It had little to do with the moment itself and everything to do with my mind's workings, the long memory it carries, the patterns it recognizes
The meanings it cannot help but assemble.
I came home already emptied by my medical work, drained, the kind of exhaustion that strips away your outer layers and leaves you more permeable than you’d like. And I set with my child self comforting her.
Then a couple of people arrived to my gate. It went so fast from a knock, a simple threshold to disproportionate thoughts and events.
The woman’s grief, or whatever fragile alloy it was spilled out of her in sobs. She took my hands, kissed them, collapsed to her knees like she is orienting herself toward something sacred and then tried to kiss my feet too thanking and praising me. The man followed. They spoke of me as if I were something beyond human and I tried to get them to stop but they went back to it.
And I felt disturbed and I got furious.
My mind doesn’t experience events in isolation. It folds them back into everything that has ever resembled them. It pulled forward feelings of being cast in the opposite role, of being made into something dark, something feared, something punished as a child.
And now, here was the inversion of that same mechanism. Instead demonization, deification, psychologically, they feel like siblings to me. Both erasing the human being in front of them and erasing the humans in them.
That is what unsettled me most, how they saw and the implications. The acts of being reduced to a monster or elevated to something godlike are forms of projection. They bypass the slow, difficult work of actually encountering another person as they are. It is easier to collapse someone into a symbol than to meet them in their complexity and recognize and build your own potentials. Their gratitude to my actions felt like a reaching, a kind of spiritual shortcut. As if by kneeling, by revering, they could access something without having to walk the path that gives it meaning themselves next time.
And I think my reaction came from that recognition, even if it surfaced first as discomfort and trauma, even as a kind of contamination that touched something older in me.
There’s a sense difficult to articulate and persistent that this isn’t new. It extends beyond my own life into something inherited embedded in the stories and histories I come from. The idea that those who are elevated are also betrayed. And worship and abandonment are not opposites. They are phases of the same cycle. People will place something sacred outside themselves, only to turn on it later, or hollow it out by refusing to embody it themselves.
More than that I was my child self when it happened. I was open, unguarded and exhausted. So instead of feeling grounded in myself, I felt the pull of the subtle seduction of being seen that way. Not that I believed it but I could see that ego thay could be fed by it, the opposite of all my hard work.
And that is what made me feel unclean, disgusted Made me feel I belong in hell for being worshipped and made it feel reasonable to end up in hell. Because anyone who can be on such pedestal is likely sinking in privilige already to be able to cater to that illusion. I could sense that part of myself that might absorb it and begin to lean into it. And that part is an embodiment of my father.
Having a complex mind means you don’t just experience events. You experience your own response to them, and then your response to that response. There’s always a second layer, sometimes a third, observing, interpreting, questioning... In moments like that, I m also watching the inner psychological patterns unfold, the history, feeling its implications, and my own susceptibility to it, and at the time, besides all of that, I felt burned out by the weight of seeing too many meanings at once.
That day I needed to be allowed the simplicity of a single interpretation. Not endless warnings.
Not being aware of and reliving the endless experiences of how easily human beings turn each other into symbols, devils, gods, saviors, threats, anything but what they actually are.
Not being aware of the recurring human tendency to avoid the difficult, grounded work of being, in favor of something more immediate, more dramatic, more absolute and more destructive eventually.
And not becoming aware, too, that no one is immune to those same distortions within oneself.
I needed to be left alone to my child self. Not burdened by the failings of human dynamics.
I came home already emptied by my medical work, drained, the kind of exhaustion that strips away your outer layers and leaves you more permeable than you’d like. And I set with my child self comforting her.
Then a couple of people arrived to my gate. It went so fast from a knock, a simple threshold to disproportionate thoughts and events.
The woman’s grief, or whatever fragile alloy it was spilled out of her in sobs. She took my hands, kissed them, collapsed to her knees like she is orienting herself toward something sacred and then tried to kiss my feet too thanking and praising me. The man followed. They spoke of me as if I were something beyond human and I tried to get them to stop but they went back to it.
And I felt disturbed and I got furious.
My mind doesn’t experience events in isolation. It folds them back into everything that has ever resembled them. It pulled forward feelings of being cast in the opposite role, of being made into something dark, something feared, something punished as a child.
And now, here was the inversion of that same mechanism. Instead demonization, deification, psychologically, they feel like siblings to me. Both erasing the human being in front of them and erasing the humans in them.
That is what unsettled me most, how they saw and the implications. The acts of being reduced to a monster or elevated to something godlike are forms of projection. They bypass the slow, difficult work of actually encountering another person as they are. It is easier to collapse someone into a symbol than to meet them in their complexity and recognize and build your own potentials. Their gratitude to my actions felt like a reaching, a kind of spiritual shortcut. As if by kneeling, by revering, they could access something without having to walk the path that gives it meaning themselves next time.
And I think my reaction came from that recognition, even if it surfaced first as discomfort and trauma, even as a kind of contamination that touched something older in me.
There’s a sense difficult to articulate and persistent that this isn’t new. It extends beyond my own life into something inherited embedded in the stories and histories I come from. The idea that those who are elevated are also betrayed. And worship and abandonment are not opposites. They are phases of the same cycle. People will place something sacred outside themselves, only to turn on it later, or hollow it out by refusing to embody it themselves.
More than that I was my child self when it happened. I was open, unguarded and exhausted. So instead of feeling grounded in myself, I felt the pull of the subtle seduction of being seen that way. Not that I believed it but I could see that ego thay could be fed by it, the opposite of all my hard work.
And that is what made me feel unclean, disgusted Made me feel I belong in hell for being worshipped and made it feel reasonable to end up in hell. Because anyone who can be on such pedestal is likely sinking in privilige already to be able to cater to that illusion. I could sense that part of myself that might absorb it and begin to lean into it. And that part is an embodiment of my father.
Having a complex mind means you don’t just experience events. You experience your own response to them, and then your response to that response. There’s always a second layer, sometimes a third, observing, interpreting, questioning... In moments like that, I m also watching the inner psychological patterns unfold, the history, feeling its implications, and my own susceptibility to it, and at the time, besides all of that, I felt burned out by the weight of seeing too many meanings at once.
That day I needed to be allowed the simplicity of a single interpretation. Not endless warnings.
Not being aware of and reliving the endless experiences of how easily human beings turn each other into symbols, devils, gods, saviors, threats, anything but what they actually are.
Not being aware of the recurring human tendency to avoid the difficult, grounded work of being, in favor of something more immediate, more dramatic, more absolute and more destructive eventually.
And not becoming aware, too, that no one is immune to those same distortions within oneself.
I needed to be left alone to my child self. Not burdened by the failings of human dynamics.
