Maybe physiology isn't the right word for it, so much as 'maturity', but since the jury's out on what percentage of maturity comes from genes and what percent comes from the environment, I'll just call it what I want for now.
I was thinking about how slowly I grew up and how being way behind my peers in maturity caused certain kinds of change to be inconceivable. I mean, in high school - right up to my junior year, at least - I still thought it was perfectly acceptable to stalk a guy junior-high-style. Sitting at the park outside his house on weekends, having a picnic. Going to band early to creepily stand around, listening to him practice. Faking a photoshoot for art class just to have an excuse to take a picture of him. And, faced with him, straight out, asking me who I have a crush on? Lying. Lying right to his face, because the concept of telling a boy that I liked him, at the age of sixteen even, was flat-out unimaginable.
This was clearly behind the curve for my age group. Everyone else had already figured out the concept of subtlety, that always having an excuse to be near someone, no matter how valid or proveable the excuse may be, still suggests to that person that something weird is going on, because that person isn't an idiot.
Everyone else had also already figured out that crushes were not the be-all-end-all of life and that it was okay to air them out in the open - that it was a risk worth taking.
I had not figured this out. I didn't figure it out until college. And as much as I sat around in high school, writing emo entries in my diary 'whyyy doesn't anybody lovvvve me... what can i dooo about it... i've tried eeeverything...' I couldn't change then - couldn't dooo anything about it - because I couldn't see the source of the problem. I had no other viewpoint to compare myself to.
I mean, I was the girl whose application essay for admittance into fucking Reed College was about an experience I had watching people smoke pot and feeling like it was wrong and weird. Reed College! Pot was wrong and weird! It was really dramatic, too, like that Coke can bong had altered my life in an intractable way. I didn't know my audience, obviously.
It's like when I was too old to admit here and was listening to the song 'With a Little Help From My Friends', when the line 'I get high with a little help from my friends' came up. I asked my mom, "Do they mean... drugs?"
"Yeah," she said.
"Wait, the Beatles did drugs??" I gasped.
My mom had to leave the room to keep from openly laughing at me. I was a true graduate of D.A.R.E. I mean, it and all its misinformation totally worked on me. I actually couldn't distinguish between heroin and marijuana for awhile - I would mix it up and call them 'maroin' and 'herijuana'. That's what D.A.R.E. taught; all drugs are equally evil and terrible. And I didn't have the comparative capacity yet to learn to distinguish them myself. Not until I was seventeen.
A few times I tried to write short stories about crime, or life on the street, or abusive parents, even though I had roughly the same understanding of these topics as I did of drugs. I thought they were really deep and hard hitting, that I could write from any point of view I chose and understand everything about it. It took until college to realize that fallacy.
But I couldn't know that I needed to be more educated until I was actually more educated enough to know that. Or until my brain had grown enough to encompass that. Either way.
Showing posts with label the past. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the past. Show all posts
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Accidental Change
I was looking for the old high school diary entry that I was going to reference, but it became long and involved and impossible, so I thought, screw it, just move, just act.
On Saturday Patrick had a laser tag birthday party. The words 'laser tag' still instill an old knee-jerk jolt of dread in me because of the last time I tried to play, which was in high school, I think. I made it through the vest-fitting stage, barely, shaking with panic at how everything was blacklit and the actual playing stage looked darker. How I didn't know whether I'd be startled every time someone shot me and my vest vibrated. How I didn't know what the sound of the lasers would be like, whether it would be too loud. And when they released us into the arena, it turned out to be a maze. A dark, windy, smoky, strobe-light-filled maze, and there was no way, just no chance at all, that I was going into it.
That high school experience ended in my sitting down outside the arena and regretting every second of my not joining in the fun while simultaneously feeling that it was impossible - impossible! - that I would now or ever be able to do something as scary as enter a smoky, stroby, maze with dark corners and suddenly firing guns. And the contrast between then (only 8 years ago at the most) and the experience Saturday shocked the hell out of me when I sat down to think about it later.
All I felt Saturday was a vague sense of anticipation, not more than leftover neural firings from high school. When they released us into the maze I ran straight into it and started playing, and all I thought was, this is so cool, this is so cool. But not even in a, 'this is so cool, I'm so glad I can do these sorts of things now since I never could before' kind of way... just in an in-the-moment kind of way.
So none of this occurred to me until later... but later it occurred to me in the form of a ton of bricks:
I spent a lot of high school wondering when I would just... spontaneously change. When my chemistry would shift and I would stop feeling sick and anxious all the time, or when I would be able to do the normal things that normal people did and react normally, instead of inevitably ending up far removed from it and on my way to some 'safe' place somewhere. I didn't really consider that in order to change I would have to take action. I just figured a doctor would eventually find the right medicine, give it to me, and I'd suddenly be better, be normal, without having to lift a finger.
Turned out I was right.
Well, sort of. Turned out I didn't need medicine, unless you count time as medicine, which I guess it is, especially when it's carrying you further from high school (and I say that as someone who liked high school, you know, as much as I could for someone who couldn't do a lot of normal, non-scary things). I did need to thrust myself into new situations over which I had no control, no safety net. But once I was there, I didn't have to do anything. I just had to live and suffer and live and suffer and watch my worst fears come true and blossom into no big deal.
And it happened so slowly that I didn't even notice it happening. I emerged on the other side of it not even knowing that I had travelled through a tunnel, and not even knowing that I should be falling on my knees and giving thanks every time I walked into a classroom and sat in the middle, or had a sleepover with a friend, or performed in a concert, or ran whooping into a laser tag arena.
It's the most personal evidence that I have of a sea change washing up slowly. I don't know what lessons to take from it since if I tried to replicate it, I know I couldn't. All I know is I changed my surroundings, I took away my safety net, I made it impossible for myself to escape, and it just happened. It would be a long leap from this to saying that it would happen like that every time. I wouldn't feel comfortable making that leap.
On Saturday Patrick had a laser tag birthday party. The words 'laser tag' still instill an old knee-jerk jolt of dread in me because of the last time I tried to play, which was in high school, I think. I made it through the vest-fitting stage, barely, shaking with panic at how everything was blacklit and the actual playing stage looked darker. How I didn't know whether I'd be startled every time someone shot me and my vest vibrated. How I didn't know what the sound of the lasers would be like, whether it would be too loud. And when they released us into the arena, it turned out to be a maze. A dark, windy, smoky, strobe-light-filled maze, and there was no way, just no chance at all, that I was going into it.
That high school experience ended in my sitting down outside the arena and regretting every second of my not joining in the fun while simultaneously feeling that it was impossible - impossible! - that I would now or ever be able to do something as scary as enter a smoky, stroby, maze with dark corners and suddenly firing guns. And the contrast between then (only 8 years ago at the most) and the experience Saturday shocked the hell out of me when I sat down to think about it later.
All I felt Saturday was a vague sense of anticipation, not more than leftover neural firings from high school. When they released us into the maze I ran straight into it and started playing, and all I thought was, this is so cool, this is so cool. But not even in a, 'this is so cool, I'm so glad I can do these sorts of things now since I never could before' kind of way... just in an in-the-moment kind of way.
So none of this occurred to me until later... but later it occurred to me in the form of a ton of bricks:
I spent a lot of high school wondering when I would just... spontaneously change. When my chemistry would shift and I would stop feeling sick and anxious all the time, or when I would be able to do the normal things that normal people did and react normally, instead of inevitably ending up far removed from it and on my way to some 'safe' place somewhere. I didn't really consider that in order to change I would have to take action. I just figured a doctor would eventually find the right medicine, give it to me, and I'd suddenly be better, be normal, without having to lift a finger.
Turned out I was right.
Well, sort of. Turned out I didn't need medicine, unless you count time as medicine, which I guess it is, especially when it's carrying you further from high school (and I say that as someone who liked high school, you know, as much as I could for someone who couldn't do a lot of normal, non-scary things). I did need to thrust myself into new situations over which I had no control, no safety net. But once I was there, I didn't have to do anything. I just had to live and suffer and live and suffer and watch my worst fears come true and blossom into no big deal.
And it happened so slowly that I didn't even notice it happening. I emerged on the other side of it not even knowing that I had travelled through a tunnel, and not even knowing that I should be falling on my knees and giving thanks every time I walked into a classroom and sat in the middle, or had a sleepover with a friend, or performed in a concert, or ran whooping into a laser tag arena.
It's the most personal evidence that I have of a sea change washing up slowly. I don't know what lessons to take from it since if I tried to replicate it, I know I couldn't. All I know is I changed my surroundings, I took away my safety net, I made it impossible for myself to escape, and it just happened. It would be a long leap from this to saying that it would happen like that every time. I wouldn't feel comfortable making that leap.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Dreams, or Time Travel
As I was falling asleep the other night I had a fleeting thought about dreams right before I started dreaming and I thought, what a prescient time to think about dreams, but what a terrible time to remember those thoughts.
But what occurred to me was something like that what we were dreaming about was ourselves in past lives or future lives, or both mixed together. Not necessarily real past or future lives, but how we imagined those lives might be. So dreaming was time travel, in a way, or at least the illusion (hallucination) of time travel.
That's always been in the back of my mind because I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how my life would look from my younger self's perspective. Like, I probably think about it at least once every day. My younger self would certainly have a different opinion on my current self's surroundings - her boyfriend, her job, her looks, the bike she rides, the friends she has, the place she lives, the things she spends her time doing - than does my current self, who is relatively bored, or at least jaded, by it all.
But when I imagine my younger self's reaction to my current self, I'm only looking at a span of two decades at most, and usually less (because my four year old self would not have an opinion other than to want to go home and play the piano). When I look at dreams I imagine it's centuries, sometimes millenia, in the case of those really weird ones where you can breathe underwater, or tidal waves deposit you on deserted beaches, or you can fly effortlessly, or the air is made of smoke.
The feeling I get in dreams is so unlike anything I ever feel when I'm awake. It's an almost proprietary mix of wonder and familiarity. I'm basically unflappable and react calmly to any bizarre situation that's thrown at me, while still maintaining that what-the-fuck feeling you'd expect from being immersed in unpredictable weirdness. Half of me doesn't know what's going on, but the other half already knows how to react according to whatever dream laws of physics apply.
But the familiarity is almost a deja-vu kind of familiarity, which never fails to make me remember dreams as 'that time I time-traveled to the past', or to even think, when I wake up, 'oh... I'm back here...' as if I were somewhere way, way ahead of right now.
Like I had changed so much that what I left behind felt like a dream. I had changed so much that what I changed into felt like a dream.
But what occurred to me was something like that what we were dreaming about was ourselves in past lives or future lives, or both mixed together. Not necessarily real past or future lives, but how we imagined those lives might be. So dreaming was time travel, in a way, or at least the illusion (hallucination) of time travel.
That's always been in the back of my mind because I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how my life would look from my younger self's perspective. Like, I probably think about it at least once every day. My younger self would certainly have a different opinion on my current self's surroundings - her boyfriend, her job, her looks, the bike she rides, the friends she has, the place she lives, the things she spends her time doing - than does my current self, who is relatively bored, or at least jaded, by it all.
But when I imagine my younger self's reaction to my current self, I'm only looking at a span of two decades at most, and usually less (because my four year old self would not have an opinion other than to want to go home and play the piano). When I look at dreams I imagine it's centuries, sometimes millenia, in the case of those really weird ones where you can breathe underwater, or tidal waves deposit you on deserted beaches, or you can fly effortlessly, or the air is made of smoke.
The feeling I get in dreams is so unlike anything I ever feel when I'm awake. It's an almost proprietary mix of wonder and familiarity. I'm basically unflappable and react calmly to any bizarre situation that's thrown at me, while still maintaining that what-the-fuck feeling you'd expect from being immersed in unpredictable weirdness. Half of me doesn't know what's going on, but the other half already knows how to react according to whatever dream laws of physics apply.
But the familiarity is almost a deja-vu kind of familiarity, which never fails to make me remember dreams as 'that time I time-traveled to the past', or to even think, when I wake up, 'oh... I'm back here...' as if I were somewhere way, way ahead of right now.
Like I had changed so much that what I left behind felt like a dream. I had changed so much that what I changed into felt like a dream.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
