11.21.2012

Dear Teen Me: Ghost Writing

Written for this contest based around this book, which is an anthology of letters from authors to their younger selves. Check it out. It's a worthwhile read. 

The Title: My two predominant nicknames as a teenager were Spook (don't remember where that came from) and Ghost (because I reminded someone of the Poppy Z Brite character); both are still used occasionally, but not as much, and Ghost has metamorphosed into a verb for a particular state of being I exist in from time to time.



Slow down.
You’re going to be an adult for a long, long, long time. There’s no need to rush it. You can be irresponsible. You can make stupid decisions. Trust me, you’re going to do it later, so better get some practice in now.

Don’t listen to what everyone tells you. They have their own dreams and they think you’re the one to realise them. They see you’re intelligent, talented and ambitious and know you can get the hell out of that town if you want to. They’ll encourage you, but to a point. Truth: they don’t want you to leave town. They’ll settle for you not leaving the state, but their encouragement isn’t about you. It’s about keeping something good for a place that has far too little.

Talk to Greg. When you’re nineteen and sitting in a pub on the other side of the world, you’ll wish you left things differently.

Talk to people. Tell them you’re not okay. Tell them who you really are and don’t try to be what you’re not. Amazingly, every one of them will surprise you. You have the chance to reinvent yourself so take it, kiddo, and let yourself be you.

Talk to your father. You don’t know it yet, but you’re already almost out of time. You started running out of time from the very beginning. Ask your questions, and when he won’t answer, ask them again. And again. And again. And don’t care how much he yells or storms off or drip-feeds those half answers, keep asking. Make him tell you who you are and who you come from. Make him tell you why he never chose you. Why he lied. Why you were a secret. Because if you don’t find out now, you’re going to be repeating that pattern over and over for a long, long time. You are always going to let people put you on the back burner for this reason or that reason; you are always going to be someone’s dirty little secret. At eighteen, you’ll promise yourself to never be someone’s secret again, but I can’t even tell you the number of times you'll break that promise to yourself.

Don’t break promises to yourself, even if it means breaking a promise to someone else.

You hate him right now; I don’t blame you. Sometimes I still hate him, too. But you are running out of time, and you need those answers.

When you’re 22 and living on the other side of the country, he will almost die and you will be able to do nothing. You’ll have to go to work twenty minutes after finding this out, and spend the day juggling customers and phone calls to nurses in West Virginia asking questions that you can’t answer about things you should know. You’ll never really find out what happened on that trip, but it will change you.

You’ll learn to swallow your anger, and you’ll learn to smile every time someone says what a good man he is, and you’ll not tell them what a shit father he is. Not for his sake, but for them. You swallow a lot of things for the sake of other people. It’s not healthy, kiddo.

(By the way, somewhere around this time there will be a boy who can talk the stars out of the sky. You’ll want to save him. He’ll think he wants you to save him. But you can’t, and he doesn’t know what he wants, and that is far too heavy for you to handle.)

Avoid strays.

He’ll finally be put into a home when you’ve migrated even further south, and you’ll feel guilty about not being there to take care of him. You’ll feel obligated to do that. The dutiful son. Don’t. You’ve got a lot of life to live yet, kid, and you are still a kid, and all of this is well beyond your years. Remember when I said to slow down? This is going to be when you wish you had.

(There will be another boy here, more charming than the first, and more appealing because he’s just so normal. Listen to your instincts here. They’ll tell you how it’ll all play out well in advance.)

By the time it’s over, you’re going to want those answers I told you to ask for. You’re going to need them. A few months after the funeral, you’re going to realise all the questions you still have and that the only person who can answer them is gone.

(The boy in this era will break your heart over and over and over and over with a graceful ease that almost, almost disguises what is happening. In the beginning, you’ll dismiss him and deem him unimportant, but he’ll do something to you. This one, you’re better off not knowing at all.)

Forget about responsibility. Forget about money. Forget about settling down. You’ve already got twitchy feet, I know, and they will get so tired your soul feels like it’s thin-to-breaking. But you’re always going to be that square peg, kid, and it’s never going to be easy for you. So don’t bother trying to please them; you can’t, you won’t, and you’ll only hurt yourself.

Just do it your way. Because even after you’ve tried all the things they wanted you to do, that’s what you do anyway.

The anger will go away. Mostly. You’ll spend a week sitting by a bed with too much to say and not enough words and the thing you’ll regret most is not speaking enough. At the funeral, you will provide comfort to others because it’s in there. Beneath the mental problems, the quirks, the bad habits, you are stronger than everyone you know. Allow yourself to be selfish because they will take every last piece of you they can get.

Do not hide your heart in other people. They lose it far too easily.

Do not be embarrassed by your faith. Yours is stronger probably than his ever was, even if he did wear the uniform. Don’t let it go just because the kids you’re running with don’t think it’s cool. Churches (but only the big, proper old ones with arches and painted windows and candles everywhere) will always be your sanctuary (but only when there’s no one else in them) even though you stop going to them so much.

Something will get broken in you the year he dies. You won’t expect it, because even then you think that you hate him too much to care. You don’t realise that bearing witness is just as important for you as it is for him. You don’t think about any of this until it happens. Something will break in you. I can’t tell you when it’ll be fixed because it still isn’t yet. Maybe it never will be. But that’s okay. There’s no shame in being a little broken now and then.
The night it happens you’ll know, and you’ll have a choice. You’ll choose to leave, and you’ll feel guilty afterwards. You won’t tell anyone this. Because you feel guilty. Because it sounds crazy. Because you don’t think they’ll believe you. But you’ll know. Staring at his face in his bed, and the nurse assuring you that it’s safe to go home and sleep for the night. You’ll know it isn’t and you’ll leave anyway. You’ll carry that with you for a long, long time, kiddo.

So slow down.
There’s no rush to see and do and experience everything. Go to parties. Skip class. Allow yourself to do less than perfect work. Talk to strangers and dance with bubbles on the street.
Enjoy the moment. 

11.08.2012

PS You have to be brave.

"One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are."
Many, many things have happened since last we spoke, but I'm not going to talk about them. Enough has been said and said and said about them that adding anything more at this point would just be rehashing things already done and sometimes, sometimes we all need a little space to breathe.
"Sometimes it's like watching a delicate flower surrounded in snow, and it tries to stand up, but the snow just keeps crushing it."
There is a certain weariness that attaches itself to life. We're taught and told that adversity breeds strength, that the injuries we suffer build character and enable us to move forward. Persevere. There's a lot of importance attached to that. The ability to persevere. It's noble. It's honorable. Whatever happens, we shall hold our heads up and comport ourselves with dignity. We will conceal all wounds and smile blithely even while blood soaks through layers and layers...
"Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone... Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way."
I wonder about that. Is our strength founded in the pain we feel, or do we only discover it at the bottom of the box when everything has already been taken out? Is it just that thing we are left holding in the end, pushing us to move breathe sleep eat because ultimately, whatever we would like to say or believe about ourselves, we are programmed to survive and even when our cognitive identity crumbles, that innate, unignorable programming kicks in and demands you will carry on. Is that noble?
"I'm just tired of it. I'm tired of feeling like shit when I didn't do anything wrong, and being angry when there isn't anything I can do to fix it, having to be the one responsible for knowing how to fix it - like I have any idea - and just. All of it. I wish it would just stop and go away."
There are those who don't, I suppose. Those who get so much piled around them that all they can do is collapse beneath it. Are they less noble for their inability to persevere? Are they damaged, flawed, unsaveable, deserving of pity because obviously they must not be imbued with this strength that is so vital, so admirable, so indicative of someone worthy of respect?
"Respect the ecology of your delusions."
There is a comfort and a danger in spending too much time in a nonexistent world. In the things we create, the stories and lives and events we manufacture, there is an order and logic to the messiest of situations. Every line of speech has significance. Every action is meaningful. Nothing is arbitrary, and you can be assured of that. But if you linger too long on that side of the glass, you start interpreting life itself with the same codebook, when the truth is there are no layers of metaphor to unwind. A mess is a mess and nothing more. The virtues - the ideals, the beliefs - you try to hold on to break down, wear down, are stolen from you. Sometimes without you even realising. You think you still have them and one day you find yourself in need of one, so you reach into the box and pull out something that looks vaguely like honesty or integrity or whatever else it is you might be seeking, but it's not quite what you expected. It's not quite what you remember it being.
"I'm not suited for this. I'm not designed for it. I don't like it. I can't even remember to breathe regularly without thinking about it, and that's supposed to be automatic. I'm trapped in the teeniest of cages without even any door that I might try for an escape. And maybe I could bear it if there were more room to move around, but I am pressed and squeezed into this limited space until so often I feel like I'm just going to burst out of it but it never yields. I don't think I am a creature that was ever meant to be forced into corporeal form. I find it awkward and unwieldy. And maybe that's why I have such difficulty trying to place myself amongst tangible things - I don't spend much time in the physical realm, and the things that exist there don't hold any importance to me." 
And maybe it's better that what you pull out isn't quite that thing you thought it was, because the world has no use for them. They're a little like fairy stories; things we tell ourselves at night to make the dreams easier to catch. Take honesty. We are, generally speaking, expected to be honest, but not too honest. If you are too honest, you're mean. You're heartless. So we develop a practice of speaking in half-truths, reading between the lines, accepting the little lies we give each other to spare someone's feelings. This is more acceptable than true honesty, but no one knows why. I've asked.
"You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty an kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be."
Inevitably, because we're trying so hard to be careful and respectful, to follow these proscribed standards of behaviour that allow us acceptance as members of the whole, there are misunderstandings, complications, confrontations, those injuries that foster that much-sought-after attribute of strength. It's part of life, they say. Everyone experiences it. Just keep your chin up, kid, and remember that smile. Maybe, even if we weren't expected to perform two contradictory actions simultaneously, these things would happen anyway. Maybe they wouldn't.
"But failing in love isn't the same as not loving. It doesn't let you off the hook, it doesn't mean... you're free to not love."
So we misunderstand each other. We hurt each other. We hide from each other and we scream at each other. We allow moments of great silence to fill the cracks that had been made. We try to replace those silences with words that mean nothing in the hopes that over time they'll start to mean something again. We tell ourselves to be strong. That the strength we've discovered or developed or however we came by it will see us through every moment of shaky ground. We try to put our faith back together. Perhaps that is the most difficult thing of all. Once the yelling is done. Once the silence has lasted too long. Once all parties sit humbled and hurt, there is still the matter of faith, and whether or not it has been truly lost. If there is still even a hint of faith left, or maybe even just the desire for faith... Maybe, in the end, that is all strength really is.
"It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet."