Don’t let the sun go down on your anger

It’s been awhile. What I come to you with right now are some lists, some general clouds that have been organizing in my mind.

The struggle of this age, the early twenties, for me, is going to be identity fragmentation. It feels good to make it official. This is the something horrible that happened to the people of my mom’s family, what she described as “becoming creepy teenagers” in her diminutive version. It’s especially apparent in my Aunt Theresa and my Aunt Annette. Aunt Theresa speaks in a garbled, disconnected way. Now that my cousin Kenneth is old enough to have meta thinking skills, he talks openly about it. His graduation party was a few weeks ago, and attending it turned on a huge spotlight for me about that side of the family. Mainly hearing him say outrightly, “She doesn’t respond when I try to have a conversation like, ‘Mom, the things you say hurt me’”, and his best friend Emily: “Your mom scares me. She’s a ticking time bomb. I feel like she’s gonna explode at any second.” It’s like when my roommate had a fake leg back in Chicago and no one mentioned it. IT FREAKED ME OUT. That’s another pattern to add to the list:

Something being present and people not talking about it or addressing it winds me up in a destructive, solipsist, perseverating way. Like how no one in my family mentions how they feel unless it’s in a physical state/ailment sense. “I feel sleepy. I have a headache. I’m hungry.” I can’t remember a day when my mom came home from work, sat down at the dinner table, and said, “I felt sort of sad today when I thought of how all my kids are leaving the house. But then I felt happier at lunch when Mike and I talked about awnings.” I NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU FRICKIN FEEL. I NEED TO KNOW.

Which leads me back to the identity fragmentation. Aunt Annette has been married, what, seven times? Mom gave me that spiel when I was like thirteen, in the car, about how she wanted to divorce Rick but she knew everybody thought she should stay with him and that really mattered to her, which miffed me at that strong, visionary age. It’s impossible for these people in my family to know what they truly think or feel about something if they can’t get the lens on themselves in focus. Because it’s taught that the self is bad. But better to be too self-centered and still generous to others than too self-denying and a deprived emotional desert. It’s not even about how much you deny yourself. That rarely helps anyone else, if it’s supposed to be an altruistic act. (This I preach to myself, as always.) Reading The Screwtape Letters is helping to delineate these concepts for me currently, and it amazes me that it was written so long ago! Dispelling further the myth that each successive generation is worse than the last!

I’ve been focusing on learning from people who came before me. Inventiveness is great, and it gets high marks from me, but as part of the process of new creation I need to see what already is. Plus, there’s no situation I’ll face in my life so far that probably hasn’t been written about by someone else already. So I can lift those structures and use them in my life. It lightens me to be able to see ”Ah, this is the time when I need perseverance. Here’s the time where I need to forgive.” So easy, too. So much easier than reinventing what’s been invented.

I’ve been putting too many random operators and limiters on my creativity. That’s been stopping me. I’ve realized that my random rules are like an OCD of sorts, creating and complying strictly to these figments to hang onto a sense of control or order. It keeps me within a snowglobe of myself, turning over and over, seeing the fake plastic snow retreat and return… and no matter what happens, nothing’s happening, because it’s all safe within my fake rules that have no real consequences except a gradual shrinking and deadening of self. I long to act and the glass is cracking. WOOHOO

Anything else? My forearms are tired from weed-wacking for three hours today. This made lifting waffle fries at dinner a palpable muscular task. I love it!

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