Day 16: Breakthru Sun

I feel different today. Not sure what it is. I said before that i finally saw a light at the end of a tunnel — to realize this is a tunnel and not an abyss was huge — but maybe now i feel that light. idk. one thing im doing is trying to remember, really get in touch with the person i was before him. i look at pictures and think, i don’t know her. or i think worse things, awful hateful things that come from the regret and pain of right now. but if i step out of all that and just think. try to get back in that head space. no, it wont be exactly the same. but she is me, one of the hundreds of iterations of me, and i can remember. and actually this is practice for when my kids leave in september. if i can do this, my next challenge is to find a way to remember who i was before i had them. so daunting. especially since i was a disaster.

one of the ways I am getting in touch with pre-him me is with music, of course, right? it’s very complicated tho because music is HIS.  i think this is a good time to record how we met and a little bit about him and the relationship. we met on myspace! in august of 2006. we were both in a literature forum and started communicating about tolstoy, my fave. it was strictly a non-personal thing for a few weeks, but then his writing started to get to me. he has a way with words. he’s actually brilliant, in a way. he thinks very deeply in these beautiful and unique strands of mind. communing with that part of him is euphoric. it’s the best ive ever had. the deepest. those strands tho are so narrow and are totally disconnected. his mind is so rigidly compartmentalized, and his walls are reinforced a thousand times over. you can ride the bliss train down one of those trails and find yourself trapped in a nightmare of ambiguous hate and fear. brush one of the thorns, and the whole thing wakes up and starts to constrict. its horrible.

one of the areas in which he excels is art.  he is not a creative person, altho I believe he once was very much so, but he has a true gift for recognizing art. what i brought into the situation was long years of studying, and a passion for, literature and film. i have limited experience with visual arts overall, but threw myself into film, first in film school and it blossomed from there. i have experienced real escape and transcendence through literature and film. and in these areas, he and i were quick to find connection. 

in many ways tho we are different. where he is rigid, I am fluid. he is closed, i am open. in the very beginning he explained to me that he knew good art, and his opinion on that was unequivocal. that art is a real thing and “good” can be objectified and qualified. i felt that this was ridiculous, because art is an individual expressing an inner state, therefore it is inevitably subjective. a piece of art can do nothing for one person but then explode the mind of another person. maybe they can relate to something in it that the first person can’t. i felt, and still feel, that one person can never determine what will speak to the entire species.  i mean wtf? that bothered me from day 1. but, i couldn’t argue with his taste. he did discount some amazing films, and i think this is where i first started doubting myself and feeling inferior. i was resentful, but didn’t know how to articulate myself. partly because he was triggering old feelings of insecurity, and altho i am a sharp debater, he was as cold and slippery as a fish. manipulative af. i can’t count how many times ive legitimately wondered whether he is a complete idiot or devious as hell. i still wonder. irregardless, he introduced me to a hundred films that expanded my world immensely. 

while I was somewhat new to film, i was not new to literature. i have been escaping into books since i was 9. when i was 9 my mom left her abusive 2nd husband in the middle of the night with her 4 kids in tow. my sister and i were older and, since she could only choose 2 kids to take to the small apartment with her, she dropped us off at my grandparents, where we lived for the next 18 months. those months were traumatic for me, because my grandmother openly despised me. she was later diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder among other things. the family was well aware of her ways: she would pick a couple of favorites and terrorize everyone else. my grandfather was too afraid of her to intervene, so her house was a hellpit. her house was a meticulously clean hellpit, and children were not to touch anything or even sit on the couch. we were contained, along with her animals, in the back yard or garage during the day and straight to the guest bed at night. we were allowed no belongings, and our few clothes were kept in a box in the closet. my  mother was too busy to visit more than once a month for a few minutes, dropping off money i think. most of my memories of that time were of hiding under furniture. if i did interact with her, generally i was being screamed at, hit, or called names. however, the boredom under the table was a massive problem for my always too curious mind, and i started sneaking books from her bookcases. mostly westerns and dirty romance novels.

I was a sheltered child and learned a lot from those books. but escapism was the dominant lesson. it never ended. as a goth teen i became obsessed with the romantic writers. as a young adult, i delved into non-fiction works of eastern religion, 19th and early 20th century american authors, and eventually Tolstoy. his fiction stole my heart. his non-fiction woke me up to what one man could offer. he was the ideal version of myself, and i loved him. i felt a strong sense of self in this area. one that took my ex many years to dismantle. i eventually came to feel separated from literature, and i no longer read. his dominant superiority claimed literature as his. aside from a handful of authors, any book i liked, he knew more about, critiqued harshly, confused me. i started doubting myself. if i read a book, he’d ask to see it and dismiss it, he’d already read it.

it’s very hard to explain this. it seems like, “Who cares?”, but it was a constant subtle undermining of my connection to things i loved. if he didn’t know more, like with the aforementioned handful, he would insert himself there. he’d study the author, he’d get into forums, he’d research the history. so if i ever mentioned it, he’d correct me. and i would be taken off guard and not know how to react. if that happened once in a while, it would be fine, that’s just life and learning and that’s great. but it was everything. it was constant. it was like a thousand tiny tentacles ever so lightly and innocently severing every last ligature of my body until i was floating lost in a sea of confusion and an inability to claim a self or reality. i recognize there is a sublime opportunity in this, and i have managed to seize it in many ways. unfortunately, the destruction of my frail self-esteem has made it incredibly difficult.

music…is a whole other thing. sighhhhh. i think i have to explain a little more: my mother was a fundamentalist christian who had worked tirelessly to keep her children safe from the secular world. nice and cloistered in the twisted, perverted molester world of the pentecostal churches. the most succinct description I can give is one she repeatedly told me, somehow unaware of how nuts it proved her to be: when i was 2 she discovered my father had been cheating on her. when confronted he silently packed one bag and left. she scooped up my 4-year-old sister and i and went to live with people from her church. they counseled her to burn all of my fathers things, which she did.  every last picture. (might not have been that big of a deal if he hadn’t been killed 3 years later, leaving us nothing of him. but that’s another story.) these church people told her she was still too attached to things and instructed her to kill her beloved cat. when she couldn’t, they killed the cat in front of her, and she lost her mind and went wandering. when she was picked up, she was covered with sores and all her hair and nails had fallen out. she was admitted to the hospital, a mental institution, where she recovered for 6 months. during this time, she allowed my sister and i to be kept by the church people. i have had dark wonderings about what happened to us there. if nothing else it is a fundamental layer to the pattern of my life of being abandoned and unprotected.

she was released to my grandparents care. they took the three of us in. she was constantly in and out of fugue states and often wandered for days with bleeding feet. she told everyone that she was in the hospital because my dad had been poisoning her with arsenic. i believed this as a child. as an adult, i realize that if there was arsnic in her blood, it would have been more likely the work of the insane cult she was involved with. and i think its fair to assume that my dad left the way he did because he was afraid of her volatile emotional reaction, the same fear that came to rule my life for many decades.

back to the topic: I was raised for most of my childhood in an extreme fundamentalist home. one of the things we were not allowed was music. when i was 10, my grandfather bought me a small radio. i got a taste then. when i was 11, i was taken back to live with my mother and brothers, and the radio was confiscated. we were only allowed christian music, went to school at the church — if you could call it a school — and attended religious services 4 times per week in addition. she remarried a real sicko from the church. he abused us terribly with her as witness. when i went to the school for help, i was kicked out of the home: i came home, terrified of what they would do to me for telling, only to find two black bags with my things on the front porch. this is when life began for me.

I lived with friends until i finished high school. i stayed out all night, i met interesting people, i lived in clubs and bars and coffee shops that had all night music. i went homeless after graduating. i lived in flop houses and in cars. i fell in love with music; it was a huge part of the real world. it was a huge part of me, i realized. i listened to goth music, 80s darkwave, industrial, 60s and 70s psychodelic (mainstream), and some punk. when i got pregnant, i had to pull it together. i found a job, an apartment. i didn’t go out anymore. but, music was still so important to me. we were dirt poor, but my kids were raised with books and music. 

when I met my ex, i had my little soundtrack of loved music, only about a dozen were obscure bands, something that didn’t mean a lot to me at the time. but music is his deepest calling. i think in another dimension he could be some creative genius musician. in yet another, he’s a world-famous producer. the man has an uncanny ability to find amazing music. he has a relentless drive to search it out. and his dominance is most thoroughly presented in this world by “his” music. he collects it, like badges of his own worth, and plays it constantly. he wakes up: he puts on music. he drives: music. he goes to the lake: bluetooth playing music. he sleeps: music. our home became his domain because he always dictated the music. it was like living inside of his mind. or his mind expanding and encasing the home. “well, just change the music!”, you say! “put something else on!” and i did that! at first a lot. i said, hey its my turn. but when my music was on, he would pout and pace. he would never say anything outright– he’s too polite– but his body language and energy would be super negative, making things uncomfortable. so instead of being able to relax and enjoy the music, it became like a stand-off. playing my music became a rebellious act. a fight. and i hated that. 

and so I would fight less and less. I would go thru phases where I’d get some energy, and I’d kick up some dust, make a big deal. but mostly, i was so tired. and his music was really good. i loved it. within the first year, he copied all my old beat-up discs to an external hard drive. made sense. easy access. i gave my brother a garbage bag full of them. (he sold them for heroine, incidentally.) then the hard drive fell off the desk, and i couldn’t get it to work. it was going to cost almost $300 to have a computer guy pull the music off. money i didn’t have. i tried to list everything on there, but couldn’t remember over half of it. eventually, i never listened to music that wasn’t his. presented to me with his domineering stamp of approval. “this is good. listen to this”

and eventually, I just disconnected from it all. it was too hard. i was too drained with the other stuff going on, the sex stuff and the emotional roller-coaster. he constantly pushed his choice of books and movies and music on me. i was choked with it. i stopped liking movies, i stopped reading. i started driving in silence and tuning out his music when my home felt like a trap. and now i have an iPod full of his music. not a single song unconnected to him. we use google music on our phones, and it’s so hard to remember who i was before, and what i listened to. when i try, i hear him in my head, telling me whats good and what’s shit. 

so its been pretty silent around here. im afraid to play anything, because I don’t want to think about him. i have played a little reggae, because reggae is so positive and powerful it escapes him. and the ramones were always mine. he tried, but he could never get inside that. and I’ve been digging around online finding old favorites that he trashed, and i gave up on. 

I think its one of those things that time will heal. i have to believe I’ll come back to it. i’ll be able to read and watch and listen all by myself again. i’ll be able to say, “this is what i think.” full stop. 

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