loose ends
i am way behind in writing about a lot of things because of the election. that’s ok i guess but i feel like i am losing track of things, and so this is gonna be a bit of a long brain dump.
i’m not going to write about prop8 anymore until something happens.
ideology and over-principled people are possibly prohibiting what could be the biggest leap forward for america in decades and causing it to be more like a small step. i guess some people are more into baby steps than great leaps. fear of the unknown. discomfort with ambiguity.
……………….
let’s back up a minute.
day of the dead: was a weird experience in that before we ventured into the streets, there was a discussion about white appropriation of other cultures and how someone else said the dia de los muertos procession in the mission was “just a bunch of lame white people with an excuse to dress up”. i’m ok with appropriation as long as it’s respectful, and used properly. in this case though, i was, personally, just straight up appropriating. but i felt ok with that; i’d never been and wanted to see this cultural event. i didn’t mourn, although i really enjoyed the thousands of laughing “dead”, and the celebration of life and death. i get tired of so much mourning. i also admit, however, that part of the reason that i went was that i wanted to wear my costume again. the costume turned out to be a little more interactive than i expected; a lot of people asked me to pose for photos. so much so that i lost my friends in the crowd because people kept stopping me. it was a little ridiculous. so much so that i got annoyed and finally started telling people no. this is not disneyland. i am not your mickey mouse. at that point i understood what was meant.
……………….
even further back: while at my mother’s house on our recent trip to michigan, she handed me a shoebox full of letters. i instantly recognized this shoe box, and immediately asked “DID YOU READ ANY OF THESE?” “no, of course i didn’t”, she said.
the shoebox was full of letters i wrote during the summer of 1997, during time i spent in the New England Literature Program (NELP) living in the woods in new hampshire getting all existential and naked and poetic and naturalist to my then-boyfriend who was back in ann arbor. when i left for new hampshire, we had been dating for about 7 or 8 months i guess. i broke up with my highschool boyfriend for him the summer before, in 1996, when we interned in DC together. he should’ve seen it coming.
anyway, he returned all of the letters to me that i had written him when i broke up with him later that summer, after i’d returned from the woods and had a whole new set of hippie poet friends and determined that a rich jewish boy who drove a yellow corvette and was studying to be a lawyer really wasn’t what i was looking for. he didn’t return them to ME, actually. he came over to my house while i wasn’t home and gave them to my roommate, and then proceeded to cry on her shoulder. she said i broke his heart. i don’t remember the breakup, really. to be honest, i think i just pushed him out of my life very quickly so that i could start being my new self as quickly as possible. i brought the letters back with me to california but i have yet to look at them. i don’t remember ever reading them again after he gave them back, and i can’t bring myself to read them now.
i told this to someone, and he excitedly said “OH MY GOD YOU SO HAVE TO DO MORTIFIED. i had thought of this too. because i no longer have many, if any, of my high school/college journals, these letters may be the only representation i have of my younger self, and could perhaps contain some very comic material. but the reason i can’t bring myself to read them now and why i am not excited about the prospect of publicly sharing their contents is that although that summer at NELP and the few months afterward was a great opening and growing experience, sometimes opening hurts, and i feel ashamed of what i think is in those letters, of what i think i wrote. there were things said and done in that raw communal setting that i am still not proud of. that i still turn over in my mind. i feel ashamed of what i probably said to him in those letters, from that place, that time, that me. i remember a very tearful phone call in which i did the whole “YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND” routine, which was really me just saying “i’m telling you that you don’t understand because i want you not to. i want to have a reason to let you go.” i’m ashamed of the lies i know i told him and myself, about who i was, about love. most of all, ashamed of how i treated him, as a person, and how i might still treat people like that now.
even more than what is probably in the letters, in the few months after i got back, i enjoyed a certain hubris. a belief that i was more powerful than i was. i was young and blonde and tan and poetic and free and i could do whatever i wanted to do! oh, how i got brought down HARD from that pedestal a few months later in a way that is too personal to be discussed here. and maybe it’s that – maybe it’s the dark winter that followed that bright summer that is making me feel so ashamed of that time. maybe it’s that i feel like i was punished for that summer, for that hubris, and because i feel like i was punished i feel like i was a bad person. and maybe it’s that bad person, whether real or not, that is keeping me from reading the letters. maybe i am not remembering myself correctly; maybe i am wrong. maybe i was being more honest with myself then than i remember, but i don’t think so. the person i am remembering – i don’t want to be reacquainted with her. there is a certain part of me that i would like to leave in the past. she still shows up sometimes, in my darker moments, and when she does i don’t like her. and so i feel like reading the letters will maybe only remind me that she’s still here, and not really in the past. that i haven’t changed as much as i thought. and i’m not sure i’m ready for that right now.
ariel is maybe writing a book about her raver years, and she faces her former self with such openness. i’m not sure what it would take for me to do that. maybe because the context of my late-teens/early twenties wasn’t that “cool” that i have a hard time looking back – there weren’t awesome characters and crazy movie-material escapades and edgy west-coast rave parties providing the scene for my sex, drugs and alcohol; it was dirty basements and trailer parks and midwestern towns where nothing ever really happened. who would want to revisit that?
……………….
on sunday night we went to see Synecdoche, NY, the new film by Charlie Kaufman, who also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. the script was fantastic, and while the movie took a little longer than it needed to to get where it was going, it was really wrenching and beautiful. it was hard for me to watch. movies that delve into regret about how one has lived their life, even though i’m still relatively young and have relatively few regrets, make me incredibly, incredibly sad. i think my deepest fear, perhaps, is a fear of regret. but outside of myself, this was particularly difficult to watch right now because there are a couple of my loved ones who are currently struggling with this – with regret – really deeply. who are at points in their lives where they are having trouble looking forward and only looking back, wondering what could have been different, and to see characters in this film that so resembled them broke my heart.
Filed in autobiographical, tv, books and movies | Tagged with NELP | Comments (7)7 Responses to “loose ends”
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I actually think your memoir would be more interesting. Blahblah, sparkly West Coast raver blahblah; it just seems so played out or something. That story has been told a million times and there is nothing significant about it. I think your journey is way more compelling. It’s probably more movie matgrew up in a 900 person town among trailers, chained dogs and Great Lakes beauty. I had a way more interesting childhood than 90% of the population and I suspect the same for you. I can be buddies w. the guys who work at our office comissary because I didn’t grow up in Westchester – I had friends erial bc you created your scene, you made your own backdrop. I from all economic strata.
Oh, and what does being Jewish have to do w. the yellow Corvette guy?
meow: no ariel bashing. everyone’s experience is different; everyone’s story is valuable. plus, a large number of her readers were excited about the idea, and she’s an excellent writer.
my story would probably be interesting if i could ever bring myself to tell it honestly, but i don’t know that i ever could. partially due to all the admitting to yourself and soul-searching you have to do, and partially out of respect for everyone else involved. i am not a fiction writer, but even if i were, fictionalizing certain things would be too difficult.
btw, if you haven’t already, you should read this book:
Iona Moon by Melanie Rae Thon
as for the “being jewish part”, perhaps you’ve never dated someone who is from a different religious background than yourself, but it’s hard when you try to fit yourself into someone else’s cultural model, especially when you’re not really interested in doing so. i couldn’t imagine myself going to jewish holiday dinners and weddings with his family. i have nothing against judaism but it’s a deep culture and it’s not something you can just ignore. i wasn’t willing to try to fit myself into it.
Think of it as a learning experience and look back at your younger years with pride that YOU HAVE CHANGED from who you were. We all do it in some sense. We all have dark periods, things we are ashamed of or would like to take back or do over, but that is part of what made us who we are today. While I agree that sometimes it is a painful journey, I think it is also a great way to gage just how far we have come. Don’t be scared, Amy. You may be surprised by just how much you can (if you haven’t already) learn from who you used to be. I say go for it! If it gets to be too much, return the letters to your shoebox and forget about it.
i think what i am afraid of is that i haven’t changed.
OMG. I needed to reread/edit my comment before I posted it. It sounds like an monkey on PCP wrote it.
It’s alot of self examining, but it just might help you crack that internal struggle you’ve mentioned that you have dealt with for a very long time. Just go into it being vulnerable and open enough to know when it’s too much or that you need help trying to make sense of it all. It could be a very healthy step for you. And by the way….you’ve changed…trust me, you have!
Yeah, the “admitting to yourself” part is rough. As part of working on this memoir, I had to recreate arguments/dialog that me and my junkie boyfriend had … including his completely valid points that I was entitled and privileged and could never understand him because of his disadvantaged background.
Ten+ years later, I see that he was right. The fact that I can’t apologize to him now makes it even worse.