random thoughts on Faith's fantasy killings
I think that almost everyone is capable of Faith’s psychological instability. Who hasn’t felt envy and hatred and wanted to hurt someone that was perceived as a threat to personal happiness or that just royally pissed you off? The difference is impulse control. Most would agree that we shouldn’t be held accountable for our thoughts though the idea of positive energy and reality being based perception might make us question that. But the average individual places the blame on concrete damages and not imagined crimes. Thinking immorally but keeping it all thought versus acting on our negative emotions. I’ve been in Faith’s (and Buffy’s) shoes and shouted in desperate anger and frustration for the voices of my psyche to just SHUT UP.
I’ve had sadistically violent fantasies sneak into my mind’s eye against my will. Including the image of getting stabbed whenever I see a knife which lead to a phobia of knives. I’ve had disturbing thoughts and obscenely offensive mental mutterings that made me question whether I have some kind of Inner Turret’s Syndrome. And it’s sporadic. It’s not a constant barrage of bad. It’s a quick flash in an otherwise normal day. It’s the thoughts that get brushed aside in favor of the altruistic or very amusing or trivial ones that occupy so much of our mental space. It’s rare enough that you know you’re not insane but the fact that it happens at all points towards the “there’s not just good inside me” and “I’m much more fucked up than I act” epiphanies.
I believe that our bodies are sacred and that sex should be a spiritual experience that strengthens connectivity and exresses love. And yet I’ve fantasized about just giving myself to strangers and think that I may have done that during lucid dreams and possible astral walkabouts. I’ve let my growing morbidity get the better of me fearing heights and crossing the street and going out at night because the thought of falling to my death or getting ploughed into by a semi-truck or mugged and shot gives me the opposite reaction of fear and self-preservation. It was almost deliciously intoxicating. I’ve imagined being the sole survivor of car collisions and plane crashes and massacres knowing that in reality it would be a horrible experience and tragic. But at the same time knowing a warped part of me would relish the incident and play it over in my head and like that it made me just a little bit darker and more evolved for having had such trauma accumulate in my life. And a part of me justifies it. They ate animals. They supported abortion. They cheated on someone that loved them.
I can cry thinking of the suffering in the world and yet I turn people into faceless cannon fodder and make use of their worst traits and failings as reasons for why it would be okay if in my morbid fantasy games they died in order to give me life moments and character building angst. To give me reasons to think “I’m better than you” that don’t have to do with my constant struggle to be an ethical and passionately devoted person that helps the hopeless and tries to change the world.