Masks

I am taking an interpersonal communication class as a prerequisite for nursing school. That much is unremarkable, and while the content of the class is mostly common sense and otherwise yawn-inducing, I have been thinking about the idea of "faces" and "saving face" in terms of relationships with others. I always find it interesting, even if sometimes sharply painful, to hear what other people think of me, or how they categorize me. It is all the more interesting to catch fragmented images of myself in my thought processes, and to think of all the bits that make me "me."

While I was out shopping today, for example, I was watching all the perfectly coiffed and manicured and fashioned women walking down the very bourgeois shopping area. I didn't feel ugly, but I did feel a bit out of sorts (that's why I can't live in the keep-up-with-the-Joneses town over the hill from where I live). I realized that I miss my dearest, far-away friend, because no one dares look askew at a woman walking around with a queen (unless the watcher is another queen). I also missed him awfully as I was walking around the Cody's on Fourth Street in Berkeley; the inventory is more shockingly inadequate than ever, the art history books are more ridiculous, if possible, and there was no one with whom to share little sarcastic tidbits from Jessica Mitford's collected letters. There was no one to tell me how splendid my newly waxed eyebrows looked, how I need to get some shirts other than t-shirts, and that it's shameful that the same images get used ad nauseam on books: Friedrich's "The Wanderer," a bust of Julius Caesar, a photograph of the Pantheon's interior, and some dreadful detail from an Impressionist painting that would cue the great line from the film "Clueless" about Monet. In my mind I drew another cliche comparison, between myself and Duerer's "Melancholia."

I thought back to how, at someone's birthday party in England in 1979, a friend named Gavin told me that I had the reputation of being "far too serious." I was ten years old! But there it was. Perhaps that's partially to explain how I ended up on the margins. Some other faults, enumerated by friends at various junctures, include being rude about acknowledging hospitality (age eight); lacking discretion (many times); being unfaithful (mostly from age sixteen onward, and I have severed ties with family members over that one); being a poor listener (age seventeen, and thanks Sisir for that one). I often want to feel perfect, so I try to change, knowing that I can never really be perfect. I am quite sure that there are many more shortcomings I could find with very little effort, and that my friends would be all too happy to tell me. But then there is the defensiveness that accompanies the introspection and the holding up of shortcomings. I suppose that what I'm saying is that I don't really want to know, because I spent so many years living under what turned out to be the burdens of other people's expectations of me rather than who I was. I remember writing one time in a journal that a then-boyfriend thought that I was clumsy and stupid, two things I really am not. I should have left him long before I wrote such a thing, but those ideas became part of me until I shook them off in the last few years. Ah, the tyranny of self-fulfilling prophecies!

As I mentioned in my post from earlier today (it's almost tomorrow, now), I was going to buy a book of Shakespeare's sonnets. Number 29 seems particularly apt for someone at the margins:
"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate. . ."

Its ending, too, provides a positive light to balance the melancholy:
"Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

But rather than think of a single "thou," I see my friends as my most powerful resources and allies.