On Delusion

& questioning myself + memory

It’s funny when I first started to think about what I wanted to write for this week’s pathos column I decided I really wanted to write about delusion. I had been feeling, for several months now, that perhaps I was delusional. Or maybe, rather, it was something that I feared that I was. I am afraid that my own memory is too abstracted or is perhaps constantly veiling the truth for me. I fear that I’m too ambitious or hungry and this makes me grotesque and therefore unreliable. Because of this, I often worry that I have things wrong in my own memory and in a bid to rectify the truth, I am prone to sadistically enjoying feedback. I like experiences where I can grow as a person, I like hearing other people’s opinions of me. I wonder how much of this is people-pleasing and how much of it is just how I’ve been conditioned, but I really do metabolize critique quite well. Maybe because I’m disconnected from one central truth about myself, so it makes me more pliable to other people’s interpretation…

…the thing is, enough critique makes you begin to accept your own mind’s fallacy.

As a survivor, this is dangerous territory.

I keep thinking about the Bengali lawyer my UK publisher brought to do a legal examination for WIWF in case we went into trial, as in in case my mother sued. She asked me about details of my mother’s sexual abuse in such a callous manner, and it was so fucking demoralizing, shocking, and embarrassing to be faced with memory. To remember and not want to. So I had to sit there and explain how difficult it is to dissolve memory into clearer digestible moments when all you want to do is run. The lawyer didn’t care. All she could say was, “What will your community in Australia say if they find out about your mother?” To which I had no response. Obviously.

Something I do readily, and often, is forget myself. I override a feeling, a known thing, and I often side with others against me. My own self-rhetoric, even after many years of healing and therapy, is that people hate me, lol (though it’s less than it’s ever been, so that’s a win!) so I can’t fathom that there is another way, another universe where I am not crazy or wrong. It has been easy for me to cower. And I have. Yet there’s also been this part of me, this adoring and resilient part that’s also wondered… what if I’m not wrong? What if I am reliable?

My therapist and I have discussed many times over the last few years how strange it is that I’ve chosen a profession where I have to be concise with such memory. So recently, I’ve had to stop myself in my tracks, pausing the acceleration of the image people want to project back to me of myself, and I’ve just had to stop letting others determine how I interpret myself and my own life and intentions.

Truth is, to be committed to this kind of work and writing, has meant I’ve had to be doubly vigilant with memory. In a weird way, I like being able to keep myself in check in this way. I’m such a Capricorn, I know, and it must be annoying, but it’s this earnest desire, I guess, to always learn more. In the way Saturn is, the planet ever-churning toward enlightenment. I think because we’ve been severed from the source and divine spirit we forget that evolution is a worthy pursuit, this spiritual edification has been lost amidst the grief of our times and we are so jaded and so angry at the loss of everything because of this, because we are disconnected, we move further into the disillusion and disconnection from ourselves, Earth and others. So I’m committed to speaking to that. And doing the work in that sense. And I love it, the work, weirdly, and doing it, is the absolution.