Your albatross / shoot it down

Bastille, “Weight of Living, Part 1,” from Bad Blood (2013).

***

Metaphorically, my mother and my last therapist would agree:

The person I really am at the core is a very small girl, her physical size counterposed by her constant, rage-filled quaking and screaming “no!”

My mother — depending on her mood — would term this either sinful behavior on my part or a failure of parenting on hers.

The therapist would have said, “You were very, angry from a young age and that little girl is still angry.”

Fazit: At some point she started determining every creative decision I made, and then she became even angrier and stopped me completely in my tracks.

Supposedly the reason I stopped writing. Stopped functioning.

I thought I needed to get her on side.

Dean O’Gorman as Mark in When Love Comes. My cap.

But lately I think what Mark said of himself in When Love Comes. There isn’t much in me. The little girl makes a loud, screaming fuss to distract from the fact that there’s nothing there. All I’ve got is my stupid songs. I can’t be what anyone needs me to be, I can’t even be what I need me to be.

I just want not this, I just want not the last seven years, I just want the girl not to be angry, I just want not to be so corroded, not to be addicted to sadness, not to be so g-ddamned paralyzed. I want not to be a historian, not to have to document every second of the struggle, every single fucking time, not to fight through nasty maze of debris from the past every single time I sit down to write. Not to be so angry that I can’t let go of it because I can’t even look at it.

***

Or, to say it in Armitage-role-speak, every time I try to ward it off by setting it on fire.

Young Guy of Gisborne (Tommy Bastow) inadvertently sets his house on fire when Robin’s father comes looking for his mother, in Robin Hood 3.10. My cap.

Every time it survives and comes back.

Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage) threatens Marian (Lucy Griffiths) before setting her house on fire in Robin Hood 2.1. My caps.

And every time I’m so unreasonably angry. Why won’t the past stay pulverized, why won’t it lie in ashes?

Guy of Gisborne (Richard Armitage) beats up Robin Hood over something that happened in their mutual childhood, in Robin Hood 3.10. My caps.

~ by Servetus on June 7, 2013.