Nonsensical Emotional Agony
Some background on what I have referred to as “nonsensical emotional agony.”
We recently began a therapy and coaching program for our eight-year-old son after some behaviors that my husband (and some others) found bizarre, but which I felt a sensory kinship with. I mentioned this connection to the therapist: I identified strongly with the behaviors I saw in him; I could imagine what he was experiencing; he must have inherited my own nervous system.
The therapist, who was quite complimentary of our parenting and reassuring in general that his behaviors were developmentally appropriate, asked me the obvious question: so what works for you then?
When I was in 9th grade, a 10th grader named David Ferraro threw out the following philosophical question in a group: “what if the thing you think is blue is red to me?” I have since leanred that this is a rather banal question that everybody at some point encounters but at the time it blew my mind, both the thought exercise itself and that it had never occurred to me before (I fancied myself a much deeper thinker than David Ferraro, who sported a blond cool-dude haircut and didn’t seem nearly as interested in academics). My gut reaction at the time was that there must be a way to refute David scientifically, but I couldn’t articulate any at the time, and David insisted that it wouldn’t be possible to prove or disprove it.
And at the very least, ([same link as previous](Science deceptively offers a level of certainty on this point that I do not believe exists, as much as I respect the scientific method as the best humans can probably do when it comes to pursuing universal truths. )) the actual science on whether my green is your yellow seems to be more nuanced and less established than I had simply assumed back in 1994. That would seem to support David’s proposition on the surface, but our belief in science as authority interposes an unstated “yet” at the end of any statement beginning with “we can’t prove.” Whatever we don’t know, science is in the process of figuring out. And as much as I respect the scientific method as the best humans can probably do when it comes to pursuing and acting on universal truths, it implies a level of hypothetical certainty that I do not believe exists—but checking that assumption only happens when I stop to think about that, such as when David Ferraro deploys it as a party trick.
Expanding from colors… a human can never really know what it’s like to be in a different human’s brain. But if we don’t reflect on that concept, I would expect people to assume a baseline similarity of experience of being in any human brain. Sure, there are fascinating things to unpack about perception, the impact of difference in languages, altered senses, damage to the brain from illness or injury. But what if one person’s entire fundamental experience of consciousness is really not intuitively comparable to another’s at all? What if the framings available to us through science and language effectively conflate completely dissimilar experiences because the vessels they are encased in, which we are able to access and compare, behave consistently in certain respects?
Nonsensical emotional agony has been with me as long as I’ve been conscious. As a child words fell short and in truth, I had little interest in naming the phenomenon that I wished would disappear; it was all I could do just to bear it. The pain would just suddenly engulf me, accompanied by an embarrassing flood of tears. I drowned in fear and shame, suffocated with self-loathing. I would sometimes flee, hide, or (if I felt it would influence the environment in a way that I wanted) scream. As a teen and young adult, this continued; I failed to grow out of something that was excusable in a child, which made the pain even worse. Over time I exhibited suicidal tendencies. Various professionals attached different labels to my nonsensical emotional agony and its byproducts, aided by my own exploration.
When I say nonsensical, I don’t mean that this pain is random. To the contrary, I can usually connect the pain to some environmental stimulus. But the pain is so disproportionate to any environmental circumstance, past or present, as to defy logic, and “nonsensical” is the only term I can find that comes close to validating the nebulous experience of an existence in which I make no sense, and I am the only thing that makes no sense. I’ve always been confident in logical reasoning; analysis is my comfort zone. So why can’t I make any sense of myself? Why do the sensations in my body seem like what I see on TV after someone is kidnapped or their family member gets murdered? Nothing even remotely like that is happening to me.
My inner world has revealed no answers, only inexplicable, intolerable pain. And though the agony itself isn’t constant, and I have experienced lots of “comfort” when it’s not present, the prospect of that subterranean agony emerging at any moment has been such an avoidable reality for me that I don’t think I know what “safety” feels like.
Notwithstanding the above pontification on brains, I think science can probably tell me more about the physiological processes at play than I know now; perhaps a brain scan would be of some use. Science would probably call it a “fight-or-flight” response, and I’m sure that’s right. Though I’ve never had a brain scan, my guess is that my amygdala is activated at these times, and I cannot even imagine that my pain would look remarkable, because that would make sense of it, and I feel very sure that my pain is senseless, invisible, and shameworthy.
But I don’t get a brain scan because I feel like I’ve exhausted the available medical interventions; I’m sure it would show that my brain is like everybody else’s. Maybe everyone else does feel like this, but only I have such bad character, weakness, fragility, that I cannot seem to do an acceptable job of controlling it. The energy it takes to protect myself, to protect others from me, and then to punish myself appropriately, leaves me feeling without agency.
I can recall only a few specific instances though I remember the sensation as frequent; I have no clear memories of how those overwhelming feelings resolved themselves. As far as I can consciously remember, they never did; only when the environment somehow changed around them. It can’t be true that my intense and frequent experiences of intolerable suffering always continued unabated at peak until something else changed to fix it. That’s not logically possible. Still, my perception is important, and it’s one of absolute powerlessness to cope in the absence of adjustment to something outside myself.
It was not until 2020 that I first stumbled upon a description of rejection-sensitive dysphoria, and my sister recommended Gabor Mate’s book Scattered, and I subscribed to ADDitude, that I fully saw myself in somebody else’s description of human experience.
Allowing myself to explore the world of neurodivergence made room for something other than the self-hatred that I had felt up to that point because I was so incomprehensible. But my neurological epiphany did not, itself, slay or even tame the nonsensical agony dragon, who remains always lying in wait for the right moment to overtake me and cause a tornado of damage to everything and everyone around. Pharmaceuticals help reduce the frequency and intensity of those moments; my dragon can now sleep through moments that used to wake it up.
I’ve never felt power over this inner monster. I live each moment with the knowledge that it will breathe the most destructive of fires in response to a threat that I’ve failed to anticipate. I walk through life anticipating disappointments and failure so as not to get caught off guard by them.