Against the Wall

The space between

How I feel 

and what I do or say

(if there is any)

Is the space where I feel

Shame, loneliness, confusion

It’s the space where I try to make things make sense when they don’t and they can’t. It is the most alone feeling I know.

There’s a thing that happens when you see something with your own eyes and hear something with your own ears, when you pick up a thing in your hands and examine it closely, when you know something in your heart, or taste blood in your mouth …

And are then told that what you’ve seen, heard, felt and experienced is not real, that somehow you are perceiving things incorrectly …

… that, in fact, the only wrong thing exists inside you and not in what is happening around you.

You split from yourself, it’s the only way. You talk yourself out of your feelings, or shove them down or numb them out so you can go about your day and show up in the ways the people around you, or the situation, or the world at large demands. 

Your mother came at you last night, drunk and enraged and scared you so much you thought you might be able to back yourself all the way into the wall of your bedroom. You actually had the thought that maybe if you pressed yourself hard enough into that wall you could become a part of it and turn the palest lavender, just shoving your atoms right into the drywall and disappearing behind that semi-gloss surface like you never existed at all. And now today you are supposed to wake up and get ready for school, pack your lunch and head off like that never happened. It won’t be spoken of, there will be no acknowledgement, and if you’re waiting for an apology, you’ll be waiting over forty years. How do you go to school and smile at your friends and spit out the right answers when your teachers ask, and play like you’re a normal kid? I don’t know, I just know that I did it, but it felt like I was outside of the experience, or trapped inside the experience. It’s fucking lonely is what I’m saying.

Photo by Pete Willis on Unsplash

How about your dad with his sparkling eyes and snake-like ways? He picks you up from school on Daddy days and takes you to the apartments of women named Candy or Barbara or Jules. They’re always the same, skinny and short with big breasts and big smiles like your dad is some kind of god-like creature. Some of them are cloyingly nice to you and others ignore you. Some give you treats and others let your dad tell you to watch tv while they go and “rehearse” in the bedroom. No matter how they treat you, though, you are not to talk to your stepmom about these afternoons when you get home and can smell the goulash she’s made wafting down the hallway of the brownstone. The whole building talks about it, and she delivers small crockpots of it to the old lady who lives upstairs and can’t get out anymore. The old lady calls your stepmom an angel, and she is. She’s a depressed and moody angel, but wouldn’t you be with a husband like that? While your dad was banging Sally or Janey or Kimmy or Sue, she was here, cooking her ass off, pouring love into the noodles you’re going to eat with that goulash wondering how anyone whose heart is breaking can make something that tastes so good. And when she asks what you’ve been doing since school got out, you’ll hope you have a mouthful of food so your dad naturally has to answer. He’ll cut in, anyway, but it will take the pressure off you if your mouth is full, even if you have to swallow that food over a lump in your throat because you know it’s bad to lie, even by omission. You know this, both of your parents have drilled this into your head even as they lie to you and everyone else, every single day. What do you do with that? I don’t know, I just know that I did it, that I managed to swallow that food and clear that table and help with the dishes because that was the least I could do. But I felt sick in that house all the time because it’s a terrible feeling to be cast in the role of co-conspirator before you’re old enough to choose, or to have any say at all. It makes you feel meaningless and powerless and like you’re part of something secretive and ugly, even if you don’t fully understand what it is.

Photo by Sanket Shah on Unsplash

One day when you’re six you’ll tell your dad you wish you’d never been born and he’ll stare at you like he’s horrified and distraught, like you’ve shot him in the belly. And then you’ll try to make him feel better as he cries in your arms. You’ll say you didn’t mean it, but you did because living this way - being forced to live like things are normal when they aren’t? It kills you inside, slowly but without a doubt.

Which brings me to my point. What happened is right about sweet sixteen, I couldn’t be quiet anymore. If someone told me something wasn’t true - that the blue sky I was seeing with my own eyes was actually green or my mother wasn’t an alcoholic, if my dad said he was the victim of all these women who wanted him for themselves and not the perpetrator of so much heartbreak - I’d scream bloody murder, I’d breathe fire. It all changed when I was sixteen because a man overpowered me and when I finally found the courage to tell my mom and ask for help, she didn’t believe me, she believed him, a stranger. Maybe she needed to believe him because the truth was too awful, I don’t know. But it broke me, and all the rage I’d been swallowing came pouring out of me. Breathing fire and naming the truth as I understood it was like oxygen, it started bringing me back to life. Back to that kid I’d been - running barefoot in the sand at the Jersey Shore with the seagulls overhead and my Nanny’s hugs. 

It turned out that there had always been ways I was trying to find some kind of truth. When I realized at seven that the duck my mom was planning to have for dinner was the same duck that quacked, I started crying. Prior to that I just didn’t get it. Food showed up on my plate and I ate it. How could I have known at four or five that a hamburger or goulash came from a cow? Those words have nothing to do with one another. Or that pork came from a sweet baby piglet, the kind I’d fallen in love with reading Charlotte’s Web? How would I know that bacon came from Wilbur himself? Is chicken called chicken? Why yes, yes it is, but lots of different things have the same name in the English language so I didn’t think twice. That’s what a homonym is, even though I didn’t know that at five. I just knew there was: there, their and they’re, the same word to my little ears for three different things. I thought chicken on my plate and chickens that lived on farms were two different things with the same name. Once I knew I’d been eating animals, I stopped, that day, that minute because I loved animals. I loved them. How can you be part of harming something you love? That’s how I thought about it then, and it’s still how I think about it now, though I do not judge anyone for having different opinions. That was a truth for me that I held onto. I loved animals therefore I did not want to be part of harming animals. There’s no mental gymnastics needed, no feeling one way but acting another, there’s harmony. Harmony was a relief.

Cognitive dissonance is when you feel one way, but act another. Maybe it was ingrained in you as a kid to believe something, and then later when you learned that what you were taught is not true, it throws your entire understanding of everything into question. So you cling to that old belief, and you run toward the people who still believe it, stubbornly and steadfastly, because that feels easier than rethinking literally everything. Or you talk yourself out of how you feel or what you now know to be true, because if you don’t there’s going to be a barrier between you and people you love. Maybe you’re being forced to acquiesce because your livelihood depends on it - for example you’re a woman at a company working just as hard and doing just as well as any man with the same title, but he’s being paid more than you. Maybe you accept that, even though it enrages you, because your family needs the benefits the job affords you, or because you aren’t in a position to risk losing a job you need in order to keep a roof over your head. There’s a different kind of cost, though. It’s the cost of knowing something isn’t right, and going about your business anyway. It’s depressing, it sucks the lifeblood out of you, and it starts to eat away at your soul. We’re all living that way right now.

There have always been children dying all over the world, from the beginning of time, because men are violent. I’m just going to let that sit there. Historians say we have fewer wars now than we’ve ever had, and while I find that hard to believe and harder to draw any comfort from, the idea is that we are becoming less violent over time. Slowly and painfully less violent. What’s different now is that we see the suffering and anguish of children all over the world in real time, on social media, as they are being harmed. Here in the country where I live, mass shootings happen at schools regularly, children are slaughtered, and we all hold our heads for a few days or shake our fists at the sky or march in protest and sign petitions and make donations and call our representatives and nothing changes and then it happens again. And again. Yesterday I saw a video of a little boy, he couldn’t have been more than four or five, sobbing and holding the dead arm of his mother while she was under a blanket. Does it matter where in the world he was? A little boy was holding the dead arm of his mother, crying for her, and if that doesn’t break your heart, something is wrong. I wanted to crawl through the screen and wrap my arms around him and rock him, the way I would rock my own kids when they were tiny and scared. The way I would rock yours if they needed it. I wanted to get him out of there and bring him home with me, back through the screen, but I can’t. I can’t, and what do I do with those feelings of horror and heartbreak and helplessness in the face of unrelenting violence? What do you do with yours? 

Children are suffering all over the world and we know, and we are supposed to go about our days like this is normal, when any sane, caring person is screaming into the abyss that this is not normal, even if they’re only screaming into the abyss inside their own heads - which is what many people are doing these days. Do not assume you know how anyone is right now, how they feel, what they think, or what they’re doing with those feelings. For all you know, they could be actively donating to every organization trying to do good work, volunteering and signing petitions and calling their lawmakers, even if they’ve given up trying to have conversations on social media. Everyone I know is dealing with constant thrumming, low-level depression and a nice side of anxiety because the world feels like it ought to spin right off its axis - that would be more sane than anything else that’s happening - and you can’t talk about it, not online, anyway. There is not a single relevant topic you can discuss that requires any amount of thoughtful consideration without someone screaming at you, and I’d love to know who is helped by that. Things have become so extreme, you are not even allowed to be heartbroken for all children suffering because the world is mad and violent, only some, and god help you if you try to push back on that narrative in any way. It doesn’t matter that children are always innocent, no matter where they are born, it only matters that you are heartbroken for the correct children.

I hope we can agree when we justify, turn a blind eye, or numb ourselves to the fact that massive amounts of children are suffering and dying all over the world, our humanity is failing. If we can’t agree on that, I don’t know what to say. Social media can be a place where people connect and uplift each other, a place to banter, to share, to pile on loudly when someone is an unthinkable Butker asshat, to see the kids of the people you grew up with, and their dogs, cats and goldfish. But it can also be a giant cesspool of toxic rage where people unleash the very worst of themselves, and where nuanced conversation has long since died. It can be depressing as hell, it can make you feel utterly hopeless about humanity and incredibly scared that we aren’t going to be able to work it out, because to work it out, you do have to be able to have nuanced conversation, you do have to be able to tolerate it when someone disagrees with you, and you do have to be able to call it out when something feels unspeakably wrong. You have to be able to think ahead, and to realize at some point, somehow, we are going to need to learn how to exist together on this planet, or we’re going to destroy ourselves. That we don’t have to agree about everything to exist peacefully, but the only way forward is together. 

Otherwise you end up in that space that isn’t living or dying, and eventually you’ll wish you could just push yourself into the nearest wall until there’s nothing left of you at all. 

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about cognitive dissonance and the toll it takes, I’ll be here 5/17/24 at 11:15am PST or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast. Thank you for being here, I appreciate you.