Lack

The tragedy is that the more I am aware of my lack the more visible it becomes.

What is this mechanism?

The lack that torments me is my brain’s lack of default social wiring. Interiorly, this manifests as the great strain of cognitive resources I use to navigate the mundane, human reality. I constantly remind myself of what I ought to do: look people in the eyes, make my face look relaxed, walk gracefully and naturally. The torment specifically is the actions I feel obligated to perform to live a social life without conflict. My actions are relationally focused, and they all inevitably serve to procure desired outcomes: people respect me with eye contact, when I am relaxed others feel safe and thus more willing to collaborate, when I walk normally I am left alone and blend into the anonymity of the crowd.

Exteriorly, this manifests as sometimes someone who looks at home and rooted to this world and other times a martian who is not of this world. At my best, I cohere into the group: I smile such that wrinkles form at the edges of my eyes, I make well-timed jokes that disarm tense situations, I appear as a citizen rather than an actor. At my worst, I am markedly different: my face never seems comfortable, I never when to speak in a conversation, I appear as an actor rather than a citizen.

These experiences happen from my interactions with individuals to my interactions in groups of about eight people. The smaller the group, all the way to just an individual, makes my differences more pronounced. There is no crowd for me to hide underneath, which is to say that there is less social signal that smooths over my lack. In larger groups of people, there are more faces, more noises, more things going on: the individual, who might judge my lack, instead splits cognitive resources across the group. In these scenarios, unless someone speaks among his silent peers, there is no possibility for individual attention. The individuals of the collection must be summed into a higher abstraction, otherwise a participant’s actions won’t respond appropriately to larger sentiment. In groups beyond eight people, there is enough social math for each person to perform that I feel my individual differences won’t be meaningfully processed.

My social discomfort is scalar, where it decreases the larger the group.

What is this discomfort built upon? Humans engage others socially to achieve some goal. A mother who scorns her son for not completing his homework wants his behavior to change, fueled by a wish for a better life. Me going to a checkout line at the store is so that my groceries get scanned and I may eat. My coworkers participate in our department to justify the team’s existence to executive leadership, securing financial security to pay for their own earthly needs. In some cases, like in violent revolutions, humans engage socially to exterminate the opposition. This is abhorrent, but it still serves as a means to achieve an end. When I interact with people, the anxiety is that if I don’t compensate for my lack then I will suffer socially and thus my own ends won’t be meant. This consumes immense cognitive resources, and effectively I am performing as an actor in a play.

Actors, across their career, tend to improve. I do not find myself such a luxury without immense effort. When I was a late teenager, I worked as a server. I had to read How To Win Friends And Influence People and The Art Of Persuasion to understand how people expected me to behave. I remember bracing myself every time I had to bring food to a patron: it felt like the end of the world. But my tips greatly increased, and people seemed more content and engaged. I had learned how to smile in a way that created wrinkles in my eyes, how to make a person feel special and visibly seen even when I had no desire to see them, how to make them in a fleeting moment feel like they transcended their consciousness into a shared experience.

But why does awareness make the exterior manifestation worse? I suppose the pain is in the difference between the expected and actual exterior representation. In these agonizing moments, this awareness of what ought to be and its deviation from what is acts as a perpetual and ticking reminder of my insufficiency. Like a metronome that, on each tick, scrapes against the insides of your skull, the grating of your being eternally echoing in your ears no different than tinnitus. Under this spell, the mind is drawn further and further away from reality into fantasy, and thus emotional energy is spent towards this play. Most notably, it is only you that watches that play; only you are aware of such theatrics. Mental vitality, my brain’s cognitive load, is reduced, which manifests in delays of speech, filtering of thoughts before words, insincere smiles half-baked under this energetic depression. Every man is bound to energy, and performing is more expensive than existing.

However there are times where I come home from work absolutely depleted of energy, and in these moments I truly do not feel human. I feel as if I am some grounded-down and wretched being, and there is nothing more I wish than to dissolve into a void. Yet I can always find an inexplicable and supernatural surplus of energy from my drained battery to write dense essays. Why is that? Considering that I publish all my works, even if they are first drafts, isn’t that performing?

Firstly, I must note that this entire online collection is anonymous (however possible that is nowadays), and it has zero connection to any professional or social persona of mine. The extent of such exposure is that I have a link in a post to a throwaway Github account, and I refuse to engage with the platform’s social features. I write deeply personal accounts of affliction, struggle and inspiration, yet what I write is divorced from my contingent reality as this person called ‘David’. In this sense, the David which is writing this sentence is socially divorced from you: the only mediator between us is the ghost of the past encoded in this writing. My performance only extends to a dance on my keyboard to send my thoughts to a likened void. If we are socially divorced, then what anxiety could I have?

Let’s imagine a world where my name suddenly became linked to this website. As I wrote that previous sentence, undertones of dread filled my stomach. The abstract would become embodied. The hypothetical would become real. Transcriptions from the void would manifest under one person: I would be transfigured from ghost into fleshy man. I have no doubt I would close the site, or efface it by reducing it to a single white sentence on the black homepage (something I have fantasized about at times). I imagine that I would never disclose personal and illuminating events to the extent I do: I would filter everything further away from what I perceive as absolute truth. Would I really feel comfortable releasing accounts of severe child abuse, theological and parental abandonment, and bipolar phenomenology if it could be traced back to me?

This returns us back to the social realm, where in such a scenario I imagine the personal discomfort is that someone would have ammunition to judge me. The fear of such judgement probably stems from wishing to avoid conflict after living greater than decade laden with anguish from personal conflict.

What is clear to me, however, is that the anguish from my lack is a second-order effect. What truly disturbs me, what truly scrapes my insides, is that I do not believe my physical body to be aligned with truth. It feels more like a vessel this consciousness is bound to (which invokes an annoying contract dissolved at death). In other words, what I imagine my bodily representation to be is not at all who I truly am. I understand my yearning for truth, my existential ache and strife, my desire for providence to be representative of my interior cosmos. The tragedy of my awareness of my lack is not the anguish caused from awareness, but rather my existential fear that I will never truly be understood.

This fear makes social performance exhausting because people are bound to their own ends to meet, and to achieve such means they are better served by general abstractions as a compass to such treasure. This abstraction is effortless in the sense that it is detached from who someone really is, and whatever is most convenient to achieving their goal is the path of least resistance. I understand this human tendency to be a side effect of energy preservation: see the popularity of games and media for exhausted workers after returning home.

I can have low energy before I sit down to write something, but it is the most rare opportunity to inscribe my personal universe into the void: I might be understood by someone, somewhere, and I can’t be obligated to respond to them if they can’t contact me. It becomes a mechanism of control that enables me to feel understood without confronting if such thing actually happened. This fantasy is more comforting than the reality I live in. To paraphrase my therapist: “You are very interesting to talk to…… It seems you don’t think in that [controlled by emotional impulse] way, so your homework is to just keep living as you are”. My translation: ‘I don’t have a clinical model for you, and I don’t know how to respond to you or what to do with you after showing me your entire being.’

Anonymity is constitutive of freedom. When there is such a divorce between the actor and the consequences of his actions, he has nothing to fear because the only harm possible towards him would be from his moral consciousness. Morality, and more broadly truth, is hardly ever interrogated due to his animal body’s desire to conserve energy. It really does take immense energy to examine something optional, in the sense that the only requirement from his biological nature is to survive and reproduce. For example, hate crimes perpetrated on the internet.

The greater reality is that this supposed invincibility from consequences even extends to real, social interactions. When someone reduces you to an abstraction, an energetically convenient projection of what they wish you to be, you might as well be inhuman, for they interact with that painting rather than who you truly are. This is why someone, after you failed at work due to personal crisis, can become enraged and rant to someone about who they believe you are (lazy, selfish) rather than see you as you really are (in crisis, struggling to stay alive). The mechanism of such reduction that enables harm is moral distance, the transmutation of human into thing.

The fact that I care so deeply about my social inefficiencies (which have always been present) is simply a side effect that I feel like I never will be truly understood, and at best just a projection.

My failed social performances all stem from one singular, consuming fear: eternal exile from my own humanity.