outer-jessie's Diaryland Diary

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The shape of my distaste

I need to tell you something: My heart is broken in a million different places. I am damaged and hurt and in pain all over, from the inside. I've been systematically dropping pieces of myself like bread crumbs along my path. Rather than a process of building, getting the education and experience to become a scholar, an educator, a wife and a "mother", and a home owner and a bill payer and a grown-up, has been a process of stripping away.

I don't mourn for my youth, not in the least, well other than the part where other younger people didn't think of me as old. I would not go back nor try to do it a different way. That's what other people are for. That's their way; this is my way. But is it?

When you are a child, you are infinite. You can open your eyes and see the world in any color you like. You can learn about everything, you can shun anything. You can be anything; you can be anyone. You are limitless with possibility. You don't have to choose. You can be a different person today than you were yesterday. You are nothing yet so you are everything.

Every day, we are "guided". Every day we are "molded". Every day of our lives we've been shaped into something, someone's ideal, bit by bit. At first it's gentle, because you're loved; your parents want you to be your own person, but not hit your sister or scream in public. As you get older, you are labeled and sorted and boxed. You're a good reader; you're a bad speller; you're analytical and you should be a scientist; you're argumentative and you should a be a lawyer; you're kind and you should be a bleeding-heart liberal. You are trimmed to fit the box.

Every year, every choice, a new box, a smaller box. You're a vegetarian democrat from the Northwest running a non-profit. You're a baptist dentist mother of two. You're an entry-level professional with a bum leg who plays poker on the weekends. You have an identity comprised of twenty or a hundred or a thousand smaller identities, and you're proud of it. But each of your identities is a shape you have to fit into. Your sense of self has been whittled down to labels, which you put on and take off the fragile and distorted skeleton that used to be your possibilities.

Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe you didn't want to be the thug that would have evolved from the little boy whose parents let him pee on the front lawn. Maybe you wouldn't have enjoyed being the spelling bee prodigy you might have been if you hadn't been prepped to be an artist instead. Maybe your sense of fashion and your light-heartedness about life wouldn't have developed if you'd chosen a business major over a French major, or if you'd been raised Christian instead of Jewish, of if you'd been sent to bed without dessert instead of spanked. Maybe.

But maybe I wanted some of those pieces I had to give away. Couldn't I have been an adult if the magic I had as a kid had stayed with me? Couldn't I have studied science and been a creative writer and have had a vision quest and learned how to play chess? I have come to think, been trained to think, that the way I think is natural, that I chose it, that I have reached the upper echelons of intelligence by believing in evolution and global warming and social justice; by eschewing dogma and nepotism and faith; by being rational, systematic, logical, unbiased. I reject this.

Structures. So many structures built to contain us, almost invisible but terribly strong. Structures that we ourselves composed to help us make sense of who we are and what we're supposed to do. They are something to define ourselves against, a code: I am this, I am not this; I am these but not those plus a little of this. And that is ok. But it limits not just what you are but what you think. I miss being able to think about everything, instead of choosing some thoughts over others. And not only thoughts, but sensory experiences, perceptions, emotions, and intuitions. I want to inhabit the world like a child does, implicitly accepting every level of experience, not just because there is bound to be some scientific justification for how each level contributes to our understanding of the experience, but because I just do.

There's a connection here, but I've rambled. It takes a long time to make a point. Or maybe it doesn't, I don't know. I'm writing a dissertation.

And my dissertation is my self. This is the problem. I've been tasked to look at what happened in my classroom from one particular direction. And I can't. I know you will say, just do it from this one direction for your dissertation, then you can look at the rest of it later on. But I can't. As soon as I write it down as a one-dimensional process, as soon as I write down anything, I will have cut away part of what makes it whole. And part of what makes me whole. How have I come to identify so much with my own work? It's become an impossible task...I am literally morally opposed to finishing my dissertation. That's quite a writing block you've got there.

1:45 p.m. - 2011-02-04

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