Hold in My Headlock
Seven Yrs Later are stories on change, in dialogue with Seven Yrs Ago.
You’ve seen me more lately. I’ve been popping up in notebooks, portraits, captions laid open, links relentless. Unseen, I’m diagramming and color-coding, assembling my curriculum on how to do this. It could be an empire, could be a bucket-mold sandcastle. I found something that hit because everyone needs people, and I needed to affirm that to myself too. So I was going along productively! positively! when I scanned for what to write next and clumped into this mile high pile of bullshit. This meandering gripe like an unairable Lizzie McGuire episode, and by my own rules, I have to release it. I calculated how fast to take this all down, deactivate, cancel, pick up coding and hacking, go up to the thermosphere and dismantle some satellites, possess Will Smith’s body, clout my way to make Men in Black a reality, geolocate every person who liked and commented, then neuralyze each one from a socially safe distance.
That takes a minute. Here’s my admission of guilt instead.
These are the ground rules for Seven Yrs in one place. I like rules in art because limits beget force.
1) Seven Yrs Ago: Post what I thought this day seven years ago. Keep it as raw as possible, though tweak for character count because Twitter.
2) Seven Yrs Later: Take one thing from Seven Yrs Ago and write about how my thinking has changed. Since I release biweekly, I pick material from each two-week window, neither skipping ahead, nor dwelling in better windows.
And there’s the crux. I pitched Seven Yrs to be about growth, but pragmatically, I had a lot of material and accepted I have to let people know I’m a writer. I want to get paid to be what I am, because I got drive and I got bills. But what was meant to be an easy re-shelving of archives became an anticipation for context, so I pushed and I spread. So you’re here, waiting for the meta to have meaning, so I peeked ahead and gulped at what I think I’m asking myself to do: reopen time and take care of my shame. Most of the situations I’ll disclose are done, but all the shame they brought out is not. The shame of not mastering who I pretended to be, the shame of having been myself all along. I didn’t know I would provoke this and now I discover it publicly. It was so rewarding to simulate that I’m just charming, funny and perceptive. You and I will soon uncover that I’ve been ugly, unlikable and hopeless. But I’m going to give myself permission to show us, because I’m all of the above, but with a little more hope. As of now, Seven Yrs is about shame and closure.
For all it agitated, I have to look at my note for what it is, a starter version of where I am now. It’s uncomposed because I was trying to put words to confusion, and I spilled them on my notebook, the one place that absorbed it. Even in private, I stepped all over myself because I couldn’t discern egotism from ego, that I had the basic right to self-esteem. I still question that; I Googled “how to tell stories without being self centered.” Rereading the note, I didn’t think I deserved the feelings I had. I blamed my attitude, labeled it as ingratitude, and told myself that I will just be happy if I had a good attitude. In my first post about Seven Yrs Ago, I mentioned that at the end of 2013, I found out I had been depressed for about seven years. Much of that length was sustained by appearing good and fine, and while one side felt that, another side cried every other day for months. That got very tiring, so I forced myself to play normal. A good attitude can bring back joy, but a ceaseless mantra obscures the rest. I recognized I had “great friends who I can lean on” and that I was “chill with everything,” yet “[didn’t] want any of it,” and that is not ingratitude; I included that for a reason. My bad attitude was rather a clue to my depression, long-lingering when I thought I had killed it on my own. When I decided to be normal again, I did not tell anyone what happened, and no one asked why I stopped taking lunch in my Lit. classroom, concentrating on my iPod, eating dry bagels. Maybe if I had told even one person I was sad, maybe I wouldn’t have stayed sad when I thought I was finally happy.
My 20-year-old self had my 13-year-old self in a headlock, still vying to strangle the ache she let in. I have them both in my pits, the pits of a 27-year-old who wanted to unplug the internet. I am easing up, though the rigor mortis will take a bit. We’ll untangle, slowly, much slower than I demanded before, so as not to break off more parts than I already have. We can take turns repeating the 20-year-old back to us: “You are yourself. You own yourself. You’re lucky that you can do that and that you are doing that.”
I am lucky that I’m doing this. I write because I need to understand, and now I want to know how I stop myself when I shame myself. The past stories we tell ourselves still carry that weight, but they do not bear the entire truth. Shame does not hold the trust that I’ve rebuilt in myself and the faith that I’m giving back to people. I’ll stick to Seven Yrs because I have new stories for my old ones. As for you—don’t follow me unless you want new stories for yourself too. None of my selves want followers, but “friends who do what they want, who are their own Battlestar Galactica commanders! Or whatever!” Get back from behind me and get beside me. Tell ‘em.