I, Aquiescência

I have something to tell you that I can’t bear to say without covering my eyes and gnashing my teeth.

I’m writing to you with the volume of a primal scream. Can you hear it? My heart begging and pleading to pound out of my chest? The words are racing along at the pace of a bass beat to a house track. (130 BPM.) I have something to tell you that I can’t bear to say without covering my eyes and gnashing my teeth. I’d much rather write it than say it. Or yell it in your ear in the middle of the crowded dancefloor. I don’t want you to know it but at the same time I need to know what you think after I say it. I know, somehow still my foundation is weak. In so many ways I’ve come so far and I’ve still so far to go. I do depend on your attention. I need your validation more than I need to eat. In fact I eat so that I grow so that there is more of me for you to look at. Yes, I’m pathetic too, I’m a demon dog in disguise hoarding diamonds in the desert, hiding from the sun by digging my muzzle into the dunes, knowing damn well I’m doing damn all but embarrassing myself. Dignity? Who’s that? All I have is my heart in my hands and the words which keep spilling out of the open wound now that I’ve blown open the dam and the ribs. I’m doing it again, avoiding, distracting with the glamor of my craft — did you notice? Fine, I’ll finally say it, (the blood pumping through my veins with such a Marianac pressure): I am!

And human, I am! I lie! I steal! I pine! I laze about! I contradict myself. I go back on my word. I’m vain, I graze on my greed, I love to be seen and I love to be hidden, I hate being alone. I cringe at being reminded I am probably nothing special. I can’t dance very well. I love my avoidant tendencies. I hoard my precious secrets, I’m pretentious, I’m ambitious, I’m entitled, I’m stubborn and often stupid, I seethe, I withhold, I react. I’m enthralled by base sensations and the fulfillment of temporary desire. I love to drink and I love to get drunk. I’m never on time. I prefer to be comfortable, coddled, inconsistent. I want to be loved so I feel that I have great powerful worth, that I’m exceptional, I’m enticing, I was chosen by someone at the expense of everyone else on the planet. But I hesitate myself to choose. I am only a character and I’m writing the narrative and this so far is only a fraction of my arc.

My deepest fear takes the form of my older self. He is aged, slowed, exhausted, and lonely. Weak and full of regrets. My stomach churns having to look at him. “I never got what I wanted,” he croaks over candlelight, eyes still as big as ever, but bloodshot. “I never found who I was looking for.” He coughs after every phrase, deep and hacking and wincing. “No. I did. Many times. But I never let them in.” His hands are gnarled and covered in gold, filled with rings he never got to gift anyone else. “Meaning, of course, that I’ve never found myself. I’m looking at you now, young still, earnest, energetic, and I can’t believe it — that I ever had so much life in me!” His teeth are yellow and he doesn’t seem to know it. “I still have everything everyone has ever given me. I can’t believe I’ve changed so much.” And looking at him, I can’t believe I managed to never change.

---

Forgive me, I forgot I have to come down from the stratosphere and return to the world if I want to be known. And I do want to be known. So desperately, you wouldn’t imagine! Liberation exists only in the space of relation to the Other. If you can tolerate being visible. Within that terrible tension comes the agony of growth, the squirming discomfort, the surviving. “I’d rather die than get caught,” a client tells me with his head in his hands, to which I say, “You’re not alive until you get caught.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted my shadow to be real — I’ve yearned for a twin — someone that understood me and my moods, someone I could rely on to be totally receptive to my thoughts, someone who challenged me by sheer exposure and closeness to myself. Consciously and unconsciously both I’ve been seeking this out with everything I do and have done, the writing, the dancing, the loving, the jewelry adorning. Inside I’m still a child. And at different times of the day I’m still trying to patch up those childhood wounds, running around in circles with a blindfold on, looking for my mommy, trying to look cool in front of my crush, reaching out for friends to help guide me.

But how desperately I want to hide from everyone! No, it’s a disaster to be seen! If you’re always around you’ll notice how often I shirk my responsibilities, how easily I cut corners, how lazy I spend my mornings. What you see outside is the curated me, the me that emerges after spending forty minutes in front of the mirror getting my hair just right. I can’t bear to let you see what I’m like when the lights are off and no one is around. For days I put off even the idea of this article because I knew I was on my mind and I knew I couldn’t get into this without really looking at myself.

J. told me to ruminate on the words: I’m ready. (I did; I’m not.) N. was quick to tell me when she found out: You’re not ready for what you want. (I knew but I didn’t want to hear it.) My mother loves to remind me: Stop procrastinating. Go out and get it. (I knew and I didn’t want her to recognize it.) My therapist points out: You’re falling into your cycle again. (God damn it, I know it!) I go on to tell my clients: No one’s going to tell you you’re ready. There will be no sign. You have to decide the time has come. (I knew all along I was speaking to myself.)

We saw Persona (1966) at Metrograph and for the first time in my many viewings I related to Elisabeth Vogler, the actress who chooses to go mute in an act of existential mutiny.

Oh, the unbearable crime of being! Being attached, being earnest, being consistent, being human… the burden! What do I do with my desire to be who I am not? To embrace all the heinous qualities which would alienate me from the rest of normal society? And what about life, which uncontrollably leaks through the protective prison I put myself in? And the others who dare to care about me, who want to edge closer to me, to see the turmoil within? The devils — what do they know?

No, really… what do they know? Why do they relate? What if we’re not all so different after all? And what we’re all contorting ourselves up trying to hide is the same rotten core we all have within, the same pit which is pure potential, which can be a tower or rubble depending on how much effort we put into grooming the garden?

Red on red on red on red. I close my eyes and see my ideal other: bloodstained. We are in a war, my lover and I, it doesn’t matter who they are or what we say to each other, everything is a battle and they who yields first wins. Power, control, desire, the tempest, the quick and the slow of the passion. Life energy. The pulp. The seed.

The enemy is inside me.

---

And then it arrives: this cascading wave of feeling that twists my face up in the train at 3 AM, returning to a home that is not mine. If I think about it I never really had a home. People that meet me this year and hear my story are starting to call me a gypsy, and I remember how my grandmother Gloria introduced herself as such proudly. My therapist says I may have a nomadic soul. That I’ll never truly be satisfied in one place. I always remember that first fortune I ever received from the mysterious man at the house party no one invited and no one saw leave: that I’ll suffer for a very long time before I live out my last years in satisfied contentment and contemplation.

Emerging also: the knowing: surrender is the answer. Behaviors can be refined but natures are innate. It’s possible to lose a battle with yourself. It doesn’t matter if you don’t ever want to suffer. As little as it matters if it’s raining and you hate to get wet. What’s left is the reality of the world and the clay in the hands with which we mold everything else.

So what will it take to become who we are? Surrender to self, meaning: Pain. Separation. Loss. Alienation. And that’s if you’re doing it right. Because the right you is wrong to everyone else — because it’s yours, only yours, no one else’s vision. People will begin to notice who you really are and fall away naturally from the misalignment… and this is all we can predict. For what comes next is the mystery of life and love, the mystery of magnetism, attraction, unpredictable spontaneity. In other words, you have to trust what comes, because you cannot know it until it is.

I dare you, I said first to the mirror and now to the page: embrace it. Become it. Suffocate yourself and live on the desperate fumes which emerge from your almost-death rattle. That is the truth of your essence: that inhuman wretch that you are when you’re clinging to life, when all the chips are down and it comes down to life or death. There is no ascension to higher consciousness without embracing your animal nature. You cannot conquer a beast you can’t even bear to look at.

Nothing is permanent and that’s the beauty of it. If you remain stagnant it is because you chose to. The comfort of predictable misery enticed you more than the uncertainty of inevitable change. You’ve survived everything so far, every single loss and betrayal and heartbreak, and you’re more prepared for what comes next than you ever have been before. And everything can disappear. And I mean it literally. You can’t hold onto anything. Not even yourself.

This is a story in three parts: a declaration, an obituary, and now a manifesto. My word is as good as the wind but I promise here and I really mean it now: I solemnly swear to be my full honest self no matter the consequences. No matter who looks at me with disgust. I’m so very good at doing this with style in the ways that I’m comfortable with, but that isn’t winning the war, only the easy battle. The crusade to individuate never ends. And maybe my grandchildren will be drafted in it, too. But I will do my best to gain as much ground as I can.

Damned if you love it and damned if you don’t. Leave if you have to. I’ll survive it. What matters the most is that I love me. No, I don’t yet, not fully, but I can’t get there until I look at me. Until I accept me. This is not the first step but it is another forward. I could tell you the ways this appears in the material world, but I won’t, not yet, and besides, the subconscious struggles to differentiate between a symbolic act and a material one. In other words my life is a ritual and ritual and art are related, fiction isn’t fictitious and all I am and all I do is up to interpretation. I don’t know the answers. All I know is: I am.

The cycle ends today because I say it does.

…and for those who were waiting on me to finish, here’s how you close off an evening after day drinking since you woke: You don’t.