JP, Berlin 1992 /Photo © Susie Fought
It wasn't all that long ago that I was 'triggered' by so many different stimuli I couldn't tell when one episode ended and another began - like one of those old hotel switchboards that lights up each time a guest in a room pressed the 'service' button, my switchboard was lit up all the time, all the rooms screaming for attention all at once, and in my hotel some of the room numbers didn't match up with the names of the guests. Is that a good image? Works for me, sounds like a fricking nightmare. It would be easy - as it always is - to serve up a dish of cold blame and wilted excuses. But 3 years of therapy -which I'm happy to report is now on a 'need to refresh' basis - will do wonders for the searching soul. Even if the searching never ends, and the manna never found and the soothing balm continues to elude one and the demons pop up like familiars in the most unexpected places and at the most inopportune times. These days, when I have a fight with someone, it is like a shock of cold water and nausea. Fight. Anger. My precious defense, especially with those flight risk women I am so drawn to. The layers of fight, fear, disassociation, and fight again have done me well (well, that's debatable!) over 50 some years. I have laid waste to some pretty exceptional people in my life, and watched somehow, as if from another vantage point. Sometimes the pieces could be put back together, sometimes not. But there was one consistent loser.
At some point it becomes an exercise in indulgence to continue to ask 'why'? At some point the facts are on the table, the mysteries are still mysteries. The dreadful truth floods into every corner like an incoming tide. I remember one of my earliest slash and burn moments - I was....how old was I...not over 14 that's for sure. I don't remember the girls name, or what she looked like, though I do have a clearer memory of her bedroom. She was obviously a friend, although I have no recollection of her before that day. It was raining. I've always hated the rain. It rained a lot in Berlin. The memory I have, vivid, painful and mysterious is of her sobbing, crying out 'why, why are you doing this? I thought you liked me'. She sat on her bed, and her bedroom was on the corner of a house, light flooding in from two large windows. And I don't have any idea what might have brought me to that point, but that I simply left, with the sound of her heartache in my ears and a face that I recognize in myself - when my soft blue eyes become battleship grey. Cruel is not something I think of when describing myself - but I can't help feeling that this may well have been the first time that a girl that I liked asked something of me, showed her vulnerability and my own interior battle clicked into action. Like a scene from 'Night At The Museum' when all the inanimate models in the Smithsonian leap into terrifying action for short bursts of mayhem and then subside as the sun comes up and the public enters the still, hallowed museum.
Mayhem - it's a good word to describe what has gone on in my brain almost my whole life. I once described it as a rubik's cube on acid, but mayhem sounds right. Why, you may ask, am I taking time out here, to re-visit my war zone. Peace has come, the treaty is in place, the prisoners exchanged, right? I wonder sometimes whether I will ever fully come to terms with the past. I can still feel the fight in me. And I wonder sometimes whether it can be as simple as I think it might be. And that the past four of five years I have been trying to catapault myself over the last barrier to self acceptance. At the heart of it is that when one lives at odds with ones very skin, there can no peace, no dimming of the lights, no lowering of the sound. I am learning, even at this middle to late point in the day, to be at peace with who I am and that there may still be acceptance from the outside as well.
Maybe it was my many years in therapy, but many of my painful memories have faded. Maybe it's just because I'm older.
I hope you have a peaceful weekend, Jill!
Posted by: Deb in Minnesota | May 22, 2009 at 07:23 AM