It seems in the past few months my entire life has paraded before my eyes.
I am malleable. I go through ideas and try on personalities like Elizabeth Taylor tries on husbands. I pick up accents like spare change. If someone comes to me with a problem I become them, I do not separate my own mind from thiers.
One month I may be ultra Christian, the next I will be bent on proving to everyone that God does not exist. I find these gurus, and follow them; I talk to friends, and bend like a willow in the wind.
Examples:
In the past two years I have been involved in an increasingly conservative and cult-like bible study which ended in four marriages and 10 anti-God manifestos; A Pentecostal missions organization which attempted exorcism on me to rid me of past hurts; a nihilist workshop; Buddhism; a near affair with a married multi-billionaire; a best friend turned lover turned not best friend; an ex-boyfriend who hatesmelovesmehatesme/something.
They all have one thing in common: they will heal me.
If I Will:
Follow a set of rules or Be delivered or Kill Yourself or Numb Yourself or Have Sex With Me or Stop Playing the Victim or Forgive and Forget or Talk To Me About Your Problems or
Or Or Or
(where's my fuzzy bunnies?)
These dramas, while fairly common in everyone's life, because of the extent of my problems with others idolization and self-deprecation let these extremes drag on to have some fairly bad effects on my life including homelessness, etc.
So I have cut myself off from anyone and everything including the idea of God or not God. I am drinking only myself. Finding me. Michelle. Swimming through a mire of grey and watching black polarize with black and white to white.
For 2 months I didn't read, write, or go to school. I didn't even bike to town for groceries. I sat in bed with a bottle-several bottles-of sweet red wine and a mirror.
(Observe my observation.)
This is me:
I am 19 years old. Intelligent by school or test standards. I am pretty. I have big eyes and long dancing legs. I feel fat. I practice masochism often. My mother is a nurse and my father was going to be a pastor but turned into a computer salesman instead. I snowboard on the weekends and enjoy playing "frisbee" with my German Shepherd, Jake.
I listen to Britney Spears while working out and cook haute cuisine which I refuse to eat due to water retention. I like to complain about how hungry I am.
I see things in black and white. I have problems with duality. People think I am either very passionate or very borderline. I drink too much and have a problem with my temper. I hate myself. I read too much Plato and Fromm and hate both.
I will numb myself. I will stretch my lips into a smile. I will wake up in the morning and I will smile like the good girl I pretend to be. I will marry a tall man with a muscular frame who will dictate my life and we will numb ourselves with this arrangement. I want to be dictated. He wants to dictate. Small crumbs to a hungry soul. We will adopt 2.5 kids (perhaps we shall adopt a dwarf?)
The problems with Miss Emotional Gymnast begins with Desire.
I want.
Oh my goodness, do I ever want. I want truth.
What is Truth? -Pilate
Baruch Spinoza says truth, like beauty, is a gift, not accumulated in the way of learned knowledge.
(So do I wait with hands open, eyes closed?)
I want love.
What is love?
I want beauty.
What is beauty?
Oh, Damn this. These elusive wishes.
I won't be satisfied until I have them and I have little hope of ever having them. My idolization is directly connected to my unbridled desire. And my unbridled desire is directly connected to my life. Nietzsche had it right when he recommended cancelling oneself out to escape the trap. But this is mundane in my situation. I don't want to die, I want to feel alive. The problem is...is...is...
THE TRAP. The nature of the trap is that it is unescapable. It pins one to a specific point of growth and disables-completely-the trapee.
So do I curl up in a pillow fort with a hand gun and stuffed bunny until my romeo comes along? Do I forget my desire? Do I numb myself to who I was at 19 with all these hopes and dreams and love and melting heart? Do I make a man my God and follow Him to the end of my days, whence the Royal HeWe dies and I wither away in sorrow and death and reality?
People are my drugs. Tell me, what is your drug? Books? Religion? Hate? Sex? Men? Women?
Do you wake up crying at night? Do you slice your skin, careful and smooth? Do you eat that third whopper to cease your rumbling soul? Do you fall to your knees in your mind, in this worldfull of people and cry for someone to hear you, to fulfill your desire, to love you, to be your G-O-D?
Or are you too numb for that now? Have you locked your heart away?
Tell me, how are you doing this? What is keeping you alive? What is keeping you numb?