Blank and Wobbly, but Good

I should write something, but I feel strangely blank. Blank isn't necessarily bad. In fact, the blank feels a bit like the eye of a hurricane. Not exactly peaceful, nor permanent, not even creative, but somewhat calm.

Being in love creates this bubble of delirium. Experience has taught me that this bubble, like all bubbles, is short-lived so I must enjoy it. I don't want to ruin it by diving into the muck. At the same time, given the nature of my muck, I have to dive into it from time to time in order to keep the person with whom I'm in love.

I have tended to mistrust anyone genuinely kind who cares for me. I think, "I am so obviously a terrible person. I am so obviously a fraud, and cruel, and cold, and lazy, and stupid, and gullible," and anything else negative. I think that, if I am that horrible, then anyone who cares for me is either stupid and not worthy of my respect, or working some sort of angle. I confess, that pattern of thought makes a person pretty damn lonely and miserable in their own skin. It's such a cliche', too; but I am nothing if not a cliche'!

So far, I haven't fallen into that trap with this person; but I'm afraid that I could. That means that I have to keep going back into the muck to take apart the devices that make me believe the Bad Ideas about myself. I have to excavate the bad ideas, and analyze them to the point that they no longer have any meaning -- like when you say a word over and over and over until it becomes just sound.

At the moment, on the verge of going to visit this Gentleman Caller, I don't want to do that. I want to bask in the glow of being in love. Basking has not yet become the raw material for anything creative. I can only express it in the words and the music of other creative people, like a 16-year-old making mix-tapes. Which is fun, but has its embarrassing limits. I must become more confident in this feeling, give it strength, learn its complexities, trust it, before I can allow myself to let it infuse the other parts of my creative life.

I'm delirious about visiting my Gentleman Caller, about being the caller myself. The following weekend, however, my parents will be visiting me. Not me, per se, but the city; during which time they will visit me. I love them and sympathize with them, but the love and sympathy are so tied up with the abuse and conditions of their love that I dread the repercussions of any contact with them. I have to psyche myself up.

They don't know about the Gentleman Caller, and I wonder why I haven't shared it with them. Of course, the thought suddenly occurred to me that he isn't really their business. My whole life I've felt as if I must tell them everything, which has led to my completely indiscreet personality and my inability to keep a secret. I've had very few secrets from them; but those that I've had, I've kept because I know that they are powerful in some way. They make me an adult, not their little girl.

I think that has been one of my most recent epiphanies, making complete sense out of a particular period of my life in my late teens and early twenties. That was the stalled period, when I sold myself short, stunted my own growth, and simply could not move forward. I jokingly refer to that as my "breakdown" because whatever system of belief or fear or motivation that kept me going through each step of life to that point had broken down and no longer worked. I couldn't take the next step in becoming an autonomous adult, and I was completely miserable.

I have realized that I had grown up in a house that hated women. Little girls were fine, but fully formed women were incomprehensible to the dominant powers in the house. Grown women were harridans and viragoes, like my grandmother, and therefore hateful; or they were weak, incapable of taking care of themselves, and therefore should be resented, like my mother (whose own mother never really let her grow up).

Women were also like shoes.

To be a little girl, pink and cute and non-threatening, like a live doll, was good. To be a grown woman, full of power and opinions and capable of taking care of herself was dangerous and bad. To be a little girl growing into a woman was treacherous. I grew from the furious beatings of my frustrated mother into the berserk beatings of my misogynist father. Both out of control until their rage subsided. I had to be a grown woman in order to get myself out of that environment; but to survive in that environment, I had to try to stay a little girl. I have not yet fully understood how I mustered the resources to get out; but I know that they too involved abuse. I simply chose the devil that I didn't know over the one that I did.

In the past two or three years, especially this last one in analysis, I've actually found a place in my head in which I feel safe. It's not a big place, just a little corner, guarded by gargoyles. I have started to feel that all of that abuse, compounded by more abuse, inflicted by Other Mothers of all genders and types, has actually passed. It may have shaped me, but I don't have to live with it, I don't have to let it reproduce itself in the disastrous personal or professional relationships that have plagued me forever. I can trust the kindness of strangers. By "strangers," I mean those genuinely kind people.

This realization leaves me light-headed and wobbly. When you try to rise above your experience and ignore it, you take a risk. You have to hope and trust, rather than defend and disappear. You have to reprogram yourself (which was my whole goal in seeking analysis). This job, this Gentleman Caller, this next book, this life here -- I keep thinking, "I've finally found the starting line. My real life has begun. Make it bigger and better! Don't fuck it up!" I think this blankness is my effort to keep upright and not swoon or wobble over.

This blankness is me holding my breath, waiting for the moment when I know that I can trust myself not to fuck it up.