child_of_the_air | Summary of my current mental health crisis... (Reply)

A summary of the current situation, for those worried about me. (I.e. anyone who's communicated with me in the past day or two, honestly.)

Trigger warnings for discussion of circumcision and severe trauma related to it. Also trigger warnings for discussion of suicidality, self-harm, and severe mental distress.

The conversation that triggered this was with a couple of people who may be reading this post. I don't blame them at all for what happened, but they may find reading this painful, and I suspect they may not want to read it at all. They are welcome to if they want to, though.

BACKGROUND

I have a severe and kind of terrifying history of trauma and dysphoria related to my parents having had me circumcised as an infant. It's possibly my most severe mental health trigger, which is saying something.

In the last year or so, I've become pretty close friends with a nice, queer Jewish family who live near me. Back in October, they mentioned in passing that they'd had their son ritually circumcised, because Judaism.

I had a pretty bad meltdown over that, including seriously considering breaking off all contact with them, because I couldn't handle the idea of being friends with someone who'd mutilated their kid, regardless of their reasons.

Eventually, after a few weeks, I was able to stabilize and resume contact with them. I explained that the topic was a severe trigger for me, and they've been really good about not bringing it up since.

TUESDAY EVENING

On Tuesday evening, I visited said family for dinner and our conversation ended up involving a novel I'm reading (Ada Palmer's The Will to Battle). This turned into a discussion of moral philosophy and somehow--I honestly don't know how--it became my long-overdue attempt to explain to them about my moral revulsion at the concept of infant or childhood circumcision.

I do believe it's a conversation that needed to happen: I'd been feeling guilty for months and stressed about the fact that I felt like I was hiding something important from them. However, this was definitely a very bad time for the conversation to occur.

The conversation went...poorly. They were quite uncomfortable with my frank admission that I thought what they'd done was "monstrous," and made it clear that they thought my views on the topic were inherently anti-Semitic.

They also probably triggered me worse by trying to use a "harm-reduction" argument, as they put it, that even though I was harmed so badly, most people who are circumcised are purportedly happier as a result, so it's a good thing to do. This triggered some other trauma involving hazing at Caltech, and the excuses people there (including administrators) used for it, but now's not the time to elaborate on that.

By the end of it, I think we were all badly broken, and I feel bad for dragging the conversation out longer than it should have been by repeating myself in an attempt to justify myself, but we managed to hug before I went home.

When I got home, though, I had a severe urge to self-harm by cutting. I've been having such urges related to circumcision trauma for a long time, but I had managed to avoid actually doing it for the past decade or so.

This time, though, it happened. Or at least I attempted it. I apparently wasn't using a sharp enough knife, because I didn't break the skin, but I spent five or ten minutes trying to cut my genitals so that they'd bleed and hurt, because this just seemed right and necessary.

WEDNESDAY

I actually woke up relatively sane on Wednesday, and managed to make it to campus by 8:30am so I could teach my first class of the summer semester. I even think I did a pretty good job of staying sane while teaching, and I sent an apology about the timing of the previous night's conversation on my lunch break.

I also talked online to Deepthi (one of my closest friends) and she gave me some good advice about separating my triggers from moralizing. The fact that my brain found it really hard to make a moral distinction between circumcision and murder made it clear to both of us just how deeply embedded the trauma is in fucking up how my brain tries to think about morality.

After work, though, I broke down crying a bit, and wrote a really depressing poem:

"Dissolution"

by DW Rowlands

30 May 2018 in Catonsville, MD

The highest Heaven will not grant us prayers

that by their very form and nature

cannot come to pass.

And so, however kind the gods may be,

we must remain as we were made:

a cursed and fallen race.

Thus, in this time and from this pain,

my only balm and only hope

is my most deep and heartfelt faith:

That the eternal, endless sea,

the wine-dark brine that surrounds all

will someday soon devour me.

"Oh gods! Oh deathless ones

who look upon my life and see

what fate has set before me on this day!"

"I pray, to heav'n most high,

and beg you let my being end

before it becomes more than I can bear!"

I then had a therapy session where I tried to explain things to my therapist and basically ended up under her couch crying for most of the session. I'm not sure how useful the session really was, since I was unable to communicate during much of it.

I made it home, though, and even made it to sleep without further self-harm attempts, although I spent a good deal of the drive home thinking about cutting myself, this time with something sharp enough to actually cut.

THURSDAY

This morning, I woke up, and things were far, far worse, and I don't know why. I spent four or five hours largely in bed, thrashing around under a weighted blanket, having thoughts about how, as a eunuch, I can never understand what it means to have "a People" or even an identity, and so I obviously can't understand any of what must be going through the heads of people who circumcise their children for such reasons.

This turned into a more general intense mental agony and desire to stop existing, or stop having will. I am not sure what things were thoughts and what I screamed out, but I definitely screamed a lot begging the gods to let me die, and I also made a lot of horrible animal-in-pain screams.

I don't really understand what the cause was at this point: I don't think I could understand anything beyond the pain of existence and the need for it to stop much of the time

The way I perceived it while I was hiding under my weighted blanket, thrashing and screaming about wanting to die--at least in those moments I could perceive anything other than pain--was that my mind was a small animal in a trap, very confused and in immense agony, flinging itself against the walls but not able to form thoughts large enough to do anything really dangerous because it couldn't plan ahead.

I wanted to die. I wanted to become an ancillary (see Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy). I wanted to sacrifice the remainder of my life as a substitute for a friend who barely escaped death a few years back. I wanted to give the remainder of my life to a friend's cat, who is old and sick, but very good, in the belief that the cat would make better use of it than I could. I wanted to bleed for the sake of bleeding.

I am very glad I didn't have the will to actually get out of bed.

Around 1:30pm, I was so worn out that I managed to get out of bed to take my meds and drink water, and communicate with people a bit better. I'm still sitting in my apartment, trying to figure out if I'm physically capable of eating breakfast, and worrying that if I eat, it will give my brain the energy to restart the breakdown.

I really need to get to work if I at all can, but I'm not at all sure I'm able to. Which, combined with a lot of work stress, has me terrified that I'm not going to be able to keep my job, or hold down any job, because my mental health is so bad.

I've scheduled an emergency phone session with my therapist for 5:00pm this evening, and an emergency in-person one for 7:00pm on Monday.

I do not believe I'm currently in any danger, and I'm really sorry for the amount of stress I've put a lot of you through today.