To follow up on the previous thought, I'm remembering being 16, and other than calling someone fat, the worst thing you could call them was old. It didn't matter to us if someone was a decent person, they got a pass for being funny, but otherwise, there was a constant vigilance about where on the attractiveness scale each of us were.
I will add, that not only were all of us childhood recipients of unwanted sex, but also came from families where appearance was vastly more important than substance.
We grew up believing that our fuckability was the measure of our value.
The alpha female of that group is now dead, she left the wreckage of her life and a story untold, a brilliant talent suppressed. She feared aging and at enormous cost, isn't going to be faced with it.
I remember feeling somewhere way underneath the desire to belong to a group of friends, that there was something wrong with the way we were looking at ourselves and evaluating others. Part of it was an extreme and somewhat rebellious playing out of the messages we were getting, but there was still the pressure to comply, to knuckle under, to be good girls.
None of us had any intention of being good girls.
There was a time of promiscuity, between not knowing how to say "no", not knowing we had the right say "no" and not knowing the consequences to our sense of self by not saying "no". This coincided with the time of drug use, a convenient way to fit in, to not look too closely at the life we were in and a general fishing expedition for love, attention, safety or direction.
Pretty silly from here, but dangerous toys in the hands of the unconscious.
You don't have to experience childhood sexual abuse to be conditioned to believe yourself to be a commodity, society will help with that. The only person I know who escaped it was raised a staunch Catholic in a big Catholic family in a big Catholic neighborhood, and sometimes I think she just closed her eyes.
I still can hear the derision in my friend's voice as she called her mother an old bag, a woman who could not escape her circumstances, who could not protect her children, whose only refuge was in making sure that everything looked 'lovely'.
I also will never be able to get rid of the memory of my mother, about a week before one of her suicide attempts, crawling around on the floor one night, sobbing looking for a piece of a tooth that had broken off. "You have no idea how bad it is to get old" she told me.
Well, now I have an idea of how bad it is.
I also have a great mass of gratitude for how good it is. Old Bag? Bring it on.
I will add, that not only were all of us childhood recipients of unwanted sex, but also came from families where appearance was vastly more important than substance.
We grew up believing that our fuckability was the measure of our value.
The alpha female of that group is now dead, she left the wreckage of her life and a story untold, a brilliant talent suppressed. She feared aging and at enormous cost, isn't going to be faced with it.
I remember feeling somewhere way underneath the desire to belong to a group of friends, that there was something wrong with the way we were looking at ourselves and evaluating others. Part of it was an extreme and somewhat rebellious playing out of the messages we were getting, but there was still the pressure to comply, to knuckle under, to be good girls.
None of us had any intention of being good girls.
There was a time of promiscuity, between not knowing how to say "no", not knowing we had the right say "no" and not knowing the consequences to our sense of self by not saying "no". This coincided with the time of drug use, a convenient way to fit in, to not look too closely at the life we were in and a general fishing expedition for love, attention, safety or direction.
Pretty silly from here, but dangerous toys in the hands of the unconscious.
You don't have to experience childhood sexual abuse to be conditioned to believe yourself to be a commodity, society will help with that. The only person I know who escaped it was raised a staunch Catholic in a big Catholic family in a big Catholic neighborhood, and sometimes I think she just closed her eyes.
I still can hear the derision in my friend's voice as she called her mother an old bag, a woman who could not escape her circumstances, who could not protect her children, whose only refuge was in making sure that everything looked 'lovely'.
I also will never be able to get rid of the memory of my mother, about a week before one of her suicide attempts, crawling around on the floor one night, sobbing looking for a piece of a tooth that had broken off. "You have no idea how bad it is to get old" she told me.
Well, now I have an idea of how bad it is.
I also have a great mass of gratitude for how good it is. Old Bag? Bring it on.
No comments:
Post a Comment