Thoughts & Feelings, Part I: Disrupted

Thoughts and feelings...what to say, what not to say? As a GenXXer, is there anything to say about the overwhelming and consuming presence of these cognitive monsters that, in my family, pervade every cell of our biology and every neuron of our conscious and spiritual beings? Are words even palatable to describe these two towering giants who have loomed large and heavy within my maternal family especially, generation after generation, and have effected everyone us at every life-point and with every breath? In fact, words aren't palatable, and so we express our thoughts and feelings through art, music, poetry, and dance. We stupefy them with addictions, we evade them in protective seclusion, we exploit them for creative power, and we admonish ourselves and others for their intensity and force of display.  

As for my thoughts and feelings and their expressions, my maternal family casted me as emotionally dramatic and behaviorally erratic; my paternal family casted me as emotionally vacant, irreverent, and destructive. I'm none of these things, but it took me decades to dismantle their characterizations of me, stamped deeply within my psyche, and what residual effects of these labels still remain within. What I am is a reflection of particular (maybe even peculiar) familial qualities inherited in some genetic variation at the time of my conception and my developmental responses to the environments in which the adults in my life constructed. I mirror my kin, they mirror me, and together we are a family funhouse of distorted and refracted genetic images of each other and ourselves. These reflections of myself in my kin and they in me are merely specters of light and shadow, like the surface of water mirroring the moon. 

My familial looking glass showed me multiple fractured images of myself and without any other mirror to compare, I believed their reflections of me to be truth, indisputable and supported by their actions and reactions towards me, which were generally critical. I understood from a very young age that something was inherently wrong with me, yet I couldn't figure out why. I had inherited my maternal family's artistic acuity and my paternal family's intellectual curiosity. I was an imaginative and inquisitive child, creative, highly sensitive, and deeply affected by the turbulent family dynamics in which I was born and could do nothing to change. The adults in my life where consumed by their own thoughts and feelings and couldn't wrangle either, let alone mine - an external reflection of their internal chaos and turmoil. Of course, it was easier for them to censure me than it was for them to pull their lives together.  

I'm not sure what my mother's motivation, whether for selfish intent or genuine concern - maybe both - but in late 1981, she presented me with my first journal. Once again, Mom was disrupted, and this time by the conclusion of her third marriage. Little by little, in silent turmoil, our tiny world began to shift and slip. My step-father moved out, an older cousin moved in, Mom took-off for days, and my brothers and I were haplessly flung to the fringes of her mess. Puberty had overtaken my young body and I was painfully self-conscious by this physical transformation and the unfettered male attention it garnered. My boobs, body odor, and virginity seemed to be of particular interest to particular males and I was frequently humiliated and molested by my cousins' friends, friends' fathers, and neighborhood boys who used to be my pals when my chest was as flat and undefined as theirs. As if my mother's disruption wasn't uncertainty enough, my body had betrayed me. I imagine Mom sensed within me an emotional crisis brewing - if so, she'd have been right. 

"I thought you could use this," she said. The journal was small and slim, no larger than my hand, and bound in baby pink paper with a sweet image of a little girl and delicate flowers printed on the cover. "It's not good to hold things in, and I can't always be here for you, Angie."

Mom couldn't have known or predicted then the remarkable consequence of the gift she gave me. I filled the pages of that first journal with rambling thoughts, untethered emotions, bad grammar, and awkward 11-year-old handwriting. I kept writing, journal after journal. Forty-three years and 70-something books later, I'm still writing. I have created more than just an autobiography spanning nearly a half a century and written across thousands of pages in longhand, I've faithfully preserved my impressions of the individuals, events, and experiences that have affected me and others in real time, as they have unfolded. Like Dumbledore's precious pensieve, my memories have been carefully preserved for posterity and my personal review, "It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form."  

Yes, thoughts and feelings are subjective with regard to the one who is thinking and feeling them, but at the time of their happening, they are true to the one experiencing them. Memory, the cognitive storage system that allows us to retrieve the details of our thoughts and feelings about a particular occurrence in time, is elastic and transmuting. Often, the details of what one remembers of an experience isn't what one truly thought and felt at the time of its happening. I have proof. I have an expansive library of my own real-time occurrences and accompanying thoughts and feelings to verify the exactness my own memory. My memory, on more than one occasion, has reshaped some of the details of my past, and in some instances profoundly, disturbingly. Why? My journals are a personal tool of painful self-correction and reflection; they are evidence of my evolution and maturity, cognitive and behavioral patterns, and shifting beliefs and attitudes over the decades. How can I argue against myself?

In fact, my journals were (and are still) the primary outlet for my thoughts and feelings in a familial environment where no one was able or willing to hold emotional space for me. My first journals show an adolescent girl whose thoughts and feelings were unbridled - a bucking mess of raw expression. I was like a rider who jumped on her horse and shot off in all directions. But, the motor and cognitive dexterity and energy necessary for intelligible self-expression through legible longhand forced my brain to slow, sort, and structure itself. I often wrote despairingly of myself at first, calling myself retarded and stupid, because I didn't know the words to describe the feelings I couldn't understand. My journals became my space holders, repositories of emotional overflow and intellectual wandering, unjudging, always available, and taking in whatever impressions I had to unload. Eventually, they became my mirrors, the truest impressions of myself, expressed in my own longhand, in my own words, as I felt them and thought them at various points in time. 

In the Cult of Dysfunctional Family Dynamics, my thoughts, feelings and behaviors were problematic. I didn't play by the rules. Rather, I didn't understand the rules - my mother's rules, in particular. From the go, I was at a disadvantage. Family rules and hierarchies are generally formed and learned from birth, but the earliest of my formative years were not spent with my parents, but within the foster care system and later with my paternal grandparents. When I returned to my mother's custody in December 1973, I knew her to be my mother, but I wasn't comfortable with her or certain of anything in her environment. My mother believed that she knew me well and seemed to have strong expectations as to how I should behave. After all, I belonged to her, we shared a bloodline, she carried me and birthed me, and therefore everything there was to know about me she already knew. Mother was wrong. I was incredibly willful and righteously defiant, aspects of my personality that were woefully unexpected and continue to set me and my mother at odds with one another. I simply wanted her to still herself and I pushed hard against her erratic, irreverent, and destructive behavior. 

But again, it's far more attractive and rottenly opportunistic for adults to censure non-compliant behaviors in children. Children, who are physically and psychologically vulnerable and who uninhibitedly reflect the chronic stress and dis-ease of their furnished environment, can be easily bullied and manipulated into serving the self-absorbed adults who run the family shitshow. However, in my case, my familial conditioning was disrupted. 

To be continued...