Embarrassed
As a teen trying to fit in, my hyperactive nervous system didn’t help, as it caused random, unprovoked facial blushing that I fervently prayed would not manifest in public, like during my on-campus Spanish class. About 90% of the time it did not. About 10% of the time it was hell. 100% of the time I loathed attention, just in case.
The first couple times it happened, I embraced the narrative that I was easily embarrassed. So I tried hard not to be embarrassed – to psych myself up before Spanish or before playing my saxophone on stage each week. But the crimson reaper struck just as frequently when I felt like a King, as a jester.
It was like massive, random bouts of incontinence, but instead of being confined to those within smelling radius, this manifestation was smeared forehead-to-chin and ear-to-ear, a glowing lamppost, visible from across the campus or from the back of the auditorium. An episode might last anywhere from 10 seconds, up to a minute or more.
The blushing was frequently accompanied by a literally-irresistible urge to squint my eyes shut, as if I was dicing onions, but without the burning sensation. And, as with many ticks, the presence of it usually made it worse.
Checking With Dad
But that “easily embarrassed” story became more difficult to hold onto, as the tick would present itself just as frequently when the group’s attention was not on me, or even when I was alone. It appeared suddenly, like an itch – an un-ignorable, physiological event with no apparent cause. I figured something was amiss, and it had finally interfered with my social life enough that I was ready to search for a solution.
So one night, at about age 13, as my dad and I pulled into our garage at 5536 Maidstone Way, I pleaded calmly, but out of desperation, “Dad – sometimes, like, even when I’m not even embarrassed or anything, and I haven’t been running and stuff, my face just turns really red and I can’t control it or anything, and it’s really embarrassing.”
I didn’t know where I was going from there, but he graciously interrupted my non-question, reminiscently, and dismissive of my angst, “Oh yeah, I used to have something like that!”
“Really!?” I was so relieved. I didn’t remember seeing any such pictures of him, so I knew he must have the answer, “How do I make it go away?”
He paused, as if he thought he had already answered that question, “Oh – there’s nothing you can do about it! It just goes away after a while.”
A while!? My father was about 40 at the time, and I was struck with the terror that I, too would spend eternity (or 27 years, which is the same to a 13-year-old) before I experienced any relief from my increasing social impotence. But, resisting the terror, I probed, “Okay. How long did it take for you?”
“About 5 years or so,” he shot back, still making no eye contact.
5 years!?!? How was I supposed to survive with this problem for 5 years!?! I would be 18 by then! My entire teen life would have passed! How could God just wreck this whole period of my life?! Why couldn’t I have gotten this from 5-10?! Or 20-25?!
The conversation ended as abruptly as it started, and as the garage closed, resting on the ground, so did my hope for a quick solution.
Deafening Silences
It’s odd to me that we never talked about it again. It seems like I would discuss it with my kids if they were manifesting obvious ticks. But even more than that, I don’t know why they never protected me through it. I recall multiple occasions where I was left to fend for myself, even early on.
I remember one dinner in particular, we were eating with a wealthy elder and his wife, the realtor who sold us our first California home. The man would later ridicule my mom for her, “My way or the highway” approach as they exited the org, but that night it was my turn for his scrutiny.
…and what’s with this kid…with all the mousse in his hair? What is that? Is that the style or something? I haven’t seen so much mousse before. And the cheeks too – are you embarrassed? Why are your cheeks so pink? That’s weird. Do you guys know why his cheeks are so pink?
My parents just looked at me – as did the whole table – like I was supposed to say something. But I didn’t know why I put so much product in my hair!? I didn’t know if mousse and gel were even the same thing. And I didn’t know why my cheeks were so pink!? And I also didn’t know that shame and humiliation were things I could fight, when they came from my dad’s clients. Apparently my parents didn’t know that either. After several rounds of ridicule met with Coller silence, his wife chimed in, urging him to leave me alone.
Why didn’t my parents address it? Part of me thinks it irritated my dad. Maybe he always left me to fend for myself because he thought I should be [de]fending myself. For as long as I can remember, he always saw me as weak – a mama’s boy (an odd complaint, in retrospect, given the trajectory of his sons’ lives). His definition of masculinity was related to the ability to command people, and I only wanted to play games with kids.
Another believable narrative says my dad just didn’t know how to handle it. His clients – God’s clients – were mocking his kid for something that seemed legitimately mockable. Maybe my parents just felt like there wasn’t anything they could really do about it, and I would do the same with my own kids. Actually, no. I wouldn’t. I have little doubt I’d knock their fucking teeth down their throat, if one of my clients started mocking my kids on our turf.
On the other hand, I’m just as susceptible as the rest of my parents’ former org members to inflating my significance in their history. My current hypothesis is that it just didn’t register as something my dad should care about, and my mom let him lead in the raising of the boys into men. It did not impact the kingdom, nor did it challenge his authority. After our exchange in the garage, he probably didn’t think about it again.
Experiments & Treatment
With zero assistance from my parents, I did the best a teen could do in the dial-up days of the internet to find out what the hell was wrong with me. I researched, and scheduled fruitless appointments with multiple dermatologists. Several friends thought it might be Rosacea, but none of the doctors did. I tried the creams they provided after telling me they didn’t know what it was. Nothing worked. Some made it worse. Almost all of them burned. So I gave up on not being a freak.
After several hundred failed attempts at making it subside by force of will, I started playing with it when it interrupted my life. It takes an act of extreme bravery or hopelessness to experiment with a social impairment as an insecure high schooler, but I figured, I could either blush and hate it, or I could blush and hate it and maybe learn something, as the only explorer in Hell.
I got to the point I could semi-reliably trigger it by will, by getting smaller – mentally, physically, and emotionally, and manually trigging the “freeze” part of fight/flight/faun/freeze. But I could not make it subside by doing the opposite. Once that launch sequence had been randomly initiated, I would have to wait out the Rube Goldberg consequences across my head, even if I possessed the confidence of Tony Robbins himself. This too was curious to me, but only after first being frustrating, embarrassing, angering, humiliating, and disempowering, for years.
Sometimes the sensation would rise at the base of my neck and then subside before flushing across my face, but I would try to bring it back, challenging myself to sit on that edge for as long as possible, often resulting in an another unnecessary, embarrassing episode. With enough practice, I found a general point of no return – not that I could reliably control it, but I could accurately predict which direction an episode would go. As with so many demons, this one seemed less powerful in my life when I faced it and danced with it than when I feared it and cursed it.
Brain Games
Sometimes this experimentation was frustrating because I would wind up actually embarrassed, unable to recall what un-self-conscious felt like, and unable to escape the spirits I had brought upon myself. Other times, I was so curious about the phenomenon, I couldn’t bring up the genuine self-consciousness necessary to stay on the edge.
This may have been some of my earliest forms of meditation, through self-empathy, as I tried to consciously be aware of – and shift authentically between the feeling of self-conscious, and whatever the opposite of it is – something like belonging, or “in the flow of society”, or consumed by the first-person-ness of my avatar.
I figured the opposite of self-conscious was self-unconscious, but it has proven exceedingly difficult to, in a moment when I sense oncoming terror, ignore the terror and throw myself fully into deep thought on another topic, so authentically that I’ve forgotten that I’m only distracting myself from the very real terror chemicals that have already been released in my body…all while not forgetting the rest of the sentence I was in the middle of, or losing my place in my saxophone solo. Fortunately on all fronts, practice makes progress.
I think this was also my foray into the wonder at my own compulsions. In the Coller worldview, all negative [sinful] feelings were simply the result of wrong choices, like going into the wrong part of town. “In the Spirit” was the only safe part of town. So we were fundamentally lacking a curiosity about the cause of all the feelings for which we already knew the cause. God was the giver of all positive things; our sin nature was the cause of all negative.
But my experiments with facial blood flow gave me such a more realistic – and less literal – understanding of their concept of demon possession. I soon noticed that “self-conscious” wasn’t the only inescapable reality. Hungry/full; horny/satisfied; tired/energized; depressed/hopeful – when one feeling fully possesses me, I can hardly access the opposite feeling; only the memory of having claimed it. So I’ll sign up, without hesitation, for a diet on a full stomach, or an all-nighter after some restful sleep. And when I’m depressed, I can only remember that once upon a time (maybe just hours ago), I said I occupied a valuable place in the universe…though I doubt the authenticity of such a claim in the moment, and only trust the temporality of the current feeling because I’ve witnessed the cycle, and I honor the suffrage of Hopeful Jamin as faithfully as Depressed Jamin. “This, too, shall pass,” is a statement of great faith.
Withered With Age
I still don’t know what’s wrong with my face. 5 years came and went. I’m pushing 30 years now, with no resolution, but through decades of embarrassing experimentation, I have moderately helpful tools. Mostly, old age brings with it a degeneration of the give-a-damn muscles, so my nervous system doesn’t let the problem loop and amplify nearly as frequently.
However, I am now quite certain that as a teen, I didn’t need a dermatologist. I needed a psychologist. But in the Coller home, I was more likely to be offered a witch doctor or a line of coke than any non-Jesus solution to my neuroses. Mental problems were Spirit problems, and the only treatment for that was the decision to follow God harder, better, faster, stronger.
Reflections
It’s probably been several years since an unprovoked episode – a luxury I couldn’t have imagined for most of my life. So it’s not really an issue for me any more. I’m 40 now – the age my dad was when he told me it wasn’t really an issue for him any more, and I hate to think that perhaps I would respond the same way to my 13-year-old bringing a similar concern to my attention.
It’s hard to remember how completely that handicap dominated the most formative decades of my life, so I try to remember that the non-issues my kids face aren’t non-issues to them.
Advancements
Only today have I found multiple articles listed on a term I’d never heard before, despite multiple internet searches in multiple eras: idiopathic craniofacial erythema. Still no cure, except for similar mental experiments to the ones I made up, just like, I assume, many others did who walked around in fear of being randomly triggered into a positive feedback loop, embarrassed by the fact that we looked embarrassed when we weren’t really embarrassed.