Zaphod for President

As I mentioned yesterday, little twitch was recently spayed, and is in a considerable amount of pain. Seeing a loved one in pain is always cause for introspection. As such, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. What follows is sure to another blather-filled rant about feelings, so if you are looking for the good stuff, i.e. cartoons and politics, keep on scrolling.

Here are some pictures of Twitch from a few weeks ago, when she was in a more playful mood:

Yesterday, my fiance and I decided to sterilize her. We decided that she was better off not having children. In order to achieve this goal, we subjected her to a very painful surgery, dooming her to a few weeks of chronic pain. She left the vet with a noticeable wound on her underside, held together by a few large stitches. She did not ask for this surgery, cannot understand why we have done this to her. Those giant brown eyes are filled with love, as always, but also caution. I can hear her thoughts: what else are these people going to do to me?

I am only 27 years old. Up north, it would be expected that I have no children, or at most, a newborn. But down here in Florida things are not the same. Down here, most people my age have two or three children, the oldest of which may be upwards of ten years old. They assume my soon-to-be wife (who will turn 31 this summer) must be sterile; why else would an attractive, friendly woman be childless? When explained that she is not sterile (at least, so far as we know) people are quick to remind her that time is running out. Soon, they say, her eggs will wither and crumble away, leaving her an old maid surrounded by cats and regret.

I did not have a good relationship with my parents. Long story short, I have not spoken with either of my parents for about two years now, and only sporadically before that. They split up shortly after I was born, and by age 16 I was fed up with both of them, desperate to go and find a “real family” that could fulfill my emotional needs for love and acceptance.

Truth be told, I cringe while reading that phrase; love and acceptance. I find myself rolling my eyes and suppressing a gag reflex. My instinct is to pick up a power drill, chug a Budweiser, and grunt. Failing that, I feel the need to call myself a “pussy”, steal my own lunch money, and then punch myself in the arm a few times. This is how I know I am crazy; I can recognize these instincts as unhealthy, and most-likely, the result of 20+ years of gender conditioning. After all, we all know that real men don’t have feelings- we have heart attacks, dying (on average) 5-10 years before our spouses do.

In my short life I have seen no shortage of shrinks, and truth be told, most of them were worthless charlatans who did nothing but waste my time. I do not want someone to tell me that I am fine the way I am, or that I deserve to be crazy as a result of things that happened in my childhood. In my experience, the single great obstacle to achieving a goal is denial. Most therapists I have encountered are denial enablers; they would say to me that it was not my fault that I have severe sociopathic tendencies- no, it was my mother’s fault for buying me pink sneakers in the 2nd Grade; it was my father’s fault for starting a new family without me. Bullshit. Fault is a red-herring. Whether or not it was my parent’s fault is inconsequential to the adult me; the important thing is that my parents have no intention of fixing the problems as they exist today. If I want a solution, I must find one, I must make it work. Fault has nothing to do with it.

After years of false answers, I stumbled upon a truly remarkable therapist. Rather than the classical “what did your mommy do to you” routine, he relied on Gestalt Therapy, which was exactly the sort of thing I needed. Simply put: this branch of psychology accepts that whats done is done, that the only thing we have any control over is our behavior right now. We cannot change the past, we cannot predict the future- all we have is right now. The three months of this therapy were more useful to me than the 20 years of pills and shrinks that had proceeded it.

I wasn’t “cured”, but only because therapy can’t “cure” anything. In my opinion, in my situation, mental illness is more comparable to an unhealthy diet than a traditional disease. Just like a unhealthy diet, there are no quick fixes, no short-term plans that can solve the problem. For example: it is perfectly possible to “crash” diet, and lost 10 pounds in an incredibly short period of time. The trouble is, once the diet ends, that weight will come right back as if it had never left. It is also possible to “behave perfectly”, to suppress your every crazy instinct and behave like a perfectly rational person. The trouble is, those crazy thoughts will keep on clawing at the back of your facade, and sooner or later, it will crack.

During the course of my self-education, I have come to learn several fancy terms that describe my particular brand of insanity. For example, when my bi-polar disorder swings into “happy” mode, I suffer from hyperactivity, attention-defecit disorder and the occasional delusions of grandeur. Those are my good days. When the ole’ bi-polar train heads south I find myself fighting feelings of misanthropy, chronic depression and extreme sociopathic inclinations. When I’m really lucky, I enjoy
paranoia so extreme that it has been classified as the early stages of schizophrenia.

What does this have to do with procreation? Everything. Some say that these conditions are genetic; they are hiding somewhere in my DNA. Others say that these conditions are purely learned behavior, and can be overcome by force of will. However, this presents the ultimate catch-22. Maybe I learned to be crazy by watching my parents, or maybe I inherited it along with my blue eyes and dirty-blonde hair. Who cares? I don’t want to be crazy, and I certainly don’t wish to doom another generation of human beings to this same fate.

The selfish part of me wants kids; lots of kids. I imagine myself playing baseball, hiding under a bed sheet, fighting with water guns, planning elaborate G.I. Joe battles, assembling complex Lego inventions, and most importantly, offering hugs and “tickle attacks” as often as possible. It is quite easy for those of us without kids to glamorize the process, and focus on all the good. I am sure this is intentional. If the word “children” only conjured visions of diapers and screaming, or the eventual criminal masterminds of high school, our species would have gone extinct a long time ago.

Truth be told: I think I would be a damn-good father…95% of the time. However, in that remaining 5% holds the key to all mental illness. Most people have “bad days” and “lose it”, by which we mean the occasional screaming match or bad decision. I have done much worse. Being good with words is not always a blessing: I have have done some very extreme damage with nothing more than a forked-tongue and the aforementioned mental ailments. I have also, and this is far worse, acted violently. Usually towards inanimate objects- but not always. I have gone looking for fights- and found them- because a part of me needed to see blood. I have threatened, I have manipulated, and I have acted like a bully and tyrant. When I think of the things I have done, the most vivid memory is that of feeling trapped by these horrible moments. When I am “acting crazy” I feel as though I am watching myself in a horror movie, unable to divert my action from some divinely engineered script.

These horrible moments have become shorter in duration, and more infrequent as time marches on. I am getting better at recognizing my condition before I lose control, and immediately removing myself from proper society before making a scene. I’m getting better. I haven’t gotten violent in a few years now, and I am quick to excuse myself before unleashing an undeserved verbal assault. I still occasionally find myself saying cruel things, but I have gotten better at breaking my tirade early, once I can recognize it for what it is- insanity. Most people who know me accept that I am a little “whacky”, and use “crazy” in describing me as a compliment. In all honesty, my insanity provides hours of endless entertainment. But this is not the “crazy” I am interested in curing. The “crazy” I’m afraid of hides deep within my skull. The “crazy” I am fighting is unknown to those around me- and for good reason.

I have progressed to a point where I am perfectly functional. I say and think offbeat things, but I am not likely to do anything about it. I am not going to punch a hole in a wall, or verbally assault you until you cry- I am just a little “off”, just enough to be entertaining, if not slightly unnerving. However, despite this success, I find myself fighting back truly crazy thoughts at least a dozen times every day. This too has become less frequent, however, it is still a daily challenge. It is undeniably crazy of me to get angry about something that happened when I was 8 years old while in the middle of debugging a PHP script. There is no rational reason for these memories to pop-up as often as they do, no good reason for me to get so angry about them. All the same, they will, and I do.

And so, just like a healthy diet, maintaining mental health requires me to be ever-vigilant, and to remain painfully self-aware. It is something I must think about constantly. I take full responsibility for this, and accept that it is my problem to solve, just as everyone else must solve their own problems. All the same, it is exhausting. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Ironically, I wouldn’t have to. The only enemies I have in life are as much a victim of this insanity as I am. The only difference between us is that I am trying to fight it, while they remain content to embrace it.

I fully expect that I will be slightly less-crazy tomorrow, and even less crazy the day after that. However, in everything I do, in everything I say, I remain perfectly aware that I am sitting on top of a ticking time bomb, ready to explode and destroy myself and those around me at any moment.

These concerns are what prevent me from having children. Perhaps they will inherit this bullshit vis-a-vis my own polluted blood. Perhaps they will simply learn it, along with my other countless bad habits. Perhaps I will be able to improve my own crazy-to-rational ratio from 95% to 99.9999999%, but even so, there is no way I can honestly tell myself that my children would not be subjected to some degree of my mental illness. Understand this: the day I raise my hand in anger to my children is the day I lose whatever remains of my soul. The fact that this was done to me once-upon-a-time offers no solace, nor should it.

There is a part of me that really wants to have children. There is another part of me that wants to dump all of my savings and buy a new convertible. Luckily, the 95% of me currently in control understands that these desires are nothing more than selfish, immature longing. Some attempt at “getting” happiness, even though I am already perfectly aware that genuine happiness cannot be “gotten” in this manner. Yes, I am saddened when I think about what it will be like when I am 80 years old and without grandchildren. But then I remind myself that this world is filled will children- I will have my pick of nieces and nephews and children-of-friends. I will continue to share my 95% self, as I do now, because I do genuinely enjoy being around children. In fact, I love those children so much that I would rather forfeit my own than expose any of them, least of all my own kin, to the remaining 5%.

And this brings us back to little Twitch. She is in pain now. She is taking small, deliberate steps. Rather than jumping up onto her chair, she cries for me to lift her. I am happy to do it. But I wonder which will hurt my little friend more in the long run: the pain of being spayed, or the pain of never knowing what it is to create a new life. What right do I have to make this decision for her? What right do I have to make this decision for myself?

In closing, let me say this: most kids I know suffer an endless array of bumps and bruises and boo-boos. Not from abusive parents, but from playgrounds, and parks, and backyards. I can only imagine how a parent feels when their child returns home with injury. My stomache hurts looking at my dog- and she doesn’t even belong to the same species.

Perhaps there is nothing noble about my desire to not procreate after all. Perhaps I am simply afraid of the endless heartbreak it will cause me. Points to ponder. For now, I will concern myself with giving Twitch the belly rub she so desperately deserves.

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