The Reactionary Trigger

[Heine's Osteotome: For cutting deep seated bone, with preservation of surrounding soft tissue, 1889]


I mostly had an extremely happy childhood. I was want for not much. String. Crayons. Newspapers folded into boats and hats. I was delighted with what I was given. The best thing I was given was what I understood as freedom when I was a child. In the summer I could play outside, way past dark. I set up the tent, my sweet mother had given me, and had sleepovers. My invited guests and I would sneak out and run to my school's playground in the middle of the night, hanging upside down on monkey bars. Dark and barely tethered, night-time is my time. I love it. It's quiet. The noise of the world is at a minimum. Freedom to me meant being happy and scared at the same time.

They don't have monkey bars anymore.

I was the last child born in a family of four children. My mother was exhausted by the time I was pushed out. I was a "mistake". Sometimes, especially as I got older, they didn't let me forget it. All of them.

I couldn't figure out by the age of 12 what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be so many things. None of these things ever were important enough for me to pursue for longer than a month's stretch. In my mind. Coming from immigrant parents there were very few viable career choices they could actually visualise for me. They were informed by the fairly affluent neighbourhood I grew up in. Pick one: doctor, lawyer, accountant, banker. 4 choices. That's it. I couldn't wrap my head around any these.

I remember I could draw. Nice dream. I remember drawing on the front porch of my neighbour's house with all my friends. Peggy, the matriarch of the porch sat drinking sun-steeped iced tea, smoking Rothman's Special Mild cigarettes. Sitting directly on the porch, my preferred station always being the floor, I was at eye level with her stubbly thick pale legs. I loved Peggy. I was drawing a picture of my house. Peggy thought it special enough to show my father. "Look, Quinn! Look what she did!"

Meh.

It was the last real thing I drew.

When I started physically developing, my darling father kept hammering the mantra that became my own:
You're stupid and ugly and will never amount to anything.

So a kid can do 2 things with this.
1. Believe it in fetal position.
2. Believe it in attack mode.

I chose Door #2.

I am highly reactionary. I need to fully learn not to respond to things for 24 hours. At least. I need to gain perspective. I need to think before I speak. I needed this more a few years ago but, as I discovered yesterday, there are triggers that send me back to the place I was when I was 12 years old.

Yesterday was a very hard day for me. I have no cat. Ack, the ex-husband/EX-best friend, wants to keep Chicken at his house longer. Chicken is so freaked out about going back into his cage/jail to come home with me that he hides everytime I go over to Ack's house.

And I'm caught in the eye of a shitstorm.

When I first started blogging the reason I started was to just put thought on a site that could upload pictures. It was for me and no one else. Sure, technically the world was able to see it. Read it. But, honestly... who would? After 6 weeks of consistent uploading, someone commented; someone outside of my friend base. Someone I didn't know was commenting on something I'd written.

Grumblecakes. Grumbli.

Grumbli's a sweet, quiet, lovely and supportive friend. The friendship happened naturally. As naturally as it could happen in this realm. She shared her life and I shared mine.

Jason was also sweet, generous and really expressive in comments. He challenged my thoughts at times. He simply supported in other times.

Worker was tragic. Is lovely. And supportive. He has a gift in decifering my tone.

Sarge initially was caustic and sarcastic. As she knows, I didn't like her from our first interaction. Well, for several interactions subsequent to the first. But eventually we found a truce. A lovely, lovely truce. She gave me some advice, from a very loving standpoint. That, I will never forget.

Collectively they became a huge part of a support system I didn't realise was lacking in my life. It is very difficult to find that kind of synergy in the world. In our individual towns or cities. The small little pockets we feel comfortable inhabiting. To me, they became a new Dream Team. But as I'd said in a previous post, Dream Teams don't last forever. You can't hold on to perfection because it's so fleeting.

Someone very wise once told me, "Nothing really, really good or really, really bad ever lasts for very long."

And that's the thing.

I am guilty as charged.
I. Was. Ridiculous.
I was insulting.
I am not without my condescension.
And I am protecting them. I protect everyone I love.

But I am not embarrassed. Not over Chicago. I am embarrassed how I handled yesterday's comments stream. I will be removing none, as I need this as a constant reminder just in case I forget this lesson. I am earnestly full of regret in handling it the way I had.

I didn't start this thing with a readership in mind. Yes, it is public. Yes, I can disclose what I want and save what I don't. And that I have done. I cannot be accused of lack of disclosure. Not when it comes to my own life alone. If these people, people who didn't choose to comment on any other post I'd made before, save Jessica, were actual readers of my thoughts, I simply wasn't aware of them. They'd never made their presence known to me before.

They never asked why I'd want to accompany my friend to the police station to file for sexual assault.
They never asked why I would cry everytime I had sex in 2004.
They never wondered why I would rather go to concerts alone than with someone else.
They never asked why I was so fascinated by how something grew.
They never wondered aloud how I could be best friends with my ex-husband.
They never wondered why I like making custom commemorative T-shirts designed for me and important others.
They never travelled with me down the road as I tipped my hat to drunkards.
They never expressed concern about my loss of employment.
They never made themselves known when I hailed Blogger as Humanity's gift.
They never asked why I think too much money is inherently evil.
They never wondered why I love Interpol so much.
Or why I stay sober when everyone else is a mess around me.
They didn't say anything when I said I hate numbers.
They weren't with me during Christmas 2004 when I cried for 48 hours straight over a 24 year old chronic and potentially fatal Crohn's sufferer, alone in California, too sick to get on a plane.
They weren't there when I was nearly hit by a car or was a witness to a car accident.
They didn't cry with me when I told stories about the injustices in some people's lives.
They weren't there when one of my new friends held a 2 year old's freshly decapitated head.

They were absent, or just onlookers.

My relationship with the aforementioned 4, started as real as it possibly could. There were introductions. There were experiences shared. Virtual strangers, and I mean that, are coming to me now asking for information, that for nearly all the reasons and more that Anonymous had so thoughtfully written out, I am unwilling to disclose. I do thank you, Anonymous, for putting yourself in my position. And I only had to read it once to get it. [she giggled]

Touché.

My mother used to say to me, "You could do all the good in the world, but as soon as you do one wrong thing, that's the thing they remember."

My mother is always right. 36 years later, it still makes me scratch my head.

I've always maintained that one really has to understand where a person came from to understand where he/she may be at this present time. Through other's thought/comments, I realised where I came from.

Thank you.

I used to be more concerned with product vs. process. I wanted to arrive at the point. I wanted something tangible to hold as the end result of labour. Sometimes process is so completely intangible, even to the one experiencing it. Maybe especially to the one experiencing it.

I woke up this morning thinking: Maybe I should give it up. This Blog thing. There is a responsibility as I'm discovering. I've historically shirked all responsibility. I've always hated restrictions and authority. I wanted ultimate freedom without responsibility.

But, as I'm discovering, freedom has a price. And I'm not sure if I can ante up.

There are things said in comment streams that, depending on the mood of the reader, it could be taken in completely different ways than it was intended. That happened to me yesterday. I regret that happening. That also happened to Grumbli some days ago. Through this process, this very short blip in the grand scheme of things, this World Wide Web has lost Grumbli. And Jason. Each for their own reasons, of course. Though, I don't think that what's happening right now is helping them come back anytime soon. Their missing presence is felt by me. I feel the loss.

I wanted this blog to be about love and comraderie.
I wanted this blog to capture the lessons that I learned on any given day.
I wanted this to be a place that I could revisit in years to come to help me remember who I was if one day I forgot.
I wanted to remember beauty.
I wanted to document it.

Life is full of surprises. Some are wonderful and some are not. This is a lesson that I will not forget. You all have helped me in bringing me closer to myself. Seeing the stuff that as much as I thought wasn't there anymore, still is a bit. But I can see it now.

So, thanks again.