OT, kind of: Thinking about Erebor, part 2

[Pressing onward before I lose my courage. Thanks for all of the comments on the last piece.]

There was the story, which seemed like a parable, and the actor, who had made the woman feel alive again, although it was impossible to explain at the beginning. Later, the woman realized that he proved to her that all the pieces of who she had been were still there. She still had it! She still had the feelings, she still had the connection to G-d, she still had the analytical gaze, she still had the words, and most of all, he reminded her, she still needed to speak.

Thinking about him, watching him, writing about him, as the words poured and poured and poured, made her feel flow.

So after Richard Armitage came blogging Richard Armitage, which saved her. The being able to write. The people she met who came along. The people who wrote comments who told her she wasn’t alone, that they had experienced, were experiencing, similar things. The things she read that inspired her and also made her feel less alone. The evidence that even silent people were reading. Even the troubles she experienced as a blogger. Because she succeeded, with the help of her readers and her friends, in standing up for herself. In the end, as a blogger, she did not crumble in the way she had as an academic writer.

Because at times, when blogging about Richard Armitage, she finally could figure out how to put desire and reason, the visceral love and the clear-eyed gaze, together.

Because it seemed like writing the blog could make her whole.

And she knew this was the only way she ever wanted to write ever anymore. Even if she couldn’t see exactly how that would work itself out in practice.

No more instrumentalization, no more compulsion. No more fear. Only flow.

The woman left her job. With difficulty. She stored her books. She cut her hair. She applied for a few jobs, to keep up appearances, but she didn’t take the applications seriously. She made herself stop. She drove home.

She had been home for five days, when one of the jobs called back. Two days to decide. She dithered. An Armitage friend whom she’d never spoken to before reassured her. She took it.

It seemed like it could be Erikson’s moratorium, the stage that one enters to pause, when one “half-realizes that [s]he is fatally over-committed to what he is not.” And as so often after 2005, she didn’t know what to do, anyway. When the gentle man went away, when her performance evaluations tanked, when the situation at work started to affect not just her but her friends, when she was sexually harassed by her fellowship sponsor and could not make him stop, when she started to doubt her ideas, when her own failure was imminent, when her mother got sick. She just didn’t know what to do and in the end she felt like she had to accept that, even if it meant screaming that she didn’t know what she would do and for heaven’s sake just stop insisting that there was some solution.

***

I’m sick of writing this like a fairy tale. This blog is my story and I fucking claim it. Angry statement and guilty confession, zugleich.

I mean: I didn’t know what to do. After 2005.

I did try to get away from that job. I did try. Eventually the only way to get away was to fail. When they decided I had failed, I didn’t even question their judgments about me. I didn’t even try again.

I know why I couldn’t defend myself as a child. A child shouldn’t have to defend her own developing personality. But my parents were raised in a world without such flexibility; their pedagogical designs drew from what they thought we needed to be adults, they hurt us first so that we wouldn’t be humiliated by the world, or so they thought. My father had his alcoholism. The church was the Only True Church. There were no questions about any of this. It was all too big, much too big, at any rate bigger than I was at the time, and I do not judge myself for running away from there. The therapist said, “You were very angry from a very young age, and the little girl is still angry.”

What I don’t get is why the little girl’s anger is so destructive. I thought I was choosing the rest of my life for myself. I thought I was deciding. I thought I was finding something that fit.

But if that was true: Why couldn’t I stand and fight for myself in Erebor? Why was I so weak? Why did I run away?

Where were you then, angry little girl?

[That is a home question — and I have to have it answered, soon. Or some kind of answer.]

~ by Servetus on February 17, 2013.