Chains

I saw "Black Swan" last week, the new film by Darren Aronofsky about the psychological struggles of a young ballet dancer. In part it's a horror film, in part it's about losing one's mental defenses to pressure. A huge theme winding through the film is that of perfectionism, and the price that perfection exacts from you.

I identified in many ways with the young protagonist, Nina. She holds herself back and is afraid to feel, wanting technical perfectionism. She begs for notes from the choreographer, who keeps telling her that she is technically perfect but passionless. In one scene he says to her, "You could be brilliant, but you're a coward."

She fights within herself, not knowing which way to go, or even how to find her footing, whether in dance or in relationships. Her overbearing stage mother treats her as a childlike doll, keeping her in claustrophobic emotional proximity and pushing her own feelings onto her daughter--not unlike many stories of adoption.

In a sense, Nina was chained by insecurities and others expectations, and her escape from her prison--through perfection--was tragic.

I have moments in my life when I feel my own strength, or when others notice it. Professors told me that they were impressed by my insights; while I would feel hubristic to call myself brilliant, there are moments when I feel that my ideas are transcendent and powerful. And then I retreat, like Nina in the film, to the prison in my head where voices tell me that I am not good enough, I will never be good enough, and that I am awkward. Thus cowardice. Why is it so hard to stand up with my own fire in my belly and tell others to listen to ME?

Friends and family keep telling me to write my story. Again, cowardice. I am afraid to put myself out there to be eviscerated. I wish that I could brush off the opinions of people who don't matter and who make a point to be rude. I am doing better at this, but I feel handicapped by the palimpsest of life experiences in which I was demeaned, devalued, and bullied. I wonder how so many people out there appear to be so strong. Some is arrogance, some is masquerade, some is stupidity. The more insecure the person, in general, the more rude and vicious they are, and the more they'll argue their point as being the only one worth merit. And of course, one of my gifts, courtesy of adoption, is the ability to read people's emotions with exquisite accuracy, even when they try to mask them. So I know when people are bullshitting me, and I say nothing.

I have decided, though, that it is time to face down my cowardice and do what I feel is right. To say what I feel, even though it may hurt other people. To take care of myself instead of carrying other people's burdens, especially the burdens of people who are irrelevant to me.

I am petrified to return to work tomorrow. IVs and procedures aside, it is an environment that can be extremely rude and nasty. I was talking to my dear friend N on New Year's Eve (she works in an Emergency Department) about how many MDs treat nurses like we're idiots who do inferior work. She said that when she began at her job last year, she applied the "killing with kindness" method, but only got railroaded and treated even worse. The MDs were either too arrogant or too heinous to read between the lines of what she said. So she moved on to telling it straight up: "You have your job, and I have mine. They are both hard. I don't treat you rudely, and having an MD doesn't give you a license to treat others as lesser than you are. Get over yourself." I will try this. I am wayyyy too nice for my own good.

Sorry for the spoiler that follows, but it's relevant. In the final scenes of the film, Nina dances the role of the Swan Queen. In the end of the ballet, the Swan Queen commits suicide because that's her only release from a lifetime of pain. It's an acted death--or should be. But to be perfect, Nina stabbed herself before dancing the Black Swan, and she dies at the end of the act, just as her character does. She needed escape--and perfection--and got it. As Hamlet said, "'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." I understood Nina's (and the character's) motivation, but haven't yet made that leap off the cliff.

I struggle with my perfectionist tendencies and feelings of self-loathing, internalizing the cruel words of others. I can understand all too well how Nina felt. Living a future filled with darkness and self-doubt is not a prospect to be welcomed. The chains are heavy.

Fragments

I had the wonderful experience this week of having lunch with someone I greatly admire and whom I hadn't seen in 14 years. We were in grad school together back in the dark ages, and she always made me smile, even though we were in a bloody shark tank. She is brilliant--one of the smartest people I know, but like me, she is often loath to bring attention to it.

As we sat together and talked about the time we spent together from 1992 to 1996, we discovered even more things we had in common. Academic faux pas we had made, how we often felt we had nothing to contribute to conversations when we were around certain people, how the cliquishness and back-biting were beyond belief in the magnitude of their cruelty. I walked into the department sight-unseen, coming from an undergraduate college where students were always encouraged to think independently and develop their own interests, rather than groomed to be clones of professors. My friend had been an undergraduate in the department and decided to stay to pursue an M.A./Ph.D. Graduate school is murderously feudal: basically it's indentured servitude, with your adviser controlling your finances and future. If you are unlucky in your choice of adviser, you are pretty much screwed. Especially when your adviser is not the strongest player in the department or field at large. The 10 years I spent suffering there was definitely not the best time of my life, although meeting a certain handful of people and having unfettered time to read and research came closest to making me feel at peace with myself.

I remember writing my M.A. thesis, on a topic that I really loved, and getting wonderful feedback from this friend of mine. Her field was ancient art, which had been my focus for my B.A. Classical scholars tend to be very focused, with photographic recall of thousands of ancient texts. I definitely do not have the same access, nor did my friend. We were quite green together, and having her with me in seminars and lectures was lovely.

She is also 10 years older than I am, and I appreciated her maturity at a time when I was all over the map with myself. My 20's were definitely a lost period in which my adoption baggage was compounded by self-hatred from feeling all at sea in graduate school. The unwanted adoptee advisee.

When my friend and I were talking on Friday, she said that she sees me as more mature (one would hope) but very much the same in terms of my interests, openness, and sunny personality. When I told her that the personality was a mask, she was stunned. She listened to everything that's been going on with such love and support. It felt comforting on many levels, and I do hope it won't be 14 years before we see each other again.

Some comments she made about me being the same have fueled introspection. I've been trying to figure out what parts of myself are molded by my aparents, and which are genetic, from my nparents. Then I realized I forgot a something big, something I often forget: there is also the variable of ME. Some things are just me. I am not a clone of them, just as I had a bad time in graduate school because I refused to be a clone of anyone.

When I was talking to C about the curious way I stand with my right leg out at an angle, it makes sense that I got that from her. She agreed. She didn't agree that she passed along her facility for languages to me. She doesn't believe in genetics for things such as interests and talents. I told her that my aparents aren't into languages the same way that she and I are. She pointed out that her parents weren't either. While I disagree with her about the genetic component of language skills, I do see her point about reading too much into genetics. After all I am a intellectual, latte drinking left-winger who lives in the Bay Area. My nfamily is Republican and conservative, dyed-in-the-wool.

My amom was an English teacher and a stickler for good grammar. Rightly so. I write well in part because of what she taught me, partly because I do so intuitively, and partly because I have done quite an apprenticeship in thinking and writing over the years: from daily writing assignments at my high school that had to be corrected and corrected and corrected, to crafting my Ph.D. thesis in painful increments over five years.

Surrounding myself with smart, witty people was probably also a helpful act. People who love me, warts and all, and who know me inside out. It never stops amazing me that I have such compassionate friends who let me know how much I mean to them. I understand that most all people deserve love, but I just can't get over the hurdle of accepting that *I* am worthy of people's love. I seem to keep reaching for those green figs on the tree that are out of reach rather than enjoying the rich bounty of what I have. Regret and self-doubt are terrible, destructive vices.

I am stumbling around trying to deal with the fragments of myself I've been collecting. I feel like I have discovered increasing numbers of these fragments, sometimes in unexpected places. My current task is to try to reassemble them in a way that is meaningful and helps me feel less anxious and depressed. I know I will never feel complete, and the cracks will always be there, but sometimes imperfection has its own beauty.