Vlog CCCXIII

Oh I had years and years of that low level infection and colds and flus. I used to panic when I came down with a virus, because I knew that I would be stuck with flu symptoms for about a year, and it would be the most difficult thing to fight off for me. The worst thing was the African primeval mentality, which my father reinforced in me and whenever he saw me, which was that sickness was a sign of being cursed by God for being less than morally perfect. I had to keep striving to be morally perfect so that the divine force would release me from the virus I had caught, but the guilt and shame were overwhelming. Also I wouldn't allow myself to rest, because I had to engage in moral striving to vindicate myself in my own eyes and in the eyes of others. My father had the same rage that a narcisstic does when he sees that you have become broken down and weak. His anger was astonishing, and rubbed my face in my own terrible failure. And this went on for years and years. And then came the workplace bullying. By this time I thought I would rather die than continue living in the same vein, so whereas before I had tried to do everything right by conforming to norms, no matter how I felt, I began doing the opposite by saying "no". If things were going to fall into disarray by my saying no, I was willing to accept that, even unto death. I kept saying it. And I began trying to understand the horrible ways in which Christianity had caught me up in its web of psychological violence, by reading Nietzsche. I took this "Antichrist" into the bath with me and soaked for hours in the tub, turning the pages back and forth. I couldn't understand the writing. It made me feel seasick, but every now and then there was a glimmer of hope. For instance I learned that "everything absolute belongs to pathology", which meant that my absolute conformity to duty and social obligation belonged to the realm of pathology. I also learned that compliance with truth-telling at any cost was pathological. "Too timid to tell a lie."
As I began revaluing my values, I got healthier. But I had been knocked back so hard by the workplace mobbing as well as by years of abusing my own interests by my reflexive Christian conformity. My body was like an overheated photocopier that had simply stopped working.
It's been a very long road of recovery for me, and I still recoil at the horror of it all and how I was allowed to almost be destroyed by those around me including my family of origin.
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And the way that affected my mind, too, made it hard for me to retrain for another job. I couldn't focus on the smaller details of anything because I was too busy keeping a vigil of hypervigilance. Also the yeast in my gut performed its own chemical effect of clouding my memory.
It really had been the longest road to recovery, because everybody blamed me for lacking persistence in things, whereas in reality I had been persisting in all sorts of things way beyond my physiological limits.