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.

Demons

I have a wonderful friend whom I had the great pleasure to meet through adoption activism. He is creative, supportive, and very intelligent, although he would blush if I said this to his face or mentioned his name here.

He has been working enthusiastically and tirelessly to put together my Newman family tree. I have ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, and in the Civil War. They have lived in the same area of Indiana for close to 200 years. Talk about stability! I've learned about relatives who have committed suicide in various ways. I have seen some of myself in the stories of various lives of my relatives.

Then last night, my friend sent me a picture he'd found of C, her Senior Picture in 1969 that was taken for her university's yearbook. There she was. Pregnant with me. It was the first time I'd seen a picture of her and thought, "Yes, I do look like her." We have the same face shape, eyes, and eyebrows. I still look a lot more like my grandfather, I think, but there was no denying this time that I come from C.

The pain shot through me like an arrow, leaving burning, poisonous residue in the wound. Yes, I look like her. I already know that I share some of her gestures. What others take for granted, I can't. It's not even just that I can't: she doesn't want me to come near her, or ever to know her.

The more that time goes by, I become convinced that she either didn't tell my brother that she doesn't mind our having a relationship, or that she put a different kind of pressure on him. His silence speaks volumes. I cannot even begin to understand how people can treat family this way. He claims that he's upholding the honor of his parents; I think he's taking the path of least resistance and losing out in the process.

To compound my pain, I read some first parent blogs this week, and I noticed that in more than a few of them, their placed kids are all but absent. It's immensely triggering. How can these parents say that they love their children, and then keep them at arm's length, waffle about setting dates to meet with them, or refuse to tell their families about their placed child at all? How can married people with two kids already think it's a great idea to place kids number three and four in order to do "God's will" and provide children to those who don't already have them? I imagine the placed kids feeling betrayed by their first parents, and the kept kids wondering anxiously if and when they might be placed, as well. None of this makes sense to me. It seems so much like adoption double-speak in which the adoptees, as ever, are damned.

I've also been thinking a great deal lately about the burdens that some adoptees bear (which isn't to say that adoptive parents and first parents don't also have burdens, but my concern here and now is for adoptees). How do we get to such a place that our very foundations begin to corrode? Why are we told again and again that our mothers loved us so much they gave us away? It doesn't make sense in any logical way, and then for those of us who find mothers who really don't love us at all, it's a very cruel joke.

I ask, too, how I have descended to a place where death is preferable to almost all other options. I was reading an essay by Howard Kushner about American attitudes vis a vis suicide in the nineteenth century, "Meriwether Lewis and Abraham Lincoln," and was struck by what he wrote about Freud's conception of melancholia and suicide as ineffective, incomplete mourning for traumatic events. For mourners, the world is empty, but for a transitory period--they learn to cope; for melacholics, the world becomes a painful cypher because they have no ego, and thus their defenses to trauma are limited. They are marginalized because they don't have a stable sense of who they are or a way to filter what happens in the world. The unresolved grief felt by melacholics results in chipping away at the will to live, and increased self-hatred and anger at the deserting love object.

Sounds familiar to me. Here I am, mourning what I've lost, being told that I should be grateful and have nothing to mourn, and having my own mother tell me that she wished I had never existed. I am trying to pick up the pieces of me and put them together in a meaningful way, but it's incredibly difficult to forge new coping mechanisms from the ruins of a self that was thoroughly burned to the ground. It is a wearying task, after a lifetime of being bullied, devalued, called ugly and many other things, to find the strength to stand up to C, and everyone else who has tormented me, and yell, "ENOUGH!"

I am angry that I lacked the strength to stop this travesty long ago, and I don't want to let it continue. But it is a struggle, every day, not to give in and find my own peace. Seriously. I have my medication, friends, support, a loving adoptive family, and one ncousin who sees all that is good in me--but it is a tiring uphill battle in a world that sucks.

I have to keep reminding myself not to ask "Why?" and instead ask "How can I get through this?" One minute at a time. One freaking minute.

It's like I never existed.

I had a great conversation with my friend Joy today. She is a wise, generous soul. She listens and having walked in my shoes, she provides wonderful support.

She was reminding me that when humans are in the middle of pain, there seems like little else we can trust. It's familiar. We've been rejected before. Some adoptees have a visceral reaction to being rejected because of what happened to us as babies. I know what this pain is, but it is overcoming me right now. I can rationalize it away with consummate rhetorical skill, but it doesn't change the way it possesses the innermost part of me. I was thinking about what David told me to do: to write it until I mean it, but right now it seems like one of the punishments meted out by Dolores Umbridge, in which writing on the paper cuts the message into the skin.

I know many people who love me and need me. I love and need people, too. Problem is, the people I love the most fiercely usually don't love me back. And what's even shittier is that these people don't reject me in kind ways, using words. They turn their backs and walk away as though I never existed to them. We never sat together and talked, never touched, never connected. WTF?

Whether these people in my life don't have the courage to speak to me, or they don't value me, I can't say. There are many more possibilities, I am sure. But their leaving without a trace, and showing me such immense lack of respect, triggers me in a monumental way. Joy pointed out that when I said, "It's like I never existed," I could have been talking about the me that was left behind in the hospital--along with all the rest of C's sparse love and emotional baggage--41 years ago. It's like I am trying to speak to people but have no voice; my words are lost in the wind; I cry and no one hears. I am alone and defenseless, no matter what anyone says to me. I know it's my job to take care of myself, to pick up that baby and love her unconditionally, but I don't have the strength to do it right now.

Being in that place leaves me on the edge of madness, both of anger and insanity.