“I don’t know,” I say. “It feels like therapy has only made me worse at making friends. I’m so conscious now of all the fucked-up things I used to do, and all the things I should never have let people do to me, and it just makes me want to hide from people until I’m whoever I’m supposed to be.”

“I don’t understand that.” My coworker isn’t really paying attention to my answer to the question she asked. I’d be angry, but it’s probably the only reason I answered her so honestly. She continues, “It always seems like you know exactly how to talk to people, you always know just what to say. You’re so good with people!”

I die a little inside. Just for a change of pace, I try to imagine what it must be like to live in that world, the one where “being good with people” is all it takes, the solution to a problem instead of the seed that grows a forest of problems. 

That’s the way it is with a lot of the dubious superpowers I’ve gotten from CPTSD. Other people envy me for my supernatural lack of fear, my eidetic memory, my hypervigilance to social cues, my skill with words… while I fantasize about carving these things out of my head with a rusty spoon.

The best way I’ve figured out how to express it is this:

Imagine that the social interactions of humans, the emotions and words and cues and body language and all of that… imagine all of that is a machine, a huge whirling machine where most of the activity is under the hood. Most people just grab the nearest lever to wherever they are and pull, just start interacting and see how it goes. Sometimes they understand what the machine does in response, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes something comes out of the machine, something develops out of a social interaction, and sometimes it doesn’t, and people just go on trying until they figure out the parts of the machine close to them. They understand the people around them and how to interact with those people, and that’s good enough.

Now… imagine that you found the manual to that machine. You have it in your hands. It’s a good manual; it shows all the possible functions of the machine and how to achieve them, which buttons make the machine produce, which buttons make the machine explode. You understand exactly what the machine is doing now, almost all the time, and you can’t not understand it — you can’t forget what you learned, can’t shut your eyes to what you see.

It sounds great, right? You can work that thing however you want to, get whatever results out of it you want. Until you start thinking about it.

When you start thinking about it, you realize that most of the time when you’re working with someone else on this machine, when you’re having an interaction with another human, you’re the only one looking at the manual. The person you’re talking to isn’t — they’re just pressing the buttons they know, doing their best. Suddenly you feel responsible for what the machine does, because you’re the only one using it consciously. Now you feel like you have to control this uncontrollable thing that everyone else is also messing with. Now you feel like, if it explodes, or if it catches your sleeve and drags your hand into the gears, it’s your fault. When someone is hurt, when someone hurts you, it’s your fault. Because you knew better. You should have been able to make a better choice.

And people don’t like it when you use the manual to run the machine. While everyone else is poking at it innocently, you’re pressing buttons with care. You’re controlling your affect, controlling your tone, selecting words that will appeal to a person, managing your emotional reactions and trying to head off theirs as you talk. This is what people call being manipulative, and they tell you that it makes you a bad person. You’re supposed to interact with other people clumsily, intuitively, without thinking about the outcome. You’re supposed to do your best, and succeed, or fail, or whatever, but above all you’re not supposed to know how it works. 

Knowing all this, how could you ever do anything in your life but stare at that machine, paralyzed?

How can you ever do anything but watch other people interact, connect, bond, and wish you could just go along with whatever’s happening and do your best the way everyone else can? But you can’t put down the manual. You can’t stop knowing what you know. You can’t stop seeing the way the machine responds to people’s inputs, and you can’t stop knowing what every single clank and judder and cheerful beep means. 

You can’t touch the controls, because you know the damage you could do with them. You know what happens when the machine breaks, and you know that using the machine with intention makes you more culpable when it hurts someone. You were supposed to know better, so it’s worse when you’re wrong. It’s not just fumbling like other people do, it’s not just a mistake, a social flub, a moment where you said the wrong thing by accident. Because you’re supposed to know the right thing to say, they say it’s malice when you’re wrong, it’s harmful. 

It’s you hurting other people on purpose, because you’re the only one interacting with any purpose.

But you can’t not interact. You can’t just not touch the machine, check out, let other people bang on it until it kicks out something worthwhile. You need connection, love, other people, and they need someone to interact with who’s making any effort at all to interact consciously and with care. You can’t waste what you know, and you’re too afraid to use it.

What do you do?

No, I’m asking, because I don’t know. What do you do? What do people with superpowers do? How do they get past the fear of doing more harm in the world than good, of making things infinitely worse just by becoming involved? How do they get to the point where they can touch the world at all?

It doesn’t seem like something most superhero movies discuss much. For as much as they talk about “responsibility,” superheroes don’t seem to feel much responsibility for the side effects of their actions. They crush buildings and toss evildoers across tables and through people’s wedding receptions without a second thought, and the noble taxpayer foots the bill. Is that what they’re brooding about on rooftops all the time?

Hold that thought — I gotta go find a rooftop.