30DEC2009
Lots of people are mean in the military, seemingly heavy handed.
Mine seems consistently different, though. Mine doesn’t just come across as meanness sometimes, it is meanness.
In my dealings with K__, I’d fall back on meanness, as if it could save me, somehow evening out my maybe having been wronged.
It seemed like a weakness in the House, my not being able to be mean enough, not wanting to really, but seemingly needing to.
Why is meanness an option for me. Why in conflict do I always go there. Because I come from Abuse? The meanness and hate is how I treat myself. Life is cruel that way.
Could I do it, if R__ genuinely changed for the better? Could I accept it. What about A__? H__? Mom? If one genuinely apologized, and genuinely changed?
The answer’s always been no. Is that meanness? They can’t change, it would go against what they inherently are.
My accepting their change, if it were to happen, that’s forgiveness. It’s another key to getting my life back. Just accepting the possibility.
It’s just another brutal price to pay.
__________
I woke up and stretched in my rack, my mind in that place between dream and present reality.
Memories flowed in and out of my head, the House, the workplaces, the military, the memory of dreams. My only regret -- my thoughts said -- Is I wish I had done the How better.
The day remained that way, a flux of random thoughts. K___ and I wouldn’t have been friends at my workplace, where technically we first met, but didn’t have a whole lot to do with each other.
He was confident in that sloppy way, he was one of those who assumed too much, who me and Mel would’ve exchanged glances over back in God‘s Country.
K__ laughing it up with friends, as Mel served them their food at the restaurant. Mel being raped everyday and me being worked into the ground.
Being pseudo grown, that wasn’t the path to being grown, it was unnatural. Got to switch paths.
Turns out K___’s path was the natural one, and Mel and me were unnatural. That look of Toughness in our eye, that old soul look she had, there’s something about that being unnatural, about that being not-good, that I don’t accept.
If I fit in with K__ now, it means I don’t have that look in my eye anymore; I’ve switched sides. It’s one reason I hold onto the story, won’t let it go.
Those wild years that followed me getting freedom .. Living on sheer impulse, never allowing an honest thought. I felt allowed. I wanted to cheat, because they did.
It seemed exhausting, the senselessness of all the thoughts. Once the world makes sense, it ain’t alive no more.
I stopped by House’s duty station. He made a point of coming outside and talking for an hour over cigarettes. _Did I tell you about my Mom having a boyfriend I didn’t know about?_ he said, as if it was simply assumed he had told me most everything.
I wondered about it. I wondered about my own behavior, socially awkward as it can be, it’s power to create moments.
__________
I look in the mirror in the latrine, and I see R__’s features, and I see Mom’s, especially when the glass is clouded with steam. No wonder I see myself as inherently bad.
It’s not just because of the way they saw me.
__________
Since K__’s left, I’ve been watching a lot of films from the hodjie shop. It’s what I do when I don’t have people in my life. They only cost a dollar because they’re all bootleg, many of them haven’t even been released yet.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee. Five dollars a day. Grey Gardens. Management. 500 Days of Summer. I choose the films for all kinds of reasons as far as their attractiveness to me, but oddly all the films turned out to be the same story, all adding up to the same moral: live your own life, with your own qualities.
What seems like a clean slate suddenly becomes a list of changes in present life. In the film 500 days of summer, Joseph Gordon Levitt has changed his voice from what it was in Mysterious Skin. He’s doing Goerge Clooney.
Like in a French film I saw once, a too-young guy with a too-deep voice. For some guys, the voice is everything. It’s what solidifies their attractiveness. For some, it’s a laugh or a smile, that does it. I wonder why I think like this sometimes.
It’s okay to work on myself this way, because you are who you want to be, and everything else is arbitrary. It’s goes along with how you treat your body differently when you feel your value, and you end up looking differently. Being yourself and being who you want to be is exactly -- exactly -- the same thing.
Being egocentric is when you think the story is about you. Abusers teach egocentricity -- they want the victim to believe that the horror story inflicted on him or her holds some deep meaning of who they are. When I feel free of it, the freedom can be jarring: the infinity of how much turns out to be arbitrary, and available for change.
I’ve never worked on myself that way. I’ve always worked on the story, because it forced me to reckon with it. I never just worked on my self, my true self, the one I have rarely experienced.
__________
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