Rumpus Room

A day.

Then another.

Then a year.

Then twenty-nine years.

It's all one moment. Ah.

I forgot how much I love this space, the blog. I love to be able to be. I think of you. I have thought of you often. I must clarify that when I say you I mean you, who is reading now. I don't know who you are, unless you tell me later. Right now, as you are reading, you are anonymous. I guess that would make me a sort of exhibitionist. So it is.

I have written about you before. I think in a way nothing I have ever thought or said was ever entirely forgetful of you. I am mindful of you always. Many time you have been a target of my rage. Other times you have been a best friend or lover that I write to longingly, but still I secure my futility by choice of this sterile medium. I maintain some control, to avoid being overwhelmed or drawn out into humiliation. The internet.

Even so, the internet is just as connective as it is dissociative. I think my emphasis on the distance between us it imposes has been a simple lens skew. A bias.

This brings me to the concept that I have been mulling on for some time, the meat of my thought that last few days. Oppositionalism. Compulsive contradiction. Much of my life I have been aware of how it seems people always contradict me. In more recent years I've begun to consider that it is something I do. I look at the world and perceive resistance. I expect it. And this is frustrating. Infuriating.

Since I've been married now for two years, the concept has become blindingly real to me. It seems to me that every time I go one way or another, my wife will be skeptical at best, angrily resistant at worst. And to be fair, I have watched myself react to her in like form. And it boggles my mind. This has been my experience, and I have been resistant to it.

My friends had a baby and my wife and I visited them in the hospital that day. While walking back to our car in the parking garage afterward, a interesting thought occurred to me. What if I have been perceiving all this opposition around me because I refuse to accept it. All the thoughts of how we always seem so polarized from one another, even though we obviously share so much in experience flashed in my mind. Why can't we seem to share compassion for one another when we have walked the very same paths and felt the same ways? Then, in that moment, I saw myself. A staunch determination to resist this reality on the face of my inner man.  And thus I see through that lens, and my ability to relate to any person completely sabotaged because I desire to relate to that which refuses to be related to. I demand for people to relate to my protest, and when they oblige I am met with protest, rejection! I see my futility laid bare, working from within to oppress me under my own once blinded eyes, that now see!

So, I see the world and it's oppositional bent. Perhaps there are truly are a million others who really are expecting rejection. But now I see me in the equation and that I no longer need to abide by the agreement. If I refuse to reject, or more accurately, choose to love and accept, then I undermine and sabotage the system of oppression. I do recall the befuddling effect of those who have loved me in spite of my demand to see their own ugliness in hopes that it would soothe my own. It made me feel exposed. It made me feel scared and cornered. I felt as though that love was making look at myself, because my certainty that all others were exactly as helpless and feral as me was tossed into question.

Truly unpleasant in those moments, even so I have been imparted something thus. I was given the seed that bore fruit while I was walking out of the hospital. It is power. What I believe changes what I see, and what I see changed what I see! I reckon my expectation (in reality it was more of a demand) to be opposed was sourced in my own opposition to rejection that I had experienced. This comes to a point at forgiveness of sin committed against me that inspired me to sin according to the message about me those injustices spoke.

Well this just got boring. I mean not really. not to me. oops. I felt as though it was boring to you, and then I wrongly thought it must be boring. It's not. I care about what I'm thinking about. This is my life. This is my revelation. It is justified in the fact that it is enriching someones life, that is my life. If it gets someone else happy then bonus. Truly, this is more for me to understand my own life than it is to entertain some reader or enlighten anyone. I would be overjoyed to learn that my rant has helped someone in any way, but if that was my reason for writing then I suppose I would have quit long before now. It's just nice to have a place where I can assert my thoughts, and not have to worry that someone is gonna throw something at me or do something else that is mean.

Anyhow, if you do think this is boring or self indulgent then by all means go find something that makes you feel alive. In light of what I am learning, I say in my heart: It's okay.

Groping in the Dark

This blog has always been a place for me to write the things on my heart, and shake the shame the keeps them hidden. An outlet. I put this blog on the internet, in true form to my indirect compulsion to be found out. And of course the people that I wanted to find out, the people that would bring the shame that I expected, found out. And then what?

I hid. I broke down and hid. And who am I writing to now? To say that I'm writing for the sake of myself would be a lie, because I would write that somewhere no one would read it. I guess I'm writing this to the people that have shamed me.

Why?

To make another appeal to be understood? By those that have declared their utter disgust and rejection at my honest thoughts? Perhaps. But why would I do that? One answer is that I feel compelled to punish myself by begging for understanding from those I know will never give it to me. A deeper, but not contrary answer is that I want it! I need approval. I need affirmation. But why from them? Those that haven't got any understanding or affirmation to give?

Because I'm reliving the first offense. The one that I was told not to talk about. I never had any sympathy for those people who got raped or abused in some other way and never told because they were threatened by the offender.  Now I do.

The reason I have compassion for them now is that I understand. I understand having my survival instincts block out my memories. Pinned down under my own desire for love and safety. I still long for these things, pine for them. Need them. But now, (what seems like always) I reach for them, but my arms are tied by fear.

And here I am writing again, to an audience that will only give me echoes of my painful past. I hear the words of affirmation from people and they roll through me like water down a water slide. The words of disapproval, they are the ones that sink deep into my gaping wound. The one I can't see. The one I can never talk about. The one that made me deaf and dumb.

So I grope in the dark trying to find the light switch, but I fear I may just have to cry out, because I feel helpless. I have to risk the threats made to me when I was too young to speak. God help me.