First Grade

-
“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
Post a Comment

What The Hell Is Shock For, Anyway?

-

Shock is a bandage. In the beginning, the very beginning, it is necessary so you don’t bleed to death. But a wound can never really heal until you take the bandage off.

Shock is a tourniquet. In the end, the thing that was so vital will turn your body toxic. It is not necessary to remove the tourniquet to heal. It is necessary to remove the tourniquet to stay alive.

I can keep things numb. Phase out, compartmentalize, water emotions away. It is my tendency to avoid conflict—internal conflict just as much as any other kind. Necessary to function, to live as fully as I can in other aspects of my life. A prolonged state of shock.

But pain—all pain—has a reason for existing. This numbing out is toxic, too.

I was in shock for three months. Three months, two weeks and two days. And when all the barriers finally came down, I very deliberately chose to keep them that way. It doesn’t feel that way at first, but this is part of healing.

I met someone who tells me they think about one event every single day, and it’s been nearly a decade. The truth is, life is filled with so many reminders. Strangers make me cry. So does Bon Jovi. (But when his music does come on, I can’t bring myself to change the station.) I still cannot wear those clothes. I have tried, it doesn’t work. (No one understands that I’ll be moody for hours because I put on a certain sweater. Because I thought, it’s been two months, surely all the voodoo has worn off by now and how long do I really spend throughout my day looking at my clothing?) That there are certain words—written, spoken, spattered throughout daily life—that seem like they will always carry connotations.

He will never understand the extent of what he took.

My friend and I both chose—years before we ever actually met—to live our lives in accordance with certain values and traditions that differed at large from the expectations of our worlds. From most of the world. It was this commitment to such variant yet identical paths that first brought us together. I saw these value sets as contradictory pieces demanding sacrifice on one end or the other—while she had built them both into a cumulative whole that was both new and necessary, and vastly meaningful. She showed me that it wasn’t about sacrifice at all, that we had something pure and new to offer to the world, and we continued from that moment to support each other in our lives and in our work.

I identified with that. No: That had become critical to my identity. People speak of triggers—and yes, there are triggers. But beyond all that, I see that one night, "the night her husband molested me," (I force myself to type those words and hold my breath as I do it), incised through my very sense of self. I see that instance reflected throughout my self-image, in all the years of taking such contradictory components and crafting them into a unified and productive purpose.

That is part of what he stole from me. Not all; the extent of it is something I have never laid out for anyone, and don’t intend to here. But that is a piece. The knowledge that my new self-image must now include these things.

Thoughts love to work in patterns. Like water following an irrigation ditch. Like a footpath carved out by nothing but the thousands upon thousands of feet that walked across it. That is, the more you think a thought, the easier it is to keep thinking that same thought. The more your thoughts follow these same well-worn cycles. (By the time the triggers stop meaning quite so much, won’t we think these things on instinct?) We are, along with our thoughts, creatures of habit.

It is hard to deliberately veer of the known path. It is necessary if you want to break the cycle.

So, my dear, start small. This process of crafting your identity—the way you want it to be, the way you believe in it—begins, after all, with the smallest thought. Do not identify with thoughts like, “I am a victim.” Think, instead, “I worked hard to get here and I’m a hell of a lot stronger for it.” Don’t stop at, “I have been (hurt?) (wronged?) (Abused).” Continue to believe, “I am someone who has risen above my past.” And then take it even farther. “I am transforming the broken pieces of my past into something beautiful.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breathing Fire

-
Breathing Fire Recently acquired skill sets:             Living from a suitcase. (Three suitcases.) Making myself quite at home in other people’s homes. Parallel parking. On the sidewalk. In the snow. I drank a shot of bourbon and heard that living feels like fire. I know what you mean about feeling fire. There is so much fire burning inside you that you don’t know how to channel. Like you’d breathe fire if you could. He had the knife to his wrist. To his throat. Look into my eyes. If you’re looking into my eyes, I want to believe you won’t do it. Why have you chosen this picturesque city, so different from the sprawling freedom of Texas? (The rest of you all have such logical reasons, I pinned a map to the dartboard and shot north of Houston.) Why? Is it enough to say that I chose something different? Rational friends beg practicalities. Was he dressed to go out? Did he have shoes on? You’re asking the wrong questions. I d...
Read more

Perhaps

-
I burnt my coffee this morning and it tastes like travel. Truly. This is the flavor of a flight made by 15 seconds. Of boutique cafés and getting lost at the train station. Of breakfast right out on the fire escape overlooking San Francisco. For the past three days, I have refused to write this. I refused to write about other burning things. What would I say. That I suddenly need herbs to help me sleep. That I let my mind sit in such a web of impatience that it burnt my skin. That I found myself scrubbing the floors clean at one in the morning, on my hands and knees, because there was absolutely no other reasonable thing to do at that hour. They smashed the windows on the avenue where we built a community. (I know home is the people, more than any place.) Dare I complain about the floors, when humans just around the corner are sweeping glass from shattered storefronts where we once shared ice creams, and gathering their livelihoods from the potholes in the streets? Dear Gd, but I see h...
Read more

But in My Heart I'm Jewish

-
I’ll tell you a story. It’s one of those deeper, family stories, but somehow I’ve always wanted to share it with you. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, because her face was bitten by a German Shepherd as a child. Because there was a nurse, Marie, who told her parents that they couldn’t hide harboring a little girl. My mother tells her story best. But I knew my grandma differently. I knew the woman who loved theatre and chocolates and beautiful dresses. I knew that when she passed away, and we drove to New York like we had throughout my childhood, her Manhattan apartment at the heart and height of everything suddenly felt too small to contain even the memories of us. I knew that when I let myself into her bathroom after the funeral to try on one of the abandoned garments, the dress was too small also and the laces snapped, and the hair tie I had braided so meticulously earlier that morning snapped in half a moment later, and I knew she watching. I knew the woman who sat on my bed...
Read more