I love you, I say, and you say, "I love you." Yet as I stare at these words, I feel their meaning lost on me, from you, now.
I believe in redemption, I believe in forgiveness. I believe in love.
You tell me how sorry you are for not being the person I needed, for not being able to help me, to take care of me. You tell me that you realize now that you don't know me at all. If I am a stranger, than how can you love me? Who did you think I was? What was that person like? Was that idea of me a good thing, or when you say that, are you merely talking about certain parts of me that you perceived as the "the real me," which you considered separate from other parts of me which you held as anathema? Or was the entirety of the me you thought you knew a corruption, a tragedy of spoiled and marred innocence turned dark and sour? Or, did you hold me in a regard of hope, waiting for my redemption, believing that in the years of conflict in my adolescence I had been some how tainted against my will, and made a puppet, but that I would rise above this external influence, to see the world as you do? In realizing you "don't know me" are you suddenly afraid that I am a monster you simply have not been able to comprehend? Am I alien, foreign, unknown, dangerous, a threat? Or, do you finally realize that all your assumptions and assertions about my identity and experience were flawed? Do you realize now that they were skewed not only because you were experiencing it from your perspective, but because you were imbuing those experiences with assumptions of connections to things that had nothing do to with who I was or am? Have you considered that you projected onto me the influences of persons like Donna and my mother, where there was no such connection to my thoughts or identity in that regard, and asserting, based on your experiences of them and associations and ideas about them, a disingenuousness to my words, expressions, and behaviors, a cunning and an intent of manipulation, a dishonesty and laziness which I do not possess? Has it finally occurred to you that I was not lying, was not faking it, was not parroting my mother, was not possessed by my grandmother or any other demon, was not out to torment you, was not just trying to get my way? Have you finally considered that maybe, just maybe, I was truly lost in unspeakable emotional grief, torment, sadness, darkness, and an overwhelming feeling of futility and meaninglessness? Is it possible that my heart was wounded, that my young, hormonal, developing mind was crumbling under stressors I could hardly comprehend much less cope with? Furthermore, that when I tried to express how lost and bereaved I was, tried to ask for help, admit that I was in a bad place, that I was lost and hurting and confused, I was met with criticism, hostility, incredulity, and condemnation.
I try to confide in you, give you pieces of my life from my own internal, first-hand experience. When I was eleven, twelve, and thirteen, and said I wanted to kill myself, I just wanted to die, you firmly believed, and continued to believe for years hence, with a deep sense of disgust, revulsion, incredulity, and shame, that I was merely saying that to manipulate you, to hurt you, to shock you, and to get my way. When I expressed directly the sense of bleakness, meaningless, and darkness closing in on me, you thought that I was pre-occupied with it, that I wanted it, that I had some kind of naive romantic entanglement with ideas of evil. You also believed that these thoughts and feelings were a direct result of my mother's influence, that she had some how contaminated me with her own bizarre thought patterns, and, or, her partner and friends had. But I did not relish evil ever; the evil that I laughed about was a parody of evil, like an evil care bear, or a nerdy, insecure vampire; not true evil, or true lawlessness; I still believed in love, compassion, justice, and goodness. Younger girls came to me in school to confide in me, to seek advice, because they were struggling to do the right thing, to know how to ask for help, to stand up for themselves, to prioritize their own values, to legitimize their self-worth, to cope with their body-image issues, to deal with bullying or sexual harassment from peers, and I always talked to them, tried to help them reason it out and find the answer that would work best for them, that would help them; if they were really in trouble, after talking to them for a little while, comforting them, summarizing what I understood about the problem, I would refer them to a teacher in the school who I knew was resourceful, kind, compassionate, and trustworthy. That was at ISA, in Seventh grade the second time, and in my Freshman year of high school, ages 13 and 15.
In my writing during my early teens, and when I talked about my thoughts and perspectives, when I spoke of pain, of meaningless and nihilism, the possibility that no benevolent God might exist, you again thought of it merely as a poisonous extension of my mother's influence, and convincing, detailed parroting of her own ideas and feelings, and perhaps also of those around her. You seemed to believe I reveled in the nihilism, in my spiritual doubts, in my mistrust of the world and the universe, in my sense that darkness was closing in on all of us, but you were mistaken. I was terrified. I had believed in a benevolent, all knowing, all powerful God, a God that was in all things, and all people. I had believed that while Christ was the son of God, and an extension of God, and God was in him, so were we all children of God, extensions of God, and that God was in all of us. I believed Jesus Christ was a divine mediator, an avatar of the all-being, created to communicate in a human way God's eternal, divine, unconditional love for all humanity, and all creation. I also believed that the soul never died, and life was a journey of learning, a class room which we entered again and again, each time with a different face, to learn a new lesson, or sometimes to learn the same lesson a different way. I believed that sometimes when we struggled to learn certain lessons which we had aimed to learn, we could get caught up in a cycle of ever increasing pain and suffering, never growing or transcending, sometimes even regressing for seasons beyond number; and I believed that God had created Christ and awakened him in a divine way to help show us the way, and that he died on the cross as a painful symbol that would burn into our memories, that we can pray to him, to God, to forgive us, to guide us, and to move us forward on the path to learning, to help us transcend those things which we struggled to learn, and over come them, there by continuing moving forward on our path of learning toward transcendence: reunion with the all-being, love, God, Nirvana.
I also believed, not even exactly consciously, that God had created a divine order, where love and goodness were always triumphant over evil and darkness.
Sadly, certain things happened which irreversibly shook my faith. I believed God would intervene, would show Her mercy on me by sparing those I loved from pain, by not taking away from me those I held dear, by giving me the chance to mend and develop my broken and underdeveloped relationship with my mother, and to be a bigger part of my sister's life, and various other things. I think in a childish sort of way, I believed I was special, that I had a purpose, that I had a path, a destiny. I didn't think my destiny was more important that any one else's, I thought every one had a destiny, and not a rigid fixed one, but a fluid destiny with various possible out comes, but all in a similar direction. You all seemed to think I was special too, and Grandpa seemed to think I was some how chosen for something, or something like that.
I didn't expect that God would spare me pain and suffering over others, either; I just thought, well, God, Benevolent, all powerful, all knowing; it's God's job to spare people unnecessary pain and suffering when at all possible. I assumed that there was a greater plan, and of course, humans have free will, so I assumed God couldn't tamper with things that would mess up the plan or interfere too directly with free will, just because certain rules were put in place by all of us as God-extensions alongside God, in order to have the project that is earth-life.
But seeing Megan, a child, pre-adolescent she may have been, but still a child, being hit, called names, shamed by her mother; hearing Megan tell me how her mother told her she wished she'd had an abortion, hearing how Megan had been abused, had been passed around between family members all over the country, how she felt unwanted, how her mother left her alone all the time, I began to doubt God's benevolence, wisdom, and power. I loved her so much. In so much as an eleven and twelve year old can, I was in love with her; my best friend, my first girlfriend, my first love. I prayed and wished that if there was any power in the Universe at all, it would give me the pain, the curse that seemed to follow and haunt Megan every where she went, that if nothing else, I could take on her burden for her. There were times when I thought my prayer was answered in the subsequent years... but of course, I am skeptical of all that now. Seeing her suffering, being so helpless to help her, and going to Junior high, where I was so isolated and Megan wasn't there, I missed her terribly as I saw so much less of her, and I couldn't fit it, and several of my teachers seemed to decide I was a bad apple as soon as they laid eyes on me. The world started closing in. Everything was wrong, everything was falling apart, I didn't know how to deal with it, I didn't know what to do. I started forgetting things all the time, I found it hard to think, and as I fell further and further behind in school, and things spiraled more and more out of control, all I wanted was to escape. I wanted to escape the terror, the fear, the sensation of worthlessness. The word failure echoed in my head constantly, reminding me that my life had no value, I could not fulfill my most basic purposes, to fit in with society by doing well in school, impressing my teachers, fitting in with my peers, being organized, keeping my room clean, and maintaining a positive and productive outlook on life. The things I could do were meaningless except where they contributed to my productivity in school; my love of crafts, art, and writing, reduced to the margin where they contributed to my success and understanding of those courses. There was nothing of value about me, I was a pariah, a shame to my family, condemned and disdained by my instructors, shunned by almost all of my peers. Even my father, whom I looked up to so much, whose approval I longed for so deeply, could only look at me with frustration and disappointment. You were ashamed of me. I started talking to my mother more, trying to confide in her about what I was experiencing, how school was going terribly, how I wasn't getting along with any one at home, how I felt so alone and as if no one understood me, and she comforted me, told me that I was still worth while, that there were still good things about me, that I was a worth while person, and should just keep trying my best and hopefully in would be over soon, and things would get better.
Then, half way through the school year, just as for the first time in my life I was finally bonding with my mother, and when she was the only parental figure I had who didn't constantly seem ashamed, dissapointed, and angry with me, who seemed to like me and think I was a good person even though I was messing up and didn't know how to succeed, I had been really enjoying the emotionally calming effect I experienced, playing, hanging, talking with, and taking care of, Aurora, too, and I loved her immensely. She was a newer and very different part of my family, not a grown up, not one of my "Parents" as I called the five separate adult who cared for me, but another kid, and a younger kid, a little one, who needed me, to love her, to give her attention. We had grown quite close, and I needed that loving relationship more than ever, and suddenly, it was ripped away from me. I felt hollow. I felt dead inside, empty. I stayed with them, at mom's, the weekend they left. I remember sitting next Aurora, between Mom and Michael in his big, old, 1970's truck at his rattled it's way down the freeway to the airport. I was wearing black-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses. My eyes welled up with tears as I thought about how long it would be before I saw them again. I had watched my mother go many times before, and I could be angry at her... but Aurora, Aurora didn't even have a choice. I wanted to keep her, to take her home with me to Dad's, to keep her, to make her my sister everyday. I felt so abandoned. She just packed up her stuff and left me behind, kissed me goodbye as she boarded the plane and flew away, and my dad found me at her boarding gate and drove me home. She offered, at some point, for me to come too, to follow after her, but at the time that was a knife twisting in my heart. I couldn't bear being asked to choose. I adored my father, and my grandparents, even my Uncle, they were my parents too, they were my family too... It wasn't fair for her to go away, to split us all apart, to make it impossible for us all to be together. I didn't let my face move on the walk back to the car, I kept my face still. My Dad parked on the roof of the building, because he thinks that's fun. He brought my Step-sisters with him, I believe, Megan and Jen, or maybe just Megan, I can't remember, maybe I'm wrong. When we got to the car he sighed, and I think he said something like, "Good riddance," maybe not so harsh, but some expression of his relief that my mother was finally gone. Then, the tears I held back came, and streamed down my cheeks. He looked confused, I think. It was almost as if, it seemed like, he expected me to be complicit in his resentment of her. But I wanted my Mom and sister back, I wanted them back more than anything in the whole world. How could God, the Universe, or any body, take them away from me like that? Why? Why did I have to lose my mother again, and when I finally felt as if I'd really had her for the first time since I was a tiny child. It took Dad a minute, but he did realize I was experiencing grief, and he reluctantly gave me a one-armed hug, and reassured me I'd see them again. I'm sure I snapped at him, maybe even yelled at him. I was so angry at him for not understanding, for being so caught up in his own resentment of her to see that I was hurt, that I was distraught, that I was heart broken, because I had just lost two of the people I love most in the world. I knew from years of silence, years of pretending that I disappeared when I went there, of pretending that my mother and anything that happened with her didn't count in the rest of my life at my Dad's, that even my grief was unwelcome, that it was a faux pa, I was breaking character, I was messing up the act.
You never considered that it was sincere, and that you were misinterpreting it all together. You never considered that I might truly be in the midst of such darkness and pain. You believed it was a petulant act, orchestrated to get under your skin. You considered even that I had been brainwashed by mother to express these thoughts, these feelings, these attitudes as a method for her to get some twisted revenge against you; even considered that I was possessed by the soul of my dead Grandmother, for the same person, to wreak havoc and take some twisted revenge against you. Failing that, as both of those are stretching reason, you simply thought that perhaps my blood was tainted by their foul inheritance, and as their spawn I had early developed a complex and sadistic technique of tormenting you, and making you miserable, purely for my own indulgence.
I believe in redemption, I believe in forgiveness. I believe in love.
You tell me how sorry you are for not being the person I needed, for not being able to help me, to take care of me. You tell me that you realize now that you don't know me at all. If I am a stranger, than how can you love me? Who did you think I was? What was that person like? Was that idea of me a good thing, or when you say that, are you merely talking about certain parts of me that you perceived as the "the real me," which you considered separate from other parts of me which you held as anathema? Or was the entirety of the me you thought you knew a corruption, a tragedy of spoiled and marred innocence turned dark and sour? Or, did you hold me in a regard of hope, waiting for my redemption, believing that in the years of conflict in my adolescence I had been some how tainted against my will, and made a puppet, but that I would rise above this external influence, to see the world as you do? In realizing you "don't know me" are you suddenly afraid that I am a monster you simply have not been able to comprehend? Am I alien, foreign, unknown, dangerous, a threat? Or, do you finally realize that all your assumptions and assertions about my identity and experience were flawed? Do you realize now that they were skewed not only because you were experiencing it from your perspective, but because you were imbuing those experiences with assumptions of connections to things that had nothing do to with who I was or am? Have you considered that you projected onto me the influences of persons like Donna and my mother, where there was no such connection to my thoughts or identity in that regard, and asserting, based on your experiences of them and associations and ideas about them, a disingenuousness to my words, expressions, and behaviors, a cunning and an intent of manipulation, a dishonesty and laziness which I do not possess? Has it finally occurred to you that I was not lying, was not faking it, was not parroting my mother, was not possessed by my grandmother or any other demon, was not out to torment you, was not just trying to get my way? Have you finally considered that maybe, just maybe, I was truly lost in unspeakable emotional grief, torment, sadness, darkness, and an overwhelming feeling of futility and meaninglessness? Is it possible that my heart was wounded, that my young, hormonal, developing mind was crumbling under stressors I could hardly comprehend much less cope with? Furthermore, that when I tried to express how lost and bereaved I was, tried to ask for help, admit that I was in a bad place, that I was lost and hurting and confused, I was met with criticism, hostility, incredulity, and condemnation.
I try to confide in you, give you pieces of my life from my own internal, first-hand experience. When I was eleven, twelve, and thirteen, and said I wanted to kill myself, I just wanted to die, you firmly believed, and continued to believe for years hence, with a deep sense of disgust, revulsion, incredulity, and shame, that I was merely saying that to manipulate you, to hurt you, to shock you, and to get my way. When I expressed directly the sense of bleakness, meaningless, and darkness closing in on me, you thought that I was pre-occupied with it, that I wanted it, that I had some kind of naive romantic entanglement with ideas of evil. You also believed that these thoughts and feelings were a direct result of my mother's influence, that she had some how contaminated me with her own bizarre thought patterns, and, or, her partner and friends had. But I did not relish evil ever; the evil that I laughed about was a parody of evil, like an evil care bear, or a nerdy, insecure vampire; not true evil, or true lawlessness; I still believed in love, compassion, justice, and goodness. Younger girls came to me in school to confide in me, to seek advice, because they were struggling to do the right thing, to know how to ask for help, to stand up for themselves, to prioritize their own values, to legitimize their self-worth, to cope with their body-image issues, to deal with bullying or sexual harassment from peers, and I always talked to them, tried to help them reason it out and find the answer that would work best for them, that would help them; if they were really in trouble, after talking to them for a little while, comforting them, summarizing what I understood about the problem, I would refer them to a teacher in the school who I knew was resourceful, kind, compassionate, and trustworthy. That was at ISA, in Seventh grade the second time, and in my Freshman year of high school, ages 13 and 15.
In my writing during my early teens, and when I talked about my thoughts and perspectives, when I spoke of pain, of meaningless and nihilism, the possibility that no benevolent God might exist, you again thought of it merely as a poisonous extension of my mother's influence, and convincing, detailed parroting of her own ideas and feelings, and perhaps also of those around her. You seemed to believe I reveled in the nihilism, in my spiritual doubts, in my mistrust of the world and the universe, in my sense that darkness was closing in on all of us, but you were mistaken. I was terrified. I had believed in a benevolent, all knowing, all powerful God, a God that was in all things, and all people. I had believed that while Christ was the son of God, and an extension of God, and God was in him, so were we all children of God, extensions of God, and that God was in all of us. I believed Jesus Christ was a divine mediator, an avatar of the all-being, created to communicate in a human way God's eternal, divine, unconditional love for all humanity, and all creation. I also believed that the soul never died, and life was a journey of learning, a class room which we entered again and again, each time with a different face, to learn a new lesson, or sometimes to learn the same lesson a different way. I believed that sometimes when we struggled to learn certain lessons which we had aimed to learn, we could get caught up in a cycle of ever increasing pain and suffering, never growing or transcending, sometimes even regressing for seasons beyond number; and I believed that God had created Christ and awakened him in a divine way to help show us the way, and that he died on the cross as a painful symbol that would burn into our memories, that we can pray to him, to God, to forgive us, to guide us, and to move us forward on the path to learning, to help us transcend those things which we struggled to learn, and over come them, there by continuing moving forward on our path of learning toward transcendence: reunion with the all-being, love, God, Nirvana.
I also believed, not even exactly consciously, that God had created a divine order, where love and goodness were always triumphant over evil and darkness.
Sadly, certain things happened which irreversibly shook my faith. I believed God would intervene, would show Her mercy on me by sparing those I loved from pain, by not taking away from me those I held dear, by giving me the chance to mend and develop my broken and underdeveloped relationship with my mother, and to be a bigger part of my sister's life, and various other things. I think in a childish sort of way, I believed I was special, that I had a purpose, that I had a path, a destiny. I didn't think my destiny was more important that any one else's, I thought every one had a destiny, and not a rigid fixed one, but a fluid destiny with various possible out comes, but all in a similar direction. You all seemed to think I was special too, and Grandpa seemed to think I was some how chosen for something, or something like that.
I didn't expect that God would spare me pain and suffering over others, either; I just thought, well, God, Benevolent, all powerful, all knowing; it's God's job to spare people unnecessary pain and suffering when at all possible. I assumed that there was a greater plan, and of course, humans have free will, so I assumed God couldn't tamper with things that would mess up the plan or interfere too directly with free will, just because certain rules were put in place by all of us as God-extensions alongside God, in order to have the project that is earth-life.
But seeing Megan, a child, pre-adolescent she may have been, but still a child, being hit, called names, shamed by her mother; hearing Megan tell me how her mother told her she wished she'd had an abortion, hearing how Megan had been abused, had been passed around between family members all over the country, how she felt unwanted, how her mother left her alone all the time, I began to doubt God's benevolence, wisdom, and power. I loved her so much. In so much as an eleven and twelve year old can, I was in love with her; my best friend, my first girlfriend, my first love. I prayed and wished that if there was any power in the Universe at all, it would give me the pain, the curse that seemed to follow and haunt Megan every where she went, that if nothing else, I could take on her burden for her. There were times when I thought my prayer was answered in the subsequent years... but of course, I am skeptical of all that now. Seeing her suffering, being so helpless to help her, and going to Junior high, where I was so isolated and Megan wasn't there, I missed her terribly as I saw so much less of her, and I couldn't fit it, and several of my teachers seemed to decide I was a bad apple as soon as they laid eyes on me. The world started closing in. Everything was wrong, everything was falling apart, I didn't know how to deal with it, I didn't know what to do. I started forgetting things all the time, I found it hard to think, and as I fell further and further behind in school, and things spiraled more and more out of control, all I wanted was to escape. I wanted to escape the terror, the fear, the sensation of worthlessness. The word failure echoed in my head constantly, reminding me that my life had no value, I could not fulfill my most basic purposes, to fit in with society by doing well in school, impressing my teachers, fitting in with my peers, being organized, keeping my room clean, and maintaining a positive and productive outlook on life. The things I could do were meaningless except where they contributed to my productivity in school; my love of crafts, art, and writing, reduced to the margin where they contributed to my success and understanding of those courses. There was nothing of value about me, I was a pariah, a shame to my family, condemned and disdained by my instructors, shunned by almost all of my peers. Even my father, whom I looked up to so much, whose approval I longed for so deeply, could only look at me with frustration and disappointment. You were ashamed of me. I started talking to my mother more, trying to confide in her about what I was experiencing, how school was going terribly, how I wasn't getting along with any one at home, how I felt so alone and as if no one understood me, and she comforted me, told me that I was still worth while, that there were still good things about me, that I was a worth while person, and should just keep trying my best and hopefully in would be over soon, and things would get better.
Then, half way through the school year, just as for the first time in my life I was finally bonding with my mother, and when she was the only parental figure I had who didn't constantly seem ashamed, dissapointed, and angry with me, who seemed to like me and think I was a good person even though I was messing up and didn't know how to succeed, I had been really enjoying the emotionally calming effect I experienced, playing, hanging, talking with, and taking care of, Aurora, too, and I loved her immensely. She was a newer and very different part of my family, not a grown up, not one of my "Parents" as I called the five separate adult who cared for me, but another kid, and a younger kid, a little one, who needed me, to love her, to give her attention. We had grown quite close, and I needed that loving relationship more than ever, and suddenly, it was ripped away from me. I felt hollow. I felt dead inside, empty. I stayed with them, at mom's, the weekend they left. I remember sitting next Aurora, between Mom and Michael in his big, old, 1970's truck at his rattled it's way down the freeway to the airport. I was wearing black-rimmed sunglasses with red lenses. My eyes welled up with tears as I thought about how long it would be before I saw them again. I had watched my mother go many times before, and I could be angry at her... but Aurora, Aurora didn't even have a choice. I wanted to keep her, to take her home with me to Dad's, to keep her, to make her my sister everyday. I felt so abandoned. She just packed up her stuff and left me behind, kissed me goodbye as she boarded the plane and flew away, and my dad found me at her boarding gate and drove me home. She offered, at some point, for me to come too, to follow after her, but at the time that was a knife twisting in my heart. I couldn't bear being asked to choose. I adored my father, and my grandparents, even my Uncle, they were my parents too, they were my family too... It wasn't fair for her to go away, to split us all apart, to make it impossible for us all to be together. I didn't let my face move on the walk back to the car, I kept my face still. My Dad parked on the roof of the building, because he thinks that's fun. He brought my Step-sisters with him, I believe, Megan and Jen, or maybe just Megan, I can't remember, maybe I'm wrong. When we got to the car he sighed, and I think he said something like, "Good riddance," maybe not so harsh, but some expression of his relief that my mother was finally gone. Then, the tears I held back came, and streamed down my cheeks. He looked confused, I think. It was almost as if, it seemed like, he expected me to be complicit in his resentment of her. But I wanted my Mom and sister back, I wanted them back more than anything in the whole world. How could God, the Universe, or any body, take them away from me like that? Why? Why did I have to lose my mother again, and when I finally felt as if I'd really had her for the first time since I was a tiny child. It took Dad a minute, but he did realize I was experiencing grief, and he reluctantly gave me a one-armed hug, and reassured me I'd see them again. I'm sure I snapped at him, maybe even yelled at him. I was so angry at him for not understanding, for being so caught up in his own resentment of her to see that I was hurt, that I was distraught, that I was heart broken, because I had just lost two of the people I love most in the world. I knew from years of silence, years of pretending that I disappeared when I went there, of pretending that my mother and anything that happened with her didn't count in the rest of my life at my Dad's, that even my grief was unwelcome, that it was a faux pa, I was breaking character, I was messing up the act.
You never considered that it was sincere, and that you were misinterpreting it all together. You never considered that I might truly be in the midst of such darkness and pain. You believed it was a petulant act, orchestrated to get under your skin. You considered even that I had been brainwashed by mother to express these thoughts, these feelings, these attitudes as a method for her to get some twisted revenge against you; even considered that I was possessed by the soul of my dead Grandmother, for the same person, to wreak havoc and take some twisted revenge against you. Failing that, as both of those are stretching reason, you simply thought that perhaps my blood was tainted by their foul inheritance, and as their spawn I had early developed a complex and sadistic technique of tormenting you, and making you miserable, purely for my own indulgence.
