too goddamn much about everyone.
Within moments of this, I got a “stalled vehicle” alert that wasn’t a wreck, an overheating, or a tire change—nothing where AAA or some other legitimate information source was potentially at play.
Someone had just pulled over with their hazard lights on, probably someone whose car doesn’t have voice interface for such things, pulling over to responsibly read or send a text without doing so while driving.
As I passed, they signaled and re-entered traffic. But Google had warned me half a mile in advance.
I repeat: Google knows too goddamn much about everyone.
How entirely granular is that evil company’s knowledge of our lives, anyway?
I shook my head, trying to clear the combination of gratitude and horror, and returned to trying to piece together my own fragmentation.
What were these social media mountains I had constructed from molehills?
Why did they matter?
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