So Many Philomels, so rudely forc’d

Posted on August 29, 2002 in PTSD Reflections

We’ve lost, for an unknown number of days, weeks, or months, a young writer who I have been encouraging and cultivating. Becca included us in a note to all her online friends:

hi everyone
well i just made one major mess up
and my dad is pissed
my network cable has been cliped
the phone has been taken away
and i hae basically no contact
that is not unsupervised
with the outside online world
sorry no more email 
no more chat
no more calls
no more anything
till further notice
sorry
Becca

And then the silence begins. But not quite. She mailed out a poem afterwards, one in which she apologizes at length to her father for the unspecified crime that led to her excommunication from the InterNet.

What did she do?

I know few details of her life. She’s bipolar for one thing and she’s seventeen years old for another. Such measly summaries do not begin to describe a person, so let me go on. I’ve often come to the #peanut_gallery chat room at Dalnet to find her waiting for me there, needing a hug. Somedays she is chatty. At other times I find her in the slough of despond. Her poetry and some conversations we’ve had tells me that there’s a conflict with her father going on over religion. Her latest poem suggests that this may be the point of genesis of her current punishment. I know she’s groaned when he’s dragged her off to church picnics and complained about the Christian radio station he keeps pounding in the background.

Becca finds herself wicked and impossible. She writes in her poetry blog:

Im afraid of you finding out the truth
the truth of how I think and feel
about a monster that I see
the monster I see every day
every single day I deal with the monster
the monster that is called me

I, too, lived with a father who got religion. I remember the constant challenges of my personal spirituality or seeming lack thereof. Once I told him that I was interested in Buddhism. He thought about sending me to a deprogrammer. He used to ruthlessly cathechize me and set moral problems for me to face. I, for my part, set him moral problems, too, and he often failed the test. For one thing, he had a hard time practising Christian charity and forgiveness. He didn’t just consider the lilies and allow them to grow: he rigorously dug up the bulbs, pared the shoots he did not like, replanted them, overwatered them, and stamped the ground when the way I developed did not suit him.

Dad had difficulty finishing an audience without hitting me and he tried to direct me away from my love for English literature into fields he thought were more remumerative, such as anthropology. The politics of that direction I took in my life are complicated. Dad believed my books were destroying my mind. I liked to read. He thought I should work more with my hands. Perhaps this stems from the childhood he spent growing up among railroad men. I don’t think he appreciated the amount of work that a writer must put in to refine his craft, that every book must be read with a mind to self improvement — if not on the first reading, then on the obligatory second. My hands never got dirty. Dad had this idea: I would become an archaeologist and set up a consulting business. I thought I saw an end run: I could get my literature fix by studying mythology. It didn’t quite work. I got entangled in discussions about kinship and social organization. I didn’t become the kind of anthropologist he wanted to be, but I didn’t end up doing what I wanted, either.

Red Water Lily has been writing about similar things as exercises from a workbook called The Courage to Heal. She came up against the wall when her parents decided that school was a waste of their money and pressed her to get a job. She says:

I was very hurt and disappointed and didn’t understand how anybody could stop someone else from making something out of their life. I hated the power that my parents had over my life and I resented them for using that power against my hopes and dreams.

I don’t think outsiders can ever completely understand the politics of a family they do not grow up in, why the victims cannot just throw away the past and get on with their lives. Therapists love the fellow who seemingly transforms. “Go back to school. Get a better job. You can do it. You can change your life.” They snap their fingers to emphasize the alacrity that is possible. Heal now! Heal fast! I think, like personnel officers, they tend to favor the manic over the depressive. They don’t know what to do with rolling slugs like me. We don’t get over things like they think we should. It’s all the same whether the do-gooder is a professional or a religious zealot. They get mad at you when you don’t commit miracles in their name.

So what happened to Becca? Did she visit a porn site link that she found or heard about in a chat room? Did her father find a log of cyber sex? (Don’t look at me) or did he read her poetry and just not understand. I suspect that religion played a major role. He seems to want to cure her like my father tried to cure me by applying the Word.

A funny thing happened just then. I wrote the last sentence of the previous paragraph like this: “He seems to want to cure her like my father tried to kill me by applying the Word.” Becca has often spoken of death. It’s her disease. I prefer to just listen and to remind her that she is loved. I believe in a light hand with suicidal friends, a little tenderness and distraction being the spiritual pharmaceuticals I apply to the aching soul. I believe that Becca has to find her own way. Red Water Lily is much farther along. But then she is older and free to ignore those who would entangle her in their expectations.

Freeing oneself of the weave is painful. I don’t think you ever quite make it all the way out. I speak of course as someone who sees the world at mid-life and who has set aside the false hope of being free from pain in favor of the healthier course of just accepting that it is there and going on anyways. I look to others to affirm that I am not entirely crazy, that though I suffer from rippling chemical levels, there remains inside of me a sane man who can assuage much of the pain. Red Water Lily said that people described her as “intense”. I have had the same word applied to me, with the same feeling attached — that it is something bad. I don’t think it is, if properly channeled. But to live your own life can be hard for the person sensitized by hormones and circumstance. Becca, Red Water Lily and I fight to be ourselves in a world that thinks it knows our minds and can make better prescriptions for our happiness than the ones we know to soothe.

I remember and apply a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. So many Philomels, I sigh. Each one so rudely forc’d.