That essay makes me shudder. It says it all too well.
For me, it's like a constant energy, a restlessness, like something too big has been shoved inside a body too small. Sometimes I feel like it wants to cut its way out, but mostly, I think, it wants to transform: take all that latent energy and apply it to this form, catalyse a reaction in the proteins, in the cells, fulfil the longing that lays dormant in the nerves.
Iris says it's like that, a bit, and also like having had parts of you cut off. When you lie down, when you get up, when you look in the mirror, there's stuff that should be with you that isn't, something essential. It's like if someone took your voice and your looks and your skills, and you remember being beautiful and talented and being able to sing, and you want to keep expressing these things, but no one will believe you: they only see something lesser, diminished, ugly and small. And it's not a shallow, vain thing, but if so much of your identity is tied up in being able to sing, being able to express that way, and yet you're not physically a singer even if that's so much of what you are... yeah.
(Not that beauty and ugliness are, necessarily, aligned along a good-bad continuum. But in terms of how people respond to you. Also, her words, not mine.)
As for not having a very solid identity, of feeling like something more and less and formless and not-applicable, I get that too. I definitely wouldn't say human is unobjectionable; everything is wrong, but human is too wrong, too smallstrangeflesh to hold this. But I think otherwise, we're quite similar. I don't like to think of myself as a person, quite, because I'm not sure all I am fits under the definition of a single person. When I try to shove myself into that box, too much of me bleeds out, around the edges. And then I get uncomfortable and the bleeding parts start wanting to wander off elsewhere and, well, I've just found that stuffing myself into that box doesn't suit me.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-11-12 09:36 pm (UTC)For me, it's like a constant energy, a restlessness, like something too big has been shoved inside a body too small. Sometimes I feel like it wants to cut its way out, but mostly, I think, it wants to transform: take all that latent energy and apply it to this form, catalyse a reaction in the proteins, in the cells, fulfil the longing that lays dormant in the nerves.
Iris says it's like that, a bit, and also like having had parts of you cut off. When you lie down, when you get up, when you look in the mirror, there's stuff that should be with you that isn't, something essential. It's like if someone took your voice and your looks and your skills, and you remember being beautiful and talented and being able to sing, and you want to keep expressing these things, but no one will believe you: they only see something lesser, diminished, ugly and small. And it's not a shallow, vain thing, but if so much of your identity is tied up in being able to sing, being able to express that way, and yet you're not physically a singer even if that's so much of what you are... yeah.
(Not that beauty and ugliness are, necessarily, aligned along a good-bad continuum. But in terms of how people respond to you. Also, her words, not mine.)
As for not having a very solid identity, of feeling like something more and less and formless and not-applicable, I get that too. I definitely wouldn't say human is unobjectionable; everything is wrong, but human is too wrong, too smallstrangeflesh to hold this. But I think otherwise, we're quite similar. I don't like to think of myself as a person, quite, because I'm not sure all I am fits under the definition of a single person. When I try to shove myself into that box, too much of me bleeds out, around the edges. And then I get uncomfortable and the bleeding parts start wanting to wander off elsewhere and, well, I've just found that stuffing myself into that box doesn't suit me.