This weekend, I was lazy, well mostly on Sunday. Although I did watch the SEC championship yesterday while cleaning house and cooking and washing clothes. Today, I did a bit of cleaning--I do some most every day just to stay on top of it--but mostly I watched TV and movies. And read.
I thought a lot about writing, but for some reason I couldn't seem to get motivated to click on that little MS Word icon pinned to my taskbar. It's a strange psychological situation. I want to write, but I don't. I can't figure out if it is from fear (of what I'm writing will be awful) or from weariness or some other odd ailment. And no, it's not writer's block. I have scenes in my head. I just don't have the energy to put them on paper.
I'm sure this is an issue for lots of writers who aren't lucky enough to write for a living. Or to have someone support them while they write. We have a full life, 40+ hours a week of work, plus family, friends, and such, and on the side, we feel the need to produce a novel or five. It can be exhausting, both physically and emotionally.
No, I take back the part about not knowing. I do know much of what it is, for me at least.
Writing is a form of escape, but in that escape I often have to face my demons. If you've read Couillon (and Counting Crows), you'll know that I have a internal voice that demeans and humiliates just for the fun of it.
I won't say I had a hard life. I didn't have to do without food or clothing or education. I didn't do without family or friends. But I did do without a stable family life. My mother is the center of the universe, not just her own, and she expects to be treated as such by those around her. And if she isn't given the adoration she deserves then the person is inferior, not good enough for her.
Even so, my brother and I were lucky in a lot of ways. Her mother, my granny basically raised us because even though we all lived in the same house, my mother couldn't be bothered unless she was playing her good mother role. By the time I got to know my father as a person, not as a distant being who only came home long enough for meals, baths, and sleep -- he was a farmer, and worked ten to twelve hours a day keeping us in room and board -- I realized he did the best he could for us by staying married to my mother for eighteen years, until I was married and my brother was in high school. And even then she threw him out of the house. I can't imagine what my brother and I would be like if he had left us behind or if my granny hadn't been there for us. As I said, we were lucky.
Love in our house was a confusing emotion. There was the good mother and the scary mother and the indifferent mother, along with many others, who came and went for no logical reason. The one thing all her roles have in common is that love only comes with compliance, complete compliance to whatever whim is drifting through her head. My brother and I were not allowed to become independent humans. Were not allowed to have an opinion other than hers. Were not allowed to do better than her, be more than she was. To compete. It was a sin to make our mother sad. Because making our mother sad meant that she wouldn't love us anymore. And it was all our fault that she couldn't love us. When I was seven years old, she started telling me that she had to love my brother more than me, because... well whatever reason it was that week. To be honest, I now know I got the better part of that deal. When I graduated college, she wasn't proud, even though I was the first one on either side of the family to go to college. She was angry and dismissive, as if I was trying to make her look bad. Because everyone knows, any idiot can go to college. My brother could have gone to college. He's more than smart enough. But he didn't. I suspect that the weight of the contempt that radiated from my mother was too much to bear.
So that voice in my head, it belongs to my mother. Whatever you do will be shit. And as hard as I fight it, it's there, always nagging me. Why bother, when you'll never be good enough. The weight of contempt pulling me under.
With that said, I'm going to go read a book and hopefully go to sleep early tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment