I don’t think I escaped the loop, but maybe that’s not the point right now.

My deepest fear is to wake up in the body of a baby. Everything about my adult inner-world is intact, but suddenly I’m in a body that is unable to express any of it. My lips don’t have the muscles to form the words. My face doesn’t know how to make the expressions. My head can’t hold itself up. I can’t move. I am powerless in my own body, completely dependent upon someone to do anything at all. I’m bound in a straightjacket, tied to a chair, writhing toward the windows of my body, screaming, and nothing happens, even though people are right there, looking inside, lovingly… Smiling, cooing, attending... The windows are one-way glass.

Maybe the tiny body spasms and contorts, trying its best to connect the wires, but all it can manage is an analogue precursor of what’s being demanded. Maybe the adult knowings are too much for the little nervous system and it has a heart attack and dies, because that body is not meant to know all these things yet.

But the deeper fear than being cut off from my body’s ability to express the reality of my inner world (echoed during my attempts to write or succeed academically), is the fear that even if I could express, the social meanings attached to my body would make me socially-invisible. And that that erasure is justified: babies don’t know all the rules of the world of form and need guidence. They have barely emerged from chaos, into this side of breathing.

I shiver: The paradox of invisibility in the midst of being hyper-attended to. Erasure through care. Simultaneous attention and non-attention. You’re here, but you don’t see me. And I am fundamentally formed to be unable to claim liberation anyways. I have no choice but to be complicit in my own suffering. I couldn’t belong to myself if I tried. Maybe, I grow to prefer the cage.

--

I read back what I’ve just written, caught in a loop. Maybe if I bring awareness to the loop in real-time, it won’t stop me from posting this.

I notice how the satisfaction of writing this came from proposing a theory of my emotions. I see how the abstraction disconnects me from what it actually felt like to live those moments, puts me above it all. The moments I might have been neglected as an actual baby. The moments of stolen childhood, juxtaposed with the paternalism of other adults. Moments in my early sexual development, pleasing others no matter the cost. Then, writing myself into existence through social theory—my version of screaming out of the windows of my body, “I am real. I exist. I matter.”

I feel annoyed that dense theory is my default way of relating. This can make me seem unpalatable and self-important. When I try to be more accessible, it doesn’t feel like me anymore. More like an alien curating a strategic presentation to optimize reception.

I don’t think I escaped the loop, but maybe that’s not the point right now.