2007-06-11 9:02 a.m.
Only Happy When it Rains
^Sing it, Shirley. I hear ya, sister.
Stayed up all night. Why? Because my sleeping disorder's been acting up big time, and I knew that if I crashed, I wouldn't wake up in time for my music final. And, frankly, this disorder has done a good enough job ruining my perfect academic record this quarter as it is. One borderline failed class is quite enough for me for a lifetime. Because let's face it, nothing is going to save that German grade from being a D.
Bleargh. I have a date with my bed once I finish this entry so I can pull another all-nighter to make sure I get to my German final on time. Lovely.
That nervous breakdown I keep promising myself is looking really nice right about now.
My friend - we'll call her Sally since nobody actually has that name anymore - and I have been on a Garbage music kick. That band kicks ass, and they're pleasantly morbid enough to keep us from being utterly miserable.
Strange. The quintessential best friend for a ragingly straight girl is supposed to be a flaming gay man, not a very open lesbian. Not that I care about such things, really, growing up with more than one person of queer leanings in my family - and living in Hollywood for all eighteen years of my life before college. But Sally and I have a lot more in common than most people would guess from our preferred topics of conversation with outsiders. Namely boys (me) and girls (her).
We've both been in quite the moods lately, as springtime brings up unpleasant memories for each of us. And because we're both in similarly awkward "growing up and fighting it" phases. We had an interesting conversation last night. About self-respect and acceptance. I don't even remember how it came up, but we were sitting in the cafeteria, feeling the pain of finals and Frustrated Singles' Syndrome and bad cafeteria food, commiserating about all sorts of personal ills in life, when all of a sudden she mentions that she's often heard people say that they would never wish homosexuality on anyone. And that she thinks that's strange, because it was only by accepting that she was queer and going through the coming-out process that she was able to respect and accept herself. Which somehow got us off on the random tangent of "if this were different, this wouldn't be".
Namely about our own existences. It's quite amazing how precariously any of us came into being. Makes me feel quite insignificant, but in a comforting way.
Anyway, all of this flowed quite easily into a conversation of all the ways in which we're fucked up...and I suddenly realized that, while I know I'm fucked up and have an intellectual knowledge of why, I can't remember more than a handful of things from before I started high school. I've blanked it out. I know what happened the way I can recall plotlines in novels - as words, facts, mostly meaningless blurbs. There are no images, no faces, no sound clips to go along with such memories.
Sally gave me quite the long stare before venturing that that could be problematic. I gave a rather loud snort and replied that that was the least of my worries. I'm terrified of whatever it is I blocked out. I'm scared of eventually remembering it.
Sally, being a Feminist Studies major, recommended that I read Intimate Politics, and maybe I will at some point. But introspection isn't really something I want to be doing.
Which raises an interesting quandary. I've decided that it's time I lose the baggage - as much as I possibly can - and the only real way to do that is to confront it. But how can I confront something I can't remember and indeed have no desire to ever recall?
If I blocked it, there must be a damn good reason, after all.
So I'm sitting here in my trashed dorm room in Santa Cruz, my blinds pulled down so I can just crash once I post this, staring at my plethora of posters and photographs covering the walls, and trying to figure out a way to reconcile all of this.
Hiding behind halfway hysterical, sugar-induced celebrations with my best friends isn't good enough. I can't keep pretending like the few memories I have of my pre-high school years constitute living. I can't keep acting like what happened before I met my best friends is irrelevant to my life now. It's not. Nothing could be further from the truth.
But I don't know if I want to remember things that were bad enough for me to suppress them in the first place.
I mean, I have enough stuff going on. I've been fighting with major guilt issues for things I could never have affected even if I'd tried to. A lot of it revolves around my sibs.
But that's another story for a different day.
Well, sitting in front of my computer with a fogged brain isn't going to somehow magically deliver the answers. I'll sleep on it, and hopefully come up with something workable. Back | Older | Current | Next
