Things did not go as I expected. Nothing new, I suppose, but still, I’d had high hopes for my grand plan. Once I finished writing MY LIFE AS A TURTLE: how I made it to geezer by lying, hiding, and denying, I told myself, my past angst would be released and forgotten. All disruptive emotional, psychological, and physical ills, self-doubts, and wrongness would be purged in one dramatic whoosh, banished into the cosmos to evaporate and dissipate. I’d be clean and fresh and whole, ready, eager, if I’m honest, to be done next mid-July. Peace be with me.
In one swell foop, I proved I must have a pretty hefty intellect if’n its counterweight is dumbasfuck—‘cause the above delusions certainly outline that in black. On the other hand, finishing the memoir portion of this seemingly endless symposium I’m penning did, indeed, douse the flame under the pot. My memories, such as they are, have no heat to them anymore. Fact is, I have no memories left to inflame. I cannot chart my full 124,000-word manuscript, because I cannot re-read it… or talk about it… or, frankly, recall most of it. There’s a blessing on every curse’s flip side, isn’t there, even to non-remembery gone amok. Still, despite vanquishing all that trauma from my psyche, it’s absence has left me feeling… how can I put it?
Empty. Not a bad empty. More like a where-do-I-go-from-here empty.
I suppose when one—that is, me—waits until their… that is my… seventh decade to acknowledge and eradicate aching truths, it logically follows I’d have a resettling period, so to speak. I mean, isn’t that the natural pattern? Crisis, cleanup, repair, recovery. Whether we skin our knee, get whiplashed in a crash, undergo cancer surgery, endure domestic abuse, or have to begin again after a natural disaster, the sequence is always the same: crisis, cleanup, repair, recovery. Life 101.
Of course, the longer and/or more traumatic the crisis, the longer and/or more difficult the recovery. Just a niggly little reality we mostly don’t like to look at—along with the fact that many folks never actually, fully recover. I’ve ghosted too many abuse-aftermath stories—sexual, narcissistic, domestic—to ignore that truth: survivors may eventually figure out how to get through the rest of their lives, but the wound remains unscab-able, forever slightly hot to the touch. Soothed but non-repairable by traditional therapies, cathartic poetry and betrayal burials notwithstanding. The key is behavior modification, say the healthcare gurus. Balance your work, play, family time. Take time for your mental, physical, emotional health. Align your spiritual, financial, environmental states.
Live your best life.
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Do I sound slightly tinged with anger? A bit frustrated? A dear friend once explained, quite earnestly, how I merely needed to reconfigure my time, energy, and thoughts so as to pursue balance… so as to feel better all around… so as to enjoy a happier, more normal life. All well-meaning, no doubt, but her earnestly-drawn diagram was patently geared toward the generic ninety percent. The only me part even close to said ninety percent benchmark is being right-handed.
Unpacking: our species is ninety percent right-handed.
We’re also ninety percent cis-gender and straight. Me? Not and not.
Only ten percent of us have blue eyes like me. I’m whiter than typing paper, making me an under-twenty-percent Caucasian. Americans account for 4.23 percent; Jews fewer than one percent. Check and check. And I only had one birth child, landing me in the twenty-four percent bucket.
But I am right-handed.
Lest ye assume I embody diversity by appearance alone, my different-from-the-rest-ness is exacerbated by a few other birthing accidents. I’m an introvert. Not too surprising since many entertainers, especially comedians, are cut from that cloth. And while Daniel Sloss will never see me as competition, I have been known to evoke a chuckle here and there, now and again.
Lonerism is a nature-as-opposed-to nurture trait, so I, being naturally multi-natured, run the full smorgasbord as variously a social, thinking, anxious, and restrained/inhibited introvert. Osiris forbid my psyche should settle on one type or another. End digression.
Then there’s my other go-with-the-gang disconnect: my whole global/anthropologic perspective thing. Sooo very not the ninety-percent norm—
… hmmm. There really aren’t all that many ninety-percent-shared characteristics, are there? Maybe I’ve been looking at this all wrong. Bet if’n I put together all my otherness percentages—and I had the slightest idea how to manipulate such figures or statistics or percentages or numerical data—my various non-norms would total up to a there’s-gotta-be-a-lot-more-like-me-than-I-know subtype.
And ain’t that a puzzlement? ‘Cause last time I looked—ya know, this morning—the various leaders-that-be in most news-producing societies rank what I consider my strongest selling points as deficits. My walking-talking, universe-ordered diverse-itity raises ire, as Twain would say, extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of my bulk.[1]
“How does all this wrap back to Turtle,” you may well ask—try to follow my mental gymnastics.
Being empty, I’ve granted myself non-need-to-fix-me permission. My Time (work-play-family), Health (physical, mental, psychological), and States (spiritual, financial, environmental) Venn Diagram may be too lopsided to achieve other people’s balance standards, but Popeye is right: “I yam what I yam.” Or, to cop a lyric from Jerry Herman, “I am my own special creation… I don’t want praise, I don’t want pity… and what I am needs no excuses.”[2]
Because my emptiness has put my am-ness in stark relief: I am an intellectual dumbasfuck with an unbridled passion for Creative Analysis, aka Analytical Reasoning, aka Deliberate Thinking.
Most people have no idea what any of that means, but it’s both my work and my pleasure. Ghostwriting’s number one professional skill. The secret sauce that wakes me with solutions to questions I didn’t (or sometimes do) realize I’d asked.
It’s also the impetus behind my current windmill (R U Smart Enough to Vote [RUSE2V]), and the reason I Cassandra-know three damn-it-all-to-hell incontrovertible human-nature truths:
Everyone thinks their perspective is right: “Everybody thinks that way. Everybody does it that way.” Welcome to sameness, an unavoidable human craving that deems those who don’t think or do “that way” irrefutably wrong.
Everyone perceives their motives as true and pure, even the nastiest, vilest people on the planet. If’n their perspective is the only right one, then their motives must follow suit, right?
Everyone believes their agenda(s) are justified no matter what others believe, think, or feel.
So figure I’ll be incorporating my passion into future postings… and RUSE2V challenges. I’ll use Critical Thinking, Debate Protocol, Abstract Reasoning, and Focused Ingenuity to explain why, for example, book banning is good and right, even though I know in my heart it’s bad and wrong.
Because, as this admittedly dumbasfuck intellectual keeps insisting, in all the universe, there is no such thing as a one-sided coin.
[1] Paraphrased from “On the Jews,” Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemmons, 1897: “He [the Jew] is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.”
[2] “I am what I am,” written for La Cage aux Folles, composed by Jerry Herman (1983).