Tribe of Howlers

I uncovered the following paper as I cleaned my closet the other day.   It is an echo of what I'm writing here, with some subtle hints of growth.  

My ex liked to call me a narcissist, and would fit it into a conversation whenever the chance arose.  You'll see evidence of it in the paper, in the narrative voice.  When she said it, it was meant as a put down, but served the same purpose that my family had for it. And it exposed a lack of understanding for the term.

When you are the guy I was to my family you do become narcissistic.   You have no choice.  Families like mine don't survive without someone to saddle with blame, and I was the colt.   If everyone is counting on you to carry all of your shit, and theirs, they need you to believe you're the reason it's there.  They'll make sure you're a self-centered individual, because they need one.  

Anytime something goes wrong, or collapses, or falls through, they'll wait on your arrival.  It could be anything.  It could be your night as the prom queen, or a Stanford graduation.  Maybe it's  a suicide attempt, or daycare.  They know you'll be there even if you're a thousand miles away, and  they'll have their answers ready.  They know what you'll say because they trained you to say it,   "You're right, Pat.  None of this would have happened if you were here, where you belong. Now will you quit whatever it is you're wasting your time on out there, and stay home?"

Ironically, that's one of the traits that my ex abused most, and liked best.  She used the same demeaning phrases, and guilt trips as they did to keep me at home, or to project her shame.  I'm one-size-fits-all, so why not?  There's a reason she's in, and I'm out, with my family that has nothing to do with me.  

You can see threads of it in the paper I found, the one I wrote 8 years ago, in 2006, just a few months after we switched places.

Narrative Essay About  A Memory of My School Years-

Written for a course taken as part of my credential program/2006

When I was an adolescent my father drank.  A lot.  He drank so much his arrests for drunk driving became common news in my family, and our small community.  It wasn't unusual for me to go to school not knowing where my father was, and leave with the knowledge that he was in jail.   My father's indiscretions became breakfast table fodder for my friends, and their families.  It got to the point where all it could be was funny.   

(My family didn't get the paper, for obvious reasons.)

Two Samples of the Crime Reports Accounting for 6 Months in Jail.

 His behavior continued to isolate me from my own family members, and from my friends.  By the time I was a senior my father's alcoholism was the single most defining factor about me. I don't know how that happened.   I never became anything but "Joe McAnerney's  son". no matter what I did on my own.   I was forever linked to his shame, and since I was linked to it, I learned to  inhabit the space it lived in.    I learned to accept its limits, sew my lips together, and absorb the impact.

Sputter & Stall

 I was not a good student.  I began to coagulate wherever I stood still.  I didn't know how to separate myself from our family identity, so I allowed myself to be evaporated by it.   If I showed signs of promise, I'd sabotage them like a good little boy, and no one stepped in to stop me.  They just shook their heads, and were satisfied.  I knew, deep down,  I wasn't allowed to surpass my father, and if he set the bar at 'fuck up', I was expected to jump under.   The worst thing I could have done would have been  to implement myself on  the world, so I agreed to be mediocre.

 I did the same thing in all of my classes.  I did just enough to get by.   But one class was different, and I couldn't contain myself when I was in it.   That class was Creative Writing.   When the instructor told us to write I was introduced to a new freedom.   I could stack words into something comprehensible just like a mason makes sense out of bricks.  I said things I wasn't allowed to say in public.  I made sense out of myself for me, and explained myself to the world in a manner I wasn't permitted to elsewhere.   Language became my neutral country, my Switzerland, and when I was there, I found others like me.  I could say anything.  

When I'm in Switzerland, I gather with my broken tribe, and howl.

 When I graduated from high school life was anything but  coherent.   I stumbled through

college.  I worked at jobs  beneath my abilities.   I resigned myself to a life that lacked meaning, or direction, or purpose.   I convinced myself that life was best lived according to a formula. I convinced myself that each individual had to agree to sublimate imagination to something more practical in the world.   i convinced myself that in order for life to have meaning, one had to agree to reject  the  vision that incubated in their singular, human heart.

 I got married and had kids, and bought a big, 
beautiful house.  I did everything the

cultural paradigm asked me to do, and was successful according to the Similar's.  I was part owner of the Great American Dream. 

But when I was alone in a forest,  or in a bookstore, or on a beach, I heard another voice.  It came from a recently foreign  place where my heart used to be.  It came from the place I discovered in high school when I first read Steinbeck and Hesse, and Hemingway.

 I knew it  was a place worth revisiting because that was the space I came to know myself.  That was where I discovered what lived in the core of me, and knowing who I was would be imperative to who I'd become.  I aspired to be someone unafraid.  And I aspired to be someone who gave credence to the mystery of imagination before paying homage to reason.

Endgame

I wrote that in 2006 hoping what was heavy would lighten up.  I wrote it before I was aware that what I had experienced as a child was trauma, and my deficiencies are named as its effects.  I blamed myself for everything until a few years ago, and still, there are some who need more.  I was never stalled, or mediocre, or incapable.  I was traumatized, and held at bay.  And for the past 8 years two people, more than any others, have refused to let up.  Their desire, and effort, to reduce me even exceeds my fathers. 

They're up there still, circling, to see If I have meat left on the bones.  I do, and they're not getting it.  I've given too much, already.
What remains of me, is mine.