Some kind of Clarification
I have a job interview in an hour and a half.
After I wrote the last writing-thing (Blog? Email essay thing?) I wanted to clarify two things. I had two things in mind, yesterday. But now, this morning, I can only remember one of them. My memory seems to be horribly compromised in the last year. Well, maybe the other thing will come to me while I am writing.
One of the things I wanted to clarify was how, back when I was writing that memoir-project-thing, a large part of what I wanted to focus on was how my teen years were pretty chaotic and miserable, and those years, that timeperiod, was one of the worst timeperiods of my life, if not possibly the worst.
The only reason that timeperiod is in competition with another timeperiod is because the other terrible-bad timeperiod, that is the several-years-following-my-second-divorce, was a middle-aged timeperiod, so in addition to experiencing a lot of stressful and disappointing things, I also felt like there weren’t going to be any second chances. I felt like it was “too late” to still “go on” to have a “good life.”
Thankfully that seems to not have been true, but anyway. That feeling of utter failure with no take-backs was pretty fucking awful.
Okay but wait. Anyway, I meant to write about the memoir-thing.
It wasn’t just that I wanted to write about how “my teen years were chaotic and horrible;” what I wanted to specifically write about was how I was embroiled in this unique social group, mostly boys, for whom things were yes, also pretty bad, in a number of ways, but things were significantly less chaotic and horrible for most of these chaps, and in fact that’s not exactly what I wanted to write about, either. Or at least, I didn’t want to approach it like that, I mean I didn’t mean to say, “my life was worse than their lives.” That’s not what I mean.
I wanted to write about how, for most of these chaps, that timeperiod is now—in middle age—a nostalgically mostly-fun time period to reflect on and think and talk and reminisce an remember about, whereas for me, that timeperiod is loaded with really difficult/painful context, so reflecting on and thinking and talking and reminiscing about it is not always a joyful experience for me, and this ended up causing a certain amount of conflict between me and a couple of these chaps, and also some of the girls, (there were, yes, also a few girls in that clique) —because after I moved back to my hometown, I would get irritated with certain aspects of ongoing reminiscing. Even though that teenage-timeperiod did include stuff that was, yes, fun and exciting and interesting, in my experience those things were largely overshadowed by the horrible things. And it irritated me, at times, that some of these chaps couldn’t get that through their fucking heads.
What specifically I mean by this is that fake-religion things sometimes just make me feel, uh, “triggered,” yet I also feel an incredible sense of selfish…hmm…”ownership” of those things. Those things are mine, they belong to me, or more specifically they belong to us, they have an incredible amount of emotional meaning/context for me, and so when a friend of mine decided to uh, register the name of the fake religion as a “business,” I felt, uh, complicated about him doing that. I tried not to feel personally outraged, but umm sometimes I did feel personally outraged.
OH GOD yeah which brings me to the second thing, which I now remember, and which I should have pointed out first, now that I think about it. Wait, but I’m not going to rewrite this, so never mind.
Here’s the second thing:
SO we, as a species, have utterly fucked up the planet we live on. Right? Do you believe this? I mean, I believe this, despite that fact that apparently a lot of people still (somehow) don’t believe this. But not only do I believe it, I have been aware of it since I was a young teenager. I have been anxious and upset and stressed-out about it since I was a young teenager. That was another thing I had wanted to write about, because I wanted to explain how, having grown up in a doomsday religion and then learning about the imminent inhabitability of the planet-where-we-live, it was inevitable that I would mature into a largely anxious and existentially depressed adult; I mean what other alternative possibly even was there???
But specifically I began to understand, as a teenager, that capitalism is completely incompatible with “environmentally responsible” living. I can remember a handful of specific thought processes, articles I read as a teenager and various epiphanies I had that illustrated this incongruity, and that was something I specifically wanted to write about and explain, in the memoir-thing.
So, I began to recognize that the ideology I wanted to live and the system I was trapped in could not work together in any “nice” way. Because functional capitalism requires the exploitation of resources, to the worst possible bitter end.
Right, so as a teenager, as I began to see this reality, I didn’t know how to even talk to many of the deluded-seeming adult figures around me, figures who were mostly preoccupied with irrelevant-seeming questions like “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?” —because I would frequently think—what do you mean what am I going to do with my life, you’re just asking how am I going to participate in capitalism, yet how can you just be okay knowing that we’re all walking around deliberately perpetuating this doomsday machine? How are you just fine with this?
And when I would try to bring all of this up to most of the deluded-seeming adult figures around me, their reactions were to mostly just gaslight me into thinking that if I didn’t want to participate in capitalism, apparently I had some kind of chemical imbalance that required prozac, obviously.
And I often believed this.
Now, there was a lot more to it, because the other thing that made their reactions very gaslight-seeming is that I did really actually experience a lot of shit, in 1988-1990, that was real-live bona-fide trauma, and it becomes very obvious to any person with even a rudimentary understanding of what complex PTSD is and how it works, that yes I was experiencing complex PTSD.
But, because of many different social/interpersonal things that I was inextricably immersed within, I didn’t understand that at all. I mean I didn’t understand/acknowledge/recognize that any of the trauma-causing things I had experienced were really even all that bad. Even though they felt really bad, I didn’t think I had…license to feel so bad. I tried to compartmentalize all the bad feelings as best as I could, and…I failed.
At that time, in that timeperiod, that is 1988-1990, complex PTSD was very poorly understood, and certainly none of the Mormon therapists I visited ever even remotely suggested that this could be an issue—they instead suggested that I had some kind of chemical imbalance that required prozac, obviously, and in some cases they very gently suggested that maybe I should start going back to church, like maybe that would help.
Also: my attitude. That was a really big problem. That was a large part of where I figured I didn’t think I had license to feel so bad, you understand. My attitude.
So began my long, complicated relationship with SSRI’s, which wasn’t really “complicated” honestly, the relationship actually could be described as “they never helped me at all, and in fact no medication has ever helped me and no diagnosis has ever seemed quite correct.”
I mostly bought into the idea that I was chemically depressed, as a teenager, and in certain ways I do still buy into the idea that it is a “real” thing, I mean it is a real thing, but it’s also a lot more complicated than most people understand, including researcher/scientist types.
So, this brings me actually to a third thing I want to clarify, a subset of the first thing, which was kind of a huge thing I was hoping to illustrate in the book-thing—that is, a large large part of my unhappiness in my younger-years could be largely attributed to the fact that I lived in a society that did not permit me to properly grieve things that I really really needed to properly grieve. Socially, it was not permitted, in part because Mormonism doesn’t permit it except in very restrained and oddly specific ways, but also because, being an awkward teenage girl who was surrounded by awkward teenage boys really didn’t put me in an environment that one might interpret as being rife with a bunch of helpful and supportive sounding boards, you get me?
I could elaborate about this for…an entire book-length memoir thing, but I’ll wrap it up, because: job interview. Soon.
So, I didn’t even begin to properly grieve those things until…honestly during those years following my second divorce, the years when I moved back to my hometown and was thus horribly faced with perpetual reminders of some seriously bad shit.
Like so, here’s something extremely personal and weird that I’m going to confess. When I lived in Salt Lake during 2010-2015, I started to go to the cemetery where my first ex-boyfriend is buried, like, when I would get so stressed out that I could not even…speak normally. Like so, you know what, I can’t actually write about that, never mind. I mean I can’t write about the things that started happening to make it so I couldn’t even speak normally, but I will say that it was when I was working at GE, with this subject-matter-expert guy who was horribly bullying me, and I don’t want to write about that. But I will write that I would just abruptly leave work and drive all the way to the cemetery on my “lunch break,” which was stupid because the cemetery was seriously like 45 minutes away, so my “lunch breaks” were like, hours long, but you know what, all the subject matter expert/engineer guys took like three hour lunch breaks sometimes. Well, I guess I only did that two or three times. So, it’s not like I did it all the time or anything.
Look, going to the cemetery was like, this last-last-last resort thing, to do.
The last time I went to the cemetery, a really fuckin weird thing happened, and never mind I am not going to write about it. Except to say that the really fuckin weird thing was that I was approached by a really precocious teenage girl who just like, approached me, we were the only two people in the whole cemetery, and she started talking to me and asking me extremely personal questions, while I was sitting on his headstone crying, and it was fucking bizarre, especially for Utah, where people don’t tend to approach strangers like that. I was having like a mental breakdown when this girl approached me and later I kept questioning it. Was that even real? Was she even real?
I really think it was real.
Sidebar: I am pretty sure that the cemetery is featured in the move “Hereditary,” which is a movie that was shot in different parts of Utah. I really think it is that same cemetery, which is only one reason why that movie made me feel like I needed to spend a week in a mental institution.
Yep I just googled it and yes, it was that cemetery. I knew it immediately, when I saw that movie and I immediately went oh ugh. I know that fuckin cemetery, oh ugh.
Well so. To abruptly shift gears! Let’s get back to how capitalism and “environmentally responsible” living cannot coexist. Let’s get back to that. (My god, why am I writing about something like this when I have a job interview in like…well let’s see, less than an hour?)
Even with the complex PTSD stuff aside, even as a teenager, it really did occur to me, pretty frequently actually, that maybe I wasn’t really truly clinically depressed at all. Maybe I was just living in a very sick fucked-up system and I had no choice but to either fight the system which would mean a lifetime of anxiety and stress and misery and probably jail, or just go with the flow and live in the system, which would mean a much more low-grade version of stress and misery and hopefully not jail, but might also come with a great deal of self-loathing, or else constant cognitive dissonance/dissonance reduction.
Right, so I chose the second thing, obviously. The dissonance reduction inevitably leads to stuff exactly like what my life led to—justifying things like, Oh Okay I guess I’ll go ahead and have children, even though I know it’s irresponsible I really want kids so I’m going to do it anyway because there’s nothing I can do about these big ugly problems so I might as well have some joy, and I guess I’ll work for horrible bad polluting tax-evading fortune-500 companies, because I need to make money to feed the children/myself/pay my mortgage, and uh,
But look. No, I couldn’t fully immerse myself in that dissonance reduction enough to just accept it. I couldn’t entirely not constantly try to think of ways that I could exist within capitalism, with children, and still not sort of hate myself for making “selfish” decisions that have just continued to perpetuate the end of humanity-as-we-know-it.
I mean, overthinking stuff such as: what if there was some way for capitalism and humanity to actually coexist? I mean to say, humanity can’t exist if we totally wreck the planet where we have to live, so…how do we make capitalism somehow “work” in a way that won’t destroy our home-world? Like, can we do this?
The answer is no, probably not. The only thing we could theoretically do is to somehow annihilate capitalism, which seems impossible. Because what could you replace it with? The other economic/government systems that have ever been tried have been abject failures, and nobody has come up with anything else.
Okay so two things about this: One thing is that I have a job interview in….let’s see, about a half an hour—and the other thing is that….wait I don’t know how to explain this. Or I guess I really just did explain it. I mean the thing about how, my entire adult life, I have been characterized as “anxious and depressed” which has given certain people (my oldest sister, just to give one example) a kind of license to constantly gaslight me as being…I don’t know what other term to use other than “infantalized.” And I wanted to write about that, and put it into a much larger context even than I have put it here.
I mean I wanted to try to effectively explain exactly what that feels like. The goal of my writing, for a long time, has been to try to make readers understand exactly what this thing feels like, this thing that I am feeling/have felt, and I thought, for many years, that the mark of a good writer is whether the writer can actually really effectively do that, or at least kind of do it.
I don’t feel like I was successful at all, as far as effectively conveying “Here’s What That Felt Like” with that memoir-thing, in no small part because it was a fucking convoluted non-linear-time adhering continuity-error-riddled mess, but the other reason is because of something that struck me as I was writing that post about The Butthole Surfers just a couple of days ago:
It’s often really hard to convey how stuff made you feel without engaging in what seems/feels like…idle gossip about people who probably don’t want or maybe even don’t deserve to be talked shit about. Or at least, when you’re talking about anything that involves interpersonal conflict, which is what most “feelings” -type situations in this life do involve. This has been an ongoing problem for me, as a writerly type, since I began writing anything that could be described as “personal essay.”
So, yeah.
Well I have a job interview in like, well, less than a half an hour. In a matter of minutes, actually. I had better put on my game face. Because of how I have to participate in capitalism, and all that.