Jill Rants and Raves: forgiven

I get into a lot of trouble for some of my blogs, and as I'm sitting here listening to Tom Waits, now seems a time for some more self-reflection. I don't write the blogs as messages to anyone, I'm not trying to communicate in some secret code. I'm writing them because I lost my way, I really lost my direction for quite a while there and this sort of public disgorging, this screaming from the rooftops even when I'm whispering - it's because it ain't fun to suffer alone, to be in real crisis and for no-one to notice, to feel like you're buried alive in a coffin and that no-one can hear. I discovered a lot through my depression of the last three years - and one of the most profound was the sincere regret of taking anyone else through it with me. And those closest to me were deeply impacted.

As a more familiar optimism and brightness returns to my life, I am humbled by what it means to forgive and be forgiven. As one begins to lay bare the reasons why ones life keeps stumbling, trying to do things differently seems daunting. Small victories - like not getting angry in a meeting with someone who has always pushed my buttons, like asking someone what they need instead of meeting their vulnerability with a critique, like saying 'no' when my terrified self wants to say 'yes' just to please them - they may seem like obvious ways of behaving to you. It may seem incomprehensible to you that seemingly simple interactions between people who care for each other could feel like actual physical threats to me, but that's the truth. The fear and anxiety of intimacy, the terror of contact, as if I were a feral cat and every touch will tear my skin off - so at odds with my warmth, my charm, my humour and attentiveness. Sometimes people hug me when they first meet me - they do it even though I'm putting out pretty strong messages that I don't want them to. 'That wasn't so bad, was it?' they say. Yeah, it was.

An inabilty to set boundaries lay at the heart of my depression. There is a moment when, if someone I am intimate with, asks me to do something, I am filled with horror, with dread. But not the horror of doing something for them. I love nurturing someone. No, it's the terror of saying 'no' and my learned fear that they will leave if I say 'no'. If you have any understanding of what I'm talking about, I have nothing but compassion for you.

And compassion and forgiveness is what this blog is about. This is, for want of a better phrase, a public mea culpa. And it isn't that I believe I'm always at fault, I can chuckle to myself now about some of the things that have been said or done to me. I still have trouble believing that one woman, filled with rage and jealousy that her ex was dating me, said to her ex that she was so mad she 'could have chewed Jill's arms off'. Can you believe that? That's like a line from a movie. 2 decades ago an enraged ex tried, you're not gonna believe this, to have me deported. INS agents turned up on my doorstep, guns drawn, at 6am on a misty Bernal Heights morning. After looking at my documents and realising a terrible mistake had been made, one of them calmly asked me 'do you have any enemies?' That's a pretty big enemy, dontcha think?

Ultimately I can only look at this end of it, only take on what is mine. I have been involved with the most generous, caring and astonishing human beings. I don't choose badly, quite the opposite, my intuition about people is rarely wrong - except perhaps in the case of the INS snitch - so I always am filled with a horrible sadness about endings. But endings there are, sometimes.

There's a movie I love - Deconstructing Harry, by one of my favorite directors Woody Allen and the opening scene, which keeps being replayed from a slightly different angle, shows Judy Davis arriving at the writer's home, the writer of a novel which barely conceals the details of a dreadful family busting affair. Davis, one of the thinly disguised participants in the affair in the novel (and in real life) is wielding, waving wildly, a pistol and threatening to shoot the novelist, played by Allen, or herself in front of him. He talks her out of her hysterical rage and then proceeds throughout the film to behave in pretty much the same way he has in the past - with little concern about the wreckage that seems to follow in his footsteps....

I just have the hardest time connecting the dots between the opening salvo in a passionate love affair, and the closing scene when doors are slammed between simmering rages. I have nothing but adoration and admiration for those women who have loved me. And nothing bad to say.