Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Taking offense, weight of the world, and caryatids

Recently, I was reading somewhere about someone being offended by something, which to me means taking great personal insult. Merriam Webster's definition of offend: "to cause a person or group to feel hurt, angry, or upset by something said or done."

I understand being offended by word or action, but not particularly by facts. In this case, a person was offended by adoptees being shown to be more susceptible to mental illness. It wouldn't even occur to me to be offended by this because I live with adoption and mental illness (with overlap between the two) and have seen too many adoptees affected by mental illness. Being offended about facts is a waste of time, in my opinion. Those are the same people who generally don't like me around because at dinner (since my childhood) we talk about the Middle Ages and how people were decapitated for state crimes and had their heads placed on stakes outside places of power. Just fact. My family finds history fascinating, and I don't bubble-wrap my kids, or fart rainbows. I love that my eight-year-old wanted to discuss Picasso's Guernica (which he came across in a book about Picasso for kids), and I didn't tell him "No, that's too dark, war is too dark, suffering is too dark." No, it's just life. The Spanish Civil War happened, WWII happened, and yes, Opa was a Nazi. Not a circus clown. Fact.

I am excited about a new chapter about to start in my life. Having at last fired that useless therapist, I am going to start seeing Dr. Irvin Yalom, the famous psychiatrist and novelist, in December. Now I will have someone to give me a run for my money intellectually, someone to push me, someone to stop me from diagnosing myself. Someone who won't let me hide in the sunny meadows of "I'm all right for now," someone who won't annoy me with useless textbook checklists (or call my brother a one-night-stand--yes, I hold grudges for years). I wrote to Dr. Yalom with a description of my problems, including adoption, and my current existential crisis (mourning the death of a father I never met; society tells me I have very little no right to mourn him), and Dr. Yalom was both solicitous and kind. I told him that I feel like a protagonist who has wandered been chucked meandered inadvertently out of her own novel and, being lost, has functioned far too long as a supporting character in other people's short stories or novellas. I need to find my way home. I need to stop defining myself by other people's narratives and to write myself back into my own. He thought that seemed like an excellent place to start discussion.

I am working with a psychiatrist! Who is interested in *me*! Who understands my health issues and my history, and who can listen! Who will be my therapist! Amazing. I won't have to draw him pictures (unless I want to), and when I make cultural references, I know he'll know them and raise me.

I've had the leisure time to read while recovering, and I've appreciated it no end. I took Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters with me to the hospital. While Hughes isn't my all-time favorite poet, I do feel warmed by his words in certain circumstances, and the tale Birthday Letters tells of his romance/life with Sylvia Plath is seductive. To be honest, I prefer his version to hers. Her poems have never spoken to my soul. There is one in Birthday Letters, close to the beginning, called

Caryatids (I)

What were those caryatids bearing?
It was the first poem of yours I had seen.
It was the only poem you ever wrote
That I disliked through the eyes of a stranger.
It seemed thin and brittle, the lines cold.
Like the theorem of a trap, a deadfall--set.
I saw that. And the trap unsprung, empty.
I felt no interest. No stirring
Of omen. In those days I coerced
Oracular assurance 
In my favour out of every sign.
So missed everything 
In the white, blindfolded, rigid faces
Of those women. I felt their frailty, yes:
Friable, burnt aluminium.
Fragile, like the mantle of a gas-lamp.
But made nothing
Of that massive, starless, mid-fall, falling
Heaven of granite
                             stopped, as if in a snapshot.
By their hair.

I remember learning about caryatids, or being a student of Brunilde Ridgway, karyatids spelled with proper Greek transliteration, in the spring of 1988: those impassive women carved in marble on the porch of the Erechtheion, tall, columnar, holding the weight of the entablature on their heads. Powerful, female. Showing a foot here, their 5th-century drapery deceptively like fluting. I found them enchanting. In 1990 I found the one that the British pilfered and displayed at the British Museum; I spent hours in front of her, examining each of her perfections and imperfections. Then in 1992 I visited Athens and saw the rest of her cohort.



I truly fell in love, however, in graduate school, in the fall of 1992, while taking a sculpture course on Rodin with the inimitable Jacques de Caso. Rodin's Fallen Caryatids were not tall, strong, columnar. No. They were sitting or crouching, nude. They acknowledged the weight on their heads or shoulders. They were psychological portraits. Not about physical strength, but of power despite it all. Of ambiguity. Of a bad day, even. Of not necessarily wanting the job of carrying whatever was on their shoulders: these are not tall, unbendable women symbolic of the polis. I could identify with Rodin's caryatids in a way I'd never identified with a statue before. I never asked to bear the weight of the secrets placed on me since birth, of the depression I struggle with, of the sadness of repeated rejections, of whatever life threw at me...and Rodin knew how to convey that weariness, that interiority, that inversion of the expected. Why is the caryatid crouching? There is beauty in the battle to stay yourself under the weight of life, under the expectations of others. Not in being "offended" by what I encountered, but in acknowledging what had to be my path, for so long.



I know my place isn't with people who cannot, or won't, go down the difficult roads with me. Those who would pat me on the head, or say, "Well, *my* experience wasn't like that, and I've moved on, I'm tired of negativity. Peace be with you." There will always be difficulty in the world, and the beauty lies in those who help you in the times when *you* need it most, when the weight is most crushing: not punishing you for asking for help, or retreating from you, or telling you at your moment of need that you have hurt *them*. Deflection, much? I am willing to have conversations about difficult topics, always, but somehow it ends up being me taking care of the hurts of others, making amends, and then no work on the other side. But demanding expressions of regret all the time, and then not reciprocating, is too much. As Nalini said to me other day, "You're not that woman anymore, to extend yourself for nothing. Let those people go."

We would all be better served by listening to others, with far less judgment, far less expression of those times we *are* offended. Take a moment, sit with your emotions when someone says you've hurt them, and see what happens. Perhaps they will transform you. Demanding mildness from all is not fair, either.

I have an article coming out in a national magazine in the spring, about adoptees, identity, health history, and DNA. The magazine did a formal photo shoot at my house the day before my surgery: it was great fun! And the interview--lasting three hours--helped me to clarify my ideas about myself and what I have been through. I am excited to speak out about my story, and potentially to help others. I am honored to think that perhaps my suffering may prevent someone else's. I will keep you posted!







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