Clarifying even more: you’re an American, and you have a Ph.D., and you speak Spanish, and we hate all of that, and it hurts us personally, and you need to try to understand that. THIS was the message and I, sincere to a fault, tried to understand it, allow for it, heal it. In the process, I nearly destroyed myself, and I lost my own connection to French which meant a whole part of my being. It was a terrible error, taking all of this so seriously. But this is what snapped in me that night six weeks or so ago, and I am still trying to understand it. I, too, want to live. It seems as though to live, I can’t coddle that poor-me discourse any more.
I’ve been so depressed since December 21 and it has to do with that event and my reaction to it, and then the things my reaction meant. I’ve got so many layers of trauma and ultimately it comes down to things I don’t want to type: not respecting myself as a person, because my mother couldn’t, and feeling ashamed because I can’t. The trauma of my first education, and Reeducation, and of here. I do not want to step out into the world because, I suspect, of shame. In fact, I think I have so much shame from the things that happened and were said that I can barely write the word. I can say what happened but not name the state of mind it puts me in.
Here, they didn’t mean all that, they just meant “I want your line for something and someone else, and I don’t seem to be able to get it, so I will marshal who I can and do what I can to keep you down.” And it only came from a certain quarter. And I couldn’t do anything about it and tried not only to rise above but to mollify, when I should have fought or at least maintained some level of self-respect. But I didn’t, I just felt terrible, Vallejo’s ‘pozo de culpa’. This was only fron a certain quarter and only a few people were deployed to do the work, but it was constant enough and consistent tnough that it worked. I became terrified of the whole town because these people presented themselves as exemplary of it.
I don’t do enough self-care but I should not also beat myself up about that. The days when I am able to not scream at myself, and feel easy doing things in the order I want to, seem so free. I have only lived that way a few years of my life, 1981-85 and then 1990-1991, I think, and I managed to recapture that some days last semester (and there have always been a few days of it here and there, or a few hours).
Trauma. Shame. Lack of self-respect. Lack of belief in self. The idea that I am lying if I think I have any expertise.
Having been gotten to question myself so that I will undermine myself. All these problems of mine are so old.
Anyway the question is what blocks me and it’s self-doubt and lack of self-belief, but also lack of self-respect and beyond that, shame. It’s the shame in particular that makes me not want to raise my head. So that’s what I have to fight, or stop giving power to.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 