On Consciously Rejecting Paranoia and Its Safety Net

"Has he simply run out of things to say?" the malicious voice inside Alex Dewey asks, knowing the effect it will have on him.

"Has he simply run out of things to say?" the paranoid voice repeats, revealing in its pathetic refrain the banality of the supposition to him.

When your paranoid voice speaks to you and it's talking about whether that vagrant is positioning himself near you to mug you? You listen - it's a voice possessed of bigotry and instincts, after all, but sometimes that's the only thing that matters.

But when you're paranoid about big-picture stuff, like conspiracies, impossible surveillance, gigantic state secrets without a rational reason to exist? Then you hear it, stop in your tracks, and you walk in the opposite direction. When your paranoid voice is lecturing you about the meaning of life, you silence it like the zealot it is. And almost as soon as you make this commitment to silence the paranoia and see the good in a person or a situation, it's like watching a flash flood as the self-deceptions erode and what you are left with may be unpleasant, but closer to truth than when you started.


See, because when I look at the situation rationally, I find that by any metric I certainly haven't run out of things to say. I've simply got too many things to say, presenting themselves to me in disjointed sequences of comedy and drama that only I can understand. I haven't run out of things to say, I've simply realized just how many things I have to say, and besides that, what a drain it is on one's emotions to organize all that together and to expose on occasion one's self to the collected truth of things. That rain of faith that life is earnest, life is real, and the grave is not its goal, and all that other mother jazz? Well, that rain never drains right into the gutters of a good night's sleep. No, to go deep means to take more than self-deception away. Because you can't just dam a flood in the souls. That self-deception goes away but it takes with it a dose of healthy self-confidence, a ten-hour or hundred-hour detour of wasted experimentation, a year of idiotic pontification, or a life of unreciprocated monasticism. You can destroy yourself from within just to destroy the conspiracy you've set yourself to. Just to expand your sphere of life, you can cause rupture and collapse.

I haven't run out of things to say, I've just found that the things I do have to say need to be said but can also run me ragged, and I have to be careful around the edges or I have to accept that I'll be sent into places I maybe don't want to go. This is all scarce comfort because I simply can't be careful around the edges. I have to hit that vein or I feel like a bloodless fraud. I can abide this feeling for hours at work, with friends, with family. But when I get that solitude I crave, I use it to think about what I've seen and sometimes it's a darker place than I'm able to put into bite-sized jokes. I have to express myself.

And today what I found is that the paranoid voice in my head is not the voice of doubt but the childishly cynical voice of hateful and universal disengagement, like a xenophobe but about everything that could possibly go wrong or go right, telling me that every opportunity for malice must some day be perfectly realized. Imagine walking along a minor highway across a bridge, a river and certain death always to your left - death only to a comically impossible misstep albeit - but still, right there. And on your right, diving toward you always, an endless succession of machines filled statistically with hundreds of the mentally ill and the physically unstable, perhaps overwhelmed that day by life. If one veers over you will not be able to dodge it and that will be it for you. Oh, sure, it's rare, but one in a billion, one in a trillion? It's not impossible. That's the paranoid voice, the voice that says that if I stay on that bridge forever I will certainly perish.

So, the paranoid voice says, don't go outside.

And I resist, successfully, only that rain of resistance just keeps coming and keeps eroding, and I kill more than just fear. "Why did you ever fear that?" the malicious voice mocks me. And I don't have an answer, and I'm raw, and suddenly that 6-block walk becomes an honest account of all the times I've failed, that I've failed to resist these fears, and what I might have been if I'd simply seized the moment, and made a habit of it. There's not a cloud in the sky and I'm soaking from perspiration by the time I've reached my destination. And suddenly in place of fear is fundamental self-doubt, and its only justification is - comfort of comforts! - that it's true, rather than false, self doubt.