Tuesday, April 6, 2010

the injustice of un-learning

Read carefully. I am opening a gate. Because I cannot see how else to make you understand, I am going to tell you a story.

When I was three I was placed in a foster home. The minutes of my life before about sixth grade are only Polaroids. I have an silent album of my days that are merely a glance and a feeling; nothing more. The first is of a cabinet in the laundry room of my mother's house. It is filled and overrun by canned goods. I see in my mind the concentric rings atop a can. Then a snap inside of me and a feeling of doom. I feel apocalypse and holocaust and the end of days in an instant. I feel the world finishing it's last revolution but somehow, the green beans at my feet survive. But all I see are yawning cabinet doors; corn, green beans, and the end of all things.

The second is a twin to the other; they are born of and fed by the same action. Flesh of the instant in which I shattered the universe and all of the pieces ran off into the ether in a squabbling line and chased each other from then until now. The pieces have run one behind the other and formed my days from that instant to this.

I am three years old, just as in the first, but I am alone. I am in a big, soft bed. It is so much bigger than me and the infinite dark of the bedroom in the first of my foster homes stretches out around me. There is a door that is too far away. It is hell. I know this as surely as I know I brought myself here. As surely as I know God hates liars. The mental Polaroid is filled with the sort of shame one could only feel in the deep hateful echelons of hell reserved for conniving little girls. I think if there is a hell and I find my way there it will be a blackened room with a perfect bed in which I cannot sleep; into which the wrong person tucks me every incalculable night; in which I lay alone, with only my shame to sing me goodnight until Satan has brought upon me the vengeance which I deserve.

These Polaroids belong to each other in the way the dawn belongs to the night. One must follow the other in the perdurable loop of my story. They must and will and always have because in my tiny fluttering heart rested the conviction that I deserved the temperate inferno of that farmhouse bedroom. I could not fathom a world in which something could happen that I did not deserve.

And so, my opinion was formed, and the dominoes fell. For 16 years, they fell and threatened to fall for another hundred. The how is not so important to our tale, nor is the when, or the why; but one day, the ripples stopped. I had shaped a life around a faulty idea of what I deserved and what was to be had. I was wrong.

One of life's most poignant tragedies and one of it's greatest opportunities for redemption is that each of us alone are that which determines what we deserve. Through what we are shown of the world and ourselves, we create bounds for our own worthiness. This is who I thought I was for most of my life. A liar. A coward. A destroyer of worlds. And I will spend the rest of my life unraveling the grim tapestry of myself.

We settle. We seek the love, the life, and the future we think we deserve and immutably, we find it. Even when it is so much less than we are. While drowning in the consumptive hatred of our personal hells, we reject the redemptive oxygen of higher hopes. We hear nothing over the roaring congress of our consciences lobbying in favor of our preconceptions, and we are deafened to the unquenchable potential of our humanity.

What I am trying to say, ever so endlessly is this: you are more. Stop. I don't care what conviction holds you prisoner to your current state. It is lying to you. Any part of yourself that denies you the flight of sanguine self-reverie is not your friend. The cruel cry of your ignominy is fallacy. Your imperfection, your humanity, makes you no less sacred; it makes you no less able to be accepted and rejoiced or washed clean in the teary salt-bath of your repentance.

Can a three year old lie? Can she bring down the sky? I don't know. I may never know what I did in the instant of the cupboard or see the endless strings of damage I did, whether by my troth or my lie. But that cannot be the sum of me. The narrow damaged line of my sight through all those years cannot have taken in the totality of my possibility. Something in me tells me that it matters so much less than what happens now. I may have been the toddler messenger of Armageddon, but I am worthy of this life.

I have been unlearning and unwinding the endless threads of my assumed destiny for 3 years, and I have only in the last month seen how beautiful a job I did with what I was given, how beautiful I always was, even as the incarnation of havoc, and it has made me love what I can be all the more.The terrible injustice is this: I was told for years that I deserved more and I never heard it. You will not hear me, and it breaks my heart. You will have to unlearn on your own, and when you do, we'll be waiting.

Please, trust me. I know things. Remember, I've been to hell.

P.S. This didn't say what I wanted it to say.It's for all of us, and I would scream it if I thought a single one would really hear.

6 comments:

maria said...

So I can leave my comments here instead of on Facebook now?

Rachel said...

yes ma'am. or wherever you want :) lol but it's kind of cool to have them here.

J. Spott said...

i have that teary knot in my throat right now.. this is beyond amazing. its my favorite piece youve written.. so far.

RayRay said...

I am so happy you found me... This is so honest. real. raw. emotional. true.

inspiring.

thank you. rachel. you are right. we are not alone.

meg fee said...

oh this was so well done on so many levels and something i'm beyond glad that i found.

Rachel said...

Thank you so very very much. Sometimes you just have to say way too much.

And I just kind of had a truly geeky moment and got really excited when I saw your comments for the first time today. I am apparently still not so good at this game!

And Meg, I love your blog :)