The Human Disease

Healing. I am healing, they say.

I am healing differently this time.

Less alcohol this time. No weekends forgetting my own face in some bar somewhere.

Instead I’m reading. Classical fiction. Sematic fiction. Religious fiction. Fan fiction.

I’m not a literature academic. Just a thinker. “Thinking is the pastime of those who can’t do”, I am told, with sneers and degradation. I guess what we can’t see, will be misunderstood by most.

We create the monsters. We really do. But not in a lab. In our homes.

Women probably start the problem. But not all women. Just the ones who give birth and don’t successfully negotiate a child to adulthood. Which, when you think about it, is a hard task to begin with. So places a good 99% into this bracket. Do I even know any success stories? Not personally. But you hear about the odd one. Stoic morals, healthy attachment and secure futures. Brought up in an environment that ticks all the boxes. Mostly though, childhood traumatises people.

Not just at the hands of the women. The men too. Men traditionally leave childhood to the woman then berate them for the failure. Recently men take a more active role. Doesn’t help though. Because men aren’t immune from paying forward their own trauma, despite what some grow up believing.

Most people aren’t even aware of it. And those that are, are trapped by the paradigm.

Little girls with awareness and understanding, stay quiet. Laying in wait until it’s their turn. Maybe they think they’ll learn enough to make it right with their own children or maybe they start a new generation of monster. Little boys with awareness, don’t stay quiet. They will never grow up to be women. They act out against the expectations on them that some subconscious part of them tells them is out of their control. And in a world where less evolved men have managed to make women the problem, there’s a high chance little boys will grow up believing this too.

That’s why they want to hurt and control. Even if they don’t know why.

Nature and nurture entwine together in such a myriad of ways that this hurt and control comes out in different ways. Overt oppression from those who gain power or covert aggression from those who don’t. Any anything and everything along that spectrum of hate and fear.

It’s not like there’s an answer. There’s no label on people’s heads telling others they are a monster. If we are to believe the history books of the women, the fictional stories they were eventually allowed to write, then we create the monsters every day. So most of us are.

So many people think it won’t happen to them. Their child will be the fix. Then they go and break their child into a million pieces and bastardise them back together without even realising it. And thus the cycle repeats.

When you think about, how can children possibly be fixed? Humans are a disease.

Some people are subconsciously aware of such a plight. They avoid children. Manipulate and encapsulate. Suppress and deflect. Seduce and impress. But human nature catches up in the end. We are built to care and love, too. The human condition.

Some indulge the monster. Acceptance and resilience are the words of millennial psychologists. With that comes role play and disassociation.

More and more turn inwards. They will be the last in their line. If everyone did this, maybe the race will end. The human race that is. Maybe the two meanings for this noun are related.

But it doesn’t end. The life of the aware, ends. The human race continues despite the lessons learned by those who have not continued it. Maybe that’s why we’re a disease.

There’s no cure. I can learn all I like, I know enough to know I could be wrong. But I want for a child one day. I want it in my bones. I can’t help it. Despite everything I have learned. But I am healing from this want. I am learning that wants are not always an accurate measurement of survival. My body wants food, but you know what? It can live without it. For weeks. I’ve tried. And my life was better because of it. So I can do without this want. Because the alternative, the awareness of another’s persons hurt at my own hands, is not something I can live with.

And I want to live.