The trouble with you is that you’re just too perfect. So said my father to my sibling again and again. A lifetime of hearing that will render you useless at being flawed, which we all are, we which all essentially have to be. What a weight to carry. What a terrible permanence. I escaped that sentence but I heard it. The impact was felt. The inference that the rest of us weren’t was experienced as a flaw in itself, the greatest one, the one that encompasses. I didn’t know it was a gift to have it pointed out that I was human. I determined not to be. I determined to be like my sibling. To not be human is a hell of a game to play here, partly because I’ve always felt I was visiting and partly because the visiting me is undeniably flesh and blood, and the point of all this flesh and blood is to be it in all its oozing uncomfortable mess, to be vulnerable utterly so that life - and by that I mean safety - comes down to relationships, the universe experiencing itself. So to play the double game, be not human, be this machine who doesn’t feel, does nothing wrong, gets everything right, never lets the beauty in to make them cry is a sort of loss-loss on a grand scale. I used to work on it with my therapist. Do you believe you’re human? She asked. Not really I replied feeling smug. And she didn’t mean the time I lay on a rock by a quarry lake tripping on mushrooms and seeing myself in my true guise, at my true size, the wonder when a friend shouted it was time to go, that I had to fit all that into this tiny body, and my reply didn’t mean that either. I was talking about the barrier to being part of this chaotic scramble, an ant on the face of a planet, one of millions, the same as everyone else. You know how it is with addicts, you’re either king of the world or a piece of shit and there is no in-between. The normal lands of even keel, no drama, a mediocre existence where some things go right and some things go wrong and both are fine is anathema. It is too vulnerable. The trouble with my father was that he was just too oblivious. The damage of those words, the perfectionism worm sent to burrow, caused pain and suffering unknown. This, that I do every day is an antidote, one of many I take, a draught of pressing publish when I know it can’t be perfect, when I don’t know if it’s finished or not.
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To be FLAWFUL and AWFUL....what a burden.
This reminds me of my mother yelling at me for using the words she sent me to school to learn. 🙃