coldhearted scientist وداد

Do you think blogs are over? Some of the ones that existed when I started in 2006, are still going, but many of those I used to read are gone — and so many have become so quasi-professional, so official. I have thought of stopping sometimes, but really what I would like is to get back to posting every day.

This was a poetry blog that became a therapeutic and political blog, and then an academic one. Mostly, though, it is therapeutic. I started seeking therapy for what I later learned was a form of child abuse when I was 17. I had thought about it before, obviously, but not been in a position to seek.

About ten years after that I had a psychoanalyst in Brazil — that is to say, I interviewed one, tried her out, before deciding that cultural differences and extreme Freudianism meant she was not the one for me. I did tell her, though, that I had worked hard as a child, knowing I was liable to pick up traits from each parent, to discern which traits of each I wanted to emulate and which I must avoid absorbing if I wished to survive.

She said, what about thinking less about other people you might want to resemble, and more about resembling yourself? I said I was doing that in daily life, but also wanted to understand who and what I was also imitating, so as to cast off some patterns that were inhibiting my doing what she recommended.

I was thinking about this now. More and more I can see what I imitated, it is endless. But it does not really deeper analysis than it has had, and now is the time to take up the Brazilian analyst’s advice. That is the reason I am nostalgic for northern California now, the place where I was doing that earlier in life, before I had even met that analyst.

One of my students says that the typical Louisiana woman is entangled in an extended family and with a boyfriend or husband who also limits her, and does not know what she wants to do. I realized: that was the person Reeducation wanted me to be, or to become.

Axé.