Gaslighting & the Gift of Letting Shit Go
Looking for an Uncommodified Gift this Holiday Season?
The people over at Merriam-Webster — publishers of our secular Bible — have given the world an amazing gift by choosing “gaslighting” as its 2022 Word of the Year. A lot of people, including me, didn’t learn this word until 2016-ish, before which anyone could be forgiven for having mistakenly thought it a fancy word for torching a fart. If you’re just coming into the fold, “gaslighting” is basically lying (or continuing to work a lie) in the face of demonstrable evidence that plainly proves you wrong, with the goal of weaseling out of something you said or did, while simultaneously attempting to distort reality. And when people then say, “But Sir, these photos plainly show that the crowd at Obama’s Inauguration is twice the size — and girth — of yours,” you STILL (with incensed indignation) insist that your tiny, little crowd is the biggest, most beautiful crowd that ever was.
That’s Gaslighting, baby.
And as soon as I’m done here, I’m going to write a Thank You letter to Ms. Merriam Webster herself for grabbing Gaslighting by the back of the hair and thrusting his face into the daylight. Like “Toxic Masculinity,” Gaslighting is more than just a word — it’s a concept. A concept that has always existed but that lacked a popularly understood name, thus amplifying its negative power, allowing it to wreak havoc beneath the surface — like the shark in Jaws sizing up Alex.
I personally feel like I’ve spent much of my life being gaslit, caught in the void between what so many of our institutions — from the Catholic Church, to Elite Education, all the way through the American Work Force, Marriage, and the stated purpose and priorities of the Democratic Party — proclaim to be and to stand for, while plainly seeing for myself what they really do and how they really are. Which is to say that I’ve lived a life over-attuned to Contemporary Bullshit. And a major, life-long mistake is my having ever let Contemporary Bullshit become my problem.
Most people don’t. Most people get on with their lives while I got hung up. Although my over-sensitivity and low tolerance might stretch all the way back to when I was just four years old, and a leap from the top of the stairs in our house led to my badly breaking my right arm. It must have been a rough night in Paterson because the ER at Saint Joe’s was backed up and my father and I had to sit and wait.
And wait.
Finally, I’m X-rayed and then led into another room where the white paper on the gurney cracks when I sit down. The doctor — who is older and larger than my father — points out in the X-ray how the bones in my forearm have already begun to set with an overlap. This doctor has a strange voice and I’m too young to understand the concept of accents, but perhaps he’s Eastern European — either that or I’ve convinced myself, in retrospect, that he must have been a Hitler Youth, because I can still see him griping my little forearm in his enormous hands, the backs of which are pale and coated with black hair like barbed wire, and then those monster hands wrench, taking me, without warning, to an all-consuming place whereupon I hear a deep, guttural wail that sounds like it’s coming from down the hall until I realize that it’s me; this unadulterated howl is singing out from the deepest pit within me.
“WHOA-whoa-whoa!” The doctor dismissively utters, as though I’m being overly dramatic — like when a little kid falls on his ass and crying is just an option. Then, he wrenches again, again coaxing that demonic, consonant-free soundtrack out of me, only to tsk-tsk chide me, yet again, “WHOA- whoa-whoa!” as he finishes the job.
It is said that people forget pain, but the agonizing terror of being caught in that doctor’s grip remain as vivid as a videotape. Only maybe I would have forgotten had he literally not added insult to injury, making me feel — in an already horrific moment — like I was further being a whiny, little wussy for expressing my white-hot pain, which was as real and indelible as a transcript.
This was my crowning experience of being gaslit.
More than forty years later, while driving through the Adirondacks, I wondered — in the perfect quiet of my car amid all that stark, natural beauty — if that doctor had inadvertently constructed a silent and invisible circuit that switched on, unbeknownst to me, whenever I’ve seen or interpreted something troubling that I can plainly see and evaluate for myself, while our [CHOOSE ONE: Broader Culture; Religious Institutions; Educational Systems; Political Parties; List Additional Here __________________] insists otherwise. Only to light up those receptors that instantly flood that deep, neural groove — worn so long ago — with Pain, Helplessness and Fear.
After driving for another two minutes, it felt like that doctor had never let go.
Or maybe I was just born an overly-sensitive little bitch who tragically couldn’t get with the program and couldn’t just let a bunch of dumb, Contemporary Bullshit roll off his shoulders. Totally not ruling that one out.
Either way, I was glad to have realized that I had probably spent my whole life unconsciously hating on that ham-handed doctor, and that I needed to consciously — in my own heart and mind — forgive him. Because I figured that one of two things was almost certainly true: he misguidedly thought that downplaying my pain might make it not as bad; something horrific happened to him (perhaps in a time and place where the suffering of children didn’t rate) and, well, Hurt People really do just Hurt.
Life improved once Forgiveness allowed me to let him go. But when neural grooves like that are worn, I’m just not sure — unless you’re competing on an emotional level with the likes of Nelson Mandela — that they can ever be filled in and sanded over. Which is perhaps why there remains a petty, man-stupid part of me that derives a tasty lick of satisfaction in feeling like I finally grew up and overpowered that doctor. (And then grabbed him by the back of the hair and thrust his face into the daylight before letting him go and finally parting ways.)
And while I still experience Gaslighting all around me, it rarely takes me to a raw and reactive place. I’m further optimistic that elevating the concept of Gaslighting will result in less of it. Because it is so psychologically abusive and messed up to do that to people, or to a country. (And most especially to people or groups that don’t enjoy the considerable benefits regularly conferred upon educated, straight, white males — maybe I should write a book called How to Be an Anti-Gaslighter…) Besides, Truth really does win out in the end, while people who truck in (and profit from) Gaslighting and Bullshit really do get the emotional voids they deserve — pathetically humping $99 superhero NFTs to their shrinking and shriveling cult.
I always like hearing when people (especially people of a certain age) give themselves gifts. And when you consider the unprecedented onslaught of negative emotion we’ve all had to digest and endure during the last half-dozen years, I’d like to suggest, if you’re so inclined, to give yourself the gift of Letting Some Shit Go.
Letting Some Shit Go (By Hasbro!) is guaranteed to arrive before the Holidays and the best part is that you won’t be further exploiting an already over-worked delivery driver because Shipping — just like the gift — is forever Free.
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