Auto: Chapter 1
An Autobiographical Piece Based on Personal Experience of Trauma: With Mingled Musings on Sexuality, Faith, and Literature
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Part 1
Autograph
No, you may not have my name. My autograph is sacrosanct. It comes from my hand, my left hand, the sinister tricksy one. And it is a secret.
And you may not have details of romantic entanglements. (This is perhaps the biggest draw a piece of writing can have for a reader. But it is where I draw a line.)
Unfortunately, such relationships involve too much of other people, are not quite enough about me (despite my best efforts otherwise.) This piece is strictly about me. Others are mentioned—with cunningly substituted names, fairly secure pseudonyms—only in so far as they relate to me. If all this talk of me repulses you, at least I am giving you early warning. I will not compel you, unless the quality of my writing does. Which I highly doubt.
“The d-I-ary of a narcissist”—this is one potential name for this self-indulgent splurge; or “Alterbiography.” But I have opted for the simple for once, the unadorned. Auto it is.
*****
I have a cynical streak in me a mile wide. It is a deep-seamed cynicism, running along my grain, part of my warp and weft. It underlies, undercuts. It is the underside. Of an unbounded idealism, an optimism that is laughable in its lack of restraint.
(It is the other side of the same coin, the flipside. A cynic is just an idealist on an off-day. An idealist is a cynic who has been thrown a bone.)
It is a clumsy, clown-like optimism that far surpasses sunny. A scorching optimism that reaches for things higher than it should.
An Icarus impulse, a yearning to be burned up in pure white light, come what may. An Icarus impulse that leads to inevitable deflation, defeatheration, that leads to the plummeting plunge, the nosedive into cynicism.
It is the movement of a pendulum which knows no mid-point of rest, just a brief stop at two extremes and a long swing between them. I feel things intensely, when I allow myself to. I am a creature of moods, ruled by light and darkness, dampness, and aridity.
Things, for me, are ripe and rife with symbolism, with a hidden inner core, an apple pip of imagery. It is something I find it hard to resist, and that I think I should resist, and that I do not resist because I enjoy it so deeply.
I read things; I read into things; I read through and between and beyond and around. I read. I read and I swing, like a librarian in a hammock.
I want to learn the middle way of virtue, the golden mean. But in terms of outlook, I cannot. Things are it or things are shit. (I am obsessed with feacal imagery. Wholesome stuff. Psychoanalyse away: there’s bound to be some interesting conclusions to be made there.)
I am on top of the world or feeling its entire weight on my shoulders. A bipolar sensibility. Manic and depressed by turns, refusing to settle for a lukewarm greyness. I spit such an idea from my mouth.
I want to learn pragmatism. It would save me a lot of pain. But pragmatism is settling. And I am unsettled.
This is me. This is my autograph, or all of my autograph that I am willing to give. You probably feel like you don’t know me very much based on this. But my name would give you no more. It is as arbitrary as it is apt; it obscures as much as it enlightens. I prefer to give you other aspects of my self. Equally arbitrarily, equally obscurely.
I will approach from a tangent, from an oblique angle. I hope such contiguousness is contagious. It is a personal statement and a political statement. It is a manifesto, of sorts. It is a confession of sorts, too. My manifession.
Autosomal
We’ll start with all things not relating to the sex chromosomes. We’ll stay away from sex in general for now. (After all, we’ve only just met.) But do not feel cheated. Sex will be back. I cannot repress it for long. Ask Freud.
We’ll start with the essentials, with the essentials of me. We’ll start, essentially, with nature and nurture twinned and twisted like a double helix. We’ll start with my personality and my circumstances. We’ll start each new idea with the word “auto.”
The word “auto” makes me think of self.
[Though what doesn’t make me think of self?]
I makes me think of cars, too, as in automobile; it makes me think of technology, as in autocorrect; and of the phrase auto-da-fé, which Wikipedia—that fount of all contemporary knowledge—defines as “the ritual of public penance of condemned heretics and apostates that took place when the Spanish Inquisition, Portuguese Inquisition or the Mexican Inquisition had decided their punishment.” Basically a big bonfire, like the one that is lit each year directly behind my house by some Protestant diehards. So far I have escaped burning.
Or have I? Right now I feel tender-skinned, scalded, tortured by any breeze that would flit past my skin. Flayed. All flayed out. Skinned and skinny.
I am on an ocean, I am tossed about like the waves of the ocean.
I am unsettled, I am restless, I am learning.
I always liked to learn. I remember learning to read by watching the brightly coloured puppets of Sesame Street chanting the alphabet at me. I remember being reprimanded for pronouncing the final letter “zee” like those incorrect Americans, and had to learn to change to “zed.” And this set the tone for my achievements, my worth, my childhood milieu. Never mind that nobody else knew the alphabet in my class: I couldn’t finish it correctly. 25 out of 26 is not bad, surely? It’s not good enough.
This message was fed to me from no age, though it took me a long time to acknowledge it, and its devastating impact on my mental health and well-being.
Parents who were desperately unhappy together, who even to this day refuse to talk about how they met, their courtship, their early years of marriage. Parents who variously used me as an emotional crutch or were incapable of forming an emotional bond with me at all. Parents who doubtless did their best, but who fell as far short as I was always assured I did.
I am a noticer. I absorb. I internalise. How literally I was not aware until my 25th year. It took me a quarter of a century of storing up pain before it spilled out. And it’s a big messy relief, a veritable orgasm of pain. I will squeeze out the last drops, I will ride that pain until there’s no pain left.
I like to walk; I like to walk far and fast; and I like to walk with my dog, Patch. I was coming out of a bad stretch of depression. Long walks helped me to do this. Coming home sweaty, flushed, with aching legs, made sleep—made rest—more of a possibility. My walks started to take new directions, a clear corollary to my mental strivings. I knew where I had to go: I had to walk past my childhood home, where I had lived until my fourth year.
Where—I learned—I’d almost been burned to death in a house fire due to a faulty heating system. But saved, snatched from the auto da fé that nearly claimed me before I’d even had a chance to fail, to rebel. One trauma among many. Including endless shouting and fighting, a father busy beyond his breaking point, a mother who was depressed and regretful and no doubt looked to me as some ideal being who couldn’t disappoint like the rest of life.
When I walked by, the only memory I had of this place—kneeling in a golden haze in the living room, practically haloed, as I gave my life to Jesus as a precocious toddler—shaded into something else. My stomach figures large in my tale. It speaks of my status: it is the barometer of my emotion. It never lies, my twisting, labyrinthine gut: I have learned to trust its stabs and drops, its leaps and shivers.
My stomach curled in upon itself. It screamed; I clutched it; my abdomen contracted. I felt wave after wave of nausea, anxiety, fear. And it frightened me. Deeply. Shook me, literally and figuratively, to the core. I could just about keep the tears from spilling over my eyelashes, flimsy barriers as they are. But I did.
This route was trod more than once, always with the same result. And it led me to confront my parents. I learned that the pleasant fiction I had always accepted/manufactured was only half the story at best. Yes, they loved me dearly; yes, I delighted them; yes, they desired the best for me. But they were each deeply scarred by their own childhood experiences, their own abuse of themselves and each other, their extreme youth and naivety. They had no hope of raising me as I have come to wish I could have been.
The most frightening—and unresolved—incident I have been made aware of is being an infant and being bruised on my face. A big ugly bruise. My parents have a habit of willfully, or otherwise, refusing to remember these times. A further indication of how deeply unhappy they were. And they certainly cannot agree. It makes me despair when they back each other out of loyalty and habit and duty, rather than rising to settle their difficulties and demanding truth, justice and equity for and from each other.
They make me sick. They make me fearful. How much they harm each other, how much they continue to harm each other. Yet remain chained by the notion that they are one flesh. I find it hard to do other than doubt they ever achieved the complementarity and openness to have been one flesh. At best, they were two different pieces of flesh who imagined for a brief dizzy infatuated while that they were somehow affinitive.
Who knows why they got married so young? They refuse to talk about it, which of course only leads me to endless speculations more shady and dramatic than any real fact could be.
Imagine a relationship founded on guilt, built on the very basis and bottom line of fear, not love. How could anything—a third, separate, commingled thing—hope to flourish in such an environment? It couldn’t. I couldn’t.
So this bruise. Apparently my mother brought me home with an impressive bruise on my face, and my father (paragon as he is) was filled with anger. His memory consists of being angry, but—when we were having our own confidential chat—he was willing to extend this to the fact that my mother deliberately hit me. This notion dissolved when I brought it up with her, and with them both together. She has no recollection of bruising me, and was very hurt that such a thing was said of her. (This hurts you more than it hurts me: what child has ever benefited from this fiction?) It was either a bare-faced lie, or she had done something so bad that she still could not acknowledge it, and would never forgive herself for.
This has not been resolved. Once again I am caught in the middle, having to make a choice between a pathological liar or someone capable of physical violence to an infant. I know both of them are capable of the latter. I also know my father is capable of the former. He can apologise with such sincerity one day, only to weasel his way out of responsibility the next by saying he is the real victim. Only recently have I had the courage to call this out, to confront it. It felt good.
Anyway, this is the backdrop of my most formative years. And the violence did not stop there. I remember my father leaving one night; I remember a loud, loud argument in which I came downstairs to find my father pushing my mother onto the stairs. I stepped forward and told him not to dare to do that (I dared to use the word “dare”), and my mother—in sheer panic—told me not to do that, to stay away, she was ok. I was afraid. But I am proud of that memory.
And proud of the memory that I never capitulated, that I reserved a proud defiance in the face of his ongoing violence. A rebellion, he would call it. [Never able to acknowledge that some rebellions are good and necessary.] A lack of respect. [Never capable of seeing the viewpoint that respect is something earned.] A sinfulness that needed purged with the rod. [God forbid that his anger at me was the real sin!] Spoil the child, and all that.
(Our rod was the wooden spoon, on the open palm. How damaging, to strike the hands—the medium of touch and creativity, of expression and self-expression—to instil in them their subservience to a strict code, to tell them they were inherently evil.)
I remember—and my father told me this was so—clenching my teeth, denying him the satisfaction of tears, or wailing, of noise of any kind. A silent, white-lipped “bring it on.” But at what cost? I feel like there must have been definite splitting here—definite dissociation.
Divorcing myself from myself. God hates divorce: this saddened Him, I am sure. In fact, only recently are these memories accessible. I buried them, concealed them. Sure, I knew I was hit regularly as a child. Sure, I knew it was frequently out of anger. But it didn’t affect me—it had no impact on the now—it was past and gone and it didn’t happen any more. And there was no need to dwell on it.
But only by dwelling on it, by allowing myself to plumb the depths of that fear and shame and distress and utter utter isolation, could I get any measure of perspective. Only by releasing the stored-up physical sensations—allowing myself to feel them properly, to be there as a child again, and not repress the memory—have I found a measure of relief, have I been able to situate myself in relation to what happened, to assert its wrongness, to set myself—my hands—free again to create.
For so long, I could not create. I could not make creative links. I was stuck in a paradigm that did not allow for shifting, for reconfiguration. In unthinking fearful acceptance. I was sick, dependent, reliant. Now I am not.
Most of my memories from childhood are negative. Certainly at home. I remember countless angry faces, raised voices, reproaches and tears. Manipulation, coercion. And I was able to outwardly conform. [My brother Mason has the same impressions: overwhelmingly negative, though for him not even school was an outlet. Ethan and Jackie (my brother and sister) have not linked any of their own personal problems to childhood yet: I hope that if and when they do I can be fully present to help. I am glad I have been able to help Mason somewhat, through listening and reserving judgement, through acting as outspoken mediator when he came out and my parents freaked out (though not outspoken enough; I am cowardly from long oppression)].
The insistence on perfection. The supposedly comforting assurance that I was a model child: preternaturally clean, quiet, docile. Is it any wonder? What were the other options? Acquiescence and submission earned me love; intractability earned me hatred. For hatred it was. There is no foundation to the claim that it was from love—certainly not 90%+ of the time. It was rage, pure and simple, of the control they had over me being broken. It was rage at something which was a threat to themselves, to their worldview, to their systems of thought. And it was a hatred that such a thing could be.
Love and hatred do not mix. This is what I have learned. Perfect love does indeed cast out fear. (Humanly speaking, no love can be perfect; there will always be a modicum, at least, of fear.) The fear of the Lord may be the beginning of wisdom, but it is not the end point. As his adopted child that fear has no place. Awe, sure. An understanding of His power and massiveness. But not fear.
The God I know and revere fills me only with security and love. He has earned my affection and respect in full measure. He sees me as autonomous, he allows me full rein to make choices, but he invites me to submit. The power dynamic—though potentially so much less equal because of the disparity in our status—is, graciously, much less apparent in actuality than any human relationship.
Where does that leave me, when the comforting illusion that my parents loved me—fully and unconditionally—is shattered? That to ask such a thing is to ask too much from any human? It throws you back upon your own resources, it demands differentiation. Something I am still achieving.
Though I still have the assurance that there is someone who does love me in such a way—indeed, the only one who can. This is a truly joyous and freeing thought.
The story of the prodigal son: when did it become so distorted? When did it become behaviour-oriented? While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and approached. He made no demands. He just loved. That is alien to me. That is infinitely desirable. And the only basis for which true sonhood, true childhood—something I never got to experience in its richness, innocence, security—can occur.
I was a symbol; I was not me. I was a public demonstration that my parents were happy and secure. I was a sparkling, perfect little gem that increased their value to themselves and others. I was all sorts of things I was not made to be; I was all sorts of things I could not be.
I was concerned about my mother, about my siblings. I was responsible, deeply deeply responsible, able to crush or raise them as I chose, as I learned how bound up they were with me, how my facility with words and my ability to empathise deeply led to me wielding an undue power in how they felt and acted.
If I was happy, if I joked, they could relax. If I was morose and withdrawn, they shrivelled up. My mother especially. She had no husband, from the point of view of emotional intimacy or reciprocity. I was that “little husband,” who assured her of my unending love and devotion, one that did not break or bend in the face of her anger or rejection, but which only strengthened in any act of (un)intentional cruelty, became more abject and desperate.
Like a puppy.
An impudent puppy. One who was crying out to be abused. One who is now crying out because he was abused.
One who is exploring adulthood, trying it on for size, finding out what it means, what it involves. Finding out about lots of auto- words: autonomy, autoeroticism, autosuggestion...
Finding out what is is to deal with the auto, to discover and name it, to inhabit and claim it, and refuse to relinquish my grip.
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