Waiting for more information from the doctors, waiting for a diagnosis, waiting for the symptoms of illness to set in, waiting to get sick and die, I got to thinking more about what exactly autoimmunity is and how it is an illness that fits my own brand of crazy…
What is autoimmunity — it is my own body attacking myself. It fits. It fits my personality. I am so harsh and unaccepting, of others, but especially of myself. It is part of my effort to curate who I am, to curate a world that I find acceptable to live in. I forcefully reject what is unacceptable in an effort to define not me, not how things should be. I use self control, and discipline, and self loathing, to force me to be more of what I want to be. Just look at my old gym routines and dieting, my extreme efforts to be a fit-not-fat-alana and you, I, can see just what kind of person I am.
I see my body as servant. There to do what I want. To be forced into the shape and function I think most reifies my belief of who I am/want to be. I am relentless. I don’t accept my body for what it is. I don’t accept the world for what it is. I pretend I don’t have to yield to this body. I think it is there for me. Of course it is attacking itself. Attacking the cells and tissues it sees as “not me”. That is exactly what I do. I live on the attack of things both inside and outside myself, when they don’t align with my limited views of who I and how the world should be.
Underlying all this is a deep misunderstanding of the world, of myself. I believe there is something I can become, that there is something the world can become –some state of perfection that follows my definitions, my will. And if I can’t curate the whole world, at least I have power over what I claim, the things closest to me. My body. My people. My “personality” and desires and actions. Those, at a minimum, will be what I want them to be. I will whip them into shape. Whip them when they come out of line. Walk faster Eric, Walk faster. I am, unaccepting of the world as it is. I am unaccepting of the things I call “mine” being as they are, as being part of this world, following the worldly laws, instead of mine.
Why do I do this? On some level, I think my best lever for manifesting the world as I want it is through force. If I am soft it won’t change. Acceptance is soft, this is an arbitrary view, but still because of it I believe that if I accept then things will never change. I use harshness and lashing out as a mechanism to motivate myself to try and force change.
Even more fundamentally, I believe the world should be what I want, that is can be shaped, by me into a state I want, and held there indefinitely. The world being otherwise is unacceptable. It is a sign of failure. My own failure in cases where things are mine, and the failure of other when I perceive them to be involved in the generation of an unacceptable state.
The question is, how can a natural state of this world be unacceptable? It arose based on causes and conditions. It is unacceptable in my mind alone, the reality is that the world is exactly as it should be. I may be unaccepting, harsh, unyielding, always on the attack, but none of that changes what this world, what this body actually are. I am like an idiot who bangs their head against the wall in the hopes of knocking it down. For all my force, all I come away with is a headache, pain, suffering. I suffer because I can’t accept the world for what it is. I can’t accept by body for what it is. I look at and endless cycle of cause and effect, of flux and change, trying to figure out how exactly to ‘fix’ it. Forcing fixes, attacking what not broken. I have a disease of the body that fits my disease of the mind.
