Category: Personal Insight

jeff is such a case of wrong place, wrong time. an outlier, tossed into a timeline that was just wrong for him and those around him, but just right for those who wish to study him. a sacrificial lamb of a soul, showing the world the worst-case scenario of what could go wrong when someone’s neurodivergences are left ignored and suppressed.

metaphysically, it’s not even his fault that he existed as he was. he was stuck that way, and there was no undoing it, no deviating from that life path he had to take on. it really does seem fated in a sense. if all the world’s a stage, then someone had to play the role of the tortured criminal, and it just had to be him.

i wonder.. if reincarnation is real [which i believe it is — matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and i’m sure consciousness exists eternally in the same way]. did he know that he had to incarnate in that way? taking one for the team, so to speak? or was he ultimately just some selfish horny fuck and there’s nothing deeper to it than that?

i mean, when i see his eyes in photos, i SEE an ultimately good soul there. a good soul that’s been ravaged and broken by its own incarnation. but of course, we don’t really have the tools to measure such a thing scientifically. so it’s all just up in the air for now. doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, though. it’s that sort of thing that keeps me wondering.

i do wonder how much self-awareness really does for a person in the end, though. jeff was as self-aware as he could be — on his own, with no outside help that matched his level cognitively — but he still killed 17 people. it’s just waking up to find you’re in hell. the existential horror of being jeffrey dahmer.

he experienced the bystander effect within himself. just a passive “i know i have to stop..” but an inability to INITIATE that action. it’s almost like executive dysfunction, but drawn out over a long period of time. and just like how all humans are biologically programmed to take the easier route, as it conserves energy, jeff acted on his impulses time after time. a sort of paralysis while still in motion. in many ways, he was paralyzed mentally.

same kind of thing with any addiction that grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go. people seem to think that if you can act at all, then you have a choice to stop whatever you’re doing. well, brain chemicals don’t work that way. he was able to stop for 9 years, yes, but that took all of his strength. eventually the muscles grew tired and he collapsed under the weight of his obsessions. and after that, he just gave in. he was tired of fighting it. he resigned himself to his fate.

just the same as with any addict relapsing. anything can trigger it. even something as small as a dirty note given to you in a library.

and back to the incarnating thing.. i wonder if maybe his “soul” or whatever knew someone had to live that life. someone had to be the bad guy, the poster child for the result of our stubborn refusal to understand mental health, our unrelenting desire to equate accountability with rage and punishment instead of understanding and compassion.

just like how someone had to betray jesus in order to get the ball rolling for his death and resurrection, i guess. someone had to play that role, and judas was the one who drew the short straw. maybe jeff had to be a sort of judas figure for the mental health field, causing the chaos that will set the much-needed transformation in motion. a devastating yet necessary catalyst.

¡ guess i just don’t want to blame him for being human. there was a lot going on in his mind, in his body, and he had no actual help for it that resonated with him. nothing that stuck. no one who truly GOT him.

i just wonder how strong any of us would’ve been against a biochemical cocktail like what he was stewing in for his whole life. especially when communicating it and being understood was impossible.

yes, people did try to help him, but it was in all the wrong ways.

the man was truly fighting himself all on his own.

[ • dahmers-ashes • ]

jeff never thought his life could be helpful to anyone, but he really has helped me a ton. he’s helped me think more deeply about people, about psychology, about the different ways in which the system fails us all, and about the complex nature of morality and human nature in general.

jeff is a teacher and subject both, perhaps inadvertently so. he didn’t recognize his own power. but i’m always going to be grateful to him for that. his actions were horrific, but his existence has somehow still helped us all here in this community. those who’ve wished to study him deeply have uncovered a lot of profound truths along the way.

like a retrograde planet, jeff’s existence bungled things up quite a bit, but it also taught us a lot in the process. and there are always going to be retrogrades. on a grand scale, we need them.

and i hate even saying that because it seems like an insult to his victims. they certainly didn’t deserve to die or be violated in all those horrible disgusting ways. it’s sort of making me squirm to even have this thought at all right now. but i guess death gets us all at some point; it’s just a matter of how it happens and what — or who — brings it. and sometimes society as a whole needs a shock to it in order to recognize that the current setup is absolutely fucked and needs to change. it’s just how the huge complex rube-goldberg contraption called “the world” is set up.

unfortunately, someone has to play the bad guy. like how judas had to betray jesus in order to get the ball rolling for his death and resurrection. without judas, the whole thing would never have happened. he hated himself for what he did, too, and he hung himself because of it.

i see jeff very similarly. he’s a catalyst for change.

and now somehow i’m linking this with the trolley problem. a few casualties for the good of the whole later on down the line? it’s cruel. it’s brutal. it’s a horrible reality. but the only way we can improve things as they are, i guess, is by fighting fire with fire at some point.

i don’t know. this might all be bullshit and i might regret saying it in about 5 minutes. i feel like i’m being insulting to jeff’s victims by saying it. but i’m also not married to these thoughts, either — they’re just swimming through my head, and i might read over them again in an hour and hate them. but maybe there’s a similarity there in that i’m thinking brutal thoughts and am self-aware at the same time, just as jeff was self-aware and yet couldn’t stop causing destruction.

i think his fame was necessary. he had to slam into our collective consciousness like a meteor and leave a huge crater so we can later fill it with new lessons and knowledge.

it makes sense that he came to light during the early 90s, with all that harsh outer-planet shit that was going on right then. capricorn and scorpio, saturn and pluto dominance. saturn is the grim reaper swinging his scythe; pluto destroys and rebuilds. jeff was absolutely a harbinger of all this outer-planet energy.

maybe in his next life, jeff will go on to be an even greater force for helping people than he was for harming them. maybe he’s already doing that right now. he just needed to go through a really nasty incarnation first.

maybe he needed to experience firsthand what horrors one human is capable of before he could help change this in the next life. i do wonder how many of us have at least one past life where we were a murderer or a rapist or some other awful person, and that’s what’s made us wiser in the end and we just aren’t aware of it.

the difference with jeff is that he seemed to retain some awareness that this was wrong. he’s bridged the gap so we can peer into the other side. he’s relatable because we need to be able to recognize these traits in ourselves.

only then can we take the first step toward righting our wrongs.

[ • dahmers-ashes • ]