Finding the new perspective, or: How do I shift how I see myself?

I was thinking of this problem today again when I saw CC’s post. (CC is a fellow Armitage fan — though not as intense as I am, perhaps — whom I met back in the days when I started blogging, and who’s on her own creative journey now, and has been writing about her steps every week.)

Saturday night here has been really strange the last three weeks; usually Pesky comes to the café after Havdalah and we have a nice long chat, but he’s away for the summer, and I won’t be here any more the coming Saturday if the moving plan unfolds the way it is supposed to. On Thursday someone asked me what I do, and I said, I’m a professor, and then, I used to be a professor, and then, finally, I’m unemployed at the moment. It got me thinking — I knew there would be some grief that I hadn’t yet felt about the loss of this professional identity, but it pinged me there. How to stop seeing myself as a professor and start seeing myself as a just a person, like everyone else, who’s seeking above all to be happy.

I am not only what I do. The entire enjoyment to be had from life does not consist of working.

All of this encouragement exists to say, you just decide, dress for the gig you want, fake it till you make it. That’s never worked especially well for me. I need the shift to happen, and I’ve never been able to force it.

I can remember this happening twice.

One the fall I turned twenty. I’d had a wonderful boyfriend in México that summer, but when I came back home, sick with an intestinal parasite, my father insisted me that he only wanted me because I was American or rich, reminding me that I am not pretty, and no one loves an ugly woman who can’t hide her intellect better than I do, and then my Spanish professor said, Mexican men think American women are easy. I didn’t go back, in any case, I never saw him again, but I decided to finish the Spanish major so I needed another language. I fell into a severe crush with a study partner in my German course, after a lot of wonderful conversations about philosophy, and thought it was unrequited, and my BFF agreed he was out of my league. Until one night, we were practicing vocabulary for the parts of the body, and I noticed him looking at my mouth. Der Mund, he said. Halt den Mund, I said, idiom. I’d love to hold your mouth, he said. I blushed. Die Zunge, he said, die Zähne, die Lippen. Die Augen, I said, and I saw his eyes move up to mine, and down again to my mouth, and then down to my breasts and further. So stupid, so trite, so visceral, the way his eyes scanned me and drew their own conclusions. It took about two weeks more of late night studying for vocabulary quizzes till we were a couple. Sometimes I would see him, looking at me from across the room — and I knew.

The lock on my soul popped open, and I knew. I am desirable. All of me together, mind, body and soul. To the right person.

The other time, the fall of 1995. I’d converted to Judaism several years before and had always thought to myself, you’ll never be Jewish the way these people are, so you’ll never be really Jewish. I kept myself on the back bench of the synagogue at home, thinking that I belonged but didn’t belong, didn’t really have a say, didn’t deserve one. In 1995 I’d moved to Germany and fallen into the emerging liberal synagogue movement there, populated heavily by expatriates who didn’t care for the German orthodox rite, people who lived outside of the metropoles, and immigrants from Russian whose main connection to Judaism was the “J” in their Russian passports indicating their nationality, who were trying to figure it out. And then one night, in Göttingen, I’d been there about three weeks, the rabbi who’d been paid to lead services didn’t show up, and we were consulting about what to do, and someone said, Servetus can lead the services, she knows all the prayers, and I said, surely there’s someone else, and the president of the congregation said, no, you know them best and we all know you like to sing, so go ahead and do it.

I’d never done it before, but after some urging I pulled out my siddur and went to the bimah and said, I apologize in advance for any mistakes, and I faced the ark and started the psalms, and soon everyone was singing with me, and I realized — you don’t need to hide. You are just as Jewish as all of these people.

I can’t make myself feel the shift to the next thing, to the next identity, to the next realization, to the answer to the question, what do you or do or even what makes you happy, but I am keeping my eyes open. I want the pieces to shift. I can’t say how they will, but I know they have to. I just have to find that place where I can stand, to look at the old me and see something different, something I haven’t seen so fully or clearly in the last forty-five years. I am looking.

~ by Servetus on May 27, 2014.