There is a Vulcan in my head. She is sitting against the door of her small bedroom with a stack of books on meditation. She is a difficult child. This is what she has come to know. Too emotional, sometimes not emotional enough. Whichever it is, it is the one that allows people to treat her the worst. If she has a problem, she will be dismissed as over-emotional and dramatic. If she doesn’t react the right way to something, doesn’t agree with someone, she is dangerously cold and emotionless.

She is sitting with her back to the door of her bedroom. She often does this when she wants privacy as her door has no lock. It is a little bit uncomfortable to sit there. She is a dangerous child, she has come to understand. An autistic child who is too sensitive to sensory input who has stronger feelings than everyone else, feelings that are harder to contain. When she is afraid or hurt or confused or angry she hits people, yells, screams. Runs out of rooms if her routine changes or the room is too loud. Instead of recognizing her problems, helping her to manage her overwhelm, allowing her to leave the room if she can’t handle it anymore, instead of ever talking to the scared child she is, she is told she is dangerous, bad, angry, a problem to be suppressed and contained. It is always about other people. Her parents tell her about how everyone else must be judging her for this. ::I am hurting and no one listens,:: she thinks inside. ::People only stop hurting me if I scream and I don’t know what else to do.:: She learns that other people’s comfort is more important than her well-being. She sits on her bedroom floor reading books on meditation, told that she must learn to control her anger.

Soon, it works. It works well. She does not feel anger anymore. Not at all. She believes she is incapable of it now. She can’t cry much either. It isn’t even that she consciously suppresses it anymore, she just can’t. She thinks this is a good way to be. The other children make fun of her by comparing her to Spock. She does not feel anger for over ten years. When people die, her lack of reaction leads others to see her as cruel and hollow. She thinks this is a good way to be.

There is a Vulcan in my head. He is 17 years old and has been having depressive episodes since he was 9. The roots of despair dig down into his history and he has become convinced they will always be there, firmly pulling him down with them no matter how hard he tries to fight it. That is, until in an instant, it all seems to go away.

It feels like the world has ended and no one else has noticed. Patterns swim across the world in little rainbow-fish schools and suddenly everything is connected, this great pulsing quilt of all existence and he can see it and he can understand it and everything is great and he feels GREAT! He spends the next month gripped by an uncontainable euphoria, running around on barely any sleep stealing tennis balls to stop the alien invasion and almost getting hit by cars and crashing his bicycle and keeping a notebook of random numbers he thinks contain a secret code and—

And then he faints and then everything comes crashing down. Down, down into a depression worse than any he ever felt before combined with the exhaustion of wearing one’s body far past it’s usual breaking point and still not stopping until it completely gives in. After 8 years of non-stop sadness this was his brush with happiness and it was terrifying. He never wanted to experience anything like that ever again. This is what happiness does to a person, he thinks, and any slight flicker of happiness brings back that same fear, the fear of violence, of self-destruction, of all the awful awful things that reside inside of a person and so every time he feels even slightly happy he shoves it down, refuses to indulge it.

He will have many more episodes like this, each one unique in their own way. He has been in and out of the mental healthcare system since he was 10 and he has another attempt at it again, going to therapists and doctors who dismiss him as too complicated, too difficult for them to help. He tries Prozac for a bit but it seems to make things worse (and he impulsively quits it cold turkey despite normally being very health-anxious). Eventually, years later, he shows up to a therapy appointment during one of these episodes and is diagnosed with bipolar.

I have very complicated thoughts about all of this. On one hand, I did hurt people during my meltdowns (I did not know they were called that until I was ~16), sometimes quite seriously. I don’t think that was ok, and I feel a lot of remorse for this. On the other hand, I grew up convincing myself of the idea that there was some strange and terrible force inside of me that made me fundamentally evil and dangerous and I lived in fear of it ever getting out, feeling the need to be hyper-vigilant and over-controlling of myself to keep everyone safe. I realized at some point after years of doing this that I could never really feel true joy because to do so would be to stop monitoring, stop managing every little thing about my emotions and reactions.

Contrary to how it may appear, Vulcans are not emotionless. In fact, they have much more intense emotions than humans do. This emotionality lead to violence and war and suffering in our society and so a Vulcan named Surak proposed that to prevent this Vulcans suppress their emotions and make decisions based on logic and pacifism and acceptance of the diversity of the universe. To be Vulcan, sometimes is to find this terrible evil in one’s heart and the heart of everyone around oneself. To have something awful inside of you, to know that deep inside you there is a power so strong it will destroy you and everything you love. You need to be on constant guard so that it never gets out. Don't let it out. dim every part of you down so that you never have to risk being burnt by that light ever again.

Now, this is a bit of a less healthy way of looking at things. I will write another essay at some point about how i envision a more well-adjusted Vulcan discussing this topic, and about what it is that I am striving toward in regards to all of this, but unhealthy attitudes are a part of one’s history as much as anything else and thus are important to discuss.

This fear of the violent thing inside us is so strong and widespread that in some ways it is embedded in Vulcan culture. There is a Vulcan word: k'oh-nar, which translates to the cultural fear of emotional vulnerability and exposure; feeling of being completely exposed in some way; an unnatural fear of losing control in an extremely intense, emotional situation(VLD). Commonly it is experienced during intense romance and/or Pon farr, but I envision it as having a bit of a wider scope than that, encapsulating any situation where one might not be able to control oneself. Mental illness, I think, could also be an application of this feeling and the deep sense for the violence within me after my first meltdown and the deep terror at any flicker of happiness after my first manic episode seem to me to be described by this singular word better than multiple sentences in english can describe it.

I relate a lot to Tuvok in the episode Meld:

[Tuvok's quarters]
(The place has been smashed up. Tuvok is sitting in a corner in the dark.)
TUVOK: I would advise you not to enter, Captain.
JANEWAY: Tuvok.
TUVOK: Please, do not come any closer.
JANEWAY: Talk to me.
TUVOK: I said, don't come any closer.
JANEWAY: We need to get you to Sickbay.
TUVOK: It would be safer for the crew if I were to remain in these quarters. I remind you, I am trained in the martial arts of many Alpha quadrant cultures. Sitting here, attempting to meditate, I have counted the number of ways I know of killing someone using just a finger, a hand, a foot. I had reached ninety four when you entered.
JANEWAY: The Doctor is fully versed in Vulcan medicine.
TUVOK: Again, for safety reasons, I recommend you sedate me before you initiate transport.

I feel a bit embarrassed indulging in discussions of this, as it all seems very over-dramatic. I am not some innate horrible-monster born-killer (Tuvok isn’t either) but that isn’t the point of a fear like this. I relate very much to the intrusive thoughts, to the whirlwind and the intimate terror at just what (you think) you might be capable of. I take a lot of comfort in this episode as it expresses this feeling that has been central to my identity and existence for my entire life better than most other things have. I often feel bad for feeling this way, I often feel like no one, not even other people with bipolar, really understand. I found understanding in Vulcans.

I do not quite know yet the bounds of my alterhumanity. In many ways I am a person who only likes to rely on things with plausible, rational explanations in the world, in other ways I find myself drawn to the strange and mysterious that lies beyond what we can prove or see. Perhaps multiple things can be true at once. But from the psychological side of things. I really see the through-line of how my childhood experiences led to me forming this kintype (I subscribe to the idea that I may have “imprinted” on Vulcans at a young age, forming my developing identity around them). Perhaps somehow the emotional repression of my childhood got the wires crossed in my brain and now I feel irrationally upset about the fact that I do not have pointy ears. I don’t know. There are a lot of things this explains and a lot of things it doesn’t, but it certainly is a part of the puzzle and talking about it, deconstructing it, understanding it is the key to slowly working it all out and perhaps healing from it.