What the Hell is This?

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
— Peter Handke, “Song of Childhood”

Every disaster, whether natural or man-made, always makes me question: Why you, and not me? Why am I here, and not there? Especially now, as I shuffle through drab winter days made greyer through the filter of depression, and continuous news of death and destruction in an already desperately impoverished country pours in. That kind of poverty makes me look ridiculously wealthy, even if I have to walk everywhere I go and can’t justify replacing holey socks. I have a sunny little studio all to myself, after all, and fresh fruits and vegetables in the refrigerator.

I’m sure there were among the thousands killed many good and purposeful people who were making a difference in their world…and yet here I am, alive, listless, self-absorbed, contributing little or nothing to my fellow man (except a measly $10 to the Red Cross), untouched by the merciless machete of nature. Survivor’s guilt…accompanied by the shame of doubting my own entitlement to live. Who the hell am I, at such a time, to concern myself with the trivial American pursuit of happiness?

**

My work with Lisa has more or less stalled. She wants me to do some visualizations involving my mother that feel really uncomfortable, and I haven’t been able to finish them. This may be the source of the depression, as well as the persistent feeling of being unworthy: unworthy of better work, of having a life that I love, of simply being loved.

**

“Why Is Such A Man Alive?” is the title of one of the chapters in one of my favorite novels, The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s story has always resonated with me because of the prominence of the theme of shame as the driving force in human psychology. The question of whether or not one deserves to be alive is a question that springs from a deep shame about one’s own apparent unworthiness.

Of course, the whole point in born-again Christianity is to realize your own boundless unworthiness, and to throw yourself upon the good Lord’s mercy. We born sinners deserve hell, and it is only through God’s grace and the selfless sacrifice of Jesus on the cross that we are redeemed. (What I never could figure out was that if we were so worthless, why did God even bother?!!)

There is a helplessness — and a hopelessness — in believing that there is something inherently wrong with you, and that only an omnipotent outside force can make something acceptable out of you. You are not only bad, but powerless. Whatever dysfunctions may or may not already exist within your family of origin, fundamentalism creates its own.

Much of my hopelessness as a born-again Christian teen sprang from the conviction that even God couldn’t make something acceptable of me. (My experiences with youth group crushes seemed to prove this.) Today, even a “passive” rejection carries a similar sting.

**

Finding Evid3nc3, that whip-smart and yummy young ex-Christian I linked to in my last post, brought back what was most agonizing about my adolescence. It seems to me even now, in remembering, that I experienced more intense sexual longings for boys than the other girls my age. (Maybe it was the Milton in me.) But boys lived on another planet entirely.

Our “Christian” beliefs made it crystal clear: we were to wait for marriage to share our Sacred Gift From God, and that was that. But how on earth was I going to get one of these elusive creatures to come close enough to marry me? The desirable boys in my youth group worshipped my brother, and (at best) patted me on the head. Marriage may as well have been Jupiter. Tori Amos was speaking for me when she growled, in her thunderous ode to girlhood rejection, “Precious Things” –

He said you’re really an ugly girl
but I like the way you play
and I died
but I thanked him
can you believe that
sick sick
holding on to his picture
dressing up every day
I want to smash the faces
of those beautiful boys
those Christian boys
so you can make me COME
that doesn’t make you JESUS…

I remember suffering at one retreat over a dynamic young visiting speaker. I spent the entire weekend staring up at the podium, cow-eyed and in agony. I wrote godawful poems about him in my diary. I knew quite well he was out of my reach. But then every boy I wanted that badly seemed out of my reach. They weren’t going to grant me so much as a date, much less a lacy white dress and a ring. The situation seemed hopeless, impossible. It is better to marry than to burn, said Paul (I Cor 7:9), but it seemed as if I were going to burn alive. Who needed hell? I had Camp Brookwoods.

At least while watching Chris-the-atheist with his winsome boy-next-door demeanor, I could entertain “sinful” thoughts to my heart’s desire that were not entirely out of the realm of possibility. As an apostate, he was no longer off limits by divine decree. Neither of us had to buy the cow to get the milk anymore. We could, at least in theory, hook up. This thought felt both exhilarating and liberating to my inner Sunday Schooler. We were co-escapees from the institution of rigid conservative born-again morality…which meant that we were no longer bound by that pietistic blah blah blah about the Precious And Beautiful God-Given Things for which the Lord had given us these Holy Temples as a Wonderful Gift to be shared Only In Marriage For His Glory.

In theory, at least, I could actually get to know this former Royal Ranger in the Biblical sense. His wholesome midwestern nice-ness, so much like the nice-ness of the church boys I grew up with, only served to make me that much hotter.

**

For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading, or should I say devouring, the novels of Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s fictional alter ego, Calvin Becker, is the child of missionaries running a retreat center for young God-seekers in Switzerland that is strikingly similar to the “L’Abri” started by Schaeffer’s famous evangelical parents. Calvin is part Huck Finn and part Holden Caulfield, too curious to stay out of trouble and too smart not to see through the hypocrisy of God’s so-called “chosen.” Like most adolescent boys he has sex on the brain, and would rather be fantasizing about his English friend Jennifer than listening to his mother’s Monday morning Bible studies. (As you can imagine, I identified with him closely.)

Few books have made me laugh out loud the way these did. Schaeffer has the born-agains’ pious King Jamesian metaphors as well as their tortured Calvinist theology down pat. Calvin’s morally rigid mother Elsa, the spiritual leader of the family, is at times hilarious in her hand-wringing martyrdom and unconstrained grandiosity. Her narcissism is epic. Readers are made, at times, to feel sorry for Calvin’s tempestuous father, whose moodiness and violence resembles that of a trapped animal. In the book Zermatt in particular, we get a glimpse of a man who might have been much happier as a thoughtful agnostic engineer leading a quiet life out of the spotlight and enjoying hikes with his son. I know from Schaeffer’s autobiography Crazy for God that his famous father was very much like Ralph Becker, and I have to wonder if, deep down, the acclaimed evangelical thinker my own dad used to quote wanted out of the fundamentalist circus.

While reading Zermatt I also wondered if Schaeffer were working out some of his rage toward his mother. It’s hard not to actively hate Elsa Becker, especially if you’ve seen very many holier-than-thou religious matrons use the same kinds of manipulative tactics (with a sweet smile) that are so effectively satirized and skewered in the book. I saw some of my own mother in Elsa’s shows of saccharine “Christian” sentimentality and in her anxious hovering readiness to take offense and disapprove. Lisa is probably right that I have more work to do here. She believes I have been somehow rejected by my mother, not just smothered.

Any rejection is easier to see in Elsa, who faults Calvin for practically every natural thought or desire he has. Like me at his age, he asks “blasphemous” questions and escapes into “sinful” daydreams and fantasies.

**

Which brings me back to my throwback of a crush. Alas, reality soon intruded upon fantasy. That’s what happens, sometimes, when you actually try to connect with and find out more about the object of your lust. The young man is, unfortunately, spoken for.

In keeping with the work I’m trying to do with Lisa, I let myself feel the disappointment.

Disappointment is an unpleasant emotion, and I know I tend to try to minimize it, because there’s a tinge of humiliation involved. You’ve let yourself want something, badly, from someone else, and they have the very inequitable power to withhold it from you. Thus my typical habit is to act as if there’s nothing to see here, people, everything’s fine…but the fact is that once again I let myself feel a desire pretty intensely, and it energized me, briefly, and put me in a fine mood, thinking Anything Can Happen…my dormant sex drive reactivated itself, and I allowed myself to fantasize about someone new. Maybe I was being unrealistic, and idealizing or projecting upon the guy, but I had no idea, really, how things might pan out. Not too long ago, after all, my expectations were quite spectacularly exceeded.

If I don’t try to disown this desire, I’m not sure quite what to do with it, or my disappointment. It hurts. It sends me back in time. It makes me cry a little. Certainly, I learned helplessness back when everything I wanted seemed so hopelessly out of reach.

I also learned to pretend — to save face, perhaps — that I wasn’t lonely, or for that matter unbearably horny. It was more important to love than be loved. Throw me a bone now and then, so to speak, and I was grateful…but in general I could be sufficient unto myself, like Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation. Most spiritual teachings toward which I gravitated, after all, whether born-again or Buddhist or New Age, aimed to attack and eliminate desires that created a feeling of lack. Lisa, however, pointed out very frankly to me that certain needs of mine were simply not being met.

In the past, they’ve been met so inconsistently and incompletely I really didn’t know what I was missing. Until I got involved with Sam. That was a revelation. It was as if I’d been coping with (and learning to ignore) a low-grade migraine all my life…and then, not only was my migraine gone, I actually felt good for a change.

In all honesty, when I’d gotten close, before, to some of my coveted, larger-than-life Others, like Max, or even Sonny, there had been a vague feeling of is that all there is? that I would never have admitted simply because the something that was happening was so much better than the nothing I usually got.

It wasn’t their fault; I placed them on such a pedestal they never could have lived up to all the hype. But again, that’s the shortcoming of having a “list,” when you fall for what someone appears to represent, for the sum of desirable or admirable qualities you believe you want, rather than someone’s mere human presence and the astonishing and unimaginable world that springs up between the two of you. I’ve been so dazzled by a pretty face alone that at times I would likely have argued leniency for a serial killer if he looked like Jared Leto.

With Sam, briefly, I allowed myself to be cared for. I accepted the abundant warmth and tenderness of someone I had previously not thought of that way rather than worshipping a physically or emotionally remote, idealized man the way I had worshipped God…and, wonder of wonders, found out, possibly for the first time, what it felt like to have those perennially ignored needs met.

**

When I lie still and quiet, I can feel the ancient emotion dully aching in my chest. It’s like a bodily memory reactivated, of a shock, the shock of deep and painful shame. My impulse is to run away from it, medicate it, minimize it, pretend it isn’t there. I’ve never been able to pinpoint its source, though I can remember many a reactivation, even as a small child. It didn’t have to be a violent rejection; simply being passed over for someone else, or not even being seen, was enough to trigger that burning impulse to get away and hide — and in doing so, hide my embarrassment.

Shame is about fifty times more painful than guilt, because guilt is about behaviors, which can be changed. Shame is about who you are. There is something inherently wrong with you, according to shame, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

There’s a part of me that reacts, when someone I favor turns out to be otherwise occupied, by saying, Well of course he has someone, someone normal, and not like you. And that believes there’s a whole universe out there of “normal” couples doing “normal” couple things, having “normal” couple sex…whereas everything I do is either a sham or a freakish aberration.

Even as a wee toddler among the neighborhood kids in our neighbor’s backyard, I was a thing apart. They played their ball games together, while I was left to my own devices. My beloved older brother’s schizoid affection didn’t help  — he could be the doting big brother at home, but with other kids he frequently ignored me, and once in a while would make me the butt of a mean joke. He was definitely the “normal” kid. He was also the one who dated in high school, and the one who got married and bought a house and had three kids (whom his wife is now home-schooling).

The beautiful Christian boys I longed for in adolescence followed similarly “normal” paths.

**

I‘ve been thinking about Jonathan again, whom I never fully grieved because I was distracted by my sudden joy with Sam. Jonathan loved me all through our childhood. As an adolescent, I wouldn’t think about him that way — not just because he wasn’t a Christian, but because he was a brainy, clique-less weirdo like me — and I so desperately wanted to be normal. Besides, he disqualified himself through his persistent and lifelong esteem of me. Who but a loser would love a loser like me? Without any of my concentrated efforts to be captivating or prove my worth? Love I hadn’t earned meant nothing to me!

And yet I’ve still never managed to earn it from the ones who withhold it.

**

This week I’ve been airing my opinions quite nakedly on my social network, without regard to how I think my family will react. They have been surprisingly silent. This feels like a step in the right direction — letting out some more of the “real me” in spite of the fear of judgment and rejection. I also allowed myself to show my irritation to a coworker about being officiously micromanaged, without worrying about whether I was being sufficiently “nice.” I keep expecting something terrible to happen, but the worst of it so far seems to be the cold shoulder from an ex-boyfriend, and the mild alienation of a couple of elementary school friends. Not that that doesn’t bother me, but it’s not exactly the apocalypse.

But here’s the question all this pondering leads to: no matter how strenuously you try to be worthy, are you ever really going to earn love for the person you are…or just for the “lovable” person you try to be? Doing challenging Dharma Mittra yoga and listening to hipster indie music didn’t net me Sonny any more than reading Lord Byron and learning more about art impressed León. But if it had, would that mean they wanted me, or just some accessories I picked up that any number of other women had too?

Have I been hung up in some forty-year Purgatory where my Sisyphean task has been to try to gain the approval I never got from my mother, or my brother, or my peers, or my God? (It seems too embarrassingly simple, but Occam’s Razor can make for a painful shave.) What if I already deserved the love that Jonathan and Sam gave me, without any of my pre-emptive efforts to be attractive or cool or deserving?

**

I still hate to think of Jonathan as gone. Once in a while I talk to him, as if he were right beside me. Sometimes I half believe he brought Sam to me, to teach me what he wasn’t able to, to break my resistance down once and for all, to make me see. To help me start living before I die.

Maybe I’ll try Lisa’s visualization about my mother again tonight.