Knowing

In my last entry I talked about lying, and truth.  But the truth is that if someone asks me how I am or what I feel, I would be lying if I said anything other than "I don't know."  Or, what would be more accurate, I guess, would be to say that the feelings are too tangled up, and I don't know which ones come first, or how many they are, or how many layers deep they go.  I've never been good at choosing a place to start.

(In cleaning a room or--so horrific--cleaning and packing to move--the question of where to start immobilizes me.  "Just pick a place," people say.  "It doesn't matter where you start, just pick a place and go from there."  And I just continue to stand in the doorway, uncomprehending.  I hear the words--they make sense--but still I have no idea how to put them into practice, and no idea how to learn to do it.)

I'm not even good at writing in a diary anymore.  I used to keep one, from the time I was about fourteen till I was--maybe--about twenty.  Even then I wasn't good at it.  I wrote a lot, but if someone were to read those books (after they found the keys, of course), they'd be disappointed if they thought they were going to learn about my life or the world around me.  Reading over them, I always notice that I almost never talk about any events, anything concrete to give a reader something to grab on to.  No, it's all about feelings.  And elaborate metaphors to illustrate those feelings.

"I wish it were the way it used to be, when the light shone upon me and everything seemed golden.  Now I just huddle in the shadows, cold and shivering, a tattered blanket all I have to try to wrap myself in, and it is woefully small. . . ."

Okay, that's not an actual quote.  It's something I just made up.  But that's the gist of it.  My writing is embarrassingly bad, though I blame my teachers for some of that.  Why did they give me As and tell me it was good?

I don't completely ridicule that girl.  I get it.  She was a teenager, and that was the way she wrote as a teenager.  I can tell now, of course, when a young writer is good--or going to be good--even through all the curlicues and winding sentences and "big" words.  (I smile at them, though.  I can't help that.)  But of course I hold myself to a different standard, as we all do, I suppose.  I should have been better.  I should have seen it.  How could I have remained so immature for so long?  It was long after everyone else had matured, wasn't it?  When I think about authors like Austen, like the Brontes, I think about how young they were when they first wrote publishable books.  My writing was like the writing of a two-year-old when compared with that.  I can't remember smiling over the naivety in Northanger Abbey or Wuthering Heights.

(Though, to be honest, Charlotte's Professor tends to make one grin.  Or grimace.  Because it's a mess, it's just an emotional, wish-fulfilling mess.  It reminds me of the first "novel" I wrote--and actually managed to finish--when I was 16-18 years old.  Oh, Charlotte.  Your professor.  And how he seemed in print form to value your qualities over anyone else's. . . . I know.  I know.  I know.)

Someone might say I'm just being hard on myself.  "We're always harder on ourselves than anyone else . . . ," yada, yada, yada.  But that's not what it is  It is pure and simple narcissism.  (If narcissism can be simple.)  Because I have to believe that I was different from other people, that my writing had something indescribable even then, that there was foreshadowing, crystal ball revealing of how it was to be, much later.  Because if none of that is true, then I'm just another person.  I'm just another nameless wisher, and there is no magic charm to guarantee that it's all been written in the stars, I'm just another girl who wants something and is, if we look at statistics--boring, cold, flat statistics--much more than likely to fail.  Branwell Bronte.  Tolstoy's brother.  So, you see, I need proof that this isn't the case, and you can imagine how upsetting it might be to think you might not find it.  To think that you're ordinary. . . .

It's amazing the stories we tell ourselves to survive, isn't it?  Amazing how the brain hits on something it just can't deal with, and so it comes up with an explanation, or invents an alternative that we cling to, because we have to--or else stumble and fall--fall hard.  And we tell ourselves, "But if I believe so strongly, then it must be true, mustn't it?"  And then, "Well, but if I believe in it hard enough, then it will have to come true, won't it?"  And then, even as everything is ending, a baffled, "But it was true--it was true--wasn't it?"

But who cares if it is true?  I do.

Who cares if it's true?  I don't.

Hedda Gabler, in Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name, kills herself because she so badly wants two things that are so at odds with one another that it is impossible to possess both at the same time.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  Hedda Gabler needs the impossible.  If her needs cannot be met, she must die.

Don't worry, this is not a suicide note.  I'm much too scared of death for something like that.  And also, underneath all the doom and gloom and giving up, I'm forced to admit that I actually haven't given up.  Not really.  It only looks that way, mostly feels that way.  But there is always that muffled spark.  "Hope is the thing with feathers----- and never stops--at all--"  How many wish this weren't true, I wonder?  Sometimes the humiliation of hope is enough to make you sink to your knees.  And even then--it sings on.

I think it's what I still do, maybe.  Talk on and on about abstract feelings, until what once might have made sense in a single sentence--or two--becomes all tangled up and confusing and turns out not to make sense at all.  But say life itself doesn't make sense, plain and simple, and we've come full circle. 

(If circles exist.  Or lines.  Or even the contour of a beating heart.)

I know how I feel, but there are no words for it all.  In all the words here I have barely even touched on it.  So my answer must be "I don't know."  Because I don't know how to tell you.