Difficulties. in In which our ignoble friend

(Right up top, because I don’t want to be more of an arsehole than usual: trigger warning for self harm, self loathing, cynicism, futility, violence.)

, particularly with typing. 2 beers down, triple scotch going. This is the far edge of self-destructive behaviour for me now. No razor blades, no breaking things, no bleeding at all. My knuckles ache in the cold. It still hit things. Still harder than I mean to.

But, I mean, this is it. I get drunk alone on a school night and eat half a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. I’m still an emo fuck with a diary on the internet. That’s what this is. This, is how we do.

I was thinking just before, about the peculiar arc of my self harm. I threw tantrums when I was young, would bang my head against things. Hard. It’s been described s attention seeking, but I don’t think that’s it. I hurt myself as an extension of my perfectionism. I hurt myself to punctuate or curtail emotion. And it works. Panic attack + headbutting wall so hard you have to check your pupils after = complete sedation within 3 minutes. Why? Just some unhealthy self soothing behaviour?

It’s about control. I do the hurting. Same way I learnt to self deprecate - if I say worse things about me first, you can’t reach me.

The thing I was thinking about, though, was playing video games. I would just punch myself in the leg as hard as I could, over and over, if I fucked up. Must have been from about the age of 5 or 6. Where did I learn that? It wasn’t for an audience.

Just the fundamental belief that I’d been less than adequate, and must therefore suffer. Not because it was just, not that I -should-, but that it would happen, that it was certain. Mechanics. Mass with a force acting on it. The cosmos wheeling with a pudgy, balled fist.

And I wasn’t physically punished as a child. I was on the receiving end of less than 5 acts of domestic violence that I can recall (most of those when I was bigger than the assailant in question), and observed only 1 upon another, I think. Long enough ago that the mind plays tricks.

I remember, vaguely, playing video games with a friend, and fucking up, and hitting myself several times - harder, more frequently with each successive failure - in a completely un-self conscious way. As though it was the most natural thing in the world. And when he asked me why at the time, I wasn’t concerned. That was just how it was. Mechanics. The world turns, and goes on turning. We were kids, and those conversations glide by you.

I promised myself, when I was 13 or 14, that I would never have kids. That my parents, and their parents, and their siblings … the whole load of them were a giant, self perpetuating emotional mutilation factory. They hurt each other, and themselves, and their kids, and it was just always going to keep going. There was no way off.

Now I’m nearly 30. I’ve been in the same relationship for going on 8 years. Even after meds and counselling and going on journeys to fucking find myself and trying to sort my fucking life out (because I’d wasted huge amounts of time on journeys to fucking find myself), I’m still an emotionally unstable, semi-functional arsehole.

Somehow, having kids is a foregone conclusion. A when, not an if. But even if the biological angle doesn’t screw them up, any kid raised by me is going to suffer because of it. By exposure.

This vaguely self indulgent post, brought to you by the letter A: for alcohol, and abuse, and other fucking wonderful things. Like anonymity, which provides me with a functional abyss, into which I may howl genteelly and without pause for as long as my pretty lungs hold out.

Cheers.