TOP DOG PRESS
TOP DOG PRESS
A Shape to Hang Things On
by Skian McGuire
I have been thinking a
lot about PTSD, this past year. I went through my own rendition of it the
year I turned 30. With no insurance and not much money, I was pretty much on my
own, so I read books about childhood abuse and made art, and I wrote some
poetry. I had very few memories that could be called linear. Mostly what I had
were pictures in my head that would not go away: an image of black-and-white
tiles, such as might be found on the bathroom floor of a New York city
apartment, spattered with a spray of what I knew was blood. The view from a dark
space near the floor, which I guessed might be under a piece of furniture. A
freeze-frame of my mother on the floor on her hands and knees, glaring at me,
the scattered contents of a kitchen drawer around her. I had one audio memory,
the yelp of a dog in pain. I had feelings of extreme uneasiness when someone
stood on my left side, and I had recurring pain in my left shoulder. I had an
extreme startle response, especially when awakened – I came up from sleep
flailing, and it was not possible for me to sleep in the same room with my
partner. She had to wake me by calling me from where she stood in the doorway. I
had nightmares that apparently translated my feelings into scenarios that were
by no means reality-based – one was set on my mental image of the starship
Enterprise. I had (in the beginning) a horrible fear that I had gone crazy from
grief, at having finally put down my old dog. Then I figured out what was going
on, thanks to an accidental encounter with The Courage to Heal, and the fear
that I’d lost my mind was replaced largely with depression, sometimes
suicidal, so I had that instead. (My childhood abuse was not overtly sexual, but
the mechanics of occluded memory seem to be the same regardless of the type of
trauma. Occluded memory may be a bone of contention in the world of shrinks –
thanks, Elizabeth Loftus, for all your ever-so-helpful help – but I know
beyond any shadow of doubt that it’s real, thanks to some well-defined scars
and absolutely no accompanying memory of how they got there.) So I had a lot of
bits and pieces and feelings and images and symptoms and scars, but no story.
I had good stuff, too. I had my
partner and my dogs and the woods. I had a job that I had to go to, for the rent
I had to pay that was already in arrears (from my period of unemployment while I
went to massage school), so that we could keep a roof over the heads of
ourselves and our animals, who could not accompany us if we got evicted and had
to live with relatives – and these were, in fact, blessings that kept me
anchored to the world. Someone needed me, so I couldn’t just descend into a
black hole of self-absorbed misery and be consumed by it. I had to remain
functional enough to take care of the ones I loved in at least a minimal way,
which was life and death for them (the only shelter they might have gone to was
a kill shelter). I would not allow that; something in me rose to their
necessity, and it was my own salvation. I also had books to read and soon, a
spiritual community that took me in. I withdrew from most social life, and
friends drifted away, but I discovered that in spite of my wretched childhood, I
had roots that were deep and values that were worth keeping from my
working-class upbringing and my Irish-American culture. I had belief in my own
strength and tenacity – at no time did I think I would be destroyed by what
was happening to me, I just despaired that the pain was worth enduring. I had a
lifetime of reading just about everything I could get my hands on, and a spotty
and incomplete but Quality-with-a-capital-Q Seven Sisters education. I had a
vivid imagination and a passion for metaphor. So, I didn’t have a story, but I
had the means of creating one.
For a long time, this troubled me –
that the only story I might possess was the one I created out of the collage of
bits and feelings, and that meant it wasn’t true, it was just something I made
up. I tried to figure out what I did remember, really and truly. I wrote down
the family stories I knew that might have any bearing on what happened to me. I
tried to identify exactly what I was feeling in my body. I wrote all these
things down on little tiny scraps of paper in different colors for the type of
thing they were – memory or feeling or family story. I made a big poster board
and glued all around the edges little pictures of dogs cut out from magazines,
because these were both comforters and protectors and I needed them to save me
from the other things I was gluing down. I wrote on other little scraps of
paper, tiny things with tiny writing, all of them, all the things that I thought
might have happened, but didn’t actually remember – things that the other
scraps added up to. I wrote down the things I was afraid might be true. I glued
little dogs in between all the other things, for extra protection. I still
didn’t have a story. I wondered if I ought to try hypnotherapy in order to
recover whatever might be buried in my subconscious. I decided I didn’t really
want to know; that what I had figured out, if it was true, was plenty bad
enough, and the horrors I was hiding from myself could damn well stay there. I
made more art: a pop-up illustration of a poem made from photocopied WWII
soldiers inhabiting a universe of blood-spattered tiles, with babies cut out
from the ads in women’s magazines scattered about in the path of their guns
and bayonets. I made drawings of the contents of the scattered drawer. I made a
collage of things I remembered – a drawing of the Bronx tenement, more of
those damn tiles, a photo of a black-and-white dog, Hershey wrappers, and many
other things – and glued it onto tiles I sawed out of pressboard. On the other
side, I painted a naked, faceless little girl. I hung the tiles in rows so that
they could be turned and the parts of the girl could be like puzzle pieces mixed
in with the parts of the childhood (it hung suspended so both sides could be
seen). (This art was hung in a show for survivors of domestic abuse in
Portsmouth, NH – I forget the year.) I still didn’t have a story, but I had
metaphor, even if I didn’t understand it -- the naked faceless child and the
puzzle pieces of memory.
Among my reading of that time was a
pair of wonderful memoirs by Mary Clearman Blew, and from her story of a sow and
piglets marooned in a flood during her North Dakota childhood, which nobody else
in her family remembered, I got this:
Mary Clearman Blew, All but the Waltz
I began to realize that it didn’t
really matter what happened. Even if I couldn’t remember the truth of my
childhood, even if all I had was a story I made up out of the whole cloth, what
mattered was what it felt like. The books I read about childhood abuse told me
this, but it wasn’t until I read Mary Clearman Blew that I realized how little
linear memory matters even in the telling of perfectly nice stories. Mary
Karr’s musings on memoir and the discrepancies of memory in her work, The
Liar’s Club (another wonderful book), reinforced this view. It doesn’t
matter if my father was really responsible for my mother’s back injury, it
doesn’t matter if I really witnessed the battering that might have caused it,
the drawing I made of a faceless man in a white shirt and tie dragging an
unconscious faceless woman out of the room was true. I felt that my father had
crippled my mother – or at least, this is what she spent my childhood telling
me. That’s what she wanted me to believe, and I did – it didn’t matter
whether it was true (I suspect not, either literally or figuratively). I had
created a metaphor, and metaphors are always true. They are always the deepest
kind of truth there is.
I spent my childhood and part of my
adulthood reading about disasters, never understanding why they fascinated me
so. In grade school, it was shipwrecks, one of which was the wreck of the Essex
– a whaling vessel, as I recall, stove in by a whale, and the surviving crew
drifted the Pacific in a whaleboat as they ran out of food and water. When one
died, they ate him. When no one died, they drew lots and the one with the
blackball put his head against the gunwale to be shot – or so they said. I
read it as willingness to be the sacrifice that others might live (like Jesus
who died on the cross, as the nuns who taught me catechism might have put it). I
must have been aware at a subconscious level that there might be another story
between the lines of the one the survivors told – I already knew that the
strong can take what they want and make up excuses later. I know now that a ship
at sea, isolated from the rest of the human world, was one way of looking at a
family turned in on itself. A shipwreck can represent devastation in any form.
The wreck of the Essex stuck so vividly in my mind (it was during sixth grade, I
think – just about the time my mother’s abuse ended because I got to be as
tall as she was) because it was the perfect metaphor for what had been happening
to me, which I filed away in some hidden part of my mind where not even I could
find it. What my family was doing to itself, what my mother had done to me, felt
like that. It felt like cannibalism.
In high school, I read about the
Titanic (anyone interested in this as a metaphor should read Connie Willis’
novel, Passage). During and after college, I read about the Civil War,
and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Shoah. I kept reading about the terrible
things humans did to each other – always brutality, never natural disasters
– which kept getting bigger and more terrible. Now I wonder if the disasters I
chose to read about got bigger because the internal pressure of the terrible
things that had happened to me got harder and harder to ignore. I hadn’t
recovered any memories yet, but they were there, coming closer and closer to the
surface. It wasn’t just cannibalism, somewhere in the shadows where I
couldn’t see, it was annihilation. It was the end of the world.
I can look back now and see that a chain of choices I made opened the way for my
childhood abuse to come back, however partially, to my consciousness. I stopped
drinking; I was no longer drowning the nightmares, and during this time, regular
dreams came back, too. (I hadn’t remembered any dreams at all until then,
except the occasional recurring nightmare that ended with me dying.) I started
paying attention to these metaphors created by my subconscious mind, which were
fascinating. I deliberately lost touch with my family, not understanding why I
wanted no contact with my mother but knowing in a deep way that I could not go
on with my life if I had to deal with her. Now I know that some part of me was
making sure I was safe from my abuser. I went to massage school, which was a
very strange choice, because until then, even hugging people had been very
difficult. My repressed Irish-Catholic upbringing had not been conducive to
touchy-feely-ness. (When I reconnected with my sister years later and filled her
in on this period of my life, her reaction to the news that I had learned to do
massage was a reflexive shudder -- “Ewwww!”) Somehow, I got massage in my
head as something I wanted to do; I don’t even know where the idea came from.
I learned massage by working on and being worked on by my classmates, and I
remembered that I had a body. During that time, I also decided that, after years
of being switchable but sticking pretty much to the top role as a matter of
course, I wanted to bottom, and I wanted to bottom hard. I dove in head first.
In roughly the same period, another
thing that happened became a metaphor for me. Every day, I drove past a roadside
pull-out next to the French King Bridge in Gill, and one day, there was a dog
loose there. There were no parked cars that it might belong to, and the nearest
houses were too far away for the dog to have come from one of those. It had to
be stray. The highway was busy and dangerous, and I could not possibly have
passed by without stopping to catch the dog and take it home (it had a collar
and presumably, tags – I don’t think it was purposely dumped.) But the dog
– a cocker spaniel – was extremely skittish. It wouldn’t come near me no
matter how sweetly I called and offered cookies. It wouldn’t come near me when
I sat down and waited. It wouldn’t be fooled by any of the tricks one might
ordinarily use to catch a reluctant dog. It wouldn’t let me get closer than 30
feet. I finally gave up and went home to call the dog officer, who promised to
go out and try to pick the dog up. I hoped she had some trick up her sleeve that
I didn’t.
The next day, the dog was still
there. I tried again; again, no dice. I left all the cookies I had. I went home
and called the dog officer again, who had no better luck than I did. Worried
that the dog was hungry and thirsty, also, the only water being down a steep
ravine, I went back with dog food and a bowl of water, which I left for the dog
I still couldn’t catch. I don’t remember how many days I went back, trying
to catch the dog – three or four, maybe. Until, finally, I went back and the
dog was dead by the side of the road.
I knew exactly why that dog was dead.
I decided I would not be that dog.
I couldn’t go on the way I was; the
weight of what I was hiding from myself – like millions of gallons of icy
seawater pressing against damaged compartments in the hold – couldn’t be
kept back forever. Then, my 17-year-dog finally had to be put to sleep, and the
flood swept in. Metaphor, and more metaphor. Even my old dog was a metaphor, in
his own way – he came to me when I was 13, finally safe from abuse because of
the changes in family circumstance. I realized later that he symbolized safety
for me, sleeping at the foot of my bed, my little nervous watchdog, most of
those 17 years. And now he was gone, safety was gone, the dog guarding the gate
was gone, my childhood itself was finally gone. It was time for my childhood
memories to come back.
Now, all these years later ( I was
30, then; I’m 47 now – must things always happen in 17’s for me?) I had
occasion to witness another persons’ return to childhood trauma – someone I
love but was geographically separated from such that I could not be with her
very often. I gave her what I could, making the drive to sit with her and hold
her and walk with her, bringing her here to walk with me in my healing woods,
listening with the ear of someone who has been through it myself. It wasn’t
very much, but it was what I had. I was going through my own hormonal hell, and
the mechanics of our relationship became clogged by these difficulties so that
the relationship itself became a source of pain. My own childhood trauma was
brought very close to the surface, seeing her pain, remembering what my own felt
like so vividly that it seemed I was feeling it again, with her. It was hell,
but I did not run away. And in the course of it, I thought a lot about the
process of recovering memories of childhood trauma and PTSD as a whole, trying
to come up with a way to understand it.
I don’t think in very linear terms
at the best of times. Things happen in my life, and they’re just shapeless
masses, big confusing tents of feeling and ideas to smother in. I need to get
them off me, get them away from me, to see what they are. I need to find some
form on which to drape them, like a dressmaker’s dummy, and see if they fit
it. I keep coming up with different models, trying and discarding, until finally
I have a shape to hang things on – a metaphor that fits. Something that gives
me the depth view, something I can walk around and consider from many angles.
Something I can grasp, because touch is nearly the only way I can understand
things, the only way I can believe.
Here is the metaphor that came to me,
about PTSD:
I think that, when bad things happen
to us as children, we make a devil’s bargain. We forget the horrible things
that happened to us so that we can get on with the business of childhood,
learning what we need to learn, growing in most of the ways that normal children
grow. (Some children can’t do this, I think, and become the statistics we read
about – the firebugs, the juvenile delinquents, the drug-addicted, the girls
who get pregnant on purpose, the runaways who become prostitutes, the ones so
terribly maimed they re-enact their abuse on ones who are even more helpless.)
There is part of us that can’t grow, can’t go on, and it’s part of us –
we can’t just leave it behind. It’s as if we had a screaming child to carry
around, while the rest of our Selves went on and kept on growing, the screaming
child stayed the same. You can’t get much done with a screaming child in your
arms. Maybe it’s as if we put the screaming child in a wagon to drag around
behind us, where it could fall asleep and stop screaming, and we could stop
being aware of it. We could forget it was ever there at all. And it stayed
there, an invisible burden, slowing us down, getting in our way, but only a
little – just getting between us and real relationships with the people we
love, keeping us from being everything we might otherwise be. It followed along
behind us, an arm’s length away, being rocked to sleep as long as we kept
moving.
Then one day we came to a place of
rest – a place where we had a secure relationship (or three), friends who
loved us, a nice place to live, a job that was secure enough or nurturing enough
an environment where we could finally sit down for a minute and take the load
off. And so the motion comes to a halt. And what happens?
The damned baby wakes up.
Screaming.
Now this would not necessarily be a
problem if everyone else could see the baby, too. They would know that we were
trying to comfort a screaming baby, trying to give it what it needs, and they
would make allowances for us, and help us, or cut us some slack at the very
least. But to everyone else, it’s invisible. We look like we’re crazy. The
din of that screaming baby drowns everything else out and we can’t hardly hear
ourselves think, but nobody else knows it’s there. We’re juggling a
screaming, squirming, kicking, flailing, incredibly loud and needy and obnoxious
baby that is part of ourselves – but only part – and somehow we have to keep
on living our adult lives, still responsible for our choices.
That’s where the crux of the
difficulty is. Children come into the world by no choice of their own and are
entitled to all the care and nurturance that they need, simply because they need
it, and they are not responsible for the conditions of their lives. In the
Catholic church, a child may be baptized but doesn’t become part of the
Communion of the faith until he has reached the age of reason, seven years old.
Until then, he can’t know what is a sin and what isn’t, and therefore
isn’t responsible for what he does. I think, Catholic dogma aside, it’s a
pretty good way of looking at how people grow up and become integrated into the
human community – that children are innocent not because they don’t know the
sins of the world, but because they are incapable of committing them. Without
the knowledge of what constitutes right and wrong, a human is no more
responsible for his actions than a frog is, but once he knows, he knows.
Adam and Eve could never go back to the Garden where everything was provided for
them and God kept them safe from pain and worry.
I called it a devil’s bargain
because what I gained may not have been worth what I lost, when I traded the
entitlements of innocence for the resources of experience. Then again, it might
have been. I think that every curse is also a blessing, just as every virtue is
also a fault, all at the same time, like the Buddhists say – no duality. At
any rate, it’s not as if I had a choice. I think it was a blessing, forgetting
most of the bad things that happened to me until I was old enough to bear the
burden, but it was a blessing bestowed upon me whether I really wanted it or
not. Did Lazarus want to come back from the dead? Nobody asked him. It was his
grieving relatives that begged for the miracle, and Jesus obliged for their
sake. Maybe it’s not for my own sake, ultimately, that events unfolded the way
they did – something to think about. Who do we live for, anyway, since our own
happiness seems largely irrelevant? In practical terms, it doesn’t really
matter.
I put away the terrible things that
happened to me; the wounds healed. The inner wounds healed, too, but like bones
set badly – the way I functioned was affected by the lack of appropriate care
at the time the injuries were inflicted. In emotional terms, I had a limp here,
an incomplete range of motion there. I had places that the memory of pain was
built in to, that I forever had to protect and defend, forever held stiff
against damage, forever armored, just as if the injuries were physical. Ida Rolf
– founder of a school of bodywork formally called Structural Integration but
informally known as Rolfing – believed that every injury affects the whole
body, not just the part that’s hurt. A sprained ankle changes the way a person
walks, changes the way their body interacts with gravity, changes every body
part in the flow of gravity above and below the injury and every part connected
to those parts – like a snag in a sweater, the whole fabric is affected. The
body develops a new configuration to accommodate the injury, and it heals that
way. Later, the damage can be undone only by painful manipulation and
realignment. (In Rolfing, it’s the fascia that’s manipulated to pull
everything into place, and supposedly, they’ve developed gentler techniques in
the years since I learned about it. The old grueling style makes a better
metaphor.) That, I think is what happens when we recover memory of the earlier
trauma – realignment, including the tearing of psychic adhesions so that
function might be regained. Not healing in the original sense, because the old
wounds have healed, for better or worse. Just – realignment. Getting the stuck
places unstuck, however painfully.
Getting that screaming baby unfrozen
in time, now that it’s woken, like Rip Van Winkle, from its long uneasy sleep.
I wasn’t the best caretaker for my
own screaming baby. I hated it, resented it, thought of it as disgusting and
useless and a horrible monster – just exactly (no doubt) as my mother had
thought of me. I did for it what I had to, gave it what care I could,
grudgingly. I didn’t have very much in the way of resources. I didn’t have
anybody to take care of me but myself and my partner, who did what she could, or
at least, what I would let her do. It’s always been hard for me to accept help
– partly, I suppose because I don’t think I deserve it. Partly, because I
can’t let myself be that needy and therefore vulnerable – if they know
what you need, the voice whispers in my ear, they know exactly how to
hurt you. The screaming baby received enough of what it needed (in spite of
my poor care) to get unstuck in time and began to grow again. It stopped
screaming. I thought I was done with it.
Famous last words.
Isn’t it one of those facts of life
(not being very familiar with real live infants, I can’t say for sure) that if
you bring one screaming baby into a room, pretty soon every other baby in
earshot will be screaming, too, out of sympathy?
Hmmm.
Now, I am not a big fan of the
“inner child” metaphor. It seems way too handy a concept for the smugly
overeducated to explain away ordinary narcissistic self-indulgence – “I had
to spend $1000 on a ski weekend in Aspen – my inner child needed to play!”
But for people in PTSD crisis, or for those of us who have spent years trying to
undo the damage of an abusive childhood, it can be useful framework for
understanding.
Daniel Pinkwater, a writer of
children’s books, explained in an interview that he had no children and that
he wrote therefore for the child he had been. The ten-year-old he once was lived
inside him still, and so did the six-year-old, and so did the fifteen-year-old.
I think he’s got something there. It’s not as if there was one inner child
still living inside us: they’re all still there, all the children we were at
every stage of growing up, a line made of an infinite number of points leading
back to conception. (Likewise, I think the person I will be lives inside me
waiting to come into being – all the ages, all the infinitesimally small
transitions in a line leading to my death. Not that it matters here.)
At any rate, in proximity of someone
else’s screaming baby, mine woke up, but now it wasn’t just a wordless cry.
I don’t know if that hurt part of me had been able to make some progress, or I
was just meeting up with an older version of that inner child. It had something
to say, not that I paid any attention to it, and it was yelling so loud I
couldn’t hear anything else. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t pay
attention to my partner whose daily life went on around me like traffic on a
busy road swarming around a breakdown in the middle lane, all the drivers
screaming and honking. I couldn’t pay attention to my friends or my work or my
animals. I couldn’t pay attention to the very friend and lover I was
(intermittently) trying to take care of. What could I do for the damn screaming
thing inside me, anyway? I told it to shut the fuck up.
All the while, the woman whose PTSD I
had come along just in time to witness was doing exactly the opposite of what
I’d done – lavishing care and attention on the hurt part of herself to the
exclusion of nearly everything else in her life. Not that it was any surprise
that she should do so; we were opposites in may ways, exactly complementary to
each other, and now I can’t help but think that it’s not that opposites
attract. It’s that they keep being thrown together by the cackling Fates. And
those old broads have a truly perverted sense of humor.
Then again, if not from the people at
the opposite end of the scale, who do we learn from?
I should point out that I am not a
calm person. I feel things strongly and I can’t keep from showing what I feel.
If I were a dog, I’d be what they call “high-strung.” Not an absolute
freaking maniac like the panting wagging dynamo sitting at my feet as I type
(the laptop sets her off, for some reason) – just high-strung. I can put my
feelings aside for a while to do what needs to be done, but they don’t go away
or get any smaller. It doesn’t do me any good to imagine putting them on a bus
and sending them on their way; the bus just circles the block and drops them off
again. I need a calm person like my partner around me, to anchor and steady me.
I ought to devote myself to learning such a middle way, myself, if only by
acting “as if” I were reasonable and calm and methodical and determined,
hoping that it will rub off. But I don’t know how she does it. I don’t get
very far.
But someone just as extreme as I am,
occupying the position a hundred and eighty degrees away? I see what somebody
like that is doing and I am horrified! worried! offended! saddened! But
maybe...maybe...the extreme I occupy could, well, give a few inches.
Maybe if I edged a little closer to the center, the world wouldn’t end.
So I find myself considering that
screaming child inside me, now with a little distance and perspective, having
finally gotten a mirror to look in and see what was going on from somebody
else’s viewpoint. (I think we have only a limited ability to see ourselves
clearly; we need other human beings to complete our view of ourselves.) I can
hear the words I was unable to make out before, the chorus of “I need! You
promised!” that made my best efforts at being someone else’s caretaker
something less than effective. I can see how the situation I’ve been in this
past year unfortunately mirrored some of the worst aspects of my childhood.
Buttons were pushed. Horrible disastrous landslides of extremely unpleasant
emotions were experienced, and passed on (no one is thanking me for sharing). I
watched the process of someone going through something very much like what I
went through, all those years ago, as her screaming child completely took over
her life (or so it seemed to me). Part of me felt envy – I wish I’d had even
half of those resources. And part of me recognized that her extreme may not have
been any wiser a course than mine was, it’s just what character and
circumstance and available resources made likely. Choice entered into her path
of recovery no more than it did in mine. Now that the screaming child inside me
has stopped for a minute to catch its breath, I can think about the choices in
front of me, for when it starts up yowling again. I don’t think I could ever
just let it take over my life, but maybe I could stop trying to bully it. Maybe
I can let myself have an afternoon of doing nothing but watch TV now and then.
But I believe that the screaming inner child actually needs the outer adult –
the brave and strong and reliable grown-up I have become – in order to find
nurture. I can’t depend only on other people; I still have to depend on
myself, and believe in my own capabilities.
It was hard, getting through the
crisis of remembering childhood abuse, and it was harder for me than it might
have been if I’d had more help and less responsibility. But if every curse is
also a blessing, so is this one. I had to remain functional for the sake of my
loved ones, so I found my own methods of coming to grips with what was happening
to me, ways of wrestling with my demons, to drag out yet another metaphor. I got
myself back – got my Self back – quicker than I might have if I’d had all
the time in the world to be gentle with the injured parts of me – like people
with lower back injuries. Doctors used to prescribe bed rest and muscle
relaxants, and back injuries could linger on, incapacitating their sufferers for
months. Now they make the poor fuckers get up and exercise. It hurts like a
son-of-a-bitch, but it works. Maybe PTSD can be like that, too. And maybe
because I had something real to fear – losing my beloved companions – I had
more courage to face the path ahead of me, as if I had to cross a narrow rickety
bridge over a horrible chasm, and behind me were not the possibly imaginary
demons of my childhood abuse (which I was never sure I didn’t make up, anyway)
but real wolves.
In the last few months I’ve come to
some valuable insights that I might never have gained otherwise. I have always
recognized a great resilience in myself; I can keep on ticking no matter what,
get knocked down and pop right back up, over and over. No matter how awful
things are, I have never felt they would destroy me. I just hated the pain and
wanted it to be over, and the idea that the pain might just keep on coming
forever, like Prometheus getting his liver pecked out only to have it grow back
and get pecked out again – that was enough to make me think of suicide, and
escape. I am incapable of believing in anything I can’t touch and smell and I
don’t trust the evidence of my own senses, I have no faith whatsoever in other
human beings, I despair that any promise anyone makes will ever be kept if I
have to wait more than five minutes for it, but I believe in my own strength. I
can make promises and trust myself to keep them, because I am not afraid of pain
and hard work and difficulty and even failure. (Failure only means trying again
with a bigger hammer.) I have realized for some time that one of the reasons I
get satisfaction out of BDSM play as a masochist is that I am reassured of my
indestructibility; it gives me a sense of triumph. Now I realize, it’s more
than that. When I was in massage school, I realized one day that the agitation I
experienced before a test was not really anxiety at all: it was excitement,
because I was good at it and knew that I would not only pass, I’d get
to show off a little, priding myself on always putting my instructors to sleep.
Now I realize that the exhilaration of a heavy beating is not just endorphins,
not just the triumph of surviving. It shows me how strong I am, how complete my
belief in myself, how shining my own courage. How worthy I am, in all the ways
that count to the animal inside me for whom survival was the only prize that
mattered. I wouldn’t know this at all except for looking in the mirror of
someone who has no such faith, for whom suffering seems to mean destruction. I
thought strength of will was the only kind of strength that mattered. It was a
terrible tragedy for me, to learn as a child that pain and suffering are
commonplace and endurable, but it was also my greatest gift. Getting hurt once
or twice or a handful of times makes you afraid of the next blow, always waiting
for it to come and never knowing where from. Getting hurt over and over again, a
whole childhood’s worth of hurt, makes you learn to absorb the impact, dodge
the blow, cope and move on.
Every curse is also a blessing. Every
virtue is also a fault. Life isn’t fair and yet how often everything comes to
a perfect balance. Everything is random but nothing is coincidence, and in the
end, it’s all a devil’s bargain because only God and the devil can read the
fine print, and God isn’t the one making the pitch.
And I’ve had enough of metaphors
for now.
v v v
As if this wasn’t already long enough, a poem from the time when my childhood was coming back at me:
Years Without Faces Come Back
After all these featureless years, all clean and bland, my
memories are coming back like ants – swarms of small
black things, nothing more than aggravating, bearing away
tiny bits of time, energy, consciousness. But no: this is
no picnic, life, and my memories
are coming back like teenage pranksters, spraypainting
obscenities on my lace-curtain past, leaving me
numb with incomprehension, no recourse and no repair.
But this is nothing random, no petty malice,
and my memories are coming
like brownshirts to shatter everything I own,
and even in the stillness that is left, where my life’s fragments
have been ground beneath jackboot heels,
I have no anger, am only grateful
that they did not come to take me away this time
like the other helpless ones who could not hide,
could never escape
from the remembering
Ó Skian McGuire 2005