Comfortably Numb - or - 'Don't Knock Neurosis'

I have very little to report - as a Trichotillomaniac I have been, today, a complete failure. I pulled one hair, one single hair, out of my head - and it was sticking out - and I couldn't be bothered to get any scissors (MISDIRECTED PERFECTIONISM ALERT! MISDIRECTED PERFECTIONISM ALERT! BLEEP BLEEP!). That last outburst is the result of having, during this long long Summer Holiday from my Place of Education (otherwise known as the experience of being a graduate) allowed my sense of humour (which had, while I was at university, turned into something I would like to think of more as wit than as mindless hysterics, generally) to revert to my old, pre-university running around with arrows and pretending to shoot them at trees (this actually happened earlier...) and bursting into volleys of laughter for no reason in particular. While the friend I was with made an animated aeroplane on the computer - NNNNNEEEEEOOOOOWWWWWW - making it fly becuase I said that if it didn't fly it wasn't a plane. *blushes* I am 22! Anyhow. Along with all that I have not really been worrying about anything. Or, if I have, I have been not really caring enough about it to keep worrying about it for long. I suppose this is how most people live, most of them time, delightfully infused with the sense that they are terribly important, and that they world is terribly important, but that there isn't very much they can do for about/for/regarding either, so they might as well not worry about them. The alternatives are the following: 1: joylessly martyr oneself on the alter of the world, thus adding not a jot to the aforementioned (no no no no no!) or 2: martyr the world, if necessary, before one martyrs oneself, because, of the two, oneself is more one's own responsibility than the word is. Indifference-in-the-face-of-one's-own-limited-capacities is possibly the most pragmatic of these three options. But is that selling out? I rather think it is. Not selling out any more than most people sell out - but selling out all the same. But my foremost priority has to be myself. And if not striving for anything means, strangely enough, that I don't tears myself to pieces like piece of machinery on full steam with something jammed between its whirling cogs ... good. Rest and recuperation. Effort expended is not always proportionate to reward reaped. Indeed, Excess of Effort Expended (EEE) seems to be directly proportionate to wReakage Reaped (RR), i.e. the undoing of what was done when one was not overexpending oneself like a rubber-band pulled round the world. The point being, my relationship with my Trichotillomania is neurotic.The following is from Wikipedia:

As an illness, neurosis represents a variety of mental disorders in which emotional distress or unconscious conflict is expressed through various physical, physiological, and mental disturbances, which may include physical symptoms (e.g., hysteria). The definitive symptom is anxieties. Neurotic tendencies are common and may manifest themselves as depression, acute or chronic anxiety, obsessive-compulsive tendencies [as in my case], phobias, and even personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder or obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. It has perhaps been most simply defined as a "poor ability to adapt to one's environment, [absolutely - why should I - I may be ABLE to adapt to my environment, but I rather think my environment should adapt to me! And, if it's not able to, does that mean that my environment is neurotic...?] an inability to change one's life patterns [in my case that of self-creation, happiness, panic, self-destruction, miserableness, and self-renovations, cyclically), and the inability to develop a richer, more complex, more satisfying personality (I try to create myself definitively - and am thoroughly alarmed when I notice any change concerning myself - it seems like the changing of the paint of The Picture of Dorian Gray - some sort of deviation from what I have, very rationally, decided to be - an imposition of small-scale evolution into The House of Art).

Actually, I was rather self-destructive during the last ten minutes. *puts on hat* Possibly because my pop-up-blocker suddenly decided that it didn't want to block pop-ups and I found myself suddenly confronted by a wall of sound and light blared by some tabloid I was casually scrolling through - as I sometimes do, because the tabloids are so much more dramatic, so long as I don't have to pay for their trash. *sips blazingly hot coffee*

Why the above train of thought (about neurosis)? 'Martian Time-Slip' by Philip K. Dick (1964). I read it a couple of days ago. I have been reading Philip K. Dick novel after Philip K. Dick novel lately. Thus far I have read circa nine. Three of them in the last week. I find them - terribly terribly comforting. In them, people are bewildered by things much as I am bewildered by things. And they seem to get along with much the same mixture of panic and delight and amused-ness and sheer wonder-filled detachment as I do. Quite apart from aliens (or is it quite apart...?) they seem to be about alienation. Or at least - about the varying degrees between being utterly alienated and utterly osmosis-ed. I can relate, to varying degrees, to both of those - which is perhaps why I am less familiar with the middle-section of experience. Anyway. The following chains of words (mind-forged-manacles?) struck me as having a bearing on the subject of this blog:

'It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.' That reminds me of the moment, quite some time ago, when I said to someone that I wished the world were controllable via remote control. And they said something to the effect that it would be rather less entertaining and surprising if it were. And I thought that it would be simply rather less potentially frightening if there was that sort of graceful gliding around to no purpose one finds in visions of unalterable Edens. If I pull all my hair out, at least it can't be imperfect. It can't be imperfect if it doesn't even exist. (Unless, of course, with Aquinas, one considers existence a necessary predicate for perfection...) But then the same could be said about my entire self - hence perhaps my occasional impulses to go not-at-all-gently into that black night - to fling myself very dramatically from something like Manfred (Byron's Manfred, not P.K.D.'s Manfred). But then what would be the point? I wouldn't be around to enjoy my lack of imperfection, my dust to dust and ashes to ashes would scatter like an exploded window-to-the-soul (MY soul) and prance into panthers, flutter into starlings, burst into the stars from whence they came... And suchlike. And I wouldn't be around to see it, except as inchoate atomic portions of other selves, animal, mineral or vegetable. So utter self-destruction is out, unless something very dreadful were to occur. It just wouldn't be cricket. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON and all that. I'm not a French Existentialist. I'm a post-Wilde-post-Ancient-Greek-Hellenism-post-modern-post-Nietzsche-sensualist-with-unfortunate-Post-Christian-Saint-Ascetic-tendencies. If that sort of conveys the cultural soup I find myself drowning in. No - not cultural soup. There's no such thing as culture any more. I'm not being an elitist snob. What I mean is - there is no such thing as cohesive culture (Dostoevsky perhaps saw the beginning of this), there is only Post-Culture. We are reviewers of all that has gone before. Nothing really new is being done - it can't be, because we have only aggregates of Past Times stitched together like dead Frankenstein's monsters - reanimated by the vitality of the people dressing up in them. The point is - I am then left with the rather mammoth task of constructing myself, on rather a moment-to-moment basis - or just playing along and feeling like rather a fraud. I remember the time when, having long outgrown my little pine child's bed, I was bought a new, rather more adequately-sized, bed. I wanted the double, rather square one, with the dark surround and then I would put a dark board over my window so that there was no light (I decided) apart from the artificial one (which was somewhat central) and then the squarish room would be perfect (apart from the door not being central (I wondered if I could cover it up...). I was told that I could have the bed I had chosen. And then a bed was delivered. A totally different bed. 'There has been a mistake!' I exclaimed, my heart pounding, appalled by the enormity of the dissonance between what I had expected to happen and what had actually happened. It was nightmarish. I tried to liaise with my mother. Tried to make her see the horrificness of what had just happened. Tried to persuade her to absolutely not take the packaging off in case that got in the way of sending the bed back and getting back the right one, the one which had been ordered. She informed me that this WAS the bed that had been ordered. But that was impossible, I told her - I had been told that I could have the bed I had chosen. Well, you have this one now, she told me. And ... so ... I absolutely refused to let her take the packaging off the thing. I absolutely refused to sleep on it. Eventually, a relative I was more likely to obey came round (was probably asked to come round) and persuaded me, still utterly traumatised, to take the packaging off and accept the thing as my bed - which I did, out of sheer politeness. My squarely-symmetrical room never did come about. But - even now - I can't help but wonder why the Hell I couldn't have just been allowed to do what I wanted? Why was what I wanted so unreasonable just because those around me didn't emphasise?

'...a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.' This, to some extent, is why I am somewhat nervous about the therapy I have been undergoing. Pulling my hair out is, my therapist says, a tool, a tool with which I let myself off the hook, so that society (which, she says, I seem to see as something generally hostile, people-I-am-not-ever-so-slightly-nervous-of being the exception to the rule) won't expect anything of me, so that I am seen to be flawed and broken and am left alone. Well - what's so not-sensible about that?!? If everyone were to/were to be allowed to interact with me all at once - OH the chaos. I would much rather flit from flower to flower and avoid the weeds. Surely that's what everyone does, to the best of their ability? Anyone who willingly endures being around anyone they can't stand is more or less self-harming in a manner I consider to be actually more harmful than what I have done. And what's the alternative, exactly? Hide? (Agoraphobia. I've seen what that does to people. It turns them into strange, pale beautiful creatures who expect more and more and more of themselves, because they are terribly out of touch with what everyone else actually achieves - until they dare not go out for fear of being unmasked as being utterly inadequate. When they are very far from being utterly inadequate. That is my experience of the thing, anyway.)Stride around looking formidable? Accept everybody as equal in the eyes of The Lord, despite having only my own necessarily judgmental eyes to look through? I reserve the right to pick and choose my allies and - to some extent - my enemies. About most people I am benignly indifferent. That probably manifests itself far more favorably than the more passionate attachments of Most Other People (an entity referable-to as MOP - or THE MOP - which is, I suppose, preferable to THE MOB). My therapist (in, to some extent, disagreement with me) doesn't want to substitute the Trichotillomania-tool for some other tool. She wants me to stop using any such tool at all. And to LIKE EVERYONE! Or that's how it seems to me. And the idea fills me with horror. It feels like falling into some nightmare pool of flailing THINGS and being subsumed into them. Just writing about it makes my heart race, as though I should run away from it. 'From childhood's hour I have not been as others were I have not seen as other saw I could not bring my passions from a common spring...' (Poe). I want to be apart from the rest of the world, to some extent. Otherwise what's the point of being a single individual at all? It is like expecting me to be humanity, all at once, a Krishna of whirling limbs omnipresent and timeless-and-yet-somehow-time-permeated - all at once. Very Panthiestic - but I'm not ready for it yet, not until I die.

What does the future hold, between now and my dissolution? Well - as I told myself year after year in little videos filmed for myself telling myself, with compassion, that if, by a certain fixed date, I didn't stop pulling my hair out, I would kill myself (on compassionate grounds - how strangely happier I always felt after I had made those videos, as though I had given myself a date beyond which I was guaranteed not to suffer), I would rather like it to be Trichotillomania-less. Don't worry (if you were): I'm not in the least suicidal now. I very rarely have been ever. A handful of times - like, probably, most people. But those videos expressed absolutely the horror I feel at the idea that I will pull my hair out for all of my life. It would be, for me, a defeat. An absurd defeat. It would not be worthy of the best that I am (post-modern value-judgment-less-ness aside, for a moment). If there's anything I damn well will get my own way about - it's this. And if that means not sinking my teeth into happiness quite so ruthlessly and in quite so exhausting a manner - resting and recuperating, in other words... - then so be it. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be...