Just some thoughts about the current state of my mind and heart...
These thoughts seemed somewhat clear and coherent when I was sitting in my room this morning, but now they seem to have escaped me... What was it I was thinking there in the semi-darkness (I have two sets of green curtains and a bamboo screen over my windows, so I am able to maintain a nice cool blue-green mood in my room all day long, no matter how bright the sun outside) between that first cup of coffee and the walk to the bus stop?
Nothing more or different than that same sense of dissatisfaction, restlessness, vague depression, and directionless desire I have been feeling for more than a year. In other words, what else is new, right? Unlike other people I know and love, I have no "real problems"---my problems are "all in my head," so to speak, and I have simply to pick myself up by my bootstraps and get on with it, which is almost word for word what my therapist said to me not long before I quit seeing him---which is to say, medical, financial, job-related type problems, the sort of problems that arise in the sort of situations I have so consistently avoided (some people call it "real life"). To return to the therapist, what I could never get him to understand is that I have been carrying around this weight of guilt and anger (and several other emotions, as well, but those are the two big ones) that stem from the events of my childhood, the memories of which have suddenly and inexplicably plagued me for the last two-and-a-half years. And, I beg your pardon, Matt (my therapist), but just how-in-the-hell is a job and an apartment, with "spare time to write", natch, going to help any of that? I know you meant well (or anyway, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt), but calling me a narcissistic mooch and telling me I need to grow up really wasn't helpful. Whenever I brought up the past, you were dismissive, and said I needed to concentrate on changing my thought patterns right now, to learn that the world does not revolve around me and my problems---fine, I'll go along with that, but feeling alone with my "problems" has been, well, part of the problem for a long damn time, so I'm not sure how that was going in the right direction. Finally, I just felt we weren't "on the same page," so to speak, after you said that the death of my cousin in a house fire would be a good topic to discuss "at another time" because you wanted to talk about why I had not done the worksheets you gave me. Huh, and I did not think anyone could ever be worse than my 6th grade math teacher at making me feel like shit for not having done my homework. Is that theapeutic?
Somehow, I am convinced the resurfacing of those old memories, and the feelings they engendered, relates to my (possibly doomed from the outset) relationship with Kelly, and my earnest desire to face those memories, and to be honest with her about what had happened, because I wanted to love her more than I had ever wanted to love anyone (including myself, which is part of the larger problem) in my life, and I could not love her (or anyone) completely if I could not face the betrayal of love that defined the first decade-and-a-half of my life. In the end, of course, I failed myself, and in doing so, I failed her and the greatest and most promising relationship I have ever been in, because I could not bring myself to tell her the truth, and all she saw, more and more, was the anger and ugliness in my soul which I was finding increasingly difficult to control, much less hide. So, the man that I was trying to be---I had foolishly quoted the Jack Nicholson line from As Good As It Gets, "You make me want to be a better man," to her, and, though I was so desperately sincere when I said it, I could not find the strength or courage or ability to do it---which was a fabrication to begin with, faded away, and the man that was revealed horrified her (and me), and the conclusion of it all was the affirmation of my worst fear, and the confirmation of what (listen up, little man) I had truly "deserved" all along. And so, not even finding myself back where I started, I found myself another turn deeper into the pit, down that ever-revolving path that leads not to hell, but only to the pit of our own (potentially bottomless) feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing, the hell we carry with us and which is open for business 24 hours a day.
Another way to express one aspect of what I have been feeling lately is my deep conviction that some of the people I love and respect (a few of you who may be reading these words, and a few others who are not) simply cannot reciprocate that love and respect (or at least, not in the same manner) anymore because our lives have drifted apart, or our paths have diverged, or whatever cliche one chooses to describe this phenomenon. Though we have a past, and common interests, our daily lives bear little resemblance and I sense that we are constantly struggling to communicate at all, much less to say the things that once were effortless, and were, perhaps, taken for granted. I am haunted by the echoes of those conversations, and I hear them often, every day, in fact, perhaps because I simply choose to be haunted, as by the other things I have mentioned above. But, if that is the price, I would still pay it, because memory always has a price, for each of us separately and for all of us together. I am fascinated by this coming together and drifitng apart of individuals and small groups, and the story I have at least attempted to tell in the multiple-voice spoken word piece intersignes deals with that, and attempts to give voice to the prophetic potential within both individual and shared memory---assuming one faces that memory, listens to it, and refuses the understandable urge to look away or hide---because prophecy is always about speaking truth to power in the world-as-it-is, not predicting a world-to-come, except to the degree that prophecy always calls for justice and for a reckoning, but through the work of human hands, not an intervention from without that relieves humanity of its responsibilities. So, to bring this back around, the fear I expressed above, about a seemingly-inevitable drifting away from the people I love and respect, puts the responsibility back on me to revive those bonds every day, to realize that memory need not be cause for mourning what seems to have been lost (something is lost and gained every day), rather that memory is what animates our desire to continue on, and to wonder at the stories that still remain to be told in the days ahead. After all, it has been said that God made man because he loves stories. Then let me be, if nothing else, a storyteller, and I will be happy.
I ask for patience, for courage, and for illumination in the days that still lie before me; I long for nothing greater than to play a role in the continuous weaving, unweaving, and reweaving of the golden braid that connects us one to another; and I ask that, through these things, my soul may have some peace.