Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize.
Having just read the Mimi Smartypants blog--not for the first time, but for the first time while not in the "I refuse to be impressed by anything, no matter how good it is, because if I admit to being impressed, then you know something about what I value and can use that information to hurt me" mindset which has hampered me since infancy. (Literally, since infancy. I can remember being maybe five and trying to be all hip and blase--though of course at five I could have defined neither "hip" nor "blase". At least, I don't think I could have. I did have a penchant for big words, even at that age, but mostly it just caused people to laugh at me)...
Let me start that sentence again.
Having just read the Mimi Smartypants blog, I realize that I have exposed several of my own personal weaknesses within this blog. First of all: I have a boring life. Oh, my past is just chock-full of tasty tidbits; it's the present that could put a meth-head to sleep. As I believe I've stated before, my current life consists of public transportation, work in a stifling environment, the continuing drama of my house, and my relationship with LJ. Though some or all of these can occasionally make for a good story, for the most part they, and by extension my life, are boring as hell.
Secondly: The aforementioned stance--my overwhelming guardedness, refusal to reveal anything REAL about myself--has sorta outlived its usefulness.
"Wait," I hear someone saying. It's my one reader, the only one who ISN'T interested in canine-human sex. (By the way: the Bestiality Buddies account for 3 out of the last 20 accesses to this page; however, they're in danger of being eclipsed by those who search for "sick of Dale Jr." Seriously.) "Wait," says my sole non-bestial, non-NASCAR reader.
"You said you were GUARDED? Not REVEALING anything about yourself? Holy crap, woman--we know things about you we never wanted to know in the first place! We probably know more about you than your MOM does!!"
No--well, okay, you DO know more about me than Mom, but there's a good reason for that. But what you know are FACTS, mostly. Facts are nothing. You can know all the facts of a person's life and know absolutely NOTHING about what makes that person who he or she is. I am not sure whether the converse is true--can you know what makes someone who they are, and not know the facts of their existence? Maybe.
I remember at JP's funeral, his brother said something to me about how JP had always loved airplanes and flight. I remember thinking that was something I'd never known about him, a piece of the life he'd had before we knew each other--but that if it came down to what we knew about who JP was--what he believed, what he dreamed of, what he feared most, what he wanted--that I probably knew more than any of his family members. In fact, that's yet-another reason I feel guilty: I didn't speak up for what he wanted to be done when he died. I didn't speak up for the things he'd told me in the middle of the long, dopesick nights. Instead he got exactly the funeral he would have never wanted. (There was a moment I remember--when they were reading the mayor's letter to his dad, expressing "sympathy" in typical government-form-letter tones, where I realized for the first time that JP was absolutely, truly, irrevocably dead; because if there'd been the slightest spark of life in his body, the minute he heard the name "Richard M Daley", he would have sat up in the coffin and bitched up a storm.)
As usual, I digress.
It occurred to me several times Saturday, mostly while walking all over the workplace, building to building, installing the summer computers--it occured to me that I have adopted a less-than-useful strategy for living in the world in the aftermath of what CR did to me. When I came back to Chicago in 1997, I was still very much myself, my out-there, ready-for-anything junkie-girl self. By the time CR had left for good, back in 2002, I was a self-effacing shell, doing anything possible in order to avoid being noticed. I justified this inaction by saying to myself that I was "flying under the radar"--that I was hiding in plain sight, dressing like an "average" person, acting like an "average" person, not stirring the shit, never standing up for myself in public or in private--but inside, still as subversive as ever, still as radical as always, still the girl who fell in love with JP and dreamed of taking over the world.
The problem is: I really AM still that girl. I really AM still subversive, pissed-off, shit-kicking, world-changing...but who on earth would ever know? The point--if it ever WAS a point, if it ever WAS anything but an excuse to do nothing and move silently and unnoticed through a world that had stopped making any sense at all--was to not be noticed BECAUSE I WAS DOING SOMETHING, not because I was embarrassed to be seen, because I was afraid of getting hurt again, because I didn't want to exist anymore. I used to tell CR that there were times I would just think about sinking down to the pavement and weeping til someone picked me up and put me somewhere safe. In part that was because of what he was doing to me; mostly it was because I missed JP. I still miss JP, of course, but the drama of CR's constant betrayals is entirely gone. (And I am eternally grateful for its absence.) But without that drama, I have to deal with the things that aren't so overt and obvious--and one of those things is that I've gotten out of the habit of doing anything, being anything, wanting anything. And I've justified it with the same "reasons" that were so popular in my family: keeping the peace (What peace?), not rocking the boat, being ladylike, not drawing attention to myself.
Well, I WANT to draw attention. Not so much to myself, but to my ideas, the things I believe. I still have those--I've never let them go--I've just silenced them. I am tired, tired, tired of that silence, and I'm ending it--immediately.
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