i wrote my previous post as a sort of belly cry, unedited. i have been thinking about what we do when we love. sometimes love comes of need. i think this happens much more frequently than we are willing to acknowledge. we love the people we need and who need us.

we do not choose our parents, for one. that love is born entirely of need. as i explore in my therapy the way i love, i go back again and again to those early experiences, the kind of love children are pushed into as if into a mold which may or may not fit them. i don’t think the mold i was crammed into fit me well. i think it was a couple of sizes too small. it was a metal canister with thin walls and sharpish edges, and when i was pushed into it some pieces of me were cut off. they were left on the ground outside the canister, all bloody and messy, while i cried inside the canister, hurting from the loss of me and from the huge compression.

but i got to love the canister. i look for the canister wherever i go, because the canister is what i learned.

new parts grew where the old ones were cut out. they are beautiful keloids the shape of stars and sea creatures and rock formations. they are miraculous. i love well with them.

just because some of our love is damaged, it doesn’t mean we don’t know how to love. those whose love was damaged early on learn to love well and fiercely and faithfully. sometimes we slip, infuse our love with some of the hurt. but our love is true and good and strong. you can count on it.

i look around and marvel at the women whose love was so badly damaged yet keep on loving with huge generosity, sacrifice, and determination. maybe men do this, too, but it is the women who strike me the most. beautiful women full of tenderness and rage, otherworldly altruism and selflessness, preternatural courage. i marvel at the women.

i heard hillary talk. i sat in a basketball stadium with lots of other women and men for a few hours. it was an uncharacteristically lively, almost unruly, crowd for such a high-profile event. i was surprised. i expected much greater regimentation. a lot of those women were middle-aged and older lesbians. when i see those women i see battle scars that make me gasp in awe. i cannot tear my eyes away. a woman who stood next to me in line was butch, brown-skinned, from some corner of the caribbean. her partner was as blond and blue-eyed as cow’s milk and irish pastures. they looked awesome. they were angry but the corners of their eyes crinkled with laughter. you don’t see the same time-worn sweetness, the same physical signs of ancient forbearance, on guys’ faces. not as frequently.

hillary gave an impeccable speech. it was her third rally that day but she didn’t stumble once. she could have been reading, except she wasn’t. i know because i was there. my heart swelled for her. she got so much shit in this campaign. she got more shit that anyone should be asked to put up with. calls for her resignation were heard since day one, yet here she was, still running, still drawing adoring crowds, still smiling her heart out, still sporting good make-up, matching outfits and styled hair, still running for godssakes. i am happy barack is getting the nomination, but hillary, what a run. i would have loved to have you as my prez, senator clinton.

• even if it kills me
• even if you always win
• even if it makes me feel bad about myself
• even if i’m hungry
• even if i’m sleepy
• even if i haven’t slept and i’m tired
• unable to think
• even if i’m crying
• even if i have my own pain
• which you barely notice
• even if i am in the middle of watching a film with someone else
• or doing something that gives me pleasure
• having a rest
• working
• i will skip work for you
• even if i’m angry at you
• even if i disapprove of you
• even if i despise you
• even if you treat me badly
• even if you show me disrespect
• even if you don’t see me
• even if i feel alone in the world
• even if it tastes bitter
• even if other people need me more
• and love me more
• and show me more respect
• because they’ll forgive me
• but you won’t
• and i need you
• can’t be without you
• it would kill me
• it would lay me dead
• it would suck the life out of me
• it would drain my life of color
• and smells
• and taste
• and joy
• it would make it hard to tear myself from bed in the morning
• and even harder to sleep at night
• you have my phone number
• you have my email
• you know where i live
• i’m here
• always
• even if it kills me
• even if i can’t

i know you will be tempted to think that this is about you. it isn’t. it isn’t about anyone in particular. except me. this is about me.

this semester i taught a class on trauma theory. i had a small group of eight students, four men and four women. from the first, the class was tremendously challenging. i must premise this by saying that i was coming from a difficult personal space. i had not taught anything the previous semester because numbing, paralyzing exhaustion had kept me nailed to the couch for months — all summer, all fall. in addition to that, in september i started seeing a new therapist and the intensity of the work has been draining me dry. therapy has proven not only incredibly exhausting for my already exhausted body (among other things, it’s totally altered my sleep cycle), but also mentally, intellectually, and psychologically disruptive. it has thrown me — hard — into a powerful psychic eddy. i’m not complaining. i consider myself lucky. everyone should be offered the opportunity to do deep work with someone who is profoundly competent and engaged. all i’m saying is that teaching this class was going to be demanding on me in a way in which no class has ever been demanding on me — even before the class started.

i think i underestimated the impact of the topic on me. when i prepared for the class in the summer i felt nothing special. i read the books with great passion and interest but without more emotional involvement than i expected and could comfortably handle. it’s one thing, though, to read these books in isolation, and another to share them with a classroom of young people. this story is about a class on trauma that turned out to be a semester-long, semi-controlled reenactment of traumatic and post-traumatic dynamics both for the students and for myself, albeit in different ways (shoshana felman describes a similar pedagogical experience in her book testimony).

i was really excited about this class, but the students immediately dampened my enthusiasm. after our first session, a sizeable number of students disappeared. those who remained proved stubbornly determined to misunderstand the texts. class discussions were like pulling teeth, not because, as often happens, the students were reluctant to talk, but because they talked too much. in fact, they talked about everything except what was in the texts we were reading. words and lines reminded them of other things, and soon the whole class was engaged in a full-out chat about a topic that was only marginally related and not infrequently entirely unrelated to the text we were discussing. even when the conversation was about the text, the students seemed unable to get, and engage with, the text’s point. there was a lot of personal sharing, little anecdotes the text had called to mind but were not pertinent, interesting, or deep. the students talked on top of each other. the stories they told suggested other stories. if i had not intervened, they would have chatted away the whole class.

i know because i tried. at first i would steer them back to the text, only to find myself having to do it again a few minutes later. i tried a different approach and let them talk themselves out, without intervening (i had nothing to say). i thought, they’ll come back. but they didn’t. unlike in any other class i taught, the students poignantly ignored my presence and talked among themselves. since we were arranged in a circle i could not imagine that they weren’t actually noticing me and my frustration. yet that’s exactly the way it looked. i went back to reeling them in, over and over, all to unsatisfactory results.

halfway through the semester i decided to change approach yet again and deliver straight lectures, something that is quite alien to my teaching style. i was worried that the students seemed to be learning nothing. i felt a professional responsibility to make sure they got some good value out of the class. the first text with which i practiced my new approach was freud’s the aetiology of hysteria. this is early freud and it contains theories that freud later revised. i chose it because freud gave these lectures when he was freshly enthusiastic about the realization that listening to patients was a better, more fruitful approach to healing them than, say, prodding them after hypnotizing them, as his teacher charcot did. that patients need to be listened to and deeply engaged with has always seemed to me one of the greatest contributions of psychoanalysis to civilization. also, freud wrote the aetiology of hysteria before rejecting his groundbreaking seduction theory, i.e. the belief that a staggering number of children endure sexual abuse and that it is these early experiences that lead to the development of neurotic and psychotic symptoms, and replacing it with his elaborate theory about incest fantasies. freud’s writings from the time when he still fully believed his patients’, in particular his female patients’, stories are rather moving to me.

so i lectured. i didn’t leave room for discussion except for focused questions which i addressed directly, without encouraging the whole class to participate in the finding of the answer, as i generally do. later, the students told me that the class became most interesting when we started looking at trauma theory proper. and, true, until then we had covered historical trauma through testimonies, fiction, poetry, and essays, but had not yet done the nuts and bolt of trauma theory. it is possible that immersion in various theoretical analyses of the phenomenology of trauma focused the class. it is possible that my taking the class in hand, corralling it into a more rigid, less permissive structure did it. or it is possible that something matured in the students.

when things were still all scattered and unfocused i had turned to a friend to discuss my pedagogical frustration. she asked me whether it was possible that the students were unconsciously rejecting my request that they confront the reality of trauma. i said no, i didn’t think so. the texts we were doing were not particularly traumatic; in fact, most of them dealt with historical circumstances that the students, because of their background, could not easily identify with. now, though, i question this. the students’ pointed refusal to take my presence into account and their noticeable reaction to my taking the class in hand suggest to me that they might have mounted a challenge of sorts for me. during the whole time (more than a month) in which they pretty much refused to discuss the topics assigned and developed unrelated side-conversations instead, i refused to get involved in the distraction. i didn’t participate. i stayed focused. i insisted on returning to the text even though the students clearly didn’t want to. on one particular occasion, the students vociferously expressed their intense dislike for a poetry collection we were reading. i had a distinct feeling of being ganged up against. i tried very hard not to become defensive. whether i managed or not i do not know. but i was very firm about the value of the collection (which is uniformly considered a masterpiece). even though i was tempted to throw my arms up and say, okay, let’s give up on this book and move on to another, i held my ground and continued teaching it as though the students had not expressed such animosity towards it.

i really thought the students disliked me, but it turns out they felt very close to me. i genuinely had no idea. after the lectures on freud, when the class had recongealed and detours into banter had almost disappeared, a deep cohesion was born in class. the students started hanging out after class. they began to call me by my first name. a male student developed a quasi-transferential attachment. he clearly sought my affection: insisted on sitting next to me, pouted if i wasn’t paying attention to him, was shy if we were alone, etc.

since i was going through an intense transference reaction towards my own therapist, i was deeply aware of the nuances of this student’s feelings towards me, and particularly sensitive to my handling of them. i tried to be towards him the way i would have wanted another (my therapist?) to be towards me under the same circumstances.

the second half of the semester was deeply gratifying to me. the students worked hard and engaged seriously with the texts. they read carefully and came to class full of questions. they did non-required research and brought what they found to class. they clearly started behaving as if they owned the class. at the same time, they stopped ignoring me. i became the referential point of all class discussions.

i closed the semester with the only direct testimony to personal trauma in the course, a harrowing book-length narrative of incest and rape. at the time when the book was assigned i became sick and had to miss a couple of classes. i later learned that the students decided to meet to discuss the book on their own (not something that has happened to any of my classes before).

i left the last two weeks for free-writing exercises. i had noticed that the students were beginning to suffer from trauma fatigue and i wanted them to have a chance to work together through the pain to which they had been so relentlessly exposed before the semester came to an end and everyone scattered for the summer. on the suggestion of a friend and colleague from another university i used as my first writing exercise an entirely free collaborative effort based on the french surrealist technique exquisite corpse. the students could write anything they wanted. since the exercise lends itself, as one might expect, to surrealist outcomes, the poems were fun and funny. after a bit i proposed that we use the same technique but talk about things that had emerged in the course of the semester. the quality of the poems plummeted. the students became unimaginative and heavy in their choice of imagery and their creative voices. the poems contained immobilizing sadness. i asked them what had happened and they all said that they felt saddened by our last reading. we repeated these writing exercises for the remaining class sessions, and i assigned a similar collective exercise to be done as their final assignment for the class. i told the students they could do whatever they wanted, but they had to do it together. they consulted over a series of days and finally decided on stringing together a series of direct quotes from the texts we had read and answering them, some as themselves, in the first person, some as the perpetrator of the abuse, some as a fellow victim or survivor, some as a visual witness, some as a family member, etc.

the result is stunning. by interacting directly — publicly and in writing — with the “characters” of the course the students testify to the characters’ trauma. they take upon themselves the physical task of acknowledging these people’s pain, making it heard. in this way, they remove themselves from the passive, paralyzing, and traumatic role of the helpless observer and become activists and protagonists. at the same time, as the authors of the responses, they testify to their own discomfort. by voicing their distress in this communal space, they become each other’s witnesses and reach higher, dryer ground together.

what is most striking to me is the depth of understanding this writing shows. these students who at first seemed so refractory show such a nuanced understanding of the complexity of personal and collective trauma that i cannot but feel that the course was a success. we went through trauma together and emerged safely on the other side. i am confident that these eight people are stronger, better integrated, more attentive, more compassionate human beings for it. i know i am.

fellow blogger and really cool person katrin left a, to me, thought-provoking comment to my post on incompleters, and as my reply to it was getting longer and more and more expressive of some thoughts i hold very dear, i decided to put it in a post.

speaking only for myself, i can say that the “gestures” you refer to are just about as much out of my control as, say, crying when i feel very sad or eating when i feel very hungry. one can be starving, have a plate of food in front of her, and still not eat it — but it’s very, very hard. there’s something heroic in such restraint, though of course heroism should be judged on motivation as well as willpower and execution. i think those of us who LIVE with a powerful urge to death are much more heroic than many highly touted “heroes.” one does get tired of being quietly heroic, though, and wants to be loudly unheroic, once in a while, once in a while. it is in fact very rare for people to commit suicidal gestures, complete or otherwise, and immensely more common to stand the pain quietly and with immense strength. this strength is, however, mostly invisible and almost invariably unrecognized. one doesn’t get credit for it, in other words, which is unfair, given the contempt one gets when he or she can’t stand the quiet courage any longer and gives in to unquiet despair.

it is, i think, in the nature of human pain to want to be shared — same as human joy. these are the things we communicate to each other: things that make us happy, things that make us sad. at the end of the day, what this is is language, except, for some reasons having nothing to do with bio-chemistry and all to do with the vicissitudes of one’s personal life and communal culture, these particular “linguistic” expressions come out not in words but in gestures.

how does one go, anyway, about saying “i am so entirely overwhelmed by the pain that fills my life that i want to extinguish this very life?” i mean, isn’t there something entirely appropriate in wanting to express this feeling through a partial (non-completed) or non-partial (completed) extinction of this life? how does language adequately convey a pain so deep that it pushes one to the very edge of nothingness? isn’t nothingness the very extinction of language? isn’t language an expression of life? how do you express your desire for your own extinction if not by extinguishing, first of all, that central manifestation of life, language?

this, and many other things besides (someone care to chime in?), is what is contained in those deep deep acts we dismissively package and toss on a shelf with the phrase “suicidal gestures.”

the paradoxical nature of a suicidal gesture is the stuff of deep analysis, not easy labeling. maybe the reaction of ER doctors and other labelers reflect as much their disinclination to think as it does their disinclination to feel, listen, be attentive, and care.

so this is my answer to you, katrin. thank you for making me articulate this stuff.

there is an ER physician in the great pacific northwest i am in no hurry to meet. from his blog, he seems a decent enough guy. his political heart, for one, is in the right place. and he writes nicely. i have a soft spot for bloggers who write nicely. it gets me every time.

but i read a post he wrote a few weeks ago and it made me terribly sad and disturbed. according to this man, i am an incompleter. incompleters are people who commit suicidal gestures without really meaning to die. this is a difficult post for me to write, because such things should not need to be explained. the ER physician who wrote the post about incompleters (actually, the post is about completers, while incompleters function as a negative, puny contrast) has no sympathy whatsoever for imcompleters. this is how he describes us:

These patients are often a huge pain in the ass. They are usually intoxicated, often combative and agitated, may require extensive workups to ensure that no actual life threats exist, and wind up spending hours and hours in the ER, weeping and wailing, puking charcoal all over and annoying staff with their dramatic and manipulative behavior. Occasionally a non-serious gesture winds up being more dangerous than the patient intended. (”You mean tylenol is dangerous?”) Many a time an irritated nurse has approached me and grimly suggested that we publish an educational flier titled “Suicide: getting it right the first time.”

If this makes it sound like we don’t take suicide attempts awfully seriously, then you’re right. Mostly it’s due to the preponderance of minor suicidal gestures over real attempts. Don’t think we’re not professional about it — we know how to rule out the serious threats and make sure that a safe disposition is accomplished. But we are not overly impressed with the low-level stuff we usually see.

i know that when i end up in the ER after having overdosed or cut my wrists i am a huge pain in the ass. this has been made as clear to me as the light of day on a bright coastal morning. i was told in no uncertain terms that i had to be quiet because there were very sick people in other beds. i know i am not welcome and i know i get no sympathy. on a miraculous occasion i have found a nurse who was sweetness personified. when, clumsily (people who are intoxicated tend to be clumsy), i upset my bedpan, i was so grateful for her kindness that i cleaned it up myself, stealthily, without bothering anybody. when she realized what i had done she gave me a great big smile and said, “honey, this is what i’m here for.” i thought, when i get out of here i’ll send her flowers. but i never did. i’m sure she went home with a light and full heart, though.

i have always drunk my charcoal without making a fuss, even though charcoal is nasty. when i had my stomach pumped i took that, too, without complaint. but there are two occasions i remember vividly in which, alas, i did weep and wail. you see, i was absolutely desperate. maybe the ER physician who wrote that post doesn’t fully realize that both completers and incompleters come from a place of terrible pain. yet, his sympathy goes only to the completers:

When a would-be completer comes into the ER, it changes the whole tone of the evening. A pall settles over the department; the place is unusually quiet and staff uncommonly grave. This guy really meant it. It’s a weird feeling.

Like the guy I saw the other day. A classic completer: middle-aged male, rather heavy drinker, recently lost his job and losing his marriage. His wife came home to find him in the garage with the engine running, unconscious, with an empty vodka bottle and pill bottles in his lap. Only she came home earlier than he expected.

…

This was an uncommon case with a reasonably happy result; many serious-but-unsuccessful suicide attempts wind up causing devastating consequences, especially when the method is violent: handgun, hanging, and certain poisonings can cause permanent brain damage, spinal cord injuries, or other organ failures. It’s all very sad. I probably feel more empathy for these folks and their families than I do for almost any other patient. How terrible must their perceived suffering have been to drive them to actually pull that trigger?

I am glad we don’t see them too often, because it’s a hard thing to stare in the face:
This guy really meant it.

i am not sure why terrible suffering should be the prerogative of the completer. i can well imagine a case in which two people with an equal amount of devastating pain might choose to do a “complete” suicide attempt or simply, as this man calls it, a “gesture.”

what is it that keeps us, the incompleters, from calling it a day? maybe that there are others, too many others, too many loved others, whose life would be all but over if we were completers instead of incompleters. maybe that we see, in some bleeding corner of our bleeding hearts, a glimmer of hope, something resembling a future. maybe that there’s enough in life to keep us going — jobs to go to, children to raise, old parents to take care of.

the subtext of the ER doctor’s post is that the incompleters are the women and the completers are the men. handgun, hanging: we don’t do that. we down a bottles of pills or hack in the inside of our wrists. we weep and wail. sometimes we puke charcoal.

but the pain, mr. ER doctor, is real, and terrible, and devastating.

perhaps people have it all backwards. instead of celebrating our will to live, our determination to stick around in spite of the horrendous pain that compels us to attack and mangle our bodies, they scorn us as silly, pusillanimous, manipulative incompleters (if i never again see the word “manipulative” referring to a woman it will still be too fucking late). the completers, may god bless each and every one of them and grant them a peaceful and joyful afterlife, stare life in the face and decide they are done with it, sorry guys, it’s too much. it is a step i can barely fathom. but the incompleters, the incompleters go through the humiliation of the ER and the psych unit, sweep up the dirt and the pieces, put themselves together, and resume the awful job of living. if i hadn’t done it, i couldn’t fathom the courage of such a choice either.

(if you want to give a piece of your mind to the ER doc, do so at his site. i will delete abusive comments left here)

the first time i had psychotherapy it was between my early and mid-twenties (i think that means i was exactly 24!). i was contending daily with serious suicidal thoughts; i didn’t know, then, how to translate suicidal thoughts into small performative moderately-safe token gestures, so it was all extremely real and extremely paralyzing. i was hanging tough, doing what i needed to do, which at the time consisted mostly of showing up for my university classes and studying or pretending to study for term exams, but it wasn’t going well. i lived in a two-story house of strange girls i had just met. i had been living at home, but things had gotten extremely rough with my mom and she had kicked me out.

so now i was living in this place in my university town a 100 mi. from my hometown, without a car, without anything, barely any furniture, barely any money. someone had given me a clunky black man’s bike on which i biked everywhere. but i had nowhere to go except class, and i don’t think i went to class much, really, at least i don’t remember going to class. i do remember taking myself once a day to the university cafeteria and eating the minimum necessary to stay alive. i would surreptitiously take some bread and an apple home with me and that would be my dinner.

my roommates were never there so, in fact, i had the house all to myself. at home, i shared a small bedroom with my two sisters and there was rarely a time when i would be in a room alone, so the empty house with no furniture felt terribly desolate to me. the landlord was an extremely creepy guy who lived with his elderly mother in a structure adjacent to ours and believed in entering our place unannounced with his own keys, so when i slept i locked my bedroom door and the french windows that gave onto a small balcony. there was no doubt in my mind that the creepy guy could get in if he wanted to, but i had to sleep sometime.

in fact, i was exhausted. i slept soundly at night. in the morning i would bathe, dress, and get down to studying. i have no idea how such studying went on. my desk was a door on two trestles which i kept immaculately neat. at lunchtime, i’d get on my bike and ride to the cafeteria. after lunch i came back and had a long, deep nap. when i think of it now, i am surprised i was able to sleep so deeply in spite of the psychic agony i was in. i spent the rest of the day in my room or roaming the streets of the beautiful medieval town where i lived.

i was always, miserably alone. i had tried to connect with some acquaintances, but i think word had gone around that i was unstable and people kept me at arm’s length. when the suicidal thoughts got really bad i talked to someone who talked to someone who found me a therapist. i was so desperate i would have opened my heart to a gorilla at the zoo if someone had told me it would help. my therapist was a white-haired, minute religious priest who dragged a leg. he was a psychoanalyst but i didn’t see him as an analyst. i saw him once a week and sat across from him in front of a large desk. during our sessions he wrote constantly, barely looking up at all.

the first time i saw him he invited me to sit and proceeded to ask me a series of questions in a most detached, bureaucratical way. at some point the questions got very personal. he asked, “do you masturbate?” trying to muster the same detached, clinical tone, i said, “yes.” “where?” silence. “on the vagina or on the clitoris?” silence. the priest looked up and considered me through his thick astigmatic lenses. “i don’t know what that means.” “you don’t know what what means?” “clitoris.” “oh.” silence. “well, it’s a small area of your genitals, just above the vagina.” “i don’t think i know the answer to your question.” “what question?” “where i masturbate.” “okay.”

i think that was the last time we ever talked about sex. in fact, i don’t think we ever did much talking at all in the approximately two years in which i saw him. he was the distant, quiet, unsmiling kind, while i was petrified by resistances of all sorts. we spent many sessions in complete silence: i sat in my chair quietly and left when time was up.

yet this strange, cold therapy made a huge impression on me. i became extremely attached to my little priest and looked forward to seeing him every week. the trip to his office was full of emotion and anticipation. the trip back full of pleasure. i felt something i had never felt before. it wasn’t love, exactly, or attention. it wasn’t emotional. it was a sense of cognitive enhancement, on the one hand, and psychological validation, on the other. my thoughts and feeling were interesting and important to someone who counted, who knew about these things, who had studied people like me. i wasn’t trash and i wasn’t a sad burlap bag of sad feelings. i was someone whose thoughts were worthy of investigation and analysis.

but this is what i want to say, this is what this whole narrative has been leading up to. i found my interaction with my therapist, such as it was, one of the most fascinating interactions i had ever had. i became enamoured of the idea of writing a short story, a novel, a play based on it. for the longest time, years really, i thought, this is fascinating literary material. this relationship felt more interesting, more worthy of being written about than a love story, a family story, a friendship.

this is the way i feel now about my current therapeutic relationship. i do not, as i did then, think that i should write a novel about it (though, now that i think of it, are there novels — not memoirs: novels — that take place solely in a therapist’s office and focus on one single therapeutic relationship from the patient’s point of view? i can’t think of any. maybe they are too difficult to write). but i do find that this is one of the most interesting relationships i have had in my entire life. i think about it constantly. there is something that is going on here that taps into the deepest depth of me. there is a truth to it that i have never found anywhere else. this truth electrifies me now as it did those twenty years ago, when i was desperately lonely and miserably suicidal and i would have talked to a gorilla in the zoo but talked instead to a small old priest with the complete works of freud on his bookcase.

this is what i have been doing:

i have been subjecting myself to the onslaught of memories and feelings that therapy has brought upon me. i have gone willingly to the slaughterhouse. i have fully cooperated in the torture. i have not shirked or hesitated. i have looked the enemy in the eye and smiled a craven smile. i have done everything it told me to do. it has been murder blood grit under the teeth blows to the solar plexus starvation agonizing thirst sleep deprivation. i am surviving only because the enemy needs me alive. i have, apparently, precious information yet to give. i am a valuable witness.

i’ve had therapy before but it’s never been like this. maybe i’m a different space. i am reacting with words rather than pushback. i am not shouting in my therapist’s face. i am not resisting saying NO saying go away saying YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. i’m not fighting her with all i’ve got. maybe i’m in a different space.

these last six months have been been like seeing a movie with me in it that is totally recognizable and entirely unrecognizable at the same. the protagonist, me, plays me very well, although she is an impostor. the events portrayed took place though they never happened. i know the soundtrack really well: i’ve never heard it before. I AM BEING LIED TO BY THE TRUTH.

STOP IT!

but i’m chained to the seat and my eyelids have been cut away. i cannot not see. sometimes the actress who plays me (who is me) looks at me squirming in my seat and laughs. i wish she didn’t do that. her uproarious laughs shake me to the core. IT’S NOT FUNNY, i want to say. but words flow one way only. she can’t hear me. she’s been hearing me all of her life. she’s done with me. she wants her own movie. she’s determined to finish it.

i stopped writing about this because this space — this very public space — is open to people who understand, people who care, but also to people who have it all figured out and do not care to learn from others. i read an appalling post the other day by an ER doctor about victims of attempted suicide. he could not have been more contemptuous of them — us. he thought these people, people like me, are a waste of everyone’s time, including their own. i thought, “what eyes see the things i write?” i thought, “if i describe what i am experiencing in therapy, will there be people who think they know me even as i am working like a dog at getting to know myself?” i felt horrified at the way other people’s gaze can violate and destroy. i felt horrified of other people’s contempt.

but there is a place for those who tell the truth and testify to anguish and pain in spite of the scorn of others. i will be a witness.

i wake up on easter day and realize that the commercial world has failed to conquer easter. that’s why easter is so nice. that’s why i get up on easter morning and the horrible leaded cloud that weighs on me like the apocalypse on christmas morning is not here. it’s wet and cloudy this morning, but other than that, and other than the fact that life offers you as many helpings of sadness as it offers helpings of joy, i feel fine. the sodden leaves of the tree outside my window are brown like it’s fall instead of spring. there are only few cars swishing by on the road in front of my house. it’s easter morning. it’s a quiet day.

happy easter if you woke up this morning and there was a note on the kitchen table that said “gone for cigarettes”

happy easter if your child, your firstborn who used to be so sweet he was the apple of your eye the joy of your day, has gone vegan and radical and hasn’t washed himself his hair his clothes in more than six months (this is for you G)

happy easter if you don’t have a plan no plan no plan at all where do i take it from here

happy easter if you fell in love with another your husband your family you don’t want them any more you want to be with another (this is for you X even if you don’t know it don’t read english don’t know this blog exists this is for you)

happy easter if your therapist is out of town how can you explain the pain to anybody who doesn’t have a therapist whose very existence guarantees their continued survival you feel as if the source of life were frozen in suspended animation and it’s scary oh god is it scary

happy easter if you have banged your head against the same spot in the same wall for years decades and there still isn’t the slightest dent not a shadow of a shadow of a sign that skin and flesh and maybe a fragment or two of bone where left there

happy easter if you don’t have anywhere to go, you’re welcome to my place, please come

happy easter if you’re tired of the long-ass freezing winter, so so tired, it was hard this year, it got too cold, i don’t want to live here anymore (this is for you L)

happy easter if your sisters, all three of them, forgot to celebrate your birthday

happy easter if you got fired you weren’t doing so well if only someone had given you a chance that’s all you wanted a chance

happy easter if life used to be a lot better oh yeah oh my god you should have seen me when now you are only the shadow of a shadow of your former self (this is for all of us)
…

you will get it back a hundredfold

…
this easter, this holiday of against-all-odds comeback from abject abysmal failure intolerable pain trauma rejection despair, this festival of hope against reason tenacious hope superglue hang-in-there splendid hope, is for you.

i have wanted to keep my thoughts to myself, as if to gather them close to my breast and keep them safe. they felt so fragile they felt flimsical, as if the tiniest breeze could scatter them.

so many blog posts are apologies for having neglected one’s blog. i find this marvelous and vaguely annoying — the need to be accountable to one’s reader (marvelous), the further, unnecessary delay of proper blogging those apologetic sentences effect (slightly annoying). yet, what is proper blogging? what do we do when we blog? should i not apologize or at least explain myself to a friend i haven’t called or written to in a long time?

my friends never hear from me. yesterday i picked up the phone on the second ring (i felt reckless) and my friend M sputtered in surprise. he fully expected to speak into a machine. he did not expect a call back. i hardly ever call back.

i don’t have caller id.

there are 9 messages now in my old-fashioned answering machine. when the previous machine broke J and i were surprised by how difficult it is to find a plain old answering machine in stores. they all seemed to come with a phone attached. we didn’t want a new phone. we had a perfectly functioning phone (which, however, died only a few months later). we finally found a lonely one on the shelves of best buys, a little gray digital one. the one that broke was analog. we have 6 brand-new little tapes we’ll never use. if you want them drop me a line and i’ll mail them to you.

those nine messages are from people i should call back, people i still have to identify, people who left information i need but am too scattered to write down, or people whose voice and words i want to keep and play again and again. one of the people i should call back left a message almost a year ago.

sometimes i don’t answer emails, either. i figure they’ll keep. J gets very upset when his emails go unanswered for longer than a day or two. i say, J, look at me, there are emails from people i love that i haven’t answered in months. he doesn’t object to the non-answer, you see. he feels unloved. people can love you without replying to your emails, i say.

one never knows whether the email got there, either. there is no confirmation. it could be languishing in a spam folder.

my friend M just found in his spam folder an email from a publisher that wanted to offer him a contract for his book on caribbean literature. all emails are deleted after a month. this email was two weeks old.

people often want more than they are willing to give. when you give them what they want they feel guilty, a little, because they know they won’t reciprocate. i have a friend who shuts down when i get too personal about myself. “i’m worried about mortality” counts as too personal. we used to be close but she decided it was better for us not to be. we used to talk about mortality, debt, and the horrors of the bush administration several times a day. now personal disclosures on my part (of the kind i just described) are enough to stop an email exchange dead. i encourage personal disclosures from her, and she offers them to me in response. maybe i shouldn’t. maybe i should honor her decision to stay aloof. but i want to know. at the very least, i have to remember not to reciprocate. it’s not like she asks, anyway.

people run from intimacy. they find intimacy extremely threatening. i am sure they have excellent reasons for it. i suck at the breast of intimacy for my antibodies against the Extreme Loneliness of life. i’m a sucker that way.

i think i’ve always struggled with believing what i felt. my feelings have always been suspect to me. “com’on really?” “no, you’re right, not really.”

i have never been really anything. my pain has always been not-really. lust: not-really. sadness: not-really. desire: not-really. love: not-really. joy: not-really. laughter: not-really.

especially love. not not not not not not r e a l l y sssss tttttt ooooo ppppp iiiiiii tttttttt.

(i stutter; especially in my native tongue. in my native tongue i stutter so much it significantly affects my life. there are things i cannot do because i stutter. in english, though, i can do almost anything. did i leave my home country to escape the shackles of aborted speech? did i lose a country a culture a people a language a way of life just so that i could talk? NOT REALLY STOP THINKING LIKE THAT JUST STOP).

i cannot shake the impression that i am a big phony.

the first book i read in english was the catcher in the rye. everyone is a phony in the catcher in the rye. i loved the damn book. still do. holden caulfied calling everyone a phony feeling a phony growing more and more insubstantial as the book progresses being barely there by the book’s end.

women make themselves disappear. people in pain make themselves disappear. we bleed ourselves make husks of ourselves desiccated shells onion-paper thin we fold upon ourselves

in toni morrison’s paradise there is a girl her name is seneca who cannot tolerate the pain of women. her sister/mother abandoned her when she was a little child left her alone in the house scribbled her a note with lipstick she couldn’t read. she was alone in the apartment for days ate everything she could find one day looked out of the window saw a woman crying that sealed it seared it she can’t stand the pain of women.

i didn’t know i existed till i read this. i didn’t know it was real, not not-really. being incapable of standing the pain of women. finding it intolerable. having to do something. making it a life job. becoming that. becoming someone who takes women’s pain upon herself.

how much love succor good work how many nobel prizes are born of pain so deep it becomes genetic.

that’s what my sister told me yesterday: it’s so deep it’s become genetic. i am stealing her word. i am giving her credit.

i have been surrounded by women for the whole of my life. in my home, i was the only male. holding my crotch. adjusting my pack. breasts period hips it’s a terrible mistake. i have been saving women since i was born. now i myself need saving and i can barely stand it it’s so painful it’s so against my genetic code it’s such an aberration. how can i ask a woman so in need of being saved by me (aren’t they all?!?) to save me. oh god oh god i can’t