Denial

Consider the following fact. You — and everyone you’ve ever known and loved — will die one day. You can read what I just wrote, and even understand and believe it, but it still doesn’t seem real to you. That’s the magic of denial. Denial is better than alcohol or drugs.

I sometimes feel like denial gets a bad rep. Without denial, most things would not be possible.

In bad times, I often find it helpful to write my autobiography in my head. It’s a book about me, written by me, but one that’s written in the third person. This has a distancing effect that I find to be helpful. For example, I currently have under $100 in my wallet and no real job. But if I thought about this all the time, I would simply be paralyzed by the badness of my situation. Instead, I simply deny that it is happening, and keep on going. “Something will turn up,” I tell myself. And meanwhile, I write my life’s story in my head, while cleverly changing the ending–

This was a difficult time for young Mr. (Censored). His funding was low, and no job prospects were in sight — meanwhile, he sighed himself to sleep every night on a leaky air mattress; the gasp of the air escaping from the mattress was like the last gasp of vanishing dreams. …But fortunately for Mr. (Censored), a new life was right around the corner!

Denial might simply be a necessary facet of human evolution, the way that other species have prehensile tails, or long necks so that they can eat the leaves off of treetops.

If you’re ever dated someone, then you know denial. If you’ve ever fucked someone right after they’ve gone to the bathroom, then you know denial. When you’re going to the bathroom, you’re sitting on a set of interconnected tubes that connect our excrement with the human excrement of everyone else in the city who is taking a dump at the same time. …We all know this. I know this. As humans, we excrete liquid and solid waste. And yet, you’ve fucked girls immediately after they’ve gone to the bathroom, and you’ve been fucked by girls immediately after they’ve gone to the bathroom. It’s gross, but no one ever has to think about it. And that’s the power of denial.

There are scenarios where you know something shitty is happening, like when a relative is dying, but denial kicks in. My brain simply won’t… do the work… of actually accepting what this means. This is why I’m tempted to say that denial is almost genetic — an important necessary defense mechanism. How can you acknowledge death? Perhaps we’re simply not hard-wired for it. Death is the absence of presence, nothing more — but how can you acknowledge that until you’re there? Being. Not-being. Existence and nothingness.

But hey, then again — a lot of people smoke cigarettes, which means they are in denial approximately twenty times a day. But still — it says right on the pack that they kill you. (I especially like the European cigarette packs, where it says “SMOKING CAN KILL YOU” in a gigantic 60-point font, as if anyone had missed realizing this before.)

Being in denial is like living in a magical castle above a non-magical land. You can see the ordinary peasants and the towns people below you, moving, shuffling around. It’s sort of sad — but maybe it isn’t? You sort of feel like you’re missing something — but maybe you’re not?

Listen. You will grow old. Your hair will turn gray. Your lover will leave you. Your friends will forget you. The bus will pull away forever, leaving you in tears. And eventually, you will disappear. …All of these things are true, and we know them for real. But thanks to denial, we don’t have to believe in any of this shit… unless we really want to. Thanks to denial, we can live forever in our own minds. Maybe we can even save ourselves — if we really want to.

Going Down Slow by St. Louis Jimmy Oden