The Rats in the Walls of my Mind

Picking up from where we left off before…

I have rats in my walls and they are trying to get into my room. My last post was about the connections I make between the pests in my room and all the things in society that we tend to ignore until we can’t run from them any more.

The “rats in the walls” here are not a group of people or an ideology that we deem as “the problem”. It is hate and unaddressed anger, mistrust between communities that is reinforced by behaviors and by history. It is the issues we pretend won’t come to bite us in the ass one day.

Not only do I draw paralells between my personal circumstance and the state of the world, I also look inside to see what kind of emotions are invoked by the process. What kind of fears pop up? What kind of desires? What kinds of things am I capable of and how can I steer myself in the deaired direction.

For one thing, I learned that I could be a pretty ruthless killer. I do not look at rats as being worthless vermin, I see them as living things whose life is to be honored. Still, when they start running around my apartment with the possibility of spreading sickness, I want to end them. I feel absolutely no remorse.

I may distinguish between different animals naturally, but I recognize this as my own bias. I don’t pretend to lnow that a rats life is any less valuable than a dog or a human. I wouldn’t treat a dog the same way because they tend to be domesticated and because I have a history of relationships with them. They are under humans control.

I wouldn’t treat humans the same way because I am a human and because I don’t want to be treated that way. Also we have language and shared experiences that we can use to communicate.

Truth is, if I could tell the rat to leave and I knew it could potentially understand me, I wouldn’t consider harming it. But i have no success in communicating with rats and I know they are not likely to understand me. And so I feel no remorse. It just feels like something that must be done.

I could feel remorse if I wanted to, but I don’t see a purpose, it would just make it harder to solve this issue. So I turn it off completely.

I suppose this is what a soldier does in war. It probably takes amuch more to elicit such feelings towards another human being, but in a war, the level of danger we feel is much higher than that of someone in a rat infested house.

The take away is that we can behave very very differently to that which we percieve as a threat. If we want to become peaceful we need to stop perceiving others as a threat. If we want a peaceful world, we need to help others to stop perceiving us as a threat.

I can tell you from first hand experience in such mentality, that is exactly what is going on in the Middle East. Sure there are people who channel their fear through religious or political or ethnic fanaticism, but it’s all just fear of a percieved threat, and sometimes that threat is very very real on both sides and so neither side is willing to risk giving the other side the benefit of the doubt.

“Every single one of them wants us dead because of what we beleive”. I remember my father telling me that and thinking “that can’t be true”…and I was right. Clearly. I beleive its our job to release some of the fear and pain of our parents and our ancestors, but to remain realistic about the threats that actually do exist. I can make more effort to connect and respect those who don’t hate me.

I could keep going on that tangent, but back to the rats.

What kind of fear do the rats elicit in me?

To identify what kind of fear is present inside me is to identify my purpose for seeing such things. Where does the fear come from and how can it be adjusted to be more realsitic? How can i be more like the son who admits that there is a threat but looks at it reasonably rather than irrationally. How to act out of love rather than fear?

I observe my reactions to the rats.

I find that when I want to sleep, I am startled by the sound of the rats gnawing at the wall. Sometimes it sounds like they have broken through and are free to roam about my room.

What’s so scary about that? Of course no one wants that, but what about it is so scary?

On thre surface level of the fear, I don’t want to be bitten. I don’t want them carrying diseases into my house.

But when I examine the first fear, I discover that the latter is much more central. To be bitten itself doesn’t scare me but if i were bitten, I should probably go to a hospital to get some shots. Modern medicine gets a lot of credit it doesn’t deserve, but I think one of the very few things that has led to longer life spans is the ability to keep pest born diseases under control.

So the appearence of a rat symbolizes illness in my mind. I am afraid of illness more than the rat itself. The unpredictable nature of the rat amplifies this.

From there I keep digging.

Why am i so afraid of illness?

There are many answers to this question. I want to avoid discomfort. I want to live long and healthily. I worry about something getting in the way of this.

But actually I have faced my fear of death to some extent. It still scares me but not to the extent that that fear has much of a hold on me. I fully accept that I will die one day, I just want it to be anytime soon.

When I play out the worst case scenarios in my mind I tru to identify what is the exact thing that scares me most about this situation. The answer I found is “a lack of control”. Being forced to rely on a doctor to help me, not knowing for certain that I will be cured of any potential disease, not even knowing if I will be healthy or ill, or bitten or not, all these things that are out of my control.

So even more deeper than a fear of disease and discomfort lies the feel of a loss of control.

That is is, that is the core fear I need to work on.

So i begin to meditate on this, to try my best to accept that there will be things out if my control and sometimes everything comes crashing down.

I have had things crash down before and I survived. Maybe one day I won’t survive, but maybe I will, and who knows for sure what is on the other side, maybe it’s better than this, so why should I worry.

This fear of being helpless or powerless is very central to our experience as humans. When we are born we are powerless and I believe there is a kind of fear that inevitably stays with us because of that. It doesn’t mean we can’t overcome it.

I don’t know for sure what the best way is to overcome a fear of powerlessness but I know that gratitude helps. When you feel true gratitude you are in abundance and there is nothing that needs changing.

Another interesting thing to consider here… I have had many conversations with friend Hive account@drrune about identifying and overcoming ancestral trauma. I suspected that my fear of the dark was inherited from my Grandfather who spent years living in the forrest, running from and sometimes attacking Nazis.

While digging into my fear of the dark, I realized I was afraid of ghosts, demons and even aliens and made the conclusion that I had inherited my grandfathers fear of being attacked by Nazis while sleeping, but because I did not have such a threat in my life, my mind went to the most likely threat it could imagine running into in a safe suburban home…demons and aliens. The fear was there and hadn’t been worked through so it had to manifest as sonething.

I have to wonder how my grandfather felt about rats and other pest living in makeshift tents and raiding old buildings to steal food for his fellow partisans. He must have had many close encounters with rats.

I have to wonder if the fear of being shot completely erases the fear of a rat or if it’s just louder so that he wouldn’t have the energy to fear such things.

I wonder if some of us fear things like rats and cockroaches disproportionate to the actual danger they present because we may have inherited that fear from a time that we did not have the cure for pest born illnesses and sanitation was worse so there we more pests present.

This is just a side note, but one I thought worth sharing.

The goal is to clean everything up inside myself, clear out the rats running around my mind, causing disturbances. And speaking of appreciation, I am thankful that I have come to a point where I am able to identify all the working pieces and disturbances inside myself with such accuracy and in such depth.

I will keep digging until I have cleaned every inch of my soul, and it will be very exciting to see what kind of life that will lead me to live!

And lastly, just for fun, as I came up with the title for this post after writing it, I thought of this song from my high school days, one of my favorite bands back then: