Neurosis

From Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny" (1919):

"I will put forward two considerations ... In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny ... In the second place, if this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche ['homely'] into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand ... the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light."

I first encountered the term Unheimliche in an English class; it appealed to me at once. Uncanny. I understood uncanny, because I have an uncanny ability: I can foresee the future.

Someone once told me that given the choice, he would not choose the ability to know the future. I was not given that choice, and I can.

Granted, my prescience isn't quite perfect — fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one's perspective. Many of the visions that haunted me never did happen ... at least, not yet. Who knows? Maybe they still will. Because a great many other visions I had have come true. And because those premonitions that did come true were sometimes so horrific to me, I fear all my dreads and fears and thoughts as premonitions that will recur not only in my mind but in the reality beyond me.

And I never know the future of companies or stocks or anything that might guarantee me wealth or power or success. I can't predict natural or man-made disasters or anything of that magnitude. No, it's always about the few people I know or about myself, mostly in relation to other people. Basically, I can only know things about friends's lives and relationships.

I guess to anyone reading this the idea might sound neurotic, or even silly, but it's rather real to me. I know can look at a person and know at once who will be a true friend and who will disappoint me, though I suppose that isn't hard to know. I always knew when friends would become couples, when couples would stop being so much as friends; I knew within moments of seeing a couple what would happen. I knew that one boy I had dated and liked very much would end up with a friend of mine; I remember the thought distinctly coming to me though I had immediately tried to forget it. But then it happened — he broke up with me and within days was with her, a girl in whom I'd confided my feelings and trusted. Okay, so that might not seem very convincing as evidence, but such things make an impact when your emotions are involved. And I will tell you about the nightmarish tragedy that convinced me I had an uncanny and awful curse.

It was in college, during the first semester I was with my most significant other of some years. I was taking a creative writing course, which I loved, a course on experimental literature, which if nothing else at least expanded my ideas about writing. And besides the assigned writing for the course, I wrote on the side.

I wrote a short story that really wasn't very short about a boy, much like my then boyfriend, except he was cynical and embittered, as well as confused and angry inside, because the first girl he had loved (who's basically me) had vanished on him without a trace (and neither very much in love nor happy with my life, I'd dreamt of actually running away not only from him, but school and my parents and everything I knew). The story had alternating narrators — him, his friends, and third person narration — to show not only his ideas but how he was perceived. They were rather imaginary, I think.

In the story, the girl from his past reappears three years later, and he learns why she suddenly left without a word. She had been pregnant, and this fatalistic girl wanted to change her life, to create and not destroy for once. She had left to have the baby, which she brought to meet him just before his graduation. Recriminations and regret and frustration surface, and the ending is questionable, neither happy nor particularly sad. It just ends, much like a day in the life of a person, with some questions answered and others not.

So what does this have to do with anything? Well, this story was supposed to have been pure fiction and fantasy, but to my absolute horror, I discovered within days of its completion that I, myself, was pregnant. I couldn't believe it — I'd had no idea. It was such a "this can't be happening to me!" moment to read the results on the first home pregnancy test kit, then the second and third. But it was happening. And unlike the girl in the story, whom I named Madolyn, a loose reference to the fallen then saved Biblical woman Mary Magadalene, I didn't leave on my own and have the child. I went home to my parents's house that winter recess and amidst a flurry of ice storms and endless crying and numbing harsh winter whiteness, I did what I thought I had to do.

It was a very terrible experience for a number of reasons. I won't go into it here. But suffice it to say that right afterwards, in the long months of emotional paralysis, I believed that what I had first assumed to be colorful invention had actually been presaging. I had foreseen the main element of the plot, the driving event, that pregnancy. I had imagined it, committed it to paper, and in this act, I had realized it — I could so easily believe I had made it real by my own will. I could know the future.

And the thought did not come clearly to me for a long time, but I stopped writing for years. I would not write a story, or verse, or anything other than required essays. Because this much I knew for certain: I was afraid.

I suppose I have to ask myself what is it that I feared? The God-like power to write about characters that might resemble people I know then control their lives? To then play God and lead them toward tragic or happy ends? Was the fear so defined to the point where I thought that if I wrote about a character whose father died that mine would? Or did I fear writing as a medium through which clairvoyance expressed itself? That I would learn of disasters as the ideas formed in my unfettered writer's mind and came to existence on the paper before me? Did I then believe the knowledge could only be discovered in this way? That if I didn't write, I wouldn't have to know. Or was I simply afraid to reflect? To imagine? To dream?

Or maybe I wasn't so much as frightened as traumatized and I needed the years to heal. Maybe.

I foresee disasters often, but not all the time. I don't dread that people I care about are constantly getting injured or ill; I don't think I suffer from any anxiety disorders. Granted, I'm insecure, but I can also be insightful. And so I'm torn from not knowing which I'm being at the times I see things. This self-doubt only makes it more terrible if I see in my dream visions, even for the briefest moment, a guy I care about drifting away from me toward someone else...will it happen, or am I just stupid?

But like I said, not everything I foresaw has happened. Some people I saw coming together never have, and it's highly unlikely they ever will. I'm sure many disasters I thought at one point or another would happen never did, of which I know I should be grateful. But what troubles me is this: I also can't say these things are impossible.