Rainbow Pie

Whenever I “did something wrong”, I felt like I was being humiliated by “a person” for a long time. At first, I just felt my body tense, my neck felt like lead, and I couldn’t move. When I was 14 years old, I couldn’t move while sitting in bed and being humiliated by my father every night, and that’s how I felt. Growing up I protected myself from my father as much as I could, but this long-time abuser of my primary upbringing had taken up residence in me, growing to be part of my superego, and he would appear as often as a ghostly shadow, and I was him when he bonded with me.

Until now, just writing down such words makes my neck tense again. The tension in my neck occupies a very important place in my life in terms of how my body feels. Even when I am making love, this demon makes my neck tense, makes me feel that I am not good enough for this girl, makes me feel that I am doing something wrong, makes me feel that I am not doing enough, makes me dissociate, makes me fall for Tantray’s temptation, makes me… develop the identity of a young adult, a literary person, an intellectual, a traveler, etc. to protect myself. People will instinctively grasp all possible resources for survival, and every day, facing an existential crisis, multiple vagal nerves will be dysregulated under chronic stress.

I tried to think back and couldn’t even remember how I was humiliated at the time. What kind of language did he use? I can’t remember any of it. I can’t remember a single thing. This protective mechanism was so thorough that it made that part of my historian’s subpersonality, the one that cherishes the historical material, constantly criticize me. Only my body doesn’t forget, only my constantly tense neck reminds me that I can’t fight or flee, that this energy is constant, and when I eat the psychedelic mushrooms, this energy comes back and I see that I have to focus on working with this part, the part that I have a hunch is the key to deciphering why I hate myself.