Tired, and so many things left to work on. Need to study for work stuff before I go to bed; want to goof off. Want to call a friend. Want a hug. Dishes, laundry, lawn needs mowing, haven't made any progress on the driveway for days, bloggy things I need to write, various portions of my house direly need cleaning, sleep--all of this feels pressing.

What I have done today: made a new friend, confronted my therapist, wrote in my journal, read two chapters of a trashy vampire story, slept when my back hurt, went on a long walk, thought about life, slow gentle yoga. And now this. Priorities, priorities.

But, I feel OK. This is what it's all for?

How do you say, “I'd like to finish your class, but trying not to want to kill myself seems to be a full time job?”

I wonder if I'm not doing something right, or if I'm just irreconcilably broken. Maybe that crucial part was knocked off long ago, like the rear view mirror came off that Cadillac when your teenage son backed it in too close to the mailbox. Or the time he didn't know what the fuck he was doing when he tried to rebuild the engine.

Some days I wake in the morning and my skin feels tauntingly intact. I would give anything just to be held, but my craving for someone to take a baseball bat or a knife to my back seems like a more honest version of the same desire. So I do the dishes; try not to cry, shake it off. Keep moving. Get dressed. Do something else. Fight. Remember to want to fight. Try, at least, to remember.


It's tempting to just tell her to give me a fail, leave it with everything else in the wreckage behind me. There's legitimacy here; I am trying, really, to build something new. New things need space to grow. The idea of tapping out is liberating, but also, angry and frustrating and sad. I love this work; I don't just like it. It uses me, all the intellectual muscle built up from years of reading useless crap that was never going to be any good to me if I was a physicist or a dancer. It's about taking the things I was inexorably drawn to, almost against my will, and weaving them into something useful and beautiful and real. I don't want to loose it forever.

I used to have a rule about relationships: no one got to hit me. It was a bad rule.

I'm not for people hitting me--but: what has to happen for things to get that far? People, in this society, don't make that sort of choice out of the blue. Before that, there is a slow eroding of boundaries, a demolition (until he's trying to get you to stay) of all the things that made you want to be with him in the first place. By the time he thinks he might be able to get away with that--before he has a chance to get away with that--you are invested. By the time things have gotten that bad, you care about him--things are complicated--you know he can do better. And he can.

But he doesn't.

You might say that rule at least worked; no one ever did hit me, who I was dating. But, things got worse in different ways. Any time there's a sharp, clear line, people will find a way to work around it.

Now I have more and different rules. No one gets to threaten me with violence--not by saying something about it, not by throwing things or hitting things or knocking things over close to me, and expecting me to stick around. No one gets to try and change who I am--not even if they're trying to change me into something I want to be. That's my job. And, no one gets to treat me like I'm stupid.

I'm not stupid.

When I was nine, my father, against my will, cut off my long hair. With profound melodrama, I swore never to cut it again. This was a serious thing; it even survived my discovery of that terrible passage in Corinthians when I was thirteen.

That's why, at sixteen, my hair was down to my waist. I had promised myself not to commit suicide, but something had to change, so I hacked it off with my sewing scissors, coiling it in my hands and hiding it away like a keepsake. Then I sat through night prayers, breakfast, and morning prayers, before--after scripture study--my sister said, "is your hair pulled back?"

I still think that is the worst kind of loneliness; to be trapped in a room with people who should see you, but can't.


I thought of this during the keynote on Friday, called "what we owe the dead." He suggested that, contrary to Freud, we can never finish the work of mourning--contrary to Heidegger, we can truly mourn for each other, not just for reflections of our own future. We are composed, in part, of each other; when one of us dies, the rest loose a part of ourselves. The rest of us, then, must process the grotesque affront of life going on after death--after the death of a part of ourselves, after the death of someone we cared for.

In typical egocentric fashion I am terrified. Not of the death of others, though I worry about that too--but mostly, I'm afraid that when I die there will not be an absence left behind. I'm afraid I'm already gone, passing my life with people who almost never see me.



I don't mean this as a criticism, or an insult to my excellent family and friends; this fear may not be a rational one. Sometimes I feel I'm the only one, like I'm somehow by nature unseeable. Other times I think it must be everyone, that we pass by each other on the street like ghosts, each calmly and politely suppressing a Munch-like scream. Of course it has to be something else, neither of those extremes--but it is not a stretch to say that we would see each other better, in a better world.

I'm sure it was too stuffy--the thing that I actually said. It was nervous, the first question of the class. "So you were in this complicated relationship, and you were this young, religious, rural black girl going to Stanford, and you expressed difficulty fitting in with the academic establishment--difficulty writing about things you had no interest in. . . and you talk about how this was a time of finding your voice. . . did you ever resolve that, feel like you found a place in academia? What advice would you have for a student now who was having struggles finding a place in the academic world?"


What I meant was different. What I meant was: You understand, I know you understand, it was in this book and I couldn't stop reading. . . You know what it's like; he was important to you, and for the first time you were with someone who loved what you loved, loved the work you knew you were for. He was the man who you could write with, who you could try to be free with, this rare and precious thing. He was strong and kind, and the gateway who ultimately restrained you. It was complicated. You understand.

You understand because you stayed after he left you bleeding. You understand because you stood in the kitchen and listened to him fuck with your reality, claiming one thing when he'd said the opposite right before. You understand because, for all the help he gave, he also held you back; in the twelve years you were together you didn't publish, but after, after there was a flood.

After, was there freedom and loneliness and peace? Is it worth it, being alone, but making something? And must that be the choice, only to have one?

And how do you make that change? How do you stand up to the establishment--this establishment that hated you--enough to work for it, how did you come to respect yourself after investing so deeply in someone who would not respect you?

When I found this in The Second Sex, it was unbelievably resonant.

"At ten or twelve years of age most little girls are truly "garcons manques"-- that is to say, children who lack something of being boys. Not only do they feel it as a deprivation and an injustice, but they find that the regime to which they are condemned is unwholesome. In girls the exuberance of life is restrained, their idle vigor turns into nervousness; their too prissy occupations do not use up their super-abundant energy; they become bored, and, through boredom and to compensate for their position of inferiority, they give themselves up to gloomy and romantic daydreams; they get a taste for these easy escape mechanisms and loose their sense of reality; they yeild to their emotions with uncontrolled excitement; instead of acting, they talk, often commingling serious phrases and senseless words in hodgepodge fashion. Neglected, "misunderstood," they seek consolation in narcissistic fancies: they view themselves as romantic heroines of fiction, with self-admiration and self-pity. Quite naturally they become coquettish and stagy, these defects becoming more conspicuous at puberty. Their malaise shows itself in impatience, tantrums, tears; they enjoy crying--a taste many women retain in later years--largely because they like to play the part of victims; at once a protest against their hard lot and a way to make themselves appealing. Little girls sometimes watch themselves cry in a mirror, to double the pleasure." pp. 296-297

Beauvoir here describes one way of embracing Otherness--specifically, the way that Twilight and millions of other romance novels are about. I remember very clearly at a young age being aware that I wasn't fulfilling this obligation of femininity. I was too happy, too healthy, too energetic and independent and selfish (in the way that children are) to be worth paying attention to. Perhaps in earlier generations this embrace of victimhood was generated out of repressed activity, but for me the self-modifications formed a solitary, powerful drive: less independent, less competent, become dependent, attacked, and therefore defensible or even loveable. I remember being frustrated at how impossible it was for me to really be a victim, and therefore a heroine--the status I wanted more than anything else in the world.

I can only think promoting this paradigm does immeasurable harm. It encourages women to forsake authenticity, and in the process destroys what could have been meaningful relationships with fully developed human beings.

The fact that deep down we all know this goes on on also calls into question the status of almost any call for help. Closing a painfully rational circuit, I now experience this phenomenon simultaneously from both sides. Having long desired the role of the victim so strongly that I would have been willing to fake it, if I could*, it's difficult to sort out which things I experience because I'm trying to embrace my weak and desirable side, and which ones are genuine expressions of damage that's been done to me, needing to be addressed.

I feel guilty about my deceptive embrace of victimhood in the past, and my inclination is to assume all of my accustomed reactions are fake. They are not all fake, and--given that I am not particularly adept at understanding my reactions to trauma--I'm not sure if I ever have been fake, or if I just exaggerated.

Today I tried to listen to a podcast a friend had recommended to me. I made it twenty minutes in before it was hard to breathe. My persistent feeling is that I must be making all of this up, what I'm showing can't be any sort of real symptoms. . . sometimes I have to remind myself, this is real--you didn't decide to stop breathing. I really wanted to hear the rest of the podcast. I was not exaggerating. Moments like this remind me that a lot of it is far more real than I want to believe or admit.

The things I have objectively lived through will leave you with a decent amount of non-exaggerated shit to sort through. Recognizing that can be a mess. Honestly is important, and in general I think everyone honest with themselves knows they've done monstrous things at some point in time. If not, well. . . wait.

One day at a time.



*and in some ways I could. The waters got muddy very early on this.

edit: also, for the record, I almost never enjoy crying. . . but it has seemed. . . necessary?

To me, Pan's Laborynth remembers the beginning; grainy and heartbreaking, jutting ribcage and sprawling lanky body next to mine, you emanating anger and a broken future to match the past, everything fragile and new. I would have found it someday, but I found it in you, in scrappy strength and Guinness and outspoken angry dreams. I felt impossibly safer and more free. All the heavy dark was an almost easy price.

And now, no borrowed faith. Over. I remember how you were more real than anyone I had ever met.; now I am a person, I am real, I am more than a sophisticated toy. Now, for myself. You were right--it's exhausting--it's better--it hurts--it's exhausting.

Bad faith is hypnotically easy.
Honesty is hard to come by.


I will show you how I hurt you, and you will do whatever you want
which will not fix it
because the time is past
and there is nothing we can do
and this is what it means to be alive.

Today has been one of Those days. You know. The days by which this blog will earn its title.

Motrin is the elixir of life, but I'm living off of V8 juice that expired last week, dry handfuls of kix my mother bought me, and ramen. Every night I lay awake for forty minutes or an hour, trying to sleep, being cold and remembering things I've done wrong. Today I didn't get much done; I walked six miles, worked six hours, and attended a lecture for Marxism, laundry is behind but dishes are done. My entire torso hurts, and so do my limbs where they're attached to it. Everything is hectic; it would have helped her with her test, but I did not show isha-bear my favorite biology textbook. I'm lonely. More color might help me breathe.

I gave away the green wool coat, the one that boy I loved told me was fitting for me because it was really sturdy and so was I. I never quite could take that as a compliment. It's too small for me now; makes it hard for me to move my arms. I think it found a better home.

I worry I'm not a good Marxist. Good, you say. Maybe I'm talking to the wrong people. Will it make sense to you if I say that I worry I'm not good?



I want to be uninhibited.

I got drunk the other night, God knows how much vodka and a couple of trusted friends. It made me think of you, brown eyes, brown hair flipping about, silly and serious and sad--I remember. Let's not speak of anger here.

I cried, not for you, not about you, wept for older deeper losses.

I made them worry, but I cried
felt lighter
clean

it isn't gone, but somehow safer someone knows.
I will tell them thank you, but not sorry

thank you

I deserve to live.

Alcohol as medication, true.