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| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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The Demon Who Chooses Option C
I�m supposed to meet Magdalene for coffee this afternoon. And here�s the thing: I want to do it, but I don�t know if I want to do it because I truly want to reestablish a friendship, or if I want to do it because I�m slowly coming around in my own heart + head to realizing that getting rid of difficult people is not always the way to deal with difficult people. I�m sure I�m not explaining that very well, because in truth, it has very little to do with Magdalene except that her friendship has been a problematic precisely because I wanted (wanted but was not going to take for various reasons) what she seems to habitually offer at the beginning of any friendship: Herself. But herself as indistinguishable and characterized by her physical being. (And that�s really just a way for me to say what I don�t want to say. What I don�t want to say is that she habitually and mistakenly offers sex as a means to getting to know her. And, sadly, it probably works, though in a very short-term way. I mean, most people like and want sex, and Magdalene is very attractive. But as far as a basis for a longer, more stable friendship? Well, this tactic is a fairly bad idea. There is still a lot of guilt and shame over sex (any kind of sex) and especially adultery, and most people eventually walk away from her for this reason (and this eventuality is one that I�d be willing to bet comes about sooner rather than later). And all this of course ignores the fact that probably the people who choose Option A: Sex with Magdalene (rather than Option B: Friendship First�or even those who choose Option C: Walk Away) are probably just the exact kind of people who would rather just fuck you than talk to you. And those people are often really not very good people. But of course all this leaves out the fact that women who like and offer sex are judged a certain way and all other related issues). But even understanding all this in a limited way is still leaving out my part in it. Though I chose Option C, I only did so knowing that part of the difficulty was brought about because of my inability to deal with a difficult situation. But the other part was that Magdalene was, to me, a difficult person because she seemingly was trying to force me to make a difficult decision. (And only time will prove that assertion correct or not.) But that�s just one example of how a person is a difficult person. There are others: The Real, Essential Demon is another example. Though He recognized His own inherent difficulty, He wasn't able to see that Difficulty is not a trait that everyone harbors. By that, I mean that because He found interactions with everyone else difficult, He assumed that it was everyone else who was Difficult, and not that He brought Difficult into every situation that He took part in. That is, He didn�t seem to realize that a fair amount of difficulty in dealing with other people arises from the Difficulty inherent in oneself. Despite that, one of the things that I liked about The Real, Essential Demon was that nothing with Him was easy. It took me a relatively long time to begin to puzzle out why I so liked this particular demonic trait, and one of the realizations that I came to in this (still incomplete) process was that He reminded me in many ways of Demon #35: Father. My father. I don�t write much about my father. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that I spent so much time ridding myself of his invasive and destructive influences that I don�t particularly like to conjure him up for what seem to me to be purely frivolous reasons, or for his entertainment value, or to satisfy the voyeuristic nature of people raised on steady diets of After School Specials and Lifetime: Television for Women offerings. And also, I gave him eighteen years to do his worst, so the rest of my life I consider my own to do with as I please. Yes, that�s right. I did give him eighteen years�or he took them in any case. I gave him those years and then I walked away from my alcoholic, mentally and physically abusive father when I was eighteen. I have not seen or spoken to him since. And I have never regretted this action. It was never a question that, after I had any sort of choice whatsoever, that I would not exorcise him from my life. When I was in my early 20�s, I would tell people that I had done this and I would get the party line in response: �Well, he�s your father. Of course you have to love him.� With the implication(s) being that I was a bad daughter if I didn�t and that I had some obligation that designated my responsibilities to him in all situations. But I walked away and I didn�t plan on ever going back. I didn�t even want to go back. I didn�t want to make peace with him. I wasn�t ever going to forgive him. I wasn�t ever going to give him the opportunity to fuck up my life again. I had nothing to gain from continuing a relationship with him. Even my therapist was shocked when I told her this. What most people don�t seem to appreciate is that I spent years trying to understand my father because I wanted to understand why he was doing what he was doing to me. This means that most, if not all, of my childhood was spent trying to understand what was happening to me. Part of gaining that understanding was trying to figure out why he was the way he was. I could see a bit: He was poorly educated�a high school dropout, was abused as a child, was hopelessly dependent on his parents (who were harshly judgmental), he married at seventeen and by the time he was twenty-three had three children that he ultimately found he didn�t want. (I was one of those children, which put me in the wrong place at the wrong time.) He was depressed by all of this and, like many depressed people, couldn�t see a way out. He drank. He became addicted to sex, addicted to pornography. All of this I saw by the time I was six or seven. Understanding took another five or six years. And then there were another six or so years to get through before I could be free of him.
I was, as a child, kept in prison of paradoxes and secrets. For example, though my father was terrifying at home (where I spent most of my time), I still had a tremendous amount of freedom. My friends were always amazed at the level of permissiveness exhibited by my parents. The example I�ll tell you about happened when I was eleven. One afternoon my friend Michelle came to visit from Santa Fe. As she was getting ready to leave my house, she somewhat impulsively asked if I could come back for a visit with her. I suppose that, with her parents, it would have been a big ordeal, with phone calls from them to my parents, and planning, and all the accompanying drama of moving an eleven-year-old girl from place to place and so on. But in my house? All I did was walk out to the backyard where my father was drinking with my uncle Robert and say, �Can I go to Santa Fe with Michelle?� And he said, �Sure.� He gave me $20 and said, �Do you need more than that?� There were no questions about how I was going to get there or how I was going to get back from there. There were no questions about who was going to be there or how long I was going to stay or even where I was going to stay. As we walked back into the house, Michelle was amazed at this typical interaction between my father and me. She said something like, �Wow. That would�ve been a lot different with my parents.� So I had a lot of freedom. It was almost as though, after I had proved my ability to keep his secrets, I could then be trusted in the outside world. I had a lot of freedom, but I paid for it. I paid for it first by having to learn how to keep my father�s secrets. And then I continued to pay for it by faithfully keeping those hard and destructive secrets. What secrets? Well, secrets that I still can�t (and won�t) talk about--if only because of that early training, this long-standing habit that leads me to deflect the interest of others who might pry into my family life, who might therefore uncover what is/was happening. (And I hope I sound bitter as hell about this. I want to be bitter as hell about this. I want to be angry and hateful and bitter about this. I want to and am these things if only because it preserves the memory of the girl he tried and failed to turn into a monster. And I am still too often intoxicated with anger at everyone and anyone who saw what was happening to me and could could have helped but didn�t. There were so many people complicit in the act of keeping my father's secrets. And that means You too. So if you�re curious as to what those secrets are, just ask yourself what you would least like to admit to knowing about any child who ever grew up in an abusive home or whose early childhood was spent in close and unsupervised contact with a demon addicted to alcohol and pornography. And if you want to know why I still keep his secrets, I'll tell you: Still keeping these secrets is kind of funny to me. Yes, I said funny. I find it funny at this moment because right now it seems as though all his secrets are going out where anyone who looks and wants to see can see them. So it seems like I�m telling, doesn�t it? Maybe. But I�ll take a moment to remind you of a few things you don�t know: You don�t know my name. You don�t know the city I live in. You don�t know anything about me that would identify me as an individual. You only know that yet another anonymous online diarist has supposedly revealed something of some supposed importance to some anonymous online voyeurist. That's pretty funny if you ask me.)
It�s time for school now. I�ll write more about Demon #35: Father later. And I�ll let you know how coffee with Magdalene went.
More lies:
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My father, ca. 1967.
My family, ca. 1975.