Cleaning out my internal cupboards

I was pulling one of my, doze on the couch all night to a bunch of u-tube videos stunts a few months ago. I woke up to Andrew Huberman interviewing David Goggins, a former Navy Seal who’d gone on to do ultramarathons, smoke jumping (parachuting into remote areas to fight fires) and a bunch of other stuff that challenge the limits of human endurance and potential.

During the interview, Goggins spoke of how he’d gone from, in his words, “A three-hundred-pound, illiterate, piece of shit” to a person capable of the significant list of achievements Huberman was applauding.

When asked how he’d achieved these wonders, Goggins told Huberman that he’d mastered his internal dialogue. He explained that most people had internal chatter, but he’d managed to develop answering voices.

When asked how, he described the process of cleaning his mind.

What does that entail? Well, every day Goggins journeys into his psyche. He opens wide the mental cupboard doors that many of us are too afraid to look behind. The ones that contain our worst traumas, our vilest thoughts...And he cleans them out.

In the interview, he described facing the demons, the emotional cobwebs and spiders lurking in those cupboards and “spit polishing” them out.

Apparently, that emotional diligence helped Goggins overcome his internal saboteur. That squeaky-clean mind of his was then able to make and follow through on plans that subterranean fears and unhealthy survival mechanisms might have derailed.

I found the level of honesty and insight quite staggering.

It reminded me of a time, in my late twenties when I had the privilege of seeing the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler at Powels Bookstore in Portland Oregon, where I lived at the time.

Butler, when asked about how he wrote, described a similar process.

“We writers,” he’d said, “employ a process of exploration; we dive into the depths of our psyches, we submerge ourselves, going deeper and deeper until we touch the bottom. And once there, we take a look around...It can be a little scary at first. But after a while, you get used to it. And doing it yields our greatest insights. What drives us? What are we afraid of? What do we most desire, in our heart of hearts?”

I remember bawling my eyes out after I seeing him speak. There was something so profound about what he’d said. I felt the truth of it ringing within me like a bell.

At that point in my life, I wasn’t yet ready or willing to do what he suggested. I was a ball of coping and defence mechanisms held together by the believe that I could get through life if only I controlled my environment well enough.

Back to that couch I found myself on.

Even as Goggins was speaking, I knew I was ready and decided to open up my internal cabinets, to descend…

You see, I’d been wrestling with sleeplessness, smoking and an addiction to sugar that I just couldn’t seem to quit, even though my conscious mind knew all the reasons why I should. And with regards to my writing, this internal saboteur was hard at work. I was heartily sick of the situation.

So, I closed my eyes and opened my mind.

The cupboards there were pretty. They came in a range of blues, reds and greens with flowers painted on them. But something was banging on one of the doors from the inside, hard.

I opened the door and out crawled a skinny, ragged beast.

She looked like an angry ghost covered in scribbles. A combination of the spectre from “The Ring,” and a furious, pitch-black version of Mr Messy from the Roger Hargreaves children’s book series.

I knew she was about fourteen.

She spoke in growls and howls. I realised it was probably the only language she knew because she contained oceans of rage and despair at what had happened to her during that year of her life and the years that followed.

She roared as I looked at her, challenging me. A furious, rebellious, spectral teenager.

I could feel how, “fuck it, I’ll just do something self-destructive,” was her answer to the gruelling process of receiving emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual wallop after wallop, whilst being shoved down into a cupboard in my mind.

She was incensed at how many times she’s railed and cried and begged to be let out, while the public face of me, the stern parent, plastered a smile on my face and pretended everything was alright.

I realised as I looked at her that sometimes the good boys and girls we are taught to be can’t hold the trauma and the disrespect. The only way we have of handling it is to smoke. Doesn’t matter what; a bong or a cigarette…Or to drink ourselves numb, or to do something dangerous like hitch-hike home, go base-jumping, have a one-night stand, or to swallow those roars in an avalanche of sugar or whichever food stops the incessant craving for some form of peace.

I realised that when “turning the other cheek”, and “being nice”, and knowing that “we look a whole look prettier when we smile” and all the other trite, bull-shitty mechanisms we’ve been taught to bury our sense of injustice under JUST DON’T WORK, my internal teenager knows that the only thing that provides relief is to show our middle finger to the world.

Those are the times when she steps in, telling the well-regulated bits of me to just sod off and let her take the reins.

However, in this future shocked, post COVID world, where we all often feel as raw as slugs that have blundered into beds of salt, it can be tempting to let that teenager keep hold of the steering wheel, consuming vast quantities of tobacco, binge watching Netflix all night and generally behaving self-destructively all the time.

It was as I sat here dizzy after such a night, I knew the internal cupboard cleaning was something I really needed to do on an ongoing basis.

It felt great to finally open the doors of my mind and take an honest look at my teenage rage-beast.

She quickly calmed, having being seen. And as I looked at her, it seemed far more important to understand her than to blame her.

I think I’ve locked many things away in the cupboards of my mind. My failures as a parent, a friend, a lover, a worker, a community member and a citizen. Those times in my life when I have felt truly murderous or I’ve wanted to annihilate myself.

All these things have sat behind closed doors, occasionally leaking out and infecting my interactions and my behaviour, like cyanide gas.

Update, a few months later

The smoking is gone! I’m now working on the sleep and the sugar. It’s three am, so as you can see, old habits die hard. I’m a work in progress.

It’s confronting but at the same time I feel a sense of relief at this process of regularly opening up and giving myself an internal spit polish. (I’m not a consistent enough person to do it daily.)

It doesn’t stop the ghouls and demons contained inside from being there but it does seem to help to acknowledge them, to face them in the light of day, and to try and understand.

Looking at and cleaning out my internal thought processes, memories and traumas seemed to help lift me out of the blame-shame-hide cycle that often keeps my rage beast at the helm.

It seems to be allowing my internal adult to gently pat the howling teenager on the shoulder and tell her, “I’ve got you.” Allowing me to move away from the realm of my nightmares and towards regularly working on realising the stuff of my dreams.