Nov 18
Carving out a place…
Okay, what follows is brain detritus with foul language, and no stylistic merit to justify it. Don’t read if you’ll be offended. Don’t read if you hold me in any esteem. But it is what it is. And I won’t apologise for it. Or justify it. Because whatever it is, it’s better off here on this blog than in my head. If I deleted, this blog would become a lie and I’m sick of feeling ashamed for whatever I am.
Sad facts. I hate not being happy. I hate feeling lonely and friendless and boring and nothing. Even if it isn’t true. I hate feeling it. I think that’s pathetic. It is pathetic. Not for anyone else who feels like this. I have sympathy for them.
No sympathy for me, please. No, no sympathy for me. I have none. I want none. I just don’t want to feel like this. It makes me angry. It makes me angry being pathetic. I’m smart, I’m not half bad to look at. I’ve got an education. I’m capable. It makes me angry being weak. Because weakness is repugnant. Weakness is the fear of rejection, the loss of respect. It’s people feeling sorry for you. That’s not the same as sympathy. It’s people moving away from lepers. I don’t have to experience that right now to know it’s true. That’s the way it is.
Reality without it’s face-on only does two things; it fascinates from a safe distance or makes people run like hell. Because people are big, fat, hairy-assed pieces of chicken shit. They’re liars and right now I wish I could say that I was just externalising my own state of mind, and I am, and I’m pissed at myself more than anything, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a little bit of truth in there.
I love people, I do. I love them for all their flaws and faults. I do that because there is nothing else that can be done. But boy, are we all a fucked up bunch of pansy-assed hypocrites. You know what word I like? Honour. And loyalty. I like that word too. I’m sick to death of seeing so many people around me using and being used. I’m sick to death of how fucking small everybody is and I’m sick to death of everything I’ve done in my life so as not to offend them. Because, you know what - that makes me a big, fat, hairy-assed piece of chicken shit.
So what if I’m not liked. So what if I attract people like flies before they dash off to the next pile of shit. So what if I could never understand my visibility and tried to be what a million other people needed. So what if I was present, really present. What the fuck made me think that it was my responsibility to fix whatever anybody else’s fucked up reactions were? How did I absorb everybody else’s fucked up projections until I ended up here, with nothing left of my own.
I’m angry and crying and angry and crying. Because I should have known better. And I should have been aware of what I was doing to myself, and now there is nothing left of me to like. And I don’t even care how fucked up the rest of the world is and I don’t even care about the who-done-me-wrongs. I just care that I’ve let something outside of me mould my existence, grind my existence to fucking nothing.
When I used to be someone people would come to, rely on for help, for perspective, for philosophy, for unadulterated fucking acceptance and love. What fucking use to the world am I now? Really… What use?
That’s not hubris. Everyone is connected, everyone is useful. Everyone conscious is useful. When did I lose my fucking consciousness. When did I lose my fucking conscience.
So, after loosening up my written tongue, that’s what I had to say. I would have said more but there was a knock at my door and B’s twins were there offering me licorice and wanting me to go and meet their Nan. So I’ve been sitting in the garage next door with a wonderful lady and Big Sis and The Odd Couple, and surprisingly, talking about real things. Talked about the people in everyone’s lives; rape victims, manic-depressives, alcoholics. And B’s autistic brother, and what it was like raising an autistic child 30 years ago. How she wanted to commit suicide every day, how she wished every day the bus bringing him home just wouldn’t arrive. How much respect I have that she is comfortable saying those things, just matter-of-factly, never diminishing the love she has for him, the pride she has in him. She can talk about the excitement of the first time he looked through the window instead of at the glass at age seven, but she tells no lies about what it was like. She doesn’t conform to everyone else’s opinion, to society’s story of the self-sacrificing mother. Which she was, of course, and deserves respect for, but there is no getting around the fact that we don’t experience life in the way our patterned narratives make it seem.
I like her. I like people who are not phased by messy reality. I guess what I wrote before going next door was how angry it makes me that people are phased by messy reality. And I guess that isn’t a new theme here, even before I said the word depression. So now I feel like, fuck it all, I am who I am, whatever. But tomorrow I will wake up and I will be left alone in my messy brain, and the mess of my reality will have, again, no place in this world. I need to carve a space out for it, even if it is only in words. More importantly, I need to carve out a place for it in myself.
Because,the world is full of people experiencing big things, big traumas, big struggles, big joys. Things which always go unsaid, things repressed and reduced, always hidden beneath the Sunday-best face we’re are supposed to present to the world. Welcome to reality, where people suffering suffer all the more because it makes everyone uncomfortable, everyone exhausted.
That’s just not good enough for me.
Life is fucking huge. Make room for it.
November 18th, 2007 at 10:10 am
I greatly admire your posting this. I have always hidden feeling this way in my journal, which no one reads and I eventually trash. You give me the courage to try to be more honest in my own blog.
November 18th, 2007 at 10:26 am
You know, I just re-read this, and it doesn’t even seem that nasty or self-pitying. God, how much I must censor myself.
November 18th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Thank you for being real.
November 18th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Hey Vianne - it’s nice to see you. I hope you’re doing okay and finding some space of your own too. You’re in my thoughts.
November 18th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
I used to write huge long screeds of ‘automatic writing’ on a daily basis, filling whole foolscap pages with wall to wall tiny writing. Not as angry or hurt as this though. More trivial, or rather bemused about the world and myself. The thing is, it’s not automatic writing at all, it’s still dressed to impress no matter how fast you throw it down, which doesn’t make it false at all, because I think we’re social beings through and through, and the ínner self is just a myth, methinks. The way you censor yourself reveals yourself, even creates yourself. I could go on, but I’ll stop there.
Anyway, life goes on. At least, until it stops.
November 18th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Hmm. I don’t think that there is an inner self, in the sense of Plato and essence, but I do think there are parts of ourselves we do not look upon. The way we censor ourselves does reveal ourselves, but does it always reveal ourselves to us? When is it a creative act and when is it an act of Bad Faith, or wilful ignorance? There is some real effort required to give ourselves a choice of clothing.
As much as we are social animals, I think that we are historical animals. We are bounded by time, and time creates narrative. I think most people who write, whether privately or publicly, begin with the youthful idea that Truth can somehow be gotten to, and end with the idea that that nothing is true. Still, the journey expands the narrative. For those few writers who remain, their capacity to expand us continues after they have stopped. And isn’t living and writing essentially the same thing?
November 20th, 2007 at 7:43 am
This reminds me of an exercise in “The Artist’s Way” called “three pages.” Every morning you get up and write three pages of whatever is in your mind. It doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t have to be fun to read. But it gets all that junk out of your head so you can have a healthy and productive day. I’m sure all the thoughts you wrote here are pretty universal, so you shouldn’t be embarrassed about writing them down. Hope it helped.
www.ithappenedinplainfield.com
November 20th, 2007 at 9:11 am
It did help.
November 21st, 2007 at 9:28 pm
“What the fuck made me think that it was my responsibility to fix whatever anybody else’s fucked up reactions were? How did I absorb everybody else’s fucked up projections until I ended up here, with nothing left of my own.”
I once heard someone say “I tried so hard to become what everyone else wanted that I forgot to be who I was.” I think many of us are like that. I know I am.