the void makes its first written appearance!

I don't know where this came from, or why I decided to share it. It's a bit bleak, but it's all true, and it does have a happy ending. I promise.

Also, Blogger apparently is off by 6 hours. To figure out when I've written things, take the time the entry is listed as, and add 6 hours to it. For example, this will probably say I posted at 11 PM. It's actually 5 AM. Weird. I don't know why I find it important to inform you of this but here it is, anyway.

****

There came a time, January of 1998, to be exact, when I woke up one morning and realized that the Pavlovian anti-feeling conditioning I had been inflicting on myself had been entirely successful. I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

And the realization was so horrifying I spent the day twisting and turning on my bed, desperate for some scrap of emotion to feed me, something to give my life some sort of color or meaning, finding nothing. I wasn't happy. I wasn't sad. I wasn't angry. I wasn't content. I wasn't anything at all.

Emotions give our lives direction. We wake up with certain feelings that color our day. Our entire lives are a shifting tapestry of words and actions, both caused by and causing emotions. To eliminate emotion entirely removes any semblance of pattern or meaning to these tapestries. Life becomes a set of routine tasks, blobs of paint thrown randomly onto a canvas, no rhyme or reason connecting anything. You live one moment to the next, you do what you're told because there is absolutely no reason at all to not do what you're told. Dislike what you're doing? So what? You don't- you can't- like what you're doing, either. Pain is gone, but so is pleasure.

If you think it impossible for a person to eliminate all feeling, you don't know me, and you don't know how far I'll go in order to prove a point or win a battle. I realize this narrative is a tad dark; there is a light at the end of the tunnel, however. Be patient.

I found myself unable to live in an utterly emotionless state, so I began the process of deprogramming myself sometime during the following summer. By the subsequent winter, I had regained a good portion of my former emotional capacity... but I still remembered what it was to be without feelings at all, and could slip back into that when the situation called for it.

The benefit to this came about perhaps a year later. To my utter delight, my grandmother had gone completely off the deep end, deciding to sell the house in which she kept us all prisoner. I was ecstatic.

One night, I was up late doing AP Chem and AP Calc homework. I was sitting in the living room, the contents of which had been stripped bare of furniture and the meager furnishings that had been present in it. There had never been carpeting in it, save for a strange, ovoid rug in the center of the room. This was gone. It was essentially me, a couch without cushions, and a table lamp sitting on the floor.

I was in my little corner of the room, surrounded by the glow of the lamp, contentedly working on my homework, my thoughts repeatedly drifting to the girl I was making progress with at school. At some point, my grandmother stomped/shuffled into the room. She feigned an expression of concern.

"Are you still up?" she asked. I smiled blankly, slipping effortlessly back into the feelingless void.

"Yeah, I'm still trying to finish this," I said, cheerfully, indicating my work. She mulled over this for a second, and her expression changed, becoming more a portrait of her inner workings; sly, calculating.

"Are you sure you're not.. upset over anything?" She said this with such an undertone of hope it was hard not to laugh. I knew exactly what she wanted. She was scanning my face, looking for a reaction. She wanted to see pain in my eyes. She wanted me to tell her how I didn't understand what was going on, how I was afraid of what would happen, afraid of not having anywhere to live. Then she would express mock sympathy for me, and tell me how it really wasn't her fault, it was my mother's. Her hands were tied, you see. If my mother had just been more cooperative, she would never have had to do this, didn't I understand? And all this would go on amid a slew of ghoulish, pseudo-grandmotherly clucking and tutting.

By "cooperative" she meant obedient. Broken. She wanted to see me hurt, afraid. And she wanted to twist the situation such that I would blame my mother for my fear and pain. She wanted to erode, distort, and dissolve the relationship I had with my mother. She wanted to humiliate her by sending us out into the street, hopefully with my sister and I blaming our mother for it. This would be her revenge against the ungrateful child who had dared to defy her some thirty-odd years earlier.

I knew the game. I had seen her try to achieve it for the past seven years. I hadn't let her win then. I certainly wasn't going to now.

"Nope!" I said, smiling winningly, carefree, the picture of innocence. "I'm not upset about anything." Her eyes probed my face, looking for weakness. She could detect a smile held half a second too long, or with too much or too little force, and use it as a trigger to fly into a rage. She found no incongruities in my facial expression; the void was serving me well.

"Are you sure?" she asked again, smiling hopefully. Her eyes, hungry, desperate for pain to feed on, did not match her smile.

"I'm sure!" I told her. I shrugged. "I have to get back to my work, now." Mystified, she nodded, murmuring things I'm sure were meant to sound supportive, and set off back to her room, periodically looking over her shoulder to catch me in a moment of weakness. She found none.

A few minutes later, she came back, this time bearing a Coke from the hoard she kept in her room. My family had, some years before, been so poor we had trouble putting food on the table. My parents fed us three meals a day, but we were only a hair's breadth away from being far worse off than that. I remember eating a dog biscuit once. A good portion of suburban America has no idea what it is to go to sleep dreaming of food.

But she always had enough to eat: boxes and boxes of cookies, donuts filled with all kinds of delicious sweetness, you name it. Knowing we were... not starving by any means, just hungry, unsatisfied by the amount of food we were able to afford... she would attempt to lure my sister and I over to her "side" with her delectable poisons. The price was listening to her litanies of hate about my parents, stories which were blown completely out of proportion so as to make her into the hero and my parents into sadistic monsters bent on oppressing her. Often enough, the stories were not just falsely represented, but entirely fabricated. I can truthfully say I never took the bait.

But I recognized what her bringing me the Coke out of her secret stash meant, and my heart filled with elation even through the numbness of the void.

She was conceding defeat. She had recognized, even though it took seven years in the making, that she had no power over me.

I had won.

She had come into my life and warped and twisted and eroded everything in it, and no one could do anything to stop her. For seven years, I had burned with resentment over this, over how utterly and completely wrong it was that someone so small, so fundamentally pathetic, really, could have so much power over people like my parents and my sister, who, despite any differences we may have, are immensely strong people firmly on the side of good.

And yet I had finally won against her. I cannot put into words how I felt.

As for the actual deprogramming process, in which I had to re-learn how to feel feelings... I shall not describe that here. I have taken up too much of your time already, and the telling of it is better suited to another story, anyway. Suffice it to say that it was, without a doubt, the most unbelievably painful process I have ever experienced.

I have read that the reason heroin withdrawal is so nightmarishly painful is that your body has essentially forgotten how to manage pain. It has become so used to its opioid receptors being stimulated that it has decided to cease stimulating them itself. And so, when the artificial stimulation ceases, practically every stimulation causes pain; the body has no means of calming stimulation anymore.

Imagine this on an emotional level, and you'll have an idea what I'm talking about.

But what I have in my life now has made it all worth it. I have people from all walks of life who care about me, and vice versa. I have strengthened bonds with my immediate family for having suffered through the dark times with them. And I have come far enough through the lingering darkness to have had friends and even lovers in the years since.

So many people out there have far less than I do, and, knowing this, I would gladly repeat the whole mess over again if, by some miracle, I could take them to where I am now by doing so.

<3.