One of the main problems I have is trying to balance the juxtaposition of then and now. Some of the things that happened were so grim that they are difficult to bury, keep occupied/tame/ in the closet or whatever, so I have to deal with them often, sometimes every day, sometimes all day. The other big problem is that they were such everyday occurrences, the creation of these skeletons, that everything reminds me of them. I’ve always seen things symbolically, and then I learned in therapy to make connections from things that happen now to things that happened then (especially things that triggered panic attacks), so that I could at least identify them and at least – if not completely control them*, not let them completely control me. I do pretty well at that most of the time I think. A lot of the time, I actually enjoy the mental/emotional/social mathematics that I have to keep up with to function. It only gets really bad when I get too close to home, geographically or otherwise. I have a busy, interesting, active helpful life for the most part. I try to keep my public troubles small and still be pretty honest. That’s important to me. I wish I were better at it and not so hard on those who are worse. It’s hard to maintain that inner self and outer self, that past that has scarred me as noticeably as a knife or a sharp rock. I always feel so hurt when people refer to me (or others) as broken, and several people have, but I know a big part of my hurt is that I know it’s true. I never had a seconds’ chance to be whole or normal. It was not in my stars. I know that it was in my stars to be many OTHER things, and so many of them good and satisfying and exciting. But I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to feel these things and not have this brutalized little girl watching it all and consulting the committee before allowing herself to feel the goodness. Instead of being able to first snoopy-dance around and feel the revelation to have to ask ‘have I earned this? Will I fail?’ and of course, feeling immediately sickeningly guilty in the next second for feeling so good when so many others have nothing, or the horrors that are worse than nothing, and those things and voices and opinions whir inside my head constantly as I proceed. I worry very much that we are all like this and feel frighteningly un-paranoid in my concern. It seems to me that we’re all like this. What else can I do to help? I want to help other broken people find and use their pieces. For me, the saving grace is that the original little girl, if never whole, at least had some fairly practical pieces. One of those being a kid who knew deep down that one day she could get to a place where she could look back and say ‘this is what I wanted, needed and deserved when I was 8 and my conscience feels UTTERLY ok with counting my own inner 8 year-old amongst the other kids (ages 0 – 104)I give a huge chunk of my life to! ’ and then grabbing my god-damned snoopy dance while I can, guilt-be-damned.
One of the reasons I think I identify with robots is that the amount of effort I have to put out to achieve anything, much less all that I do, is kind of sick, in my opinion. I know that. I see that. People often comment on it in nice ways, and I tell them the truth: that if I didn’t do all of this, I’d go nuts. I try to make it sound like a joke. Those of you who know me have seen this before - especially poor SDB and Chris. When I crash, I crash as hard as I worked. It’s ugly, and I try to keep it as brief as possible. And there’s the cold fact that machinery wears out. However, the up-side of it is that it is the only sure-fire therapy for me. It is truly occupational therapy. It also satisfies me in other extremely necessary ways. It gets me appreciation, sometimes even respect and admiration, and a lot of the time, it helps pay the bills. I blog in the in-between places, and treasure my mail at the lowest points. People generally forgive me and treat me well when I crash. Then as soon as I’m up again, I keep going. It’s worth it all for the snoopy dances. The part of me that needs to explain and be forgiven is comforted by helping others’ get their great pumpkin waltz on. I won’t be dissatisfied if I die from the effort of trying to stay sane, be useful and enjoy life, or if I never do anything more than that with my life.
It may not be a perfect – or even a great system, but I’m still here. And despite the whispering, clamoring and clawing of the memories***, and the fact that the crash times come harder and faster – and last longer these days, there are still the ‘beyond snoopy dance’ moments. The rarest moments when the clouds break or the rain FINALLY falls or you reach a gentle state of peace and comfort, and for maybe one second (or less, but thank god(ess[es) they SEEM longer – and are easily recalled…) the past is quiet, the future is blind possibility and you are just here and feeling sun or rain.
I was gifted with one of those ‘letting myself feel good’ moments yesterday. There was sad news in my e this week, some of the saddest kind, the death of a friend who I’d just seen and hugged last weekend. When I opened the next letter someone had sent the following email. I will post it anonymously to cover their ‘might-be-embarassed’ factor (which I DEEPLY and sympathetically respect) and yet share and thank them publicly. Great thoughts, great writing, FANTASTIC timing, fantastic friend. May you all at least one such friend in your lives and may I sometimes be one of them.
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email from “chaucer”:
i wanted to do something "nice" for the world today -- and now it's 2am TOMORROW...so i thought "maybe sam will take this late-night-value-meal-stab-at-niceness."

so here's to you right now. at this moment, you are the one i'm trying to hug back.

you are my rushmore. no, it's more than that, it's deeper than that. you're my my solar eclipse, and also that deeply grey, rainy sky in mid-september. you're the wind against my west-bound train when i'm restless and lonely. you're the white paper bird on my shoulder, the oxygen which permeates the dense emerald forests of west virginia, the pulse of the atlantic as it beats tirelessly against the rocky coasts of maine. you ARE my rushmore, but you're also my dry gloves in february after the tips of my fingers turn pink. you're my morphine, my dream 45' collection, my hypnosis. you're the best beaten-up paperback novel i ever read, the most eerie melody ever played on a harp, you're the lennon, the mccartney, AND the harrison to my ringo. you're the ghost that sweeps through my house some nights, bringing both chills and company when I'm up late drinking coffee and watching slasher marathons on the television. when i need sunshine, you beam yellow and white and golden bursts that dance around my face and draw me to the sky. you are an original, elusive, unpredictable and multi-faceted spirit which can be neither tamed nor understood, a very strange bird indeed, but one which, were someone able to keep, would provide unmeasurable happiness (chris feels this at times, i'll bet) and "childlike wonder..." no, the ordinary birds can only dream of lives of such spectacle. you are sam.

*tips hat*
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Happy birfday to me! *snif! siggghhhh!** Thank you so much. Friends like you make me want to TRY to be this person.
-s


*it seems to me that we all know that you can’t control ANYthing, not one single thing really.

**Rogers’ grandma.

***ugh, that made me think of the boxes in the attic in ‘The Hunger’!