When I was a teenager I used to write short stories, usually in class when I was bored. I didn’t really know how to talk to people, and I wanted to try and identify with people for whom I didn’t understand. I was afraid to ask some of my questions out loud. There was this guy named Jeff Crabtree. People talked about how he was weird and a creep. They didn’t like the way he lingered around or how he responded to social cues and would make comments such as “That guy’s gonna kill his girlfriend or somethin…” He kept coming back to those social groups that abused him, and I didn’t know how to ask him why he did it.
I knew John a little bit and he didn’t strike me as someone who would kill other people… but I wouldn’t have put it past him to off himself. And he was weird by the standards of the times, those rules defined by other children judging and regulating teenage interpersonal communication. He just didn’t conform to the moving baseline. Me too. He had some scars on his arms. Me too. Alternate means of coping. And left alone in one’s thoughts the mind begins to wander, and wonder.
So I wrote a short story about John shooting himself in the head near the creek where I had my first kiss at. Well, I hadn’t entertained killing myself, but when Sara told me that she loved me and our lips first met, I did feel my heart stop. So I wrote about a heartbroken and misunderstood teenager with nowhere to turn in his short life than the barrel of a gun. It was called “Rainy Night.” I posted it on a forum called the Temple of the Screaming Electron under a pseudonym, - the kids called them “handles” back then - Anarchy476.
I guess I wanted to take what I was feeling and aggrandize it, catastrophize it into something destructive. I didn’t want to hurt anyone though. I had been in some fights at this point in my life. I didn’t like that. And I really didn’t want to take my own life, but writing about it in a fiction about somebody else - recognizable but somebody else - provided enough layers of separation from the character and myself.
People have always told me shit. I don’t know why, but people have a tendency to open up around me, to tell me stuff they say they don’t tell other people. As I have contemplated these experiences I have returned with a deep sense of gratitude for the vulnerability of those in my company.
This has also provided me an earnest number of doublebinds. I turned a kid in for drawing up plans to shoot up our school in the 9th grade. I hated that fucking principal too. His van smelled like cigarettes and onions. And I wasn’t too fond of school either as an institution. I spent a lot of my time hanging out in the auto shop, where I would join other teenagers to complain about our teachers, chew tobacco, and try to sneak girls into the loft above the shop. There was a couch up there and… well…
There was this guy who would come to school in a go kart that he built. Eric came and went as he pleased, so it seemed. The teachers all thought he was dumb, and a troublemaker to boot. And so they would usually look through him. He basically didn’t exist at our school, and I think the faculty preferred it when he just couldn’t make it in.
But when he did, he was usually in auto shop. And he wasn’t dumb, either. He could put a car together and take it apart better than just about anyone I knew (I spent more time than I was supposed to in auto shop… it was the place to skip on a closed campus). He taught me how to drop a gas tank. And he built his own go kart. We were 15… no one could even drive a car yet. He didn’t have a dad to help him, money to fund it, or support to check his work. No, he was not dumb…
I thought he was pretty cool because he let me ride his go kart. He must have thought that I was pretty cool because he basically told me to take a couple days off of school, handing me plans for what he was going to do to the poor buggers who remained.
I took this and immediately turned state’s evidence. Man I narced on that kid so quick. Well… not that quick. I took the note home and laid it out on my bed. I stared at it for about an hour or two, paced my bedroom floor, and told myself how big of an asshole I would be to give this very detailed plan to murder students and faculty to that fat cocksucker who gave me detention only to find out that it was a goof. My feelings of betrayal overwhelmed the overwhelming logic and evidence before me. I mean, Jeff didn’t kill himself, I only wrote about it. This guy wouldn’t kill other people, lots of them, and warn me about it beforehand… who does that? He did. And now I had to do something. And doing nothing was doing something.
I folded the note, put it in my pocket, and I told no one that evening; none of my family. And there it remained next to my chest while its contents consumed my thoughts. I kept it safe and close to my person until that following morning. Trembling, I approached the principal’s office.
“What is it now?” He scoffed as I cowered in his doorway. I felt about 2” tall. I hated this man. And he hated me. I had embarrassed him and the school on what he determined to be “serial incidents.” I didn’t respect him and he knew it. And I felt like I was swallowing every bit of pride I had, every fiber of my body on fire as I told him “I have something to show you.”
Well, the mass-shooting didn’t happen. The principal told me thank you (I’m sure that hurt more than his first two heart attacks. I can take credit for the second one. Not the first, though. It’s not my fault that his wife left him). Eric disappeared and that was it.
Wrong. I thought he was going to jail and I would never see him again. Wrong. A couple days later he was back and it was as if nothing had happened, like the administration had just swept the whole thing under the rug. I told no one. I couldn’t be certain if he knew it was me that turned on him, but I was terrified that he did. That I was the only one he told. And then one day he asked me “What did you do with that note I gave you? I got in a lot of trouble over that!”
So I lied.
“Oh shit man, I threw it in the trash at school.” Yes, he was mad. But I think he accepted it. I still kept that shit to myself for years, terrified that he’d one day exact his revenge. Maybe this time he would only need to write for one.
And I was alone in my head with these thoughts and so many others. So I wrote short stories for those hard lined memories; the ones that wouldn’t go away: thoughts and emotions about people, pain, anger, and experiences… all the should-have-saids and what-if-I-dids.
I’d lock these stories and poems up in a box I kept under my bed and sometimes in the AC ductwork. I figured if I hid them well enough that my thoughts would be safe from people who didn’t understand me. As I had understood it to this point, to be misunderstood was to be made the target of authority and abuse - or to be unseen, looked through and not even considered. Which cuts deeper? I don’t know man, they were each dehumanizing and left their own hosts of symptoms in the scar tissue that remained.
If only I had found the works of Carl Jung during those early years of tumult, or someone who in meaningful ways showed me that I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. I think it would have gone over better than trying to control my thoughts. School tried and it didn’t work. Organized religion controlled my thoughts about as well as the frequency I masturbated. The only thing it did do was curate in me a strange voyeur fetish.
I remember being 18 and feeling so alone in my thoughts. To take this further I remember wanting to be alone in them sometimes, preferring the seclusion to the group think I would take notice of. The way one group would regard another. The pecking orders- hierarchy structures within friend groups, and the caste system of popularity and privelage. The people who didn’t seem to have any problem finding tribes weren’t doing what seemed sane. Maybe tribelessnessnes was was kept me alive. A lot of those people went on to join the military. A lot of them didn’t come back. Or they did and aren’t here now. Maybe my ass not running balls deep towards other people with guns was a good thing.
Knowing that I wasn’t alone in the thoughts that contributed to my tribelessness would have been a welcomed reassurance to the quiet contemplation I was often left to. There is a passage from one of Jungs books I only hope some young person finds before the time it took to come to my own awareness. I have shared it with many and I will do so here as well:
When a patient begins to feel the inescapable nature of his inner development, he may easily be overcome by a panic fear that he is slipping helplessly into some kind of madness that he can no longer understand.
More than once I have had to reach for a book on my shelves… [to] show my patient his terrifying fantasy in the form in which it appeared four hundred years ago.
This has a calming effect, because the patient then sees that he is not alone in a strange world which nobody understands, but is part of the great stream of human history, which has experienced countless times the very things that he regards as a pathological proof of his craziness.
Collected works of C.G. Jung Vol 13: Alchemical Studies
I have taken to collecting my own works which reflect this very point Jung expressed… and my aunt too. They tied it together nicely, like a good rug does with a room. Here is what she said:
Same story, new faces…
Like those old fables in the book The Brothers Grim, the folktale of man changes with the tides of culture, time, and individual articulation. That way it doesn’t get stale, boring, or nihilistic, with just enough layers of separation to blur the storylines and make us forget the play we are all in. The game. The gamble. The dance… the eternal now you see me, now you don’t.
And whether you realize it or not, you’re it. This is what you, me, and everyone else, everyTHING else has got ourselves mixed up in. And the ones who have convinced themselves otherwise, well they are playing the greatest game of all. The one in which they do not know they are playing.
Tat Tvam Asi