Sometimes, when I was a child, I would dreadfully grasp grand conspiracies about my family. In my more fitful moments of delirium, they were smiling cannibals fattening me up for the inevitable day that they would devour me. Or maybe a clandestine cabal of wizards, controlling pawns in midnight strikes against some exiled evil, and waging furious battles against rival cabals while I am left mundanely uninformed. Or perhaps agents in some sweeping government sleeper cell which would one day go active and bag me away in an unmarked van.
In my more lucid moments I would realize the laughable improbability of it all, but no matter how my rational mind chortled at the thought, my body would react with a clenching, palpitating hyperaware adrenaline sensorium. I would try and try to dissuade myself of the ridiculous phantasm, but no amount of positive counterthought would erase the panic of toothy smiling faces, pinched cheeks, mysterious midnight drives, knowing looks and the scent of secrecy. I never wanted to admit it out loud, even though there was at least one sobbing admission in my childhood. I knew it was wrong, and I never wanted to own that fear. Even now, in my young adulthood, I think back on the teary rage of knowing I only eat to be eaten, and can’t help the momentary heaviness of breath, pounding chest and ringing about the head.
If I could say that my adult life is more lucid than my childhood, I could not say that my suspicions of conspiratorial menace have abated entirely, or even that they were undue. Even now, in my safest sanctum, in my grown-up body with my grown-up done-school brain, I still know the quiet claws of paranoia rap upon my windows. I still feel watched. I still feel listened-in upon.
And it’s the “or even that they were undue,” part that gets me the most. I ask myself, “How can you maintain the illusion of safety if you know it is an illusion?” Sad part is I can only tell myself “Stop caring, it goes away,” and the adolescent under my grown-up brain smirks all jaded, with his cloves and his black clothes. Does that same Band-Aid have enough stick left to work again? No, obviously not, and I might rebut myself, “Did it work the first time?”
So the question becomes now that you know–and you know you know–what’s going on and whose hands are in whose pockets, and you know they aren’t secret wizards, and you know they aren’t sleeper agents, and you know they aren’t cannibals, do you feel safe?
No, but now I own that fear.
