Mind slip
09 May 2011 06:46 AM Categories: Writing prompts | The struggle
I spent yesterday in a serious funk, an I-don’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed funk. It was Mother’s Day and I wanted to be left alone, to not be reminded of familial connection or maybe pressure or I don’t really know but is the point of that day to separate from the family, from the offspring, to pretend they don’t really exist? It was like a day of real depression, but since my brain is constantly connecting the subconscious dots, choosing its moments of flatness at the most appropriate symbolic times, I think my feeling of being down was directly tied to this idea of Mother’s Day and being a mother and the daughter of an ambivalent mother.
Another thing to bring up to therapy, to my lady of privilege chatting sessions, where I feel so self-indulgent and can go on and on about my self-fulfillment. During my last session, I brought up this dream I had, a very boring dream involving moving clothes from one place to another at my grandfather’s place at Hollywood Beach, moving them for some young women who were moving in. I took them in small batches from somewhere to a shed, a temporary storage place.
The week before in therapy had been tough, with lots of tears and the apprehending of my feelings about being weak, about childhood and dependency, and now I felt the pressure to come up with something, but this? The movement of clothes? Somehow, my therapist pulled me to a different place, put me in the position of the clothes, and then the tension, that feeling of taut energy thickening in the middle of my body, came to life, being shuttled from here to there, anger at the clothes, anger at the task. I even started to cry.
But it sounds so fucking ridiculous, doesn’t it? I struggle with being in therapy, with having the kind of life that allows me to schedule various appointments and go running afterwards, a life where I can write in the daylight and document my post-therapy meals on Facebook. Lucky, yes, perhaps self-indulgent, yes, and the guilt for being me goes on an on.
I forgot to get another job, I forgot what it was like to need something, I forgot my own mind and origins and yesterday I wanted to forget everything. So I kept on reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, got myself lost in the story of a family falling apart, a woman who became a stay-at-home mom in reaction to her own upbringing, the pull of danger, of not being nice, under the surface.
From the prompt "Mind slip."
Image: Boy with his "spaceship" in the back yard, taken using the Hipstamatic app.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
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