instincts of a killer, of a cat. And literary remedies.
I had a triggering phone call with my grandma today.
I wanted to hang up.
She was making me feel so toxic.
She talked about how when I was in elementary school, how my classmates looked down on me for being absent-minded and not great at school. About how I then came out top of my class with 100% on math and language arts. How all of a sudden people respected me. They no longer looked down on me or called me “daydreamer”
But the thing is I don’t think I minded the nickname “daydreamer” I think it’s romantic and cute and I don’t think it was maliciously meant. And I don’t remember disliking my classmates. Or feeling looked down upon.
I was very much in my own world playing my own made up games and I had fun doing so and I barely noticed anyone’s opinions and whether it was due to a lack of perception or a lack of actual threat, I didn’t feel this resentment to which my grandma latches even to this day.
The fact that she kept track of these things, about the exact grade that my classmate gave me (for what? Peer eval?) and her name — details I’ve long erased from my mind for being irrelevant and for taking up space for important memories (I wish to remember how it felt to kiss H for example. I want to know this so badly) — the fact that my grandma then told me that I was then, after I gained everyone’s respect (god what an intense elementary school — one could only imagine what kind of Harvard-undergrad, Yale-graduate alumni I’d be now if I continued with that energy) that I had been invited to that girl’s birthday party and how, she made it sound this way, I refused on account of “living too far away”
She made it sound like an excuse!
But the truth is I just simply didn’t want to go. Out of laziness or maybe there was no one to take me.
I don’t remember ever triumphantly turning down a birthday invite on account of resentment. In fact I’m usually very quick to forgive. As soon as someone extends a hand of friendship, I take it. I’m quick to forget.
But I’m usually the one that others don’t forgive.
In hindsight I was careless and severed my relationships because I perceived the person as having wronged me or simply being wrong period. (The wrong way to be, for example. I thought T was acting like a big ignorant fascist the way she talked about Muslims and lost all desire for friendship with her.)
Sometimes the answer isn’t to sever completely but to take distance (T is one of those cases — and I didn’t sever this relationship completely but it will take a lot of coincidences to bring it back because we are no longer at a point of going out of our way to be friends) I wish I had taken distance so I could come back to people now. Check up on them now and again.
But those friendships are forever gone because I didn’t care about preserving them. I was protective of myself the way my grandma is protective of herself and myself.
And I remember how my first instinct, when something goes wrong with people, is to go on without them.
She trained this instinct into me.
Even with boys I loved dearly, as soon as I felt that they weren’t good for me, I killed all possibility of reconcile and kept them as friends I secretly still loved from afar.
It’s like I’d been trained with the instincts and reflexes of an assassin.
And when I thought of all that, I thought of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and it wasn’t so much a thought as a…sudden inhale and an instant recognition of an archetype.
I read about Estella again and i felt that I related to her greatly. I even know who my very own Pip would be. And I think he’s very sweet and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him but our relationship too has been severed.
When I think of all this I can’t help but resent my grandma. It’s complicated with her. She raised me and she gave me wonderful things. Things like self-esteem (to hold my own opinion of myself as the final verdict and to not go around like a beggar asking for approval) and epicurean ideals (how flashiness and wasting money are stupid ugly things and how being content with very little money is much more fun because the fun lasts longer and when you can make do with very little you are ironically wealthy beyond compare)
I love her for that.
But this toxic trait of severing relationships and not valuing them and being quick to react in self-defense…
Well I feel very much like a cat
I can, without thought (and that’s exactly the problem), scratch people to the point where they no longer feel safe around me.
And I think reading is this all-encompassing thing for me. It’s art and it’s aesthetic enjoyment but it’s also a meditation
It’s an experience
And it alters me.
Had I not read great expectations (and many other books in fact) I would’ve not been able to spot and recognize and name this very toxic quality about my grandma and the way she raised me.
Reading creates a link between me and healthier ways to be.
by showing me the problem and by giving me a model of how to be.
I’m convinced that the biggest reason people can’t get out of their own toxic patterns is that they don’t know how else to be. They dont have a mental model of a healthy way to be.
I’m sort of generally opposed to those types of literatures that are about the subtle dramas in human interactions which we call classics but i think they really do have this medicinal value to them which is more potent than other types of books. There are gummy vitamin books and delicious cookie books and then there are medicine books that heal you from the inside by showing you a model, of healthy and unhealthy ways to be.
Sometimes I feel so determined. That my life has been determined I mean.
What would my life have been like if I had a grandma who was more of a loving but maybe even obsequious type?
And what would have happened if I had gone to a middle school that was more like my elementary school? In some ways I’d be better off. I think I might be a career woman now.
But then I think maybe these are the spiritual lessons that people talk about. These people who claim they have access to the other side say that we are here to learn lessons. So maybe we come back over and over again until our sense of right and wrong and good and bad are so ingrained and we are able to maintain a level of mental health untouched by circumstance so that, at the age of 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, I would’ve been immune to my grandmas instinct trainings and I would’ve told her “grandma,
It’s not a big deal.”
But I feel that I had “skipped over” some of the “beginner lessons” — lessons about the self-damaging effects of coveting wealth and status and wanting to be looked upon by others as wealthy and important in that way. I feel sad for beginners who are still there.
But then those beginners know not to sever relationships. So.
They probably feel sorry for me too.
I feel so grateful to have found books. It’s a sort of religious. A sort of answer to things. A cure for things. But it’s also the celebration of life too. It’s all the wonderful things.
It’s empathy training with emotionally intelligent people.