चंगे Willful Evolution

Man, it's crazy how fragile human emotional webbing is.

Just finished reading "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison, and all my will to go out and see Otter at work, to see Niki rock her Hairstiks at Mallory Square, to do anything but mourn the cursed relevance of that book to my own experience, just kinda got swept out with the tides I won't be swimming in tonight. Lord almighty. I squirmed and fidgeted, put the book down and smoked a bowl to stop my nervous, ghost-encounter tremors. Yeah, the story mirrored enough of my own childhood that I was nearly derailed by the Flashback Memory Train...

...but it was more the idea of another living human being having to go through that bullshit, more the idea of another unfinished child being forced to mature like that, so lopsided and hardened, so broken by force and mended by will alone, that drove the meaty, bruising fist into my belly. Oh, what an aching thing.

I decided a long time ago that I could either be victimized by my experiences or I could learn from them and make myself grow strong enough to never let them hurt me again. Strong enough never to hurt another person out of some backhanded effort to get back at my own past. Sounds easy enough, but, y'know, it's a daily decision-making process. A willful reformation of one's own ethos. I am still, a thousand years and a million miles later, affected by the virulent rage that accompanied my maturation, still feel like fighting at the slightest provocation, still am afraid to get too drunk or too wound up because that fire is still in my belly. Though I have learned to control myself most of the time, though I have learned to soften my brow and loosen my muscles, though I have learned to express my rage through more effective means, to meet anger with love and find laughter in slaughter,

The fire in my belly still burns.

Goddamn it, it burns.

I do not desire children of my own, indeed I fear for any offspring of my body, but I am fiercely protective of other children. Protective of children, animals, any who are not able to defend themselves effectively against unsought pain. I vacillated from wanting to destroy absolutely everything to wanting to destroy the people who think like me. Like I used to think. Like, some days, I still do.

Mama taught me, forever ago, that the only thing I can change with any certainty is Me.

Both my parents were beaten, lacerated, bruised, and just outright abused when they were children. When I developed language skills, my erstwhile father naturally assumed his parental role as household tyrant, raining down the verbal, emotional, and daily physical abuse that he suffered in his youth. Mama, on the other hand, realized how fucked up it was to have the people you were s'posed to trust treating you worse than the dog got treated, beating and cursing you like the meat they wish they'd never met, and she decided never to do that shit to her own kids.

She didn't always succeed, from what she's told me.
More than once, she laid her hand across me and meant it.

But I don't ever remember her beating me.
Never.

I remember her getting mad sometimes.
After I turned 11, I remember her being really tired a lot.
Tired in some place in her head that I couldn't touch.
Somewhere I couldn't help fix.
Somewhere that was probably my fault.
Maybe...

I probably had that same look myself.

...

It's pretty astonishing to me to hear people excuse their aberrant behavior with the phrase "I can't help it." Like that just fixes it all up and makes it just another shitty hand we all gotta play as best we can. Like there's nothin for it.

Baby, back the fuck up and look at yourself:

The shitty hand you got dealt was your bigoted community.
Was your manipulative, vindictive mother.
Was your hard-drinkin, fist-swingin father.
Was your sexually abusive grandfather.
Was your lack of family.
Was your lack of history.
Was your abject poverty.
Was your minority status, by sex or pigmentation or economics or religion or whatever.

The Way You Play Your Hand is the way you choose to conduct yourself in spite of what you've been dealt. The way you play is by trying to find and create honor in dishonorable circumstances.

To create love where there is too little love to sustain you.
To obviate violence with compassionate action.
To find peace deep in the very eye of chaos, deep within the bones of your ribs.
To reinvent yourself as only
You
Have the Power
To Do.

It's maybe the hardest thing you'll ever do. It'll keep you busy all your long life. But, y'know...

You're it. You're the only one. You are the only person in the whole wide world who can teach you to be the most rock-solid, fun-lovin, life-grabbin, experience-swallowin person that only you can be. I've heard a thousand times that the Cycle Ends With Me, that the violence has gotta stop somewhere, and it's gonna stop with me.
And that's true.
But what's also true, is that you are, I am, We Are the crazed solo inventors of our own fuckin cycle. The Cycle Starts With Me, goddamn it. The Love's gotta get up in my life somewhere, and I'll be damned if it's gonna be in anybody's bed but mine.

I choose.
You choose.

You're it.

I love you.