June 23, 2007
Who I amLooking back at my life so far, I think it can be best pinned down to two points in my life -- and the way they dragged everything that followed back towards them. The first was when I was five behind the bushes at a dinner party my parents had brought me along to. It wasn't even so much the event itself, which I blocked out for years and which was (all things considered) rather tamer than it could have been. It was the mark it left on me. The people who knew what happened looked at me differently. And that in turn made me look differently at myself. I spent, in one way or another, the following decade and change apart from the world around me. Part of it, and yet somehow removed; like it was a murder mystery over dinner and I was there to play my role, but mostly just sit and watch. The way I remember it -- the way I managed to internalize it --
People should do things more in the light. I need to, anyway. I write so much in the dark, on the final cusp of comprehesibility. I just tried to turn the lights off in here, but I turned them back on. If I'm going to look at myself, it needs to be a good look; I can't allow myself the comfort of hiding from everything.
Anyway, the way I managed to internalize my alone-ness, if that's a word (for growing up I was only sporatically lonely; well, I guess I was lonely all of the time, but I only sporatically had the chance to sit around and think about it. The way I managed to internalize it was that I went for a walk in the woods behind the house. I got really lost in those woods - but for only like ten minutes or so - but when I managed to find my way back to the house it wasn't the same house. All the details were the same, down to the last crack in the paint, but everything was different. It's like, when I got lost in the woods, I was never able to find my way back again. The place I came back to was completely different, because I was completely different. And the only thing I wanted was to go back to being the person that fit.
And so I went right through to high school feeling consumed by this alone-ness, or at the least haunted by it. I met to friends in middle school who are with me to this day. The extent to which those friendships are successful, however, has and always will depend on how alone I feel and how alone they each feel. To the extent that the two quantities don't match the friendship fails to work. And I know the brunt of that falls on my own self-centeredness. When they're not giving me what I need, I've never been one to work hard to give them what they need.
Either way, in high school, I started to branch out in infinitesemal ways. I started to weave roots out into the world again. Take the risk of opening myself up to new people and new ways of being me. The gravity of what had happened when I was five, or rather how I came out of what had happened, was starting to lose its pull.
And then I went off to college. And the roots shriveled up and died. What new ones manage to squeeze their way out through what felt like concrete served the purpose of sheer dire necessity. I had those roots not forced themselves out, I would never have been able to pull myself back from the brink. And like the last time I so forcibly felt alone-ness, I worked really hard to arrange myself into an approximation of the person who went over the brink to begin with. The problem is, that person no longer fits in the place I find myself arrived at. And having dedicated so much effort to reviving withered old roots, I find myself quite unconfortably rusty at the prospect of growing new ones.
posted by Adam at 02:42 |
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Adam Freelance Film Critic
Albany, NY
Boston, MA
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