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october 24, 2000."What's wrong?" - conversation with dirk, last night I don't like being an adult. I don't like it one bit. I will not claim that I have lived my life in a hearty and decisive fashion. On the contrary, it is clear that I have been very pampered in my short existence. I have not had to shoulder the burden of constant food preparation. Very rarely have I been called upon to tend to the hygiene of my bathroom. Although I have worked hard in my all-too-brief summers, my contribution to my own university education has been about a quarter of the required cabbage. I have raised laziness to a virtue, inactivity to a vocation. And now that I have my own kitchen, my own bathroom, my own husband and my own cat (well, kind of), I have a new appreciation of the amount of time I have wasted over the years while others took care of me. Now that I am my own responsibility in more than an abstract way, I wonder at the life energy that others expounded to shelter me. I mean, talk about your middle class oblivion. But pushing guilt & indolence aside for the moment, I have recently realized how hard I made my life by moving away from all my support networks. With adulthood comes an inevitable feeling of isolation, or at least it does in this culture. But I have managed to make the whole bloody mess even more drawn out & bitter by piling all of my stresses on top of one another. Getting married? Oh, that's not a big deal when you really love someone. Training for a lifelong career? Easy as pie. Moving halfway across the country? What a grand adventure. Keeping a house of your own? Larks. Ha. I can't believe I was so very stupid as to think that every big thing would be an easy thing. In the last two months I have felt so bone-deep depressed that I despaired of ever again feeling competent and engaged with the world. And with my usual tendencies towards the dramatic gesture, I wondered neurotically if it was the result of my marriage. Had I made the wrong choice? Could my problems be solved by an obsessive analysis of our relationship? Forest for the trees. That's all it was. I picked on the flashiest thing in my life and tried to make it the root of all my joys and sorrows. That never works. Yesterday I did a writing exercise that was cut short by the cat destroying the screen door. But in those nine minutes, I'd poured most of my current anger and fear onto the loose-leaf page in spiky black ink. And when I had properly chastised the cat, I went back to look at what I had written. "I have failed," I wrote, "and I hate failure." So I sat down & wrote a list of the things I saw as failures. It was a long list, with about 20 different points. Depressing. So I wrote out a list of my successes. It was four items long. "Attending all my classes, handing in all my assignments, regular church attendance and minimal food spoilage." What does this prove? That I've been wallowing in my own perceived incompetence. That I've closed my eyes to the many causes of stress I have visited upon myself in my search for the easy cleansing answer. And that I am obsessively hung up on doing everything right the first time, regardless of circumstance or training. It's like the year that I put myself through Purgatory, because I thought I needed to suffer for hurting Alexi. I spent a year reducing my own self-confidence to rubble every time it was rebuilt. And where did that get me? Well. Nowhere. It produced a lot of neurosis when I began to date the Boy and completely undermined my confidence in the relationship. But it went away. And I don't believe Alexi is any better for my year of psychological self-scourging. Which is the lesson for today. No one has to be miserable just because they feel they should. The best way to fight the darkness is right action. The best fuel for that machine is hope. My cynicism and despair is cheap, requires little tending and runs forever. All it requires is my soul. And having regained my soul so recently, I'd like to see what I can do with it. |
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