Self-loathing
A (short) memoir
We end this week with some reminiscences from the ever-excellent Ana Bosch. Memoir is a tricky medium- one of those a-lot-harder-than-it-looks feats of writing that is so tempting to try but so, so easy to get wrong. Or worse, you can get it right (or about as right as is possible) factually but in the process suck all of the soul and life out of the story in question.
Ana dodges all of these pitfalls like a pro. This piece is unflinchingly honest without being self-indulgent, it weaves a good story without losing sight of the fact it is about real people with real lives and it stays faithful to reality without ever being boring.
This is quite an achievement.
Enjoy.
TJB.
This I write inspired by C. Elyse. In this particular post, she gives the writer excellent advice on how to approach writing a memoir.
The first time I married, I was 26 years old. Some might say 26 is old enough to know what one is doing; others might be of the opinion that marrying at 26 in this day and age is a recipe for disaster. Either way, it will not change the fact that that is what I did. After five years of marriage (which I will not go into out of respect for my ex, who is, by all accounts, including mine, a very good man and the five years spent together were also good), I decided I did not want to be married anymore. I wanted more; what I wanted more of was, unfortunately, not clear to me at the time. But then again, it was not more I wanted; it was just different.
You see, there is something that women of my generation (X, that is) were told when growing up: You can have everything you want. But then we were also told what “everything” was. It was a career, friends to go out for beers with, a husband, some children, a nice house, you know what I mean. And then we were made to believe that once you had all of that or were on your way there, you would not long for anything else.
I was shocked to discover that that was so far from the truth that you would need a telescope of Hubble proportions to maybe catch a glimpse of the truth, waving back at you, aeons away from where you were standing with all those things you were amassing with your hard work.
Categorising people is what culture does really well. As a catholic woman, a good girl too, I was supposed to want all these things, and that is all I would ever want/need. It should be enough. When I figured out it wasn’t enough, I went to a therapist to help me feel satisfied with what I had. A career, work stability, a loving husband, and friends, his friends, that is, since in my quest to fit into the role, I also became a woman who did not cultivate her own friendships. All of this I participated actively in. I was, in fact, the ringleader of my metamorphosis process.
When I first met Cristina (my therapist), I was prompted by the question, "What brings you here?” to which I replied, “I want you to make me want what I have.” She looked at me with an inscrutable facial expression but half-laughing eyes and replied, “Hmmm, let’s see where this takes us.”
Needless to say, the effect was quite the opposite. In each session, she just sat there while I peeled away at my layers to find out what I truly yearned for and gather the strength to one day say out loud to my then-husband and also my family, “Hi, I am sorry I am hurting you, but I don’t want any of this. So I am leaving.”
The immediate effect of proclaiming that I was leaving to the unsuspecting victims was disastrous, but I will not go into that here either; it is too painful, and this post is free.
But let’s keep the pace. After one horrible year where I felt I deserved all the bad looks and the self-loathing, every single gram of it, I moved to the US with a crappy grant (after quitting my job as a doctor) to do some research, both scientific and spiritual. When I say crappy grant, I mean that after many calculations, I truly did not know how I was going to make ends meet. But thank God my new boss was covering my health insurance, so dying destitute of tetanus was not a possibility I had to contemplate.
I remember going apartment hunting in the North End in Boston. This was before the North End became cool and hip. I could afford a place there, which was good because it was close to work, and as it turned out, I spent so many hours in the lab that a long commute would have maybe meant camping under my desk just to make sure I would be back in time to do a new time point in my time-chase experiments. As I was saying, I went to an agency to inquire about an apartment. There, I met Lisa, a 3rd generation Italian who spoke three words of Italian (ciao, a dopo, ci vidiamo) and peppered her conversation with them, possibly thinking, “Spain is close enough to Italy for this woman to think I am cosmopolite.” I didn’t; she wasn’t.
At some point, while visiting the shitholes she had on offer, we struck up a conversation about everything and nothing, which somehow led to the “Do you have a boyfriend?” subject. I recall the question feeling like a slap in the face, one that you don’t see coming. It hit me like the smell of the studio apartment we were visiting when she casually dropped the bomb. I think that Lisa was one of those people who have the knack of asking the question you least want to answer. How they manage to look at you and, in 5 seconds, figure out the one topic that is most painful for you to address is a mystery. Standing there, in the studio that seemed to be rented by a single girl, judging by the string of bras hanging on the shower curtain rail; a woman who had time to cook and eat but who piled pans and dishes with decomposing food, I was sure that Lisa could see the scarlet “D” of divorce freshly branded on my soul.
“I have recently broken up,” I blurted out, not knowing why and how I had lost control of the words that came out of my mouth. I thought that the fact my voice broke while talking would be enough for Lisa to understand that this was an off-limits topic, but Lisa was either cruel or stupid, so she rammed on- “Oh, I’m sorry, what an asshole he must have been,” assuming that I had been abandoned to fend for myself. The self-loathing I was carrying around could not let me leave it at that. There could be no person in the world thinking that I was a victim of a broken heart. I wanted to scream- “I was the asshole in this story! I deserve the scorn of the world!”
Instead, I managed to feebly clarify, “No, no, I left him.” She stared, her eyes wide open, and with a huge smile drawing on her face, she said, “Good for you! Way to go!” and dropped the subject. But I swear I looked into her eyes for a fraction of a second and saw a clear mixture of pride and, dare I say it? admiration.
This response has had me befuddled about womanhood and relationships until now. Every so often, I open the proverbial memory trunk and take this particular memory out to see if I can make sense of it.
C. Elyse1 from A Sip, A Shout Out & A Sentence prompted me to write about surviving as a single woman in a foreign country. We were half-jokingly chatting on Notes about writing stuff that would piss off people. Her words were “preach to women that have lived in two countries as single women; piss off men who can’t get with the 21st century”, and that has led me here, rethinking Lisa and her admiration at the fact that I had left a man in my early thirties without a good reason and didn’t seem to be afraid about being alone. This, of course, was not true. I was really scared. I thought of the apartment I was checking out, wondering if this was my destiny: a dark studio apartment with one window, soiled plates, and dirty laundry.
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I have questions. I love the way you face the world.
"“I was the asshole in this story! I deserve the scorn of the world!”
I've been there. This post nails that feeling, absolutely stunning.