Once a week, or maybe it was once a month, I would go have supper with my girlfriend, her father and his girlfriend. ( feels strange using "girlfriend" for a divorced woman in her fifties. Partner? Sounds like they started a landscaping business together or as if they were a trapeze act. Main squeeze? Anyway…) His girlfriend ran her own studio where she taught painting, mostly to people who had never painted before and often had never previously considered themselves artistically inclined. I liked her approach to teaching. It was great to see people in their forties or fifties discover the joy (for lack of a better word) of visual art making. Especially when they found that it was not the kind of joy they had been expecting or hoping for at all. People cried. It was new-agey at times but I'm not one to deny the spiritual dimensions of the artistic experience, I'm just not one to talk about them very much.
We were eating the regular stew/soup whose ingredients varied (being made from vegetables used in the previous days still life class) but that always tasted the same. At least there were usually sausages on the side. The conversation, like it often does when you are with someone else's family, was mostly about people I didn't know or had met once. So I was not usually an active participant in the conversation and just focussed on eating. The father's girlfriend was talking about a younger woman who was a friend of theirs and about her relationship problems. She said something like,"We all know why she has problems with men." I didn't really care why but it felt like a follow up question was expected and that I should do my part for the meal time conversation. Also, she said it with such a conspiratorial tone that my imagination went wild (she has the half developed lifeless body of her stillborn twin protruding from her abdomen?). So I asked why. The answer was apparently very obvious, judging by her tone of voice. "Because she's never gotten along with her father."
Was it the tone? Was it because it felt like I was being taught something that she thought I should have already learned by that point? Or did it just ring false? I said "How do you know that's why?" And may I say I didn't say this with challenge or even that much disagreement in my voice but with just enough doubt to make it known that I may not of the same school on this topic. She looked at me like a child who had buttoned his coat wrong, whose toque was falling down over his eyes. I'd made a nice effort to dress myself but I still had a long way to go to getting it right. She explained to me how everything we do, everything we think, how all our interactions with others, our problems and weaknesses are all a result of our relationship with our parents and our childhood experiences. Of course she was not the first person I had met who believed this. Probably most people believe this. It's on tv all day long and while not everyone goes around talking about it, just about everyone would say they agree with this view. But something about that conversation maybe me think for the first time "really?"
It sometimes happens that in a conversation something will be said that strikes me as especially wrong. I don't mean some idiotic opinion that is easily dismissed as pure crap. I mean something deeper that I want to disagree with but I realize that I can't reasonably argue against. I can't articulate my reasons for disagreeing so I file it away thinking that someday I'm going to be able to explain why this pisses me off so much. Of corse usually by the time I can explain my views with the level of eloquence I require of myself the conversation is long over and I'm forced to store it away until I, one day, by good fortune find myself in a similar conversation. Ah ha! This time I've got it! Wham-0! That's why you are wrong! Sometimes it takes years. It's rarely satisfying.
Seeing as I'm rarely in a conversation of any depth these days - heck, I go days without being in anything that rises above a verbal transaction - this will be my outlet.
The idea that we are all merely the sum of our slights, emotional injuries, mini-tragedies, and traumas is all pervasive. From the most dimwitted who barely reach the level of intellectual capacity to engage in self-reflection to people who I like and would consider smart, view themselves in this way. They all engage in this tired, superficial, self-psychoanylisis that passes for an "examined life" these days. Every personality trait, or tendency can be connected back to some childhood event or flaw in their parents childrearing skills. If not, give them a minute I'm sure they can find some deeply buried trauma that is at the root of some current behavior or another. Even when it's not so clear cut as "this happened and now I'm like this", I'm sure anyone reading this has established a loose narrative in their minds about how they were shaped and molded that adheres to this way of thinking about how we become who we are. I've thought this way before, as well. It's such an accepted way of explaining ourselves that I doubt many people are even aware that they are choosing a way of seeing themselves rather than just describing the laws of nature.
Of course it's hard to reject this outright. If you were kidnapped by a stranger and locked in a cellar for two years when you were eight, then attributing your fear of strangers and discomfort with confined spaces to this seems like a logical and even important link to make. It's not always wrong. Here's what bothers me about the "shaped by tragedy" storyline that we buy into. First, our lives are not stories. They don't follow a narrative arch with early events setting up later plot twists culminating in either a cathartic, see the light moment where suddenly it all becomes clear, things are corrected and we move forward as better people, or in a tragic and inevitable crash, and subsequent rise from the ashes. The first narrative is well represented by the "I'm glad all these bad things happened to because it made me the person I am today. And I love myself." crowd. The second plot variation can be seen in something that seemed common when I was around 20 years old and that I'm sure it continues unabated, and that is the people who become addicted to something, in the case of those around me it was heroin, for three or four months, hit "bottom", go to rehab, move back home for a couple of months, and once "recovered", triumphantly return relatively unscathed but wearing a new, attractive, yet unearned, world weariness or, even worse, wisdom. I survived something. I've paid my dues. Now I have a darkly interesting story to tell to my new boyfriends/girlfriends.
Secondly, what's the point? Is it to provide cover? An excuse? Does it give you a comforting constant to cling to? A truth that grounds you? My relationships always end the same, sad way. It must be because I hate my father. It couldn't be because I'm sometimes an asshole or ,even simpler and more disappointingly dull, that relationships are really hard. If you do connect some problem to a distant cause, well, then what? While understanding a problem can help fix it, knowing the cause doesn't necessarily have the same benefit. If the cause is something that happened, well it's something that happened. It can't be un-happened. You have a leak in your ceiling. You search tirelessly for days to find the crack that is letting the water seep in and drip onto your floor. You find it. However, your ceiling is a thousand feet high. You've wasted your time. Just find the spot on the carpet and put a pot on it.
I'm not against self-reflection. Not at all. I feel I try very hard to understand myself. I know my strengths and weaknesses and approach life accordingly. Somethings about myself I have been able to change or at least move into the background. I have spent innumerable hours thinking about where I've gone wrong in my life as well as about what I should keep focused on in order to maintain a satisfactory level of happiness. But I refuse to play the connect the dots game or to order my life into a grand narrative (which doesn't bode well for someone hoping to write). Example:I seem to be afraid of fully engaging in the things I am most passionate about partly for fear of rejection but more so because I might realize that I'm not as good as think I am. That I'm just ok. Why? I don't know exactly. But I'm aware of the problem and I'm trying to overcome it. Now if I could attribute this to some scarring event, perhaps being cruelly humiliated by an authority figure when I was in a very vulnerable state, that would help me how exactly? Is any amount of energy wisely used searching out this dark hidden origin?
Lastly, isn't it just a boring way to see life? You often hear people posit that the only way we can understand our lives or ourselves is by creating narratives that explain and provide structure. We need to see ourselves as characters in a developing story to make sense of where we've been and where we're going. But this often leads to the expectation that our lives will follow a narrative path. We end up forcing tidy resolutions, climaxes in the action, conflict, retroactive meaning and a clear arch into the future. Not surprisingly people need preformed narratives to fill the gaps, give reason to random events, and make up for their lack of imagination. This is where these alluringly simple explanations fit, explaining the past and lighting a path towards the future. But putting everything into a neat little row seems dull and not an accurate reflection of the swirling mass of experience, sensation, and memories that life really is.
Letting everything float around unformed (or tentatively formed) in our minds provides us with the most possibilities. You can put it together one way but always maintain the flexibility to reshuffle when necessary. You don't get stuck living your life in a less than ideal way just because this is the story and you are a player fulfilling a role. I'm always dismayed when someone I've known for awhile refers me to something I said - likely with the full force of my conviction at the time - that I now seem to be contradicting. It's perhaps supposed to embarrass me that I've betrayed my younger self? I'm not sure, but if you still firmly stand by all the crap you said ten years ago, well then, god help you. You should remain malleable. Not only is the future malleable but so is the past.
This why I don't like taking photographs. I'd rather be doing things than recording things. Most people, I think, don't like the jumbled memories and prefer a clear documentation, a focussed representation of the past. So they need to be constantly taking pictures to stand in for the memories. But a thousand disparate images and impressions of something is a far better representation than a picture of a single moment. I guess I'm trying to say that knowing what and where all the elements that form you are is a rich enough understanding without forcing connections like "I eat a lot of cake because my mother thought she was fat."
So that's what I've come up with, speaking of unformed masses. A bit of a ramble, sorry. I'm sure if I've gotten my point across or if there is a point. Or if the point was worth all that typing… well, was it?
