This was my post from a year ago today, when it was “just-spring;” now it is my anniversary. It is an anniversary of liberation, reconciliation, understanding, and of return. Return of the one I had become, and will be again.
In late July of last year I left a very problematic relationship and I remember clearly the first day of August. It was luminous and late summer had started, and I felt calm and free. I felt as I had long ago, not just before the beginning of the relationship in question, but even more, before the beginning of Reeducation. The feeling did not last because I then got harrassed. So did some of you. It was a rough ride. But that is over too now, so far as I know, and it has been for some time.
I did not leave that relationship as soon as I might have. There were a number of reasons for this, both positive and negative, but one oddly positive one was the strong feeling that if I waited it out until the bitter end, that end would also blast into the stratosphere all remnants of Reeducation. I would see Reeducation clearly and become able to face it down. I think this was true.
One thing this person realized about me was that I suffered from debilitating self-doubt. He later exploited that to his own advantage, of course, but earlier on, he said: “You know, you should just abandon self-doubt – altogether.” I saw the point, but did not know at the time how to go about doing it. In the last couple of weeks, however, I have done it big time. The methodology is, you throw it directly out the window. Every time a piece of it comes up, it goes right out the window. You have to trust that if any of it is reasonable, it will return in a more helpful and less virulent form.
The relationship was a pharmakon – a poison, but also a remedy – which leached Reeducation out. That is why I am glad I was in it. On this day last year, I also ran into one of the brighter of my old Reeducation comrades. I realized from my conversation with her that the goal of Reeducation in its less twisted versions was in fact to live as I had done before Reeducation. I not only could, but also should become the one I was, the one I had become Before.
II
Reeducation was psychic murder and it was directed primarily toward my professional and creative being. It was not that “giving up my bad old habits felt like dying, but was actually good for me,” as I was repeatedly and formulaically told. The habits I gave up for Reeducation were regular sleep, daily exercise and writing; the ones I acquired were self-hatred and self-torture. Formerly, I had gone swimming at the barrier islands and hiking in the woods on weekends. Now I was too weak to leave the house. I was told that these cataclystmic shifts only felt bad – only looked like signs of serious trouble – because they were changes. People with families like mine all hate changes, but all changes are always good. I was coming out of “denial” and if I felt enough pain, I finally would. At that point I would come to agree with certain authorities about who I was and should be, and my life would be clear again.
These are the reasons why I am not entertaining defenses of Reeducation from anyone, or suggestions that “I might have just misunderstood.” At the time I did indeed give Reeducation the benefit of the doubt and a series of second chances. I certainly did hope I had misunderstood. I tried to read Reeducation in the most enlightened possible way. I gently questioned its faulty logic. “Do you mean to say that . . . ?” And the answers were always the same.
I escaped alive, though, and stayed alive in the ghostly manner of torture victims who have been released from jail. I used to think it was unfair – self-indulgent – to compare myself to such people, but with all due respect for the obvious differences I really do think the interrogation / accusation / break-you-down experience of Reeducation was of that family.
III
So that was how I died, without actually going into death. Originally, my plan was to resurrect myself in an entirely different place and profession.
Since Reeducation’s heaviest attack had been on my professional identity, I did not think I could ever continue in this profession without continuing to suffer altogether too much psychic pain. That was not an unreasonable estimation. The alternative life I planned was very attractive. I ought perhaps to have gone ahead with it. I may still. However I was convinced for other reasons, perhaps good ones, to stay, at least for now, and I am here.
Had I left, I would have left some things I really like for some other things I really like. I might have healed sooner and better, and more quietly, with less effort. Or, I might have just buried Reeducation’s wound. In any case, I am tired of being here in what has been, to some extent, a perfunctory manner. To be here fully I need to reconstruct myself entirely, at the very site of my death. They say you cannot go back, but I believe my case is an exception, or that I can make it one. I already feel the breeze of return – the return of the one I had become Before.
IV
For a very long time after formally leaving Reeducation, I kept on deciding to become a full person again, starting right away. I said, “Act as you used to act, live as you used to live, and you will become yourself again. Cultivate yourself like a plant.” This sounded practical, but it never worked. Finally I realized I could only unlock my psychic tomb if I first threw the debris of Reeducation out onto the ground. This worked more quickly than I could have imagined. My bones have already grown muscles and veins. I have climbed from my niche. I am blinking in the sun.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Coincidentally, August 1 is Emancipation Day in Jamaica.
Blessings,
Geoffrey
OMG! Emancipation Day! I knew it was the Swiss National Holiday and they all go hiking … but Emancipation Day … 🙂 Happy Emancipation Day!
I’m going to try it.
Thanks for posting this, it’s helpful to me too.
Happy anniversary.
It’s good to stand in the sun.
Yes, what a powerful treat, the sun.
Pour some water and you can kettle a full name of a constellation.
Happy anniversary too.
I’ve been experimenting with that methodology. I was driving, and I kept stuffing my self-doubt out through the window. However, it apparently was somehow able to cling to the window frame and keep sticking its snout back inside the car. I kept pushing it back out, and it kept coming back in. It was like something from one of the Alien movies.
Does the window need to be open?
I have had that experience many times. The window may or may not be open but you have to think of it as open. I actually imagined it as a trash chute or memory hole.
This blog was established in February 2006 with the goal of “throwing out the trash” and I did not manage to fully do that until 18 months or so later.
It happened all at once. I got a comment from someone else on their positive Reeducation experience, and in a flash of insight said, “I cannot afford to keep a ‘balanced’ viewpoint on this one more day.” I stayed up for about 36 straight hours dissecting the evils of the self-doubt I got from Reeducation. I realized that despite having dissected it before, I was at some level still trying to negotiate with it. I finally realized that *the whole thing* was just off. And at that point I was able to finally dump it. This was after many years.
Negotiating with *my father* is a whole other deal. I just spoke to him on the telephone and I am at this moment somewhat unhinged.
The person who despite his faults was the one from whom I learned that it was possible to hold onto mental health in any situation. The person who now manages to visit upon me certain horrors which were visited upon him by his aunt, who was, to the extent that she was able, my savioress. The person my X this post commemorates leaving reminds me of. The unquiet one I will carry in some way until my death. The Jekyll and Hyde. The one with whom I would have preferred to collaborate, or at least reconcile, but must probably “kill” in some manner to be finally born.
The father thing sounds terrible. I think maybe I can relate. I don’t speak to mine, and negotiating with him is still almost impossible.
When I mentioned “the system wants me to beat myself up” … I was surprised that worked so well at cutting the ouch level for me. So I went ahead and tried “my father wants me to beat myself up.” Uh oh. No dice. I mean to say, yes he (his image in my mind anyhow) does want that, but my reaction is not to resist.
“The system wants me to beat myself up” is a truly great phrase, and it works because it is true. My father doesn’t want me to beat myself up. I am not sure what he does want but I suspect it is for me and the rest of the family not to have been affected by his alcoholism. This wish is well meant, at least at one level (it is also rather egocentric, as it would permit him to get away with his behavior, consequence free). I even wish it too, and I would wave a magic wand and be unaffected if I could. That, of course, is not how things work, and you have to deal with things as they are. In reality, I was and am affected – we all were.
Very interesting on yours – he wants you to beat yourself up, but your reaction is not to resist. This is where I am somewhat lucker than you maybe, if more convoluted. It is my mother’s bullying I was trained not to resist. With him things were more direct, and you could voice disagreement.
Or – wait – is it that with him, the do not resist message was more cleverly camouflaged? That is it I think, and that is my brilliant insight for this morning, inspired by you (Tom). So the question is, what message is from him is it that I do not resist, or resist, but only through a glass, darkly?
There are more than one and I do not see them or know how to sum them up yet. My mother’s was about taking femininity to its logical extremes – self-mutilation, infirmity, psychic death. My father’s are about invisibility or something. Perhaps “be absent but not autonomous” – and also “be bright, but only in such a way as to confirm my convictions.” I want to be present, yet autonomous, and I want to be able to take all of my perceptions into consideration, not only those which are acceptable to him. It is as though his message were that one should not exist fully, but should believe that this half-existence is all the existence there is.
And yet he does not want to be that complicated. When he is feeling clear and objective, he has far more enlightened things to say than that.
HMMM. In my teens I adapted some common graffiti, slogans and headline phrases of the day to myself. Perhaps in these lies the key to the messages of my father’s I wanted to shed. Some I remember:
“Free Huey Newton” = “Free Z”
“Regional autonomy for Catalonia” = “Regional autonomy for Z”
“Israel’s right to exist” = “Z’s right to exist”
It appears that I considered myself:
a. incarcerated
b. colonized, and poorly administrated at that, and that
c. My right to exist was in question – and had never been made clear.
So the sentence I could believe at this point (sentences you do not really believe, do not work) would be something like, “My father did not or does not fully perceive or recognize my right to exist, and my rights to autonomy and freedom, but I do.”
***
As a child I adored my father despite the drinking issue because he was so much more functional than my mother. I was very concerned that if I learned too much from her about how to be in the world, I would end up in an even more seriously abusive marriage than hers or as a lunatic bag lady … it seemed to be the logical conclusion of her beliefs. I therefore considered it more useful to learn about the world from him, because he had a job and was not so afraid of everything.
Also, one of my fields is shared with him. This is because of actual interest but also because it appeared to us kids that some type of formation and success in this field was a prerequisite to *personhood.* Both of my brothers are also in it, although the youngest is much less affected by these things, and more by others (he is *twenty* years younger, that’s why).
This is the field in which I retch when I write, ever since my wierd therapy experience. A decent shrink could have helped deal with this. For example, I used to have dreams of killing my father when I wrote in this field, but a friend who did not even know one of his faces was that of an abusive drunk said look, that’s normal and even good.
Anyway, I went to therapy because I wanted to figure out how to deal with my mother, who was dealing with my father, and oddly (but predictably given the alcoholic nature of this family), how to become a person who could feel comfortable and natural in and with this family (I thought my discomfort must have to do with some problem of mine, independent of them).
Talking about this with someone else, it became self-evident – I said it, not the shrink – that it couldn’t be just my mother and I who were messed up, he had to be also, with us taking the blame. That was when I realized that the meaning of his drinking problem was not just that he was out of it half the time and that when he was not, people were worried about the next time he would be. The whole deal affected us all in many more ways.
Now, this would have been a good time to start studying alcoholism, but I got shunted into all of that ACOA B.S. instead. I still need to study actual alcoholism, or alcoholic families that is, and I may start blogging about them.
Anyway, what I realized this morning is that I have trouble writing in my father’s field because, since the realization I had about him in that therapy and then never got to process (the shrink was a lot more excited about the possibility of my also being a sexual abuse victim, so I had to deal with diplomatically defusing that and did not get to deal with my actual problems) – anyway, since the realization about him that I never got to process, I have been sort of disgusted at some parts of the image (his) I introjected and I want to either distance myself from it (change careers) or throw it up.
I woke up this morning, still fuming from the conversation last night, and thought: I hate him. I do not enjoy this and it is going to eat me up, I cannot stand it, but I hate him. I want to quit my job so as to further disengage from everything which is his, thought I. Of course, if all of this were fully true I would be calm with it, but it is inaccurate – just an emotion – and emotions are passing states, not necessarily bedrock reality as my ex-shrink seemed to believe.
What I need to do with my father is basically evacuate his c*** (sorry about the crudeness of this analogy) , and throw up the good parts (yes, even those). I am imaging that the good parts will come up in the form of an interesting African fetish doll, wise and magical. I will place it on my shelf, as I know I will enjoy seeing it, but it will be outside of me.
I already like the idea of this ceremony. In fact I am already doing it. At some point soon I will come upon the African doll I have just called into being. I will bring it home. Come to think of it, I need a ceremony like this for one of my brothers, too.
P.S. Tom – I forgot to say that the methodology for throwing self-doubt out the window also involves declaring onself not guilty. This part is very important. Not guilty of major, permanent flaws. Not guilty of cause of your father’s suffering or of his illness. In my case, not “guilty” of the problems my Reeducators were sure I must have.
As I say, this is a really really important part of the methodology for excising self-doubt by throwing it out the window. For many years I tried to do it without this element, and that is why I failed. You have to say you are not guilty, not even a little bit.
Don’t worry that it may not be 100% true. Any actual responsibility you have will re-present itself in a more useful form.
P.S. What my father has: a chaotic soul held in check by an exo-skeleton of lucidity. This I think *is* the true portrait of an alcoholic – although some of their exo-skeletons are not made of lucidity but of rigidity. This makes them more obvious but also less insidious, easier to defend against.
Odd fact: I recently intuited that one of my deans may also be a discreet alcoholic, or addict / dope fiend of some other type. It would explain some of his behavior and attitude – male chauvinism is one part of these, but it is not all. It would also explain why I was as blind as I was to his fucked-up-ness for as long as I was. And his exo-skeleton is of the “lucid” type, not the (more obviously) rigid type.
“Not guilty.” Aha. Thanks. I’m trying it that way and it’s working much better.
In fact yesterday when I was trying to wrestle self doubt out the window, my other hand on the steering wheel, a feeling of guilt was exactly what I was filled with. That was why I was feeling the need of some kind of magic. (On paper, the guilt had nothing directly to do with my father. It was triggered by an avalanche of misunderstanding in the tense atmosphere of a right-wing blog. Nevertheless.)
Good. Glad I remembered how key that is.
Some of the Al-Anon sentences are good on this issue, although I prefer “not guilty” tout court.
What they point out, when they’re on point, is:
1. “you didn’t cause it, can’t control it, and can’t cure it” (it being alcoholism or in this case the tense atmosphere of bloglandia … which I am sure is alcohol driven in part), and
2. you can be imperfect, or make errors, but still not be GUILTY.
These are two things I picked up in my second much briefer Al-Anon stint. Another thing was that everyone with alcoholic relatives seems to suffer from free-floating guilt/shame that is easily triggered and makes them manipulable through it. Everyone feels flawed somehow and feels that if they could de-flaw themselves, or could have done so, everything would be or would have been better.
But the guilt is not actually attached to a crime, and there is no actual flaw. It is important therefore to recognize the guilt as an epiphenomenon of the alcohol thing and feel free to just let it pass by, dump it, whatever, not let it attach to us.