Feeling bereft this morning, not sure why. The sky is thick with clouds flowing smoothly northwards, and it will rain today. But that’s not the reason for how I feel. It’s that, somehow, I don’t feel that I’m living my life. I feel that, somehow, I didn’t build this, this life. And yet I must have–or at least contributed quite a bit. Yet so much must have happened subconsciously. Contradictions galore… I want to live in a city. I don’t want to live in an ugly city. It’s me, I’m the problem. I can’t accept anything about myself, really–at least that’s the sense I get if I start digging. I wonder about these courses that “teach” “radical” “self-acceptance,” for example. I’d probably run screaming from the room. My “Acceptance” meditation pack asks, “Who or what are you resisting in your life right now?” Ask yourself in the second person, just like that. Well, today I realized that the question still works if you cut it off, like so: “Who or what are you?” And I got nothing–and a lot, or more, it seemed, than when I asked the complete question. My resistance is to myself, and it seems to work on at least two levels. One, I resist the “real” me, which I don’t accept because she’s an unworthy, bad person who should never have been born. I think part of that belief was bricked and mortared into my core in the maternal bosom. I suppose a radical self-acceptance course would “teach” me how to unbrick myself and to love the core me. But here’s where the second problem arises: I do believe that I’m the sum of parts, somehow. I change, I morph, I am not constant–or at least not constantly the same. I think science would bear me out at the molecular level–and even psychologically and neurologically. For example, I was probably born with astigmatism, but over the decades my eyes have changed in other ways, affecting how I see and focus on the world. My brain was developing at birth and continued to do so throughout childhood. I’d like to think it continues this way still. So, biologically I’m inconstant–and culturally, sociologically, I’ve reinforced these statuses through fashion (fashioning, making): how I learn, what I learn, how I live, what I choose (or not choose) as my environment. And still, I resist the “real” me–and of course I resist the real me, because at some level I don’t believe there is one–hence, unbricking the “core” so it can be “accepted” seems like a fools’ errand to me. But I’m at a loss how to keep fashioning the me I have–the one I have created. I’m haunted by the past, I can’t see the future very clearly. That we’re in such horrible political waters doesn’t help. I suppose I should undertake an audit of all the various bits and pieces of me, and polish them up, make them shine, put them together… (“She’s so well put together,” her friends said of her. Ha ha.) If I was attacked (see “rusty nail” incident), and I believe I was, then that assault also contributed, along with the “raised by wolves”-and-“narcissistic mother” syndrome, to my core instability. But I had a guardian angel, in (and after) that incident. Sounds wacky, but I know it to be true. Does that mean there is a core, that I believe there is one?
In other news: I went on Facebook for the first time in days, perhaps actually weeks, and it was shockingly boring. If you don’t constantly feed it, it serves a very thin gruel back. All the interestingness comes from the feeding, which grows an ephemeral life at the expense of an embodied, durable one. It’s a digital mirage, and a perfect simulacrum at the level of the mechanics and dynamics of “real” life. But it’s not real life. I will write a longer “commonplaces” note about this on Evernote.