Cognitive dissonance
I play with the edge and no one even knows that I’m doing it. You may think you’ve got me pegged, but you’re wrong. My soft exterior belies my second carapace, the protective armor I developed over time to keep my integrity, my authenticity. Where my heart used to be, there is fire, my hands and feet are ice, and my mind is calm and cool and driven by anger layered under years of self-control.
I love children and animals and kind men, but I have a soft spot for the rebels, the ones who must be free. I look at them and I see what I want for myself, an open life, a fluid carapace that falls away when needed, a life only controlled when necessary. They ride the edge without resentment, take on stray dogs and people in need of a schooling. I watch them from my window on their motorcycles, with their tattoos or piercings or pointy shoes. I watch them and feel my carapace start to dissolve, with lust, want, desire – or maybe I’m just making plans for my future.
Three things most people don’t know about me:
That I learned how to shoot a shotgun in sixth grade
Where the fiction ends and the truth begins in my writing
The true content of my innermost thoughts
From the prompt "Allow me to introduce myself," which is always the first prompt of the Round Robin (including telling three things that most people don't know about me). This is the first time I went for something outside of the standard. Very lightly edited.
I really wanted to write more today, to take some time to craft something, but I am working on very little sleep and the stuff I am coming up with is so dark and filled with loathing that I don't think it belongs here or anywhere. I have to accept that today will not be productive for writing and acknowledge that when I am this tired, moments of levity are hard to come by.
Image by bábo gábo.
Truth or dare
Maybe it was those dreams of French hackers who took over my Facebook account, adding me to groups on postmodernism and cooking, on philosophies of sophistry, on European pop groups and flexible sexuality. Maybe I was too hot last night. Maybe it was the stomachache I went to bed with that could have been the beginning of a night of anguish but was held off with pills. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe this is my protective carapace in action – just try to reach me through this hidden, hard shell. Go ahead. Try.
The house gleams, clean from floor to fur-free floor (with some exceptions). The day will be gray and blustery and I will conquer worlds from the filtered light of cloud cover. I have to-do lists. I have fires to feed. In my mind there is a heated swimming pool in a luxurious addition to a house I’ve never been in. The water shimmers, it moves slightly as if the earth beneath it is adjusting itself. I stand on the lip, feet wet, in my bathing cap and my bathing suit from seventy years ago (the fabric is heavy and the water binds it to my skin). I do not face the pool, but somehow I make the backwards dive, smooth, clean, triumphant, body sharp as a knife.
In the morning I drink coffee. In the afternoon, hot water. At night, beer and wine. When resourceful, present, I cook every night. I improvise, it’s like jazz or being on stage, and so what if the audience is small and my work, my art, hidden?
I am not supposed to be beholden to my moods, to let emotional whim control my day and how I see myself (it’s an Ennegram type four thing, and it makes sense). If I tie my stability to my every strong feeling, I am bound to implode. But there are days when I feel strong and confident, when I am open, and there are days when I feel strong and confident in a defensive way. I like to ride these feelings when I have them, even if I am shadow-boxing in the living room by the heat of a midday fire, alone except for the animals, making the air move around us, watching the raindrops on the window merge and take each other down.
My body and my mind are my own. I am sovereign over this land. Try and catch me, try and categorize me, take what you see and make it into something else. Go ahead. Try.
I dare you.
Image originally by Margaret Chute of Dorothy Sebastian and Joan Crawford (!) in 1927; scanned by Allison Marchant.
I feel better now.
Tenacious me
Everyone goes through times when writing feels impossible, but what is most frustrating about this spell is those trapped thoughts tugging at me, asking for a voice. I don’t feel empty. I feel frustrated. Sure, I could use the old schtick of breast beating and past resurrection. I could structure whatever it is that needs life into heavy metaphorical framework, thereby obscuring the poetry, the deeply felt quality of it.
Here are the elements: a dream in which I showed the boy how he could blot out the moon with his thumb, and an email from a friend discussing the flood of mutual feeling that emerged when she recently ran into a man who broke her heart decades ago (thanks, b.). The moon fakes a glow, it reflects the light of another; despite its fakery, the moon has power over the oceans, the pull over water and blood; blotting it with a finger is a fraud; our attempts to pretend that deep, inexplicable connection doesn’t exist are a form of cheating the self: moon/ trickster/ tides/ love/authenticity.
Maybe it’s as simple as that, a series of words. Maybe I’ve just been on a throat-clearing binge, need to write and write and write until I get to the point or until the point gets to me. It’s so easy to give up on this stuff, especially when the only compelling reason to keep going comes from within me. Nobody's paying me for this, or giving me a grade, and having the willpower to struggle through self-doubt, foolishness, and what appears to be my own incompetence is not one of my strong points.
The Round Robin starts up again on Sunday. I think I need to challenge myself to not go back to the old themes, to try and divert myself from familial dirges and soaking in the past. Those themes and approaches are too easy. The less sleep I get (my sleeping tends to suffer during the RR – I race to wake up and start writing as early as possible), the darker my writing becomes, too. I don’t necessarily want to avoid darkness, but I do want to avoid the incessantly inward glance. So I need to keep up with my sleep, to remind myself that I have the time.
Attempting to direct my writing may initially result in some pretty poorly written work. It’s unfamiliar territory and will be necessarily self-conscious at first. Or maybe it won’t. But I don’t want to give up on something just because I am not immediately competent. I have to give myself permission to be bad at it. I think that’s the key to a lot of new things for me – I need permission to do poorly, on the assumption that I will learn and improve (or stop after I've tried repeatedly without improvement). In other words, I can set myself up to work through self-doubt by being easier on myself, by allowing myself to fail. If I allow myself to fail and give myself room to learn (and to be unknowing), I can develop tenacity. Willpower.
Hmm. I feel that heart warmth, the faint burn of waiting tears, a recognition of the truth. Is this part of what is going on in my mind, the thoughts that will out? What the fuck do they have to do with the moon and love? Am I distracting myself with metaphorical baubles while the rest of me struggles with what it will take to change my writing (and anything else that needs a rethink)? Maybe.
Maybe it’s all very simple and I just haven’t been able to see it until now.
Image: Incredibooth photo of me, obscured by balls of artificial light.
Is the title a little cutesy? Once I thought of it, I couldn't resist.
From there to here
I started out writing anonymously, with the idea that I would probably write while locked up in the bathroom. It was the only room in which I could shut the door and have some semblance of privacy (most of the time), although that concept didn't last very long, thank goodness, and I am happy that I didn't name the blog the first thing that came to mind, The Bathroom Diaries.
In preparation for a February blogiversary post, I’ve been going through the old stuff, including a file of posts I deleted early on because of their extremely personal, current-at-the-time nature. In the very early days, I wrote candidly about my life. I could do this because nobody was reading and nobody knew who I was anyway. It’s interesting – and sometimes disconcerting – to see the roots of some of my current themes in my early writing, though I have also come a very long way.
For example, here’s something from December 27, 2007: Most of today was spent trying to fight the feeling of being in a mind-numbing life. It's a great psych-out, talking my brain out of its funk, trying to stay in the moment. Lots of internal pep talks. I am no longer totally mired in brain funk, but still struggle with boredom and my self-imposed exile. Four-plus years is way too long to feel that way, but at least things are changing.
Here’s what I wrote on January 16, 2008 on the idea behind writing to survive: Trust me, this is writing to survive. If I don't get it out of my mind via my fingers, I think I would do something really destructive. There is an element of self-censorship to what I write, but that's good. It gives it form and reason.
I’m not sure what I think about this now, as someone who has both been very open on the blog (perhaps too open, especially when it comes to writing about other people) and has also constructed metaphorical frameworks in order to control my emotions and threatening thoughts, posts that attempt to extinguish or at the very least contain my internal fires. Self-censorship is not the right word to describe how I form my version of reality here. Clearly I get something by being open about my feelings, open in this very public context as much as I able to be open, but maybe the rationale for that is an inability to be open elsewhere. And sometimes I obscure my intent with metaphor and walls of words, all written with a compulsion to get them out there, as if I was sending secret messages to an ideal reader.
That post goes on to say: As I was playing with H and C today (H=husband, C=the boy aka child), I reminded myself of how short these days are. C won't be little forever. He won't always want to be with me. He won't remember wanting to rub and kiss my belly. His sweet (albeit repetitive) play will change and he will move on and be an independent creature. He deserves a sense of his inherent worth, not a vague feeling of being inconvenient (oh, I hope I'm not passing that feeling on to him).
There is no danger of the boy forgetting the soothing properties of my belly – he still rubs and kisses it when he needs to be comforted. His play has gotten less repetitive, of course, and I still try to be in the moment with him as much as possible, to remind myself that his childhood is fleeting. And now that I have more personal space – it didn’t exist back then, between the staying at home and the kid who didn’t want to go anywhere and the extended breastfeeding and co-sleeping – I no longer worry about giving him the idea that he is inconvenient.
Over time, larger themes have emerged – guilt, forgiveness, desire, – my voice has become stronger, and my writing has shifted. Certain topics take on the quality of a wave, with the buildup, the crest and trough, sometimes building up again months later (for example, the stillbirth of my first son was a huge topic in late 2008 – early 2009, with intermittent, much less overwrought mentions after that, not that I've dropped it completely). I’m also having fun identifying my favorite posts which, surprisingly, are mainly fictional. For example, Berkeley type still makes me laugh and The Bottom of the Sea, part of the NaNoWriMo novel I wrote in 2009, shows what I can do when I really apply myself. In the process of identifying, of charting the progress of my mind and where I've gotten stuck, as well as seeing how I took something I wanted to do – write – and made it happen, I am better able to evaluate what works and what I must change before another four years slip into memory.
One thing that I can both agree and disagree with now, this sign-off from January 9, 2008: Too self-aware. Damn. And without any prospects. The prospects are out there, but I might need to tone down the self-awareness a bit. Too much can paralyze.
Image: The boy, spring 2008.
Finishing this up as the boy lies sick in the couch across the room, wondering if this post will be of interest to anyone but me. Well, at least I can show that change is possible, and that even without much external change there can be internal shifts. I credit writing and my determination to keep on doing it.
So much to answer for
In the dream this morning, I thought, “why not invite him over to dinner?” The house was empty now and I was trying to piece everything together, my life, the grocery store trips, how much food to allow my household of one. My old dormant crush, the man I now know only in my dreams but who could still hold a place in my heart (diminished by knowledge and years and age, jammed in between the other things from my twenties that I regret), was coming to dinner.
Before he made it (in the omniscience of dreams, I saw him walking along the sidewalk, this Yorkshireman – never underestimate the power of an accent – with his wiry climber's build and surprisingly grey hair), I woke up. 4:44 a.m.
I was relieved to wake up so late. Last night, restless after a day at home with a sick boy and a never-ending stream of movies, I was having a hard time getting to sleep. I had to bring out the Buddhist Scotsman with his gentle, almost sexy whisper-voice (“and now allow the muscles of your thighs to soften”) in order to get my spastic mind to quiet itself, to take that internal tension, so automatic at times, and smooth it out. I soothed myself with images of a night of extended sleep, expecting all the while that I would wake up at 2:30 or 3:00. But I made it to almost 5:00 a.m. and that was good enough for me.
I don’t have enough to do, enough to feed on. Don’t envy me. I’ll be envying myself in six months. Or, really, I have things to do but I am having a hard time getting interested in them. Oh, there’s the usual cleaning, the stuff sorting, the life organizing, But I could also be exploring and writing and entering life more. I have to structure my time and make myself a life and I am just realizing now that I don’t have to stay in the house as a form of atonement, a way of showing that I am not a layabout wasting time (as I waste it). There are wonderful things about controlling my days, but not if I let them slip away.
Don’t laugh at me or roll your eyes – or, at the very least, don’t tell me that you are doing so, and I'll pretend that you aren't – but I think I am holding on to this emptiness as a penance, that the structure I set up against myself is a form of payment for my sins. I am not a religious person. I was not raised in an environment of structured guilt. But I carry around guilt anyway and I cling to her, the old me, the one who was alone, who took her anger and directed it inward. I’ve mentioned at least once here the idea that my thoughts could kill. In a recent tearful conversation about my first child's birth/death, one therapist nailed it when she asked me if I thought that I killed that child with my anger and hate. I had a lot of that at the time, a lot of adolescent resentment. I was sixteen and on my own. I knew then – and know now – that killing with thought and emotion is impossible. I know and I don’t know. It’s so hard to shake, this feeling of responsibility. I hated and wished for release and then he died. It's a twisted logic, a spurious connection between a, b, and c.
My second son's birth was a trigger. Not that my life before parenthood was some sort of free romp, but it was much less self-constrained. Then the boy who got to live arrived, along with the overwhelming reminder of what I was capable of, my dark powers. I’ve been trying to make it up to the ones I’ve wounded, the ones who are no longer here, including the adolescent me who was stuck with the responsibility, the burden of someone else's death.
I used to have dreams about the baby I forgot. There he was in the antiquated crib in the high-ceiling room with the wispy curtains floating in the breeze. By the time I remembered – to get food, to change a diaper, to check in – he would be dead. I haven’t had those dreams for years, thank goodness. That’s part of the healing process, the joy of having a child now and doing right by him.
I am grateful for my ability to pick apart my emotions, for finding the why. Once I know the why, I can deal with it, and I am, ever so slowly. This new discovery of my self-imposed prison both as penance and as a way to hold on to the girl that was, is useful. I can cry over her and then allow myself the freedom to live.
So why the dream visit from the Yorkshireman, the occasional Mancunian? He used to represent freedom to me, freedom and desire, the world of art and living on the edge. He’s an outdated symbol (nothing personal Mr. H/C/T) who was showing up for the final supper, our last meal together.
It’s been a long leave-taking from my caged life, but I am halfway there. The second half, which is all action and forward movement, is going to be the most difficult. It will take willpower and a sense of direction without knowing my ultimate destination. I can do it, though I may be writing about it ad nauseam until I get further along the path.
A note on the title: "So much to answer for" is a line from the Smiths song Suffer Little Children, which is about the 1960s Moors Murders. It fits Manchester, my dreams, and guilt.
Image: Me, last night, verging on sleep.