DISPATCHES FROM THE PIT, 1: NO "HELP" IN HELL

When you say that you are lost, buried, pummeled badly, in wretched shape, that you are unlikely to recover, that you will soon perish, that nothing shy of a miracle could possibly save you, you are seldom believed. People think you are merely being grandiose and melodramatic.

Or worse, you are believed, and they ask, or more commonly command, that you “get help.”

There is an unspoken presumptuousness in the invokers of “help”-reception, which I have grown to find deeply galling. First, there is an unearned presumption in the notion that said “help” even exists at all. (By that I mean, “help” that is truly helpful, not as is unfortunately more common, “help” that advertises itself as helpful, but in fact isn’t.)

Then there is the presumption that someone in need of help wouldn’t already actively be looking for it. Think of someone who endures chronic, crippling pain. Does one not presume that a person who suffers in this manner wishes to find relief? Yet somehow a person who suffers psychically is presumed not to know that psychic pain feels bad, and that he therefore needs to be told to seek out that which might ameliorate, or at least reduce, his suffering.

Thus the non-sufferer presumes to suspect that the sufferer is simply malingering in some manner, or that he must obtain a perverse pleasure from wallowing in his misery instead of attempting to find relief, the way that Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” narrator speaks of a man self-indulgently moaning over a toothache. Of course, malingers and wallowers do exist, but the default presumption that the sufferer is really just one who feigns his suffering to gain attention mostly has the effect of pushing genuine sufferers to conceal their misery, as they grow increasingly weary of being treated with default skepticism or patronizing unctuousness.

"I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man" -- Dostoyevsky's unnamed "Underground"narrator

More often, however, the sufferer conceals the reality of his suffering for a simpler reason: he doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of himself. Unlike the malingerer, the sufferer opts to cultivate a degree of stoicism about his circumstances; much as he may feel tempted to “rant” at times, he knows that indulging such impulses provides no real benefits. Once one is done ranting, after all, nothing has truly changed; one’s problems are just as present as ever before; if anything, one is in a worse state of upset for having willfully re-familiarized himself with that which causes him pain, trauma, and humiliation.

There are some, of course, who seem to relish “kvetching” about their problems. This species of person, the kvetcher, embodies an entirely different mindset, one that I find not only foreign, but positively alien, to my own.

Under normal circumstances, I take special care to avoid talking about my problems. If directly asked, I will reflexively deflect and subtly but deliberately change the subject. I do this in part because I strongly suspect that the asker doesn’t really ache to know the answer; he merely asks the question as a sort of social nicety. But I also refrain, as explained above, due to the knowledge that often the interlocutor in question will care, or at least will flatter himself in presuming to care, and will attempt to “help,” or at least flatter himself in presuming that he is attempting to help.

Often, I’m afraid, such “help” is mere busybody bluster and unctuous twaddle. It is a means of ego-driven self-aggrandizement of the sort undertaken by those want to make you into a “charity case.” There is a certain arrogance, after all, in even presuming oneself to be a person who is fit to help another; still more to demand that another take his (unasked for) counsel, or be deemed insolent on account of his refusal to do so.

Moreover, and perhaps more egregiously, there is a stinging effrontery in the very presumption that you are “sick” while they are well, that you are “broken” while they are all together, that you need them to cure or fix you. Such an understanding is insulting, not because people don’t get sick in mind or broken in spirit, but because it fails to respect that, when it comes to mental, spiritual, and even physical health, all of humanity is on the same continuum. That is to say, everyone is sick or broken to some degree, some more than others at particular times; such is our shared condition.

Therefore, the approach all too often found attitudinally, even among many of those who claim affiliation with the mental health field, and certainly among many of those most eager to render specious counsel to the ailing, the wretched, and the low in their midst, is ultimately dehumanizing in effect, because it does not recognize the abovementioned continuum, a continuum whose full implications are expressed in the famous adage, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

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One seldom thinks of the inverse of this adage, of course: “Here, bereft of the grace of God, I go.” One doesn’t ponder this adage-reversal, that is, until one finds oneself seemingly psychically sheared of the grace that one previously presumed himself to have been granted. Then, one truly knows what it is to be the sort of person whom the supposed “fortunate ones” look upon with mingled pity, scorn, and contempt.

To feel oneself stripped of grace is to know oneself as having been flung into the pit.

Finding oneself flung headlong into this fearful aperture is a shock at first, and major shocks are typically accompanied by a sensation of disbelief. The circumstance never ceases to seem surreal, because one never seems quite able to become adjusted to the conditions which prevail in the pit. Misery cannot cease to be miserable, regardless of how familiar it becomes.

As with the souls in Hell, fresh assaults of disorienting trauma continue to pummel the sufferer’s consciousness. Indeed, the pit, like Hell, is a state to which one cannot inure oneself. The only difference is that while Hell is forever, time in the pit is merely temporal.

Of course, that which is temporal isn’t always temporary. Sometimes it may even last a lifetime, as many a pit-dweller can attest.

Andy Nowicki is the author of A Final Solution to the Incel Problem, Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker, Meta-Pizzagate,  and numerous other works, both fiction and nonfiction. His author page is www.altrightnovelist.com