finding the missing pieces

of a childhood that was devoid of the emotional and spiritual substance and sustenance that I needed.

Fuck you if you think that's too touchy-feely and Newage-y (pronounced like 'sewage'-y). Girl's gotta grow the way she's gotta. No two ways. I'm a sunflower, and I'm a-bloomin', and you can't fucking stop me. So there. Neener neener. All obstacles will be flattened by my own personal Mack truck, or, alternatively, a sledgehammer. Doubters are not welcome here.

still trying to throw off the shackles

of a repressed, middle-class, suburban childhood.

Met a kid the other day (late teens, early 20s? Can't tell any more, in my dotage :-) who was absolutely covered from head to foot in tattoos, had the hugest ear-piercings you've ever seen (you know, the kind that look painful, like you could throw a basketball through them?)

He was incredibly open about everything, blabbed non-stop about his fake/phony black rappa/gangsta 'accent' (which I poked a little indirect fun at him for since he looks, aside from the tattoos, like an average, middle-class white kid). He took the indirect comment at face value and said, "Yeah, people think I'm a phony. Even I think I sound phony. But I can't help it - it's what I grew up with, and I slip back into it when I get comfortable with people."

He also told me about what has to be the weirdest, most unbelievable phobia I've ever heard of: Fear of being a certain distance from home???!!?? WTF! I think he was messing with me. But, whatever. It made a good story :-)

I think I was impressed that, by his still obviously wet-behind-the-ears age, he seems to have already made some of the mistakes that most of us don't get to make until we're long out of the nest and have no one to rescue us any more. It's like, he's fucked up so bad and in so many ways that he bottomed out (or possibly, touched bottom?) in a way that seems to have really grounded him in his own sense of self - of who he is and what he wants from life.

I'm so freaking JEALOUS!!!! What I wouldn't give to have a Tom Sawyer phase, a phase where I'm that grubby, grimy little boy who gets to go everywhere and do anything just because I damn well please and because every man who sees me sees a little of himself as that boy, and gives him a hand along because he knows what it's like to be that boy.

giver vs. taker

Niggling thought which may explore later, just trying to capture it before it escapes -

Thinking of this woman who works at the convenience store. Always irritated that she makes no attempt to be friendly to me. I try all kinds of things - jokes, ignoring her, aggressive friendliness, silence, what have you. Nothing works. She's impervious.

The thought knocking at my brain comes from re-reading my 'conditional love' post, and having this flashing thought that maybe people resent it when you need something from them, even the need to be appreciated!

So it's sort of like, if I do something in order to be appreciated, they resent having to appreciate me. If I'm nice to them, or try to get them to like me, they resent it.

Hm. Not sure if I can unravel this one just now.

And it also occurs to me that not everyone is like this.

I also noticed that this lady was really friendly one day when I came in in my black gig clothes, fresh from a gig. Who knows if the two things were related, but my brain is constantly working away at these little 'patterns', trying to solve them, trying to make sense of them, work them out. There are times when I wish I could find a switch to shut the damn thing off, but it seems to be such an indelible (?) part of my nature that I've just about given up on the fight and just spend my energy letting that be part of the flow of who I am. Two-edged swords and all that...(meaning that it's both a feature and a bug - I learned to do this to survive my non-communicative and unresponsive parents, and now I 'use' this brain function all the time, whether I want to or not. Constantly seeking the patterns that never existed with my parents. Seeking that predictability, that 'explanation' that makes it all suddenly make sense. Order out of chaos and whatnot.)
***

Feels like I'm responsible for everything that happens. Instead of seeing it as a flow, a give and take, with people like this who remind me of my mother in their unresponsiveness to me, I get caught in that same pattern of trying to please them.

Well, maybe I can just stop giving a shit. Or, I give a shit, but I don't *do* anything about it. Like I feel the feeling come up, but I just go (in zen fashion), "Oh, there's that feeling again. How nice." Then I let it go, and say, Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

But really I'm not angry at the feeling, I'm angry at having grown up with a mother (and a father, too, though in a different way) who were so clueless, so unconcerned, distant, uninvolved.

It was as if I had nothing to do with them, I was this - jeez, I can't even describe the feeling. I don't like any of the words and images that are coming to mind. They piss me off.

I want to move on from this, replace these painful ideas and images with something that feels good, that makes me happy to contemplate.
***

Maybe she just finally feels like she 'knows' me well enough to be friendly. Since I always came in during the day at random times, she seemed to assume that I don't work, or something?! When I finally explained (not that she asked, I was just sick of being treated like some rich bum) that I'm a musician and I mostly work nights and weekends, she seemed a little friendlier.

It also reminds me of a little exchange at the cash register at the local shi-shi organic grocery a few weeks back - I was again wearing my musician's black, and had hoped to change before going shopping so that I wouldn't look like an oddball, but had no good place to change (other than the car) and didn't have the time or energy to hunt for someplace. So I said fuck it, I need a couple of things here, fuck these people and their bullshit intolerance of anybody who's not dressed *exactly* the way they are - REI, Eddie Bauer, Gap, whatever. What.EVER. Fuck!

So I'm standing there in line, getting my purchases totted up by the cashier, and to make conversation I ask this lady next in line (who was radiating an icy, unapproachable air) if those were grass seeds on her shirt. (And I admit I'm drawn irresistibly to these people - as if I get them to crack a smile, to open up to me in some way. I have to make some dent in their facade, make an impression, get them to notice me. Ah - layers. The onion, she hab many, many layah. Ah, so, grasshoppah.)

Now admittedly this is probably not the all-time winner in the tactful question department, but I was curious, and I figured anybody bold enough to go around with their gardening clothes on wouldn't mind. Must be pretty self-confident, right?

But no. She came back with this crack about "not feeling any need to dress up to go grocery shopping".

Picture me befuddled. WTF???

It wasn't til I was out in the car that I realized that maybe she thought I'd dressed up to go shopping!!! That maybe she thought, that I thought, that wearing all black to the grocery store was cool and hip.

Wow.

That's when my brain starts hurting, starts overheating.

Even now, in retrospect, I'm still trying to figure it out.

Like, was she maybe feeling a little bristly and defensive at having made the choice to go shopping without changing her shirt? And so she took a pot shot at me assuming that I was trying to make her feel bad?

Truly, I was only curious. I couldn't quite see that far, and at first couldn't figure out what those little specks were on her shirt. I realized they weren't a printed-on pattern, and then suddenly it came to me that they were those little burrs that you get from walking through tall grass.

I was so pleased with my deduction that I just had to find out if I was right, but she was standing far enough away (and seemed to be trying to keep her distance from me) that I couldn't really tell. So I just asked. And got slammed for my question!

It occurs to me also that her keeping her distance may partly have been that she assumed I was 'dressed up' to go shopping (my god, the very notion that we have to be so concerned about what we wear just in order to go fucking shopping makes my head hurt. Jesus FUCKING christ. Get a GRIP, people. This shit does not matter!!!!! To have to calibrate so closely, so perfectly, what I'm wearing so that I blend seamlessly into every environment I pass through, even if it's only for the briefest instant. Maybe it's part of the whole classist thing? AAAAAAAaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! Get me out of here!!!!!!!)

Then I found myself wishing I'd said to her that I was a musician and this was my gig clothing, but she could have denied that she was making any comment about my appearance. Fuck. Endless loops. And this was fucking weeks ago.

Classist bullshit. I fucking hate it.

kid with her nose pressed against the candy shop window

always on the outside looking in.

Someone on a feminist blog just put her finger on it for me. She said that a prominent feminist blogger "loathes being a woman and suffers a bit from penis-envy. Can’t say as I blame her. It’s hard to be a woman living under patriarchy."

I think she hit the nail on the head. And it resonated because I feel that way.

I grew-up in a male-dominated family with only brothers and no emotional connections with any of the women in my life - not my mother, not my aunts, not my grandmothers. My mother had only one female friend, and that relationship was quite distant and short-lived.

My mother used me as her emotional prop right from the beginning; when she wasn't turning to me for comfort or 'wisdom' (when I got old enough to talk), she saw me as her best buddy and confidante. And then she'd turn on me any time I failed to be any of those things...confusingly competing with me at the same time she expected me to be her best bud. No wonder my head is so fucked up about women.

I related more to my dad - more logical, more math-oriented, more of a problem-solver. Just like me. Easier to deal with, more predictable, even if an asshole. (Jeez, I sound like a guy!)

But I was a girl. My dad wouldn't let me into his world (any more than mom would let me in to hers - she claimed that she was 'sparing' me from the chores girls always had to do, but what it really felt like was that I was being shut out of her world so she could have some space for herself. And then she wonders why I never liked her much.)

So I had no place in the family. I was the fifth wheel, the one with no use, no purpose, except to get periodically yelled at or lectured by my dad for - what - failing to be male??? seemed to be his basic gripe. I tried to basically disappear by sitting around reading all the time, just like he did. There seemed to be some safe camaraderie in that. And as soon as I was old enough, I was gone a lot playing music. There was nothing for me at home - it was an empty spot, a hole where my safe zone should be. I took to reading late at night, falling asleep on the couch, because it was the only way I could keep myself from noticing how lonely and isolated I felt with my own family. I just simply felt like I didn't belong, like nobody wanted me.

I remember dad used to carry me upstairs to bed for a while when I was little when I would fall asleep on the couch reading. Then I distinctly remember one night where he decided not to, and never did it again - I think he woke me up and asked if I was going to bed, or maybe if I wanted to be carried? and I said no, I was going to read a little longer. And then he never asked me again, and I felt distinctly abandoned.

What is it with parents and putting their own hurt feelings ahead of understanding that children need to go their own way in order to be allowed to grow up? How do they expect us to actually become adults if we're always having to put our own parents' emotional needs ahead of our own? Some seriously fucked up shit there. 'Course dad was probably only in his early 30s at that point. No excuse, but men are pretty clueless, relationship-wise, until at least in their late 40s. They rarely begin to 'get it', at all, until they're in their 50s or later. Something to do with testosterone levels dropping off, I s'pose. Man-o-pause.

***
As I child I never had close female friends - we moved too often, always right at the moment when I was beginning to settle in. I realized this the other day - we moved five times before I was 7 years old! I think I got a bit gun-shy, and since this was the sort of thing my parents would never have thought of, considered, noticed or discussed, it went underground and just became one of those invisible 'patterns' in my life that I didn't unearth for decades.

I had a couple of really good friends in junior high, but they both left suddenly in 9th grade - one moved to the east coast with her family and the other just - disappeared. I can't even remember the details, I just remember feeling abandoned and alone and not having the strength to start again.

I eventually did find a few casual friends in high school, including one friend who was a bookworm like me, and with whom I went bike-riding and had a few other adventures.

But we were never as close as I was with the junior high school friends, they were actually GOOD friends. The high-school friend was, well, a bit of a jerk, to be honest. Her parents were rich, her brothers were weird, her father was a patriarchal, misogynist asshole and her mother was the typical smiley, passive, stay-at-home wife. Bleh.

Wow, just when you think all the crawlies have emerged from under the rocks, you discover still more yet to be revealed...

I think what I'm saying is that I never formed strong connections with women, at any time in my life. I had a chance to do it in jr. high, and got started along that road, but circumstances beyond my control kicked me out of that safe, warm place and found me alone again, stranded alongside the road. Yet another abandonment.

And fuck you if you think I'm making too big a deal about it. My youngest brother was born shortly before we moved into the house my mom lives in now; as far as he's concerned, he lived in the same place for 16 years before dad died. So yes, he's had his share of rough knocks, but he also started out with some significant stability that I never experienced. Something there about growing deep roots that allow you to withstand the later winds of fate. Those of us that were never allowed to grow deep roots - either emotional or physical - are much more subject to being knocked over by those gale-force winds of chance.

There's also something about how mom always sucked up to the men in her family - including her own sons - knowing that they're the ones she'll be dependent on later in life. And yet at the same time she expects me to be her sole-source emotional supporter. While simultaneously throwing me under the bus emotionally, financially, in every real way you can possibly imagine. And at the same time acting like we're best buddies.

Is it any wonder I'm so confused?

I still can't really wrap my head around all this or articulate very clearly how simply betrayed I feel, by my entire family, over and over and over again. My little brother tried to make it up to me for a while, in various ways, but I think he got overwhelmed by how much unfairness there is and how extremely angry I am about it.

validation

I've always disliked that word, 'validation' - it reminds me too much of the big machine that goes 'clunk' and stamps your parking ticket. Like I've been slammed in the head by some smarmy, patronizing, phony-ass shrink's bullshit. Sigh.

But the grain of truth is that we all need validation. We need it like water and air.

It's another one of those invisible things where people who get plenty of it take it completely for granted and never have to think about it; while people who never get enough always feel like there's something wrong with them and wonder how to fix it. Kind of like how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

It's like my same old analogy of a plant blaming itself for not getting enough rain. WTF, is what you should be saying. Uh huh - blaming ourselves for not getting enough validation is like a plant blaming itself for not being located in a place where enough rain falls.

Yeah. Crazy shit. But that's what shrinks and self-help gurus tell us: That we're responsible for our own validation or lack thereof.

Bullshit. The only difference between us and the plants is that we have legs, and can move ourselves to a spot where there's more rain. Or validation, as the case may be.

I got to thinking about this while hunting for a quote about making mistakes being compared to the continuous course corrections that an airplane's autopilot makes. Here's a link I found that quotes it, plus a bonus story about how Thomas Edison had to try 10,000 different elements before he found one that would make his lightbulb light up:

Thomas Edison once mentioned to reporters that he had tried over 10,000 materials as filaments for his new invention, the electric light bulb. One reporter asked how the young inventor maintained his persistence in the face of so much failure. “Failure?” he responded. “I didn't fail. What I did was successfully eliminate 10,000 elements which were unacceptable for my needs.” What most people would call failure, Edison saw as the process of invention.

The ability to accept so-called failure simply as information and then make corrections without self-invalidation is rare. However, it is a critical key to success. Accepting defeat or criticism is never easy, but it is those people who take feedback and make corrections who create lasting success.

Everyone fails. Everyone makes mistakes and has painful experiences. Most people just complain about them, justify them or blame someone else. The self-actualized person learns from them, adjusts, and goes on. No self-condemnation. No pity parties. No blame. Just awareness and correction. It’s not what happens to us but rather what we do with what happens to us that makes the difference.

How do we make corrections without self-invalidation? Here’s an example: If we were to fly to a distant city, our flight would be off course more than 90 percent of the time. Constant feedback and correction would be required to reach our intended destination. As we drift off course, the guidance system reports to the autopilot, and the autopilot makes the necessary adjustments. As our altitude drops or increases slightly, the same thing occurs. This feedback and correction cycle continues over and over again hundreds of thousands of times throughout the course of our flight.

****
I was sitting there nodding my head as usual, going, yeah, right, glass half full vs. glass half empty. Sure. Positive thinking. It's all in your head.

And then I remembered, just before I got sucked (once again) into the bullshit meme-land of shrinks and self-helpers everywhere, that we don't in fact have control over everything that happens in our lives.

Whew, almost got me there!

So, ok. Validation is like rain. Rain falls where it wants to.

Validation is like rain because we don't have any control over where or when or how much of it falls on us.

So if we're not getting enough validation, we have to go somewhere where we get more of what we need.

Now, this seems simple. But remember that humans only learn how to do these things if their environments teach them how to do it. If your environment doesn't teach you, you most likely won't learn it.

Sure, you may randomly stumble on a book or movie that shows how a particular idea works, but most of us are experience-based creatures - that is, we only learn these behavioral patterns by actually going through them. It's the rare human who can learn something just by hearing about it. Most people have to be shown repeatedly, sometimes violently. Many people simply cannot learn new things once the initial 'imprint' has been laid down. It may simply require a certain amount of intelligence. Not to mention motivation.

Anyway. So my point with all this is that those of us who have been socialized to perceive ourselves as failures will be far more likely to be subject to feelings of guilt and shame any time something goes wrong. We've been 'wired' to take the hit, take the blame, take responsibility, regardless of whether we had anything to do with it. It's like when you see that cop car's lights flashing in your rear-view mirror and you wonder what you've done wrong, even if you haven't done anything wrong. We get this kind of built-in 'guilt reaction' that kicks in just because we've been yelled at so many times or falsely accused that it puts us a little off-balance all the time - we're always a little susceptible to being accused of something that we didn't do.

So.

How to change this wiring? BTSOM, as my dad used to say (beats the sh*t out of me. Nice, eh?)

But seriously, I think all a person can do is try to get aware of every time that little voice in your head goes "you're no good, you're a fuckup, let's watch you mess this one up". It's like they set up little trip wires and booby traps and obstacle courses all around you to the point where you're afraid to move for fear of making a mistake.

Whew. Exhausting to even walk through all that again.

So. Overwrite the sons-a-bitches, don't let the bastards get you down. Tell them to shut the fuck up (even if only inside your own head). Don't let them win. Call them on it every single time they try to undermine you or make you feel bad about yourself.

And maybe, eventually, you'll relax a little and have some moment's like ol' Tom had, happily tinkering away in his workshop making a million 'mistakes' a minute and never worrying a bit about it.

Why? Because he was learning. Constantly. Every single thing he did taught him something new, and he was able to learn from each thing and put it to use because he didn't have that constant, nagging voice of shame echoing inside his head telling him that he was a 'failure, failure, failure.'

Shut up, voice-in-my-head. You're on notice.

for the record

Ok, so here I'm going to copy verbatim some text from a book called Stalking the Soul.

I feel like I spend half my life (or at least, half of my life in the last 10 years or so) gathering 'evidence' against my family's belief in silence, in might makes right, in sticks and stones, sink or swim, suffering builds character, etc. etc. Or fill in the blank with your own personal favorite aphorism.

In case I forget about this book later on, here's some text from it that captures almost exactly what I experienced (and continue to experience) from my family.

Why, you may ask, do I feel the need to copy somebody else's writing? Because it's evidence, as I say, that I'm not just making this up or overreacting or just trying to get attention. All of which I've been accused of at various times while trying to make my case, make myself heard, get recognition, acknowledgment, comfort, appreciation, what have you, you name it. (What do I win if I manage to write an post consisting entirely of catch-phrases? Never mind, don't answer that.)

This writing shows that somebody else feels exactly the way I do about it. Which means not only that I'm a) not alone, but b) I'm RIGHT. I'm fucking right. So neener neener, stick than in your pipe and shove it up your ... oh, wait, that's not how it goes. Sorry.

So with all that ado, here's the text (p.96):

Abusive individuals evade a direct question when it is asked. Because they won't talk, one ascribes wisdom and grace to them. One enters a world with little verbal communication and vague unsettling remarks. Everything is suggested but never said outright. A shrug of the shoulders or a sigh will suffice. The victim tries to understand: "What have I done to him? Why is he reproachful?" And because nothing is actually said, anything becomes cause for blame.

Denial, whether of reproach or conflict on the aggresor's part, paralyzes the victim, who cannot defend herself. Abuse is perpetrated by the refusal to acknowledge what is happening [emphasis mine], discuss the situation, or jointly find solutions. [Family: Please make a note of this. This means YOU.]

If the conflict were out in the open, discussion would be possible and a solution might be forged. Within the scope of abusive communication, however, one must above all prevent the other person from thinking, understanding or reacting. An effective way of aggravating the conflict is avoiding dialogue [family? Looking at you again], which silently imputes blame on the other person. The victim is refused the right to be heard. [emphasis mine again. Damn, I could have written this whole thing, not so eloquently or dispassionately, to be sure. But the feelings? Every damn one is right on the money.]

Her version of the facts doesn't interest the abusive individual, who won't listen. [Wow, there sure are a lot of people like this. And even those who pretend to listen often don't care, they just want to seem like they're good people.]

This refusal of dialogue is a way of saying, without directly epressing it in words, that the other person does not interest the aggressor or that she doesn't even exist. [ow :-( ] With anyone else one can ask questions if one doesn't understand, but with abusers discourse is tortuous and unclear and can only lead to mutual alienation [emph. mine].

conditional 'love'

The small intestine is where the body begins the process of sorting good from bad in terms of the absorption of food. The unwanted 'junk' gets sent to other parts (kidney, liver, etc.) to be filtered out and eventually eliminated from the body.

But what happens when this mechanism gets confused? When there's some kind of meddling with the sorting process, interference - where somehow bad gets classified as good, and good as bad? This confusion can happen when the body gets too much junk food and has to try to find tiny crumbs (literally) of goodness out of a pile of bad stuff.

When there is too much 'non food', the body (and the mind - only Westerners split them apart in this unnatural way) becomes sick. (Maybe I should just start calling it the 'being', and skip over such convoluted westernisms such as 'bodymind' and other argh-y English-mangulating crap. Anyway...)

In eastern medicine, there's a psychic/metaphysical component to this as well: It's where our 'gut' instinct for sorting good from bad in our lives also occurs. Bad people, bad vibes, bad situations, etc. There's literally a whole separate set of wiring in the gut that makes it like an entire, separate brain from the one in the head (though of course they're connected, as all things are). In fact some would argue that it's the more powerful of the two 'brains', that it's the one that really runs the show, the back seat driver of the psyche, being the one that's been in existence the longest - the lizard brain.

So I'm sitting here noticing this, and wondering, Why does my gut hurt? What's happening that I need to be paying attention to?

And I realize that it's to do with the fact that unless I'm actively feeding somebody (metaphorically, as in emotionally) I can't feed myself.

Working my way back from that: I was a really smart little kid, with a really, really needy mom (emotionally, that is).

So she had this giant need, a huge vortex kind of like an emotional vacuum cleaner, sucking around at everything nearby trying to get what it needed.

And here I am, this newborn baby, trying to get my needs met.

What I learned was, the only way to get mom to pay attention to me was if I took care of her. Otherwise, I was just this pain-in-the-ass, noisy, smelly thing that made big messes and stressed her out.

So it became my job to become the 'good' baby, to be quiet and peaceful and never disrupt my mom's equilibrium.

I basically disappeared. I was complicit in my own virtual (?) erasure, making my needs invisible so that I could actually survive at all. As soon as I expressed a need of any kind - poopy diaper, hungry crying, needing to be picked up, falling down and needing a boo-boo kissed - there was this angry, scowling, critical face, making it all my fault. All my fault that her life had become this endless round of cleaning and tidying and chasing after some ungrateful two-year-old who couldn't take care of herself. Damn babies, anyway!

So now I carry this pattern along in my adult life: I feel that unless I'm actively helping somebody in my environment, that I have no value whatsoever. So I'm constantly (at a subconscious level) trying to feed other people: Make them laugh, help them solve a problem, make sure that the thing they need is sitting there waiting for them almost like magic, so they don't even realize I've done it for them.

And of course they took it for granted, since I never once demanded any payment or recompense - I was just this silent, perfect, needs-meeting device.

Well, I tell ya WHAT, it fuckin' SUCKS (literally), and I ain't doin' it no more.

****
But the bigger problem is, how to keep this from happening in my daily life? I can often see the pattern in retrospect, after it's too late, it's already happened, I've already set up a pattern of interaction with somebody that establishes me as the 'giver' and them as the 'taker'.

I've become more and more conscious of this over the years, and have become very angry about it at times, becoming angry with the other person for taking advantage of me.

But what is it in me that allows, or insists, that I behave this way?

I contend that it was that early, unconscious (subconscious?) training by my mother to put her needs ahead of my own or else I'd be treated totally like shit. Like I was an evil being, to be reviled and treated with contempt.

And of course my mother wouldn't remember any of this - I never called her on it, not til many, many years later (like, in my 40s) when I finally felt strong enough to stand up to her, unwilling to accept her silent threats of disapproval (and oh how powerful a parent's disapproval can be! Don't tell me it hasn't powered the entire lifetime of most of the people of the planet - the eternal search for the parental 'smile' that one never got as a child. That unconditional acceptance, that most important component of love of all: Mutual respect.)

So now I see how it plays out in current relationships, but sometimes it's exhausting to be so aware, so conscious of every little detail of every interaction. It's like learning to speak a second language - it never flows freely from some unwilled place, but rather constantly requires effort, the struggle to make oneself heard and understood.

What I want to know is, how come so few people ever engage in this process of self-reflection and self-knowledge? Answer has to be: Because they don't have to. Because, for whatever reason, they manage to survive, are able to get enough of what they need from life, without ever having to change a hair on their heads.

How the fuck does everybody else get away with this, but I cannot?

who's got your back?

People ask me over and over again, "So, why did you quit architecture?" I've never really been satisfied with my answers - they always left something missing. I think I may have finally hit on one that seems to capture the truth: Nobody ever had my back.

Over all those years, with all those projects and all those working relationships and connections and interdependencies and you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yourses, only one manager ever had my back. But he wasn't there long, and after that, I never had a similar relationship. They were all looking out for number one, ready to drop me like a hot rock the instant they saw a better option. They were fickle, unreliable, unpredictable, undependable. Huh, reminds me a lot of my parents...

He was the very first one (manager, that is), and even he tried to torpedo me initially, until I stood up to him. I never let his first salvo get past me, though it took everything I had to do it. I've always wondered if he even realized he was testing me, or if it's just an unconscious thing guys do to anybody new. (Just read somewhere, in some random Google search, a line something like, "As soon as he knows you'll accept that first lie, he knows he has you. You're his forevermore." Are men really that simple-minded??????

Never mind - please don't answer that question. I don't really want to know.
***

A woman in a male-dominated world finds there is no safe place to stand - there are piranhas everywhere, every potential ally will turn and gobble you up if it looks to be to his advantage. Women are no better, and in fact are often worse: There's so little support, and so much competition to get even a token spot in this world of good ol' boys, that most women will gladly throw another woman under the bus to climb even a fraction of an inch higher on the ladder.

Argh, this isn't where I really wanted to go with this.

I wanted to link the 'no one having your back' idea with having that same feeling in my family.

And also realizing that you can never climb very high on the ladder of power if the desire for power itself isn't a big motivator.

we learn to relate to others

the same way we learn language: By hearing it over and over and over again from the people we grow up with.

It is learned at such a deep level that it is mostly unconscious.

Many parents try to instill more conscious messages, hence the litany of 'shoulds' many of us can recite from childhood. Some of them have actual words, like the "Suffering builds character" my father was so fond of. Many of them are just feelings, that get triggered every time a similar situation comes along - the feeling of shame when you even hear someone being mocked, for example, bringing back the burning ears and sick-to-the-stomach feeling of wishing the earth would open and swallow you up. Or flinching when you see that same glare of utter contempt on a mother's face that looks just like the one you saw so may times when you were little. They can bring you to your knees with a glance, a scowl, a word. We are so craven, you see, we're all really just little children inside, never having grown up, never having been loved well enough, we seek, crave, long for that acceptance, word of praise, glance of appreciation that we never got. Such simple things, yet so hard to find, as unreachable (or so it sometimes seems) as the moon.
***

My brothers think this shit is lame; that I'm being pathetic, a whiner, a sissy.

The thing is, they got both sides of the coin - the mocking, plus the knowing that eventually, being men, they'd get to be part of the mocker's club themselves.

Me, on the other hand, being the girl, and the oldest, knew all along that I was never going to get to join that elite club. I watched mom be a doormat over and over again, disappearing from rooms at the slightest sign of conflict or unpleasantness. She always managed to be elsewhere when the shit hit. No wonder she has no memory of any of it, and imagines my childhood to have been entirely peaceful and pleasant: She wasn't there.

Let me repeat that, for emphasis: She wasn't there.

Oh yes, her body was there often enough, washing clothes and cooking and cleaning; but mentally? Emotionally? She was totally checked out. She was on some other planet, some safe place between her ears that had no connection whatsoever with my personal reality. In fact, she almost never checked in; never sent messages; never asked me how I was doing. She really just didn't know. Because she wasn't there.

Wow. No matter how many ways I stumble on this little 'gem' of truth (barking shins and stubbing toes each time), I'm still dumbfounded by this realization.

It's as if my mind (and human minds in general, I don't think this is something unique to me) simply cannot process the idea of a mother this disconnected, this dissociated, this uninvolved. It's as if the organism would cease to function. As if a tree discovered that it's own roots were trying to strangle it, or like that Twilight Zone episode where this guy's hand becomes possessed and he tries to strangle himself.

It's just so unnatural, so completely contrary to everything nature evolved us to be, that it just simply does not compute.

I imagine I can come back to this in a few hours or days or weeks and marvel, yet again, at this revelation; it will always seem fresh, because it is so shocking. And potentially devastating.

So how to keep it from repeatedly shutting me down? Well, I think that's what dissociation is for. Taking that which is impossible to deal with (at least, single-handedly, without help from another, understanding soul)

immediately,

on re-reading the previous, I am shocked and appalled by the language at the end. How quickly the parental voices step in to overwrite, edit and negate. I almost deleted it, edited it out; but why? Who am I protecting? If someone sees these words, someone who knows me, will they be shocked? Hurt? Repulsed?

And do I care? Because, if said person were involved enough in my life to have been privy to these feelings in the first place, I might never have had to have the feelings.

Does that make sense? In other words, if there'd ever been someone around who cared enough for me to talk at all about any of this stuff, it would never have accumulated into this giant, mooshed-together mountainous blob of stuff that's too big for anybody to deal with, let alone little old me with my tiny, rusty, bent-handled teaspoon. I do my best, but still.

It's about the layers, baby. First there's a layer of grief; then a layer of anger. Then a layer of sandstone - no, wait, that's shale, the oil-bearing strata. Never mind.

So then after the anger, there's another layer of grief, then a giggle, then something completely different. You see, they're all compressed there together, like growth rings, or maybe it really is like shale, where millions of years worth of layer upon layer upon infinite layer of organic debris is compressed, gradually, by its own weight (and the weight of hundreds of tons of rock on top of that) into this entirely new substance that is no longer the leaves, or any one thing - it's this gloopy, sticky, tarry, undifferentiated mass (for some reason I find myself thinking of that moment in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray is trying to shake some ectoplasm off his fingers and saying, "It slimed me," in a voice of complete and utter disgust).

The weight? My mother. Or, more accurately, her disregard for my feelings. I think it's that that translated into the 'lead' feeling - the sense that she was actually sitting on me, in some way, sitting on my feelings, blocking them by her very disregard. That her disinterest, in and of itself, was this sort of force that dammed the feelings up inside me (erg, just had 'talk to the hand' pop into my head, yuck, massive cultural disrespect meme, blech, yuck, get it off me).

It's this force that I've internalized, this resistance, this - blockage? Disrespect? Trying to find the right word. It's as if I have to pry her loose from me, shove her away, disconnect her, break her hold on my mind/body/psyche/spirit. I keep having the image of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens pop into my head, the parasite bursting out of her body cavity. The metaphor of the eggs being laid inside her body is not lost on me - the parent can lay the 'eggs', sow the seeds of discontent, by how they treat you.

This is crucial, understanding this almost Pavlovian mechanism by which we learn to relate to other humans: It is entirely unconscious, entirely unwilled. It is entirely situational and circumstantial; think of the child raised by wolves who thinks he's a wolf even though his arms a legs clearly differ from his wolf 'brothers and sisters'. The human mind is infinitely adaptable (which, of course, can be both a feature and a bug). The fact that we can adapt means that we often do adapt, even if it's not in our long-term best interests to do so. The organism simply responds to its environment the way it learned to over many millions of years of trial and error. The ultimate survival mechanism.

Next layer

of the onion, that is.

So, peeling away here, in my layer-y fashion, I find guilt underneath the shame.

Guilt that I screwed up, guilt that I did something wrong.

Guilt that it's my fault that people go away, that they leave me behind, helpless and hopeless, terrified, scared witless, frightened beyond any capacity to cope or function.

It's astonishing that I manage to function in the adult world at all sometimes, given how often this mute terror grabs me from behind like the undertoad and sucks me into the watery emotional underworld of panic and despair.

I try so hard to find out what I did wrong, I tie myself in the most amazing Gordian mental and emotional knots trying to retrace my steps and play a sort of reverse, deconstructionist chess game trying to second guess what might have worked if only I had known.

But growing up with what I grew up with, there was never any going back, never any strategy for repair or mending of bridges; never any healing or consolement; only the icy cold of abandonment and neglect, the flat, featureless, frightening grayness of a world with no emotional color.

I remember several times when I was really sick (as a kid) and had been lying in bed for several days and it had been quite a while since anybody had checked on me.

I felt this leadenness overtake my limbs - literally, as if my blood was turning to lead while I was lying there and I couldn't move. "How curious," I thought to myself, fascinated (and terrified) by this further weirdness (the mind can go weird places anyway when you're already sick; this seemed like just another possible deviation that I hadn't yet experienced. Also, when you grow up reading Dr. Seuss and Rudyard Kipling and Alice in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe, it's really no wonder if your mind is more comfortable with the strange than with the so-called 'normal'. Really, I never had a chance at anything remotely resembling 'normal'. I now approach 'normalcy' the way a drag queen approaches her makeup: With a sense of adventure and excitement and a chill of the secret pleasure of having 'gotten away with something' when I manage, somehow, to actually 'pass'.)

Anyway - I'm thinking now, in retrospect, that the leadenness was the literal feeling, in my body, of cutting off, of abandonment. As if my very molecules, or something, were actually changing, somehow, to try to shut out the unwanted feelings that I was unable to cope with alone. (I wonder if that's one of the times I need to go back to somehow, to reconnect with having a whole body, a whole spirit? To remember what it was like before my feelings got split off?)

This leaden state I think was a precursor to true dissociation - I think I felt that first few times as a literally bodily state, where my body, with its horrible and noxious feelings - eewwww - became this wooden, disconnected thing. Not 'me'. Of course I didn't think of it that way at the time - it was more like a sort of disconnected feeling of watching myself disappear, of feeling my body become so immobile, from having lain still waiting forever in hopelessness for someone, anyone, to show up and perform the normal adult caretaker behavior of giving a shit.

But nobody ever showed up, and it became like that game where you hold your breath to see how long you can go without passing out. As I lay there, motionless, I began to lose contact with various bits of my body - as if I were paralyzed, as if my body had literally become lead and lost all feeling, losing even the physical sense (proprioception?) of where one's arms and legs are in space. I was just these disembodied thoughts, floating around nebulously like some science fiction creature. Nobody cared; nobody noticed. I think I may have tried to explain the feeling to my mom, but of course she wasn't interested - she just thought I was trying to 'get attention'. Fuck, yeah, you fucking moron - ATTENTION. Fucking PAY ATTENTION TO ME! That's your fucking JOB as a fucking PARENT, you clueless piece of shit! Stop trying to fucking GUILT me for wanting what EVERY NORMAL CHILD TAKES AS A MATTER OF COURSE, AS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT.

Fuck. Did I say that already? Let me say it again: Fucking fuckity fuck fuck FUCK. Fucking stupid-ass pieces of SHIT. Is it too late to send them back, to exchange them for some real parents? Some parents who actually CARE????

if anger turned inward is depression

then anguish turned inward is shame.

That's my new contention.

I was sitting here (lying here, actually) crying, working through some old stuff, and I felt my face going into that shape you see on small infants who are really howling their guts out. You know the face - little mouth stretched as wide as it can go, eyes scrunched, making as much sound as possible. Howling.

And then I felt my lower lip start to go into that shape that I think of as being beyond the howling phase, when the baby has been left to cry for too long and has begun to enter that stage of despair, of losing hope. Where she has no belief that her caretaker will ever return for her, she's been abandoned, left alone to die. The wolves will eat her. She is terrified, distraught, and so full of fear that she begins to shut down. This is when the exhaustion sets in; in self-defense, her little limbs curl up, all energy leaves her body, and she assumes that curled-inward fetal position so familiar to those witnessing someone in major self-protection mode.

There's nobody there for her; no one she can trust. So she does the only thing she has left to do: Retreats from the world into the safety of sleep, where these fears no longer overwhelm her.

Of course, there's always the lovely nightmares. Do infants have nightmares? I know I started having them around age three, and had them more or less continuously throughout my life until the brief period when I had a consistent partner to curl up with every night, and then, more recently, I've had some nightmare-free stretches as I seem to have released some of the old demons by creating a safe enough time and place in which to face them down and let them go.

But I still have bad patches. Since the panic attacks early last year, I've taken to falling asleep in the wee hours with the lights on, as if waiting til it's almost light out will keep me from falling down the black hole again.

It's worked, more or less - no more panic attacks, yay! But has also wreaked serious havoc with any semblance of a 'normal' sleep schedule. But, hey, I'm doing what I have to do, and it's not hurting anybody, and it sure as heck is helping me, so FUCK that 'normal' shit. Girl's gotta do what she's gotta do.

Long-term solutions

So, if you tell somebody, someone who claims to love you, over and over and OVER again that you're miserable and terrified and suffering and lonely and have no one to turn to, that you've been having panic attacks and are afraid you're going to DIE,

and after all that, after all that intense outpouring of fear and rage and misery, they then proceed to

not call you or check on you in any way shape or form

for the next several MONTHS?

And if they ever do call, there's no, "Hi, how are you?" There's no subtle sussing around for a way to help. There's always resentment, and anger, and irritation that you're so fucking needy and pathetic. That you can't just fucking get your shit together.

And then they're all fucking walking-on-egg-shells, because they don't fucking GET that what you fucking need is fucking HELP and for somebody to SHOW that they fucking GIVE A FUCKING SHIT by actually fucking CALLING you now and then, and not just to pretend that nothing's wrong and that they'll only talk to you if you don't bother them with all that annoying suicide shit that's just a bunch of attention-getting anyway.

No fucking SHIT, you fucking moron. Attention? A person who's lonely and terrified and miserable doesn't need any fucking attention. Naw, we're just being manipulative assholes. We really LOVE being this miserable, it's so much fucking FUN. It's just fucking GREAT. In fact, why don't you fucking TRY it, you piece of shit?
***

So.

You've mentioned suicide to them, because you're afraid you're going to do it.

You don't really WANT to die, but when the pain gets bad enough, when you haven't slept or eaten in days, when you're terrified to leave the house because you can't stand the idea of yet another harsh word or rude action that will send your already full-to-the-brim pain reservoir sloshing all over the place so that you fall, yet again, down the rabbit hole of despair at the cruelty and selfishness of other humans -

FUCK - people worry about a fucking PET TURTLE or some shit more than they worry about actual humans. "Oh, pweese, won't you check on little anklebiter for me? I'm so worried he'll get lonely. I don't want him to be stwessed."

Of course they don't fucking GIVE a rat's ass about YOUR stress or loneliness. No, that's YOUR problem, babe. After all, you've got a car, you can dial a phone - what more do you need? So you have no money. Eh, money's over-rated (says the guy with two houses, four cars, a boat, a living room full of excercise machines, who complains that his friends tease him that he doesn't have a widescreen in his fucking living room. Jesus FUCKING christ.)
***

A friend (obviously no longer a close one) committed suicide about a week ago.

I have to say, I understand (I think) how he was feeling: Alone, lonely, end of his rope, no end in sight, no hope, no future. Getting older, all the bright possibilities that once beckoned from a glorious future never came to pass; the disappointments accumulate, over and over.

You never expected to be a superstar, no; but you thought you'd be loved, cared for; that you'd have a family of your own, or at least someone to curl up with at night.

You thought you'd have a home of your own; a nest, a safe place, where they couldn't throw you out because they'd found someone else who could pay them more money.

You thought you'd be doing something worthwhile with your life, something valuable, something that made you feel appreciated and important and special.

And yet, even when such appreciation came to pass, it was never enough - it never filled that empty place inside, that always hungry place where lack of true parental appreciation for who you WERE should have been.

Instead they were always on about what you DID; they never seemed pleased with you, never happy to see you; just the sight of your bright, shining little face never sent them into raptures of joy.

You became what they call a 'human doing' instead of a human being.

And even that never worked. You could never please them - you'd do the art projects your mom wanted, but you were too good, too quick, too naturally talented. Your amazing early work was met with: Silence.

The fact that you read at the age of three was used as a way to shut you up alone for hours on end, assuming that you were totally self-sufficient and would be just fine. News flash to moronic mother: Shutting a THREE YEAR OLD up alone with a bunch of books is the social equivalent of - I don't fucking know what. But I know that it fucked me up. At the time when I most needed other people, I was continually ALONE. Yes, I know, you had the new baby to deal with. Right, so what was I - fucking dog meat?

Yeah, I know. You weren't really ready to be a mother - ill-equipped and all that. Whatever. How the fuck does that help ME? Answer: It doesn't. Not at all. It's just another pathetic excuse.
***

And here we go round the fucking hamster wheel again: Trying to figure out WHY.

Why ME? Why am I, particularly, so miserable?

In this culture we're held entirely responsible for everything that happens to us, from the circumstances of our birth to the long-term outcomes of said circumstances.

You will fucking NEVER be cut any fucking slack for having been, say, emotionally rejected by your father for committing the heinous crime of being born female.

No one will ever sympathize that you didn't get enough support; after all, you're a girl - you're just supposed to shut up and smile and get married and have babies and stay the fuck out of the way of all the important people, namely, men.

Men don't care because all they want is to fuck you if you're sexy; have you as a status symbol if you're gorgeous enough, or indenture you as a child-bearing machine and household menial if you appear to possess the right mix of - let's see if I can get this right - sugar and spice and everything nice, was that the prescription women got stuck with? While men got to do all the fun stuff - frogs and snails and shit.

No one will ever care.

No one will genuinely be concerned that you're like a flower that, season after season, put forth leaves and branches and a bud or two - but never blossomed.

They'll blame YOU for that - you see, it was your own damn fault. You were just too angry - you wouldn't suck it up and roll over and let them get away with their shit. You fucking CALLED them on it, every fucking time, and they got tired of the woman who wouldn't let them remain little boys with their little boy toys. You wouldn't play 'mama' for them.

Eh, whatever.

FUCK y'all. Fuck ALL y'all.
***

What a fucking INSULT to call suicide a 'long-term solution to a short-term problem'. You can fucking KISS MY ENTIRE ASS, you sanctimonious piece of shit.

Have you ever fucking EXPERIENCED what this person's going through? No, you fucking well haven't. You don't have a fucking CLUE what it's like. Not only that, you don't fucking CARE. You just don't want to be bothered. It's too much trouble. Plus, it makes you think, and you don't LIKE to think. Thinking is hard. It's just too fucking difficult. Thinking is for people who got a bad hand in life, and you, we'll, you're special. There's no way you'd ever 'let' something like that happen to you because you're in total and complete control at all times of everything that happens in your life, and anyway only losers ever complain about their lives. That's victim shit.

Don't give me fucking platitudes about how it will get better. How do you know? It's been getting steadily worse for the last ten years - what the fuck is going to change? Am I going to magically get younger? Win the lottery? Suddenly become beautiful when I never have been before? Suddenly develop a completely different personality that allows me to be blissfully oblivious to the total and complete mindfuck of being a woman in a male-dominated world?

FUCK you.

***

Hearing your father screaming, “Don’t let my son die” is what kept you here. You know, now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you really matter to somebody. I think that those of us who contemplate suicide do so because we’re pretty dang sure that nobody cares.

The sound of the gun will echo for a long time, true - but so will your father’s words. That will pull you through, will give you the strength to deal with the rest of it. Hearing somebody scream that is like somebody throwing you an emotional life preserver - it’s probably what helped you survive. You’re very lucky to have someone like that in your life.

I envy you. I wish someone would care about me that much. I’ve wished for it all my life.

it's not the feelings that are the problem

it's the unrelieved (and unrelievable) accumulation that's the problem. The inability to find relief. Or help. Or anybody who actually gives a shit, on a daily, real, actual basis. In my life. In my actual, real life. Not online. Not via phone. Not by paying some complete stranger a bunch of money.

What I bloody fucking well need is someone who actually, genuinely, gives a shit.

The worst thing about it, I think, is the gradually increasing disconnection from reality. I no longer know what is real. I spend so much time lost in thought - reading, watching movies - that 'reality' is a concept that no longer has much meaning. Who cares? What difference does it make in a world, a country, a culture, where everything is manipulated by those with the most power to mold the world around them to match their own perceptions? When the average person might as well be living in a video game for all the contact they have with the actual people in their lives. In this country, people are absorbed in the lives of fictional characters and celebrities (and what's the difference, really?) while consigning responsibility for the real feelings of the real people in their lives to - someone else. A shrink, preferably - a paid 'carer'.

I swear to god, if I see another pair of people walking down the street while having separate cell phone conversations and paying no attention whatsoever to the person they're actually with, I will fucking kill them both. Or at least smash their fucking cell phones and scream at them, Fucking pay attention! Or a couple at a restaurant busily playing 'who's more important' by competing to see who can spend the most time on their strawberries rather than fricking talking to each other.

feels like i'm becoming someone else

as if I am no longer myself.

As if, in the process of pruning off unwanted people, trying to block out painful bits with which I can no longer cope alone - somehow, I'm losing track of who I am. As if I am slowly being carved away, til nothing is left.

I looked in the mirror just now, and I didn't recognize myself at all. Who is this person? I wondered. Where is grasshopper? Where has she gone? I have become so much in the habit of hiding everything 'unpleasant' that I fear I'm losing myself entirely.

I don't know who I am.

How can I find myself? Is there a map? Who knows the way?

let's see what happens

Keep returning to the image of the wolf chewing off her leg to escape the trap. Feels like that's what I have done/am doing with my family: Escaping the 'trap' of my family role is so essential to my survival that I have no other choice.

So I do what I have to do. In a way, it simply feels like, What happens if I do this? Like, Ok, here are several 'choices'. You've already tried the other one; tried the path of 'good girl, do what's expected'. It was seriously fucking you up; was killing you, whether anybody outside of you can actually perceive that fact is beside the point. You're the one who has to live in here, with you, inside these feelings. You're the one who has to make the choice: should I stay or should I go. It seemed clear to me that 'stay' = death; 'go' = life, or at least the possibility of same. Hope. Potential. Go toward the light, grasshopper, and I don't mean the one at the end of the tunnel, or the one they talk about in near-death experiences. I'm talking about growing toward the light of hope, the way a blade of grass grows, simply, toward the sun.

And not to make it sound as if I take this choice lightly; it's just that, once the agonizing is done, once the choice is made, one simply has to move on. The outcome will reveal itself in time. Hopefully, I have not made a choice that is as dire as chewing off a leg; hopefully I will soon find some metaphor that... wait just a goddamn minute. I've just realized that the societal 'shoulds' have leaked into my brain again while I wasn't looking. 'Put on a happy face'. Fuck that shit - it's the same ol', same ol', Don't bother me with your problems, kid, only dressed up as fancy, NewAge (pronounced like 'sewage') bullshit.

Ok - lather, rinse, repeat. Each lesson will be repeated until learned. Etc.

So it's society, and perhaps my family, as my up-close and personal representatives of same, who insinuate the 'wolf-chews-off-leg-to-escape-trap' meme into my head. Uh huh. Ok.

Now what? Find new meme, grasshopper, one that works for you. Second verse, same as the first means you haven't escaped the cage yet. You've stuck your head out, looked around, not sure it's safe out there. Frying pan, fire. Which to choose? The known tigers inside the cage, or - what? It's beyond the edges of the map, or as the old-timers used to say, Here be dragons. The unknown.

Stepping off the map.

i grew up listening to men's voices;

the women in my life were largely silent.

Unlike the stereotypes of family gatherings where the women chatter like hens, flocking together to gather and sort and sift the details of family life, the women in my family seemed fragmented - nothing held them together, at all, except the fact that they'd married men who were brothers. They rarely seemed to have much to say to one another; my mom's few comments about my aunts seemed catty and resentful (which, these days, I might attribute to being trapped in patriarchal, emotionally oppressive marriages - it's all about competition for status within the constraints of the passive, wifely role).

I don't even know what my mother did at these large clan gatherings - in my mind, and in many photos, she is simply absent. Maybe I picked up my penchant, at least in later life, for lurking at the margins of rooms, evading the limelight, from her? Funny how these things don't become clear until a great deal of time has passed, until one is able to view things from some distance. Up close, the details blur, it all becomes part of what is; there's no ability to sort, categorize, attribute, make sense of things. One thing just happens after another, with seeming randomness. The pattern, if there is one, doesn't emerge until one can look from afar, as if viewing the scene of one's life from an airplane high above.

***
It strikes me that, after dad died, mom must have begun making up for lost time: she became an unending chatterbox, one of those oblivious yammerers who'd hold you in the death grip of painful, relentless detail about people you'd never met (and never would) and couldn't care less about; it was as if, by filling every speck of airspace solidly from edge to edge with the trivia of the lives of random strangers, no stray unwelcome thought about her own life could intrude. It felt (still feels) like a kind of static, the blank screen on the TV when there's no reception. I once, puzzling over this strange affliction with my younger brother, referred to it as 'Radio Mom'.

It was as if, no matter when you called or stopped by, no matter where you were or what you were doing, she'd immediately drop into whatever train of thought was uppermost on her mind - such as a minutely detailed and exhaustive (exhausting?) post-mortem of a visit to her favorite coffee shop, and exactly what the favored barista said, and what said barista was doing with her life, and how the barista's friend had told a story about yet another acquaintance...by this point I'm beating my head against the wall to keep from screaming "shut up!" at her in absolute frustration and mind-numbing boredom. "If I ever get like this?" I said to my brother, "shoot me. Just shoot me. Put me out of my misery."

***
These thoughts were triggered by reading Caroline Knapp's essays, realizing that never have I been inspired into a flood of self-expression by a woman author before.

Why is that, I wondered? And realized that I grew up reading books by men, about men; I think I identified with male characters more than female ones, and working out the above ideas about the silence of the actual women in my life reinforces this notion.

I've had to consciously seek out women writers, women filmmakers, women whose stories get told as loudly and unselfconsciously as mens'.

You know what? There aren't many. Women's stories, I mean. Women are largely eradicated from the history books; a token woman here and there - Joan of Arc, Madame Curie. Many, if not most of the women who are allowed to make it into the halls of fame have tragic stories, as if women are only truly likeable if we suffer, a lot. But silently, and with a smile on our faces, troubling no one with our woes. The most celebrated women are those who sacrifice themselves to the men in their lives - fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. Florence Nightingale; Queen Elizabeth; Mother Teresa. The ones who are canonized are those who serve, endlessly, unquestioningly, unstintingly. Those who rebel? are dead - Thelma and Louise is the first example that comes to mind.

Wandering, random, meandering thoughts aside (oh no - I'm turning into my mother! Aaaagggghhhh!!!) I think Knapp's writing inspires me because she's so unapologetic, and mostly seems not to be trying to be clever or to impress you with her wit and erudition. What she says is so plain, honest and open - not quite raw - more as if she's simply speaking to you, directly from her experience, hiding nothing, a seeker after truth. Maybe that's what resonates for me: This honesty, this willingness to hold nothing back if by doing so one is able to expose, to uncover, the truth. Such as it is and what there is of it.

finding the story

that allows you to be released from the incessant expectations of others. A framing, a way of telling the truth, that allows you both to be who you are while acknowledging the way you are inevitably shaped by the world around you.

Reading The Merry Recluse, the last essay in the book by the same name. She describes the moment that this phrase arrived in her mind, and how it freed her from the mindset that had trapped her before in the unflattering, often unsympathetic perceptions of others about singlehood.

Re-framing. How does one do it? I feel as if this is exactly what I seek - the right phrase, the right angle from which to view my life, my circumstances, my story, so that I can tell it in a way that is pleasing to me. To hell with what everyone, anyone, else may think. Who knows what they think, anyway? Most people don't know their own thoughts much of the time, as near as I can tell. Thoughts are like the weather - the zen concept of monkey-mind, that running, endless, often meaningless commentary that's like tuning in to Stream of Consciousness Radio, 98.wacky on your dial.

Like all things, I think it just happens when the moment is right - the seed is planted, you've watered it well. But you just have to wait - there's no forcing the sun to come out, to warm the soil to just the right temperature for the right number of days for your little seedling to pop out of its safe cocoon of dirt. It'll happen when it's ready.

***
Reading further, she captures almost perfectly the ambiguous feelings of being single, caught between enjoyment of one's 'freedom' and envying couples and families:

Why don't I want that? That's what comes up. Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

I think it's what she describes in a previous essay, Time Alone:

Isolation - the impulse to isolate - is about fear and self-protection; it's about creating a cocoon, a place so seductively comfortable it becomes difficult to leave. It is not, strictly speaking, about solitude, although access to solitary time certainly comes in handy. But I can be isolated - can feel isolated - in a roomful of 25 people, at a party, in the middle of a week that's peppered with social obligations. The sensation has to do with flight, with distance, with a compulsion to erect barriers and hide behind them, lest others see how fearful I am beneath the surface, or how troubled. Get me out of here. That's the feeling. I am uncomfortable. I need to be alone.
[...]
That's the difference between solitude and isolation: solitude is calm and serene, isolation is fearful; you bask in the one, wallow in the other.
[...]
...how quickly solitude can turn to isolation, how quickly that soothing sense of self-sufficiency can be replaced by the sense of estrangement, and how difficult it is to get back into the world once you've stepped away from it, as though you've entered some alien obit and can't quite propel yourself back into the normal, human one. Solitude is about cultivating peace and quiet; isolation is about yielding to fear, and the more you yield to fear, the tighter its grip on you becomes. Spend too much time without people and the simplest social activities - meeting someone for coffee, going out to dinner - begin to seem monumental and scary and exhausting, the interpersonal equivalent of trying to swim to France.

She captures, for me, the essence of what it is to be terrified of other people. There's this mystery, some secret that everyone else seems to know but somehow you've never acquired the knack for: being at ease around others.

Knapp doesn't seem to have the tendency toward self-examination that I seem to have developed (maybe from reading too much 'self help' stuff) - she seems, more often than not, to simply tell her stories as if she were slightly detached, observing herself from a distance.

Maybe this is what writers do? Or maybe, even, is why they write? They can't speak of what they 'see' in real life, it'd be too strange, too odd, too awkward. Since there's no one to speak to about it, no one who seems to share that exact experience (or who's willing to admit it), they have to let it out via the relative anonymity of print. The word 'confessional' comes to mind, (which, I realize, is not an original idea). A way of purging all the bottled-up feelings, longings, desires, frustrations of a lifetime. A way to let it all out, but at a safe distance from whoever might receive this message in a bottle. Thus is the socially awkward, shy, introverted recluse converted into a powerful voice who can speak for all the others out there who are unable to find such an outlet. Her voice channels the longings of all those who, like her, wish they could break out of the cage of fear and shame.

Which is why 'merry recluse' is so powerful, at least potentially: It reframes her story from sad, shy spinster to a woman of life and letters who chooses this path for herself after careful consideration of her options.

Of course, once again, I'm reminded of fundamental misattribution error, the human penchant for explaining things in the ways that are most convenient to maintaining our self image or view of the way things should be. A bit of rationalization is always handy for taking the edge off of too much raw, undiluted truth.

Unfortunately I don't think it worked for Knapp any better than it works for most of us - the need for real, genuine, fulfilling human connection cannot be assuaged by any amount of mental contortionism. The reality is, we simply need other people. Whether we're able to actually get said needs met is another question altogether.

But I think it gave her peace, at least temporarily. As one who has spent much of my life agonizing over where I went wrong, starting long before I'd really had a chance to actually make many mistakes of such life-changing direness*, I'm glad she was able to find some respite from the pain of feeling like an outsider, if only for a moment. That she was able to find some joy, even a kind of grace, in being exactly who she was. And that her 'moment' is captured in print allows the rest of us to see where she went, and feel a little less alone in our own struggles. As a fellow recluse, I am grateful to her for leaving her story behind for all to see.

And I'm under no illusion that she did it for me, or you, or any other reader - she did it for herself, as we all do: the hope that somewhere, sometime, someone will see who she is (or was, she died in 2002) will vindicate all that pain, all that suffering. That it will not have been for naught :-) She did not go quietly.

***
I feel as if Caroline Knapp sacrificed herself, in a way; she died of cancer, which to me is the demise of ultimate self-sacrifice - being eaten alive by all the buried angers and resentments of a lifetime. (My father died of cancer, and I still think it was because he always pretended to be 'fine', no matter what. Put on the happy face. He had hundreds of people at his memorial service, which I know I never will: Because I'm not nice. Or, at least, I'm trying to no longer be 'nice' in the ways that are damaging to my physical and mental health. I've had plenty of people say I'm a 'nice' person in ways that caught me off guard, given that I grew up feeling like there was something fundamentally, basically wrong with me.)

Not to accuse her for her own death; however, I do believe that by swallowing the poison of being 'good', one result is that we die a slow, painful death of being silenced by our goodness.

I have never really wanted to be 'good'; I chose it as the lesser of the weevils (once again).

Now I'm trying to break out of the trap. Easier said than done. Dad lived to be 48; I'm 46. We'll see how far I get. Grandfather managed to live to be 90-something in spite of what appeared to be a lifetime of depression masquerading as taciturnity. Maybe living out in the country was part of it? Who knows. Dad's side of the family (except for dad) seem to be of fairly hardy stock. It's a liability in some ways - no matter how sick you are, you still look frickin' healthy as a horse.


*As evidence I offer this 'poem' from a pain-filled teenage night in a college dorm room, feeling alone, terrified of the loneliness, seeing my life stretching ahead as a desert from which I would never escape:

bitterness, pain, tears - self-pity for a life wasted
carelessly spent, irreplaceable, unredeemable
null and void
a cancelled check.

once begun with clean, pure slate
opportunity, limitless; capabilities, unbounded;
slowly dribbles away, like an hourglass' sand
till naught remains but dust.

a faint powder, mere residue
marks the passage of a soul
scarcely noticed, the remains soon forgotten
scattered far and wide by the winds of time.

in pursuit of a unified field theory

Seems like all these posts, thoughts, ideas - pretty much everything I've ever written or read or talked about has something to do with trying to find the underlying pattern, the key, the link, the rosetta stone, the magic decoder ring...

The problem with all these attempts at understanding is that I can't understand it with my brain. That's the basic fallacy, the fatal flaw behind the failure of most 'therapy' or what have you to achieve any long-term, lasting, sustainable change: The change needs to come from the system, not the individual. When the system changes, the individual's experience will change; her sense of being supported by the system will change; and suddenly, voila - she no longer needs to change.

The problem was never with her in the first place. The problem was (and continues to be) that she does not get what she needs from her environment.

A friend once passed along this anecdote about how cells work. He'd been under the impression that cells are designed to sort of 'hunt' after certain chemicals in their environment. That is, that a cell that is meant to 'capture' (layperson language) some substance from its environment - say, sodium, for example - sort of motors around its universe until it 'finds' some sodium and then munches it up, kind of like a very tiny PacMan.

But the reality, according to this friend's friend (a more science-y type), is that the cell evolved, and is designed to exist, in an environment that naturally provides a certain amount of sodium.

So it's not so much that the cell 'hunts' for what it needs - it's designed, by nature, to be 'receptive' to the thing it evolved to need. In other words, it's a sort of symbiotic relationship: The environment has a bunch of sodium, so a cell in this environment gradually adapts to having a lot of sodium in its environment. In fact, it comes to expect (at a biological level) that there will be a certain amount of sodium in its environment.

The cell doesn't have to go hunting, at all - it just sort of sits there and 'waits' til some sodium bumps into it, and then absorbs it right up. Yum! Happy cell! :-)

I think damn near every 'problem' humans have can essentially be likened to an inadequate supply of sodium in their environment.

Now, you can say, But humans are smart, and mobile, and we can go and find what we need. We don't have to just sit there and wait!

True. But I contend that that ability to hunt for what we need arose in times of environmental stress - that our organisms evolved in times of plenty, and that the 'adaptations' such as nomadic behavior, were later add-ons to cope with our resources suddenly drying up.

The problem is, once we're out of the 'drought' period, we continue to use those same adaptations as if they were still necessary. The organism doesn't seem to naturally 'reset' itself - it seems to get 'stuck' in whatever mode current conditions demand, regardless of whether conditions revert to 'normal' (meaning, the environment in which the organism evolved its current characteristics).

trauma bond

Feel like a little beacon sending out my signals, seeking that connection I never got as a child, that essential feeling of belonging, somewhere. Like a little tracking device, radar, homing in on any 'source' that might give me what I need. Keep trying to attach, attach, make up for what was lost. I think some people meet that need (or attempt to meet it) via the modern idea of 'romance'. If you want to know what I really think, I'm beginning to believe that all modern-day versions of so-called 'love' are more or less some attempt to satisfy that deep-seated need, to whatever degree it went unmet. And in most western cultures? It went severely unmet. Read Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, anything by John Bowby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment theory. Anyway...

I, like many others, still carry that hunger inside me. Every day, sometimes many times each day, that hunger awakens, and gnaws away at me, trying to get my attention, trying to get me to do something about it. I read somewhere that the vagus nerve modulates the 'connection' impulse - that is, it's directly involved in the translation from 'need' to 'action', and that when satisfaction of the connection 'need' gets repeatedly blocked by one's life experience, eventually a sort of numbing occurs, a separation between the upper and lower halves of the body, as if a major wire had been cut. I experience this viscerally, the image that comes to mind is of that magician trick where the assistant appears to be cut in half yet still alive, each half contained in apparently separate boxes.

(Randomly popped into my head just now: Wonder if the whole phenomenon of 'cutting' fits in here somehow? Unbearable emotional pain blocked from conscious awareness demands expression, relief; cutting floods the system with many of the same pain-relief/pleasure chemicals that 'love' does? I bet bulimia works along similar lines.)

I speculate that what is called 'sex addiction' (do I have the right term? I think it's a stupid label, just as I tend to think all pejorative labeling does no good whatsoever, only adding insult to injury) is a response to this 'disconnect' - sex, particularly orgasm, triggers all kinds of 'bonding' chemicals that appear to be essential to our physical, mental and emotional well-being (chemicals such as oxytocin, for example).

So the drive to have sex is actually an appropriate response, in some ways - the organism is attempting to get its needs met in spite of the so-called 'logical' brain's message telling it that its instincts are bad, dangerous, wrong or harmful.

The problem is that when one's 'connective' hardware, or programming, or whatever language works for you, goes haywire, then no amount of sex is going to cure the problem. Sex without love, without intimacy, without a whole hell of a lot of patience for the emotional turmoil that inevitably accompanies the untanglement of such deep-rooted trauma, will generally only serve to exacerbate the problem. It would be like substituting soy burgers for a real beefsteak - the body craves iron, red-blooded heme-source; the soy tickles the tastebuds, but fails to satisfy. You could eat a million of them, and get really fat, and still be starving. In the same way compulsive sex becomes a really horrible kind of junk food for the soul.

Following this train of thought, the article (which I may try to hunt down a link for, no promises) suggested that sublimatory activities such as exercise (which is often suggested by self-help books as a way to take the edge off), may actually be counter-productive, in that it takes energy and focus away from the real need and distracts it toward a substitute which, while possibly triggering some of the same chemicals released in the body by loving, connected touch, in no way shape or form compensates for the lack of love. In other words, it's yet another kind of junk food.

Our culture seems very attached to this junk food approach to life, on all levels, and seems to become more so every day. Going against this lemming-like march into a robotic, sanitized, emotionless future feels like a gargantuan, sisyphean task.

There are many ways people find to cope with, hide from or mask these unfulfilled needs. Some ways are considered more socially acceptable than others. The one thing that seems to be unacceptable in our culture is to actively, openly seek to have one's needs met.

Because needs are, in and of themselves, shameful - a sign of weakness.

people who are unaware of subtleties

think said subtleties don't matter.

For example, when I sit concertmaster of a group, I like to know in advance who the other players are going to be. This helps me map out in my mind what the various power dynamics are likely to be, and to conserve and/or build my energies accordingly (it takes a lot of energy for me to stand up to people who might like to undermine my position, for example. And trust me, there are plenty of those - regardless of who's sitting in that chair, there are some who suck up to the person, and others who will pretend that you're no better than they are, and therefore undeserving of respect.)

The conductor, on the other hand, often thinks (or appears to think) of us as interchangeable cogs in the machine of her orchestra, and fails to recognize how the intricate power dynamics of a group can make or break its functioning. It would be as if the four horses pulling a carriage all wanted to go different directions, and yet were harnessed together in such a way that they were forced to pull the same way. They would appear on the surface to be pointing the 'right' direction, but the hostilities between them would be visible to a close observer as a misplaced hoof, or bared teeth, or a certain stubbornness that manifested in the horse being uncooperative and belligerent. Said hostilities would slow the carriage down, at the least, and make the team unruly and difficult to manage at best. The driver would have to spend a lot of energy micromanaging, and would further stir things up by over-using the whip.

People who are harnessed together to meet an external goal not of their own choosing (which I think is a fair description of the mercenary mindset of many freelance musicians), will tend to be businesslike, in other words, 'professional', but there won't be the kind of camaraderie that allows there to be a true joy and freedom in the music. Which sort of tends to kill its spirit, if you ask me...

Working for a conductor who's oblivious to these dynamics is, I imagine, like working for a politician: The guy is always saying what he thinks people want to hear in order to keep his position; he does a lot of sucking up. And yet when he's around people he thinks owe him fealty, he tends to mistake peoples' deference for fear, and can often be quite dismissive of their questions, needs and concerns. Sometimes people like these see the mere fact of asking a question as a sign of weakness. Blargh.

I find the best way to deal with people like this is to be slightly abrupt, almost rude, and a little demanding; it keeps them on their guard and reminds them not to take you for granted. Keeping your distance can be a good thing. Especially when they then kiss up to you to try to woo you back (why am I suddenly thinking that this sounds a lot like an abusive relationship???), it's good not to give in.