This is not a fishing expedition, it's just some words
I don't remember when it started, but it's been a long time that I've wanted to write publicly about the effects my father's death. It's not been all these 40 years - for a very long time it never even occurred to me that I might write about anything at all, let alone Dad's death, that it might be of any worth to me or to anyone else.
And to be clear, I'm not sure this can have any value at all, this writing. For so much of my life I've not believed I had a right to speak, writing didn't even come into it. Speech is ephemeral at least, there for those around you, but the idea of putting words in an order, on a virtual page and sending them out into the interweb seems audacious to me. A bold act of arrogance, claiming a front-and-centre position for me and my thoughts and my trauma and my version of Life As It Is. It's as if I believe there is something important for me to say, as if I deserve to be heard, that my feelings and beliefs have value.
(For the sake of full disclosure, I've blogged before when I was touring Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, the one-woman show I co-created about my real reaction to my real sister's real murder. I think the fire inside me after Kate died gave me audacity, I was pushed so hard to the wall then, it was either bury myself in the wall (which I tried very hard to do, but failed) or come out fighting. What's more, and certainly more importantly, I had a brilliant collaborator who told me I was allowed to speak on that subject, that I should speak on that subject, that many people wouldn't understand which is why I must speak on that subject, so I did. There was nothing pure about it, nothing virtuous, but I was angry enough with the world to feel it deserved my words, good or bad, so it had them like it or not.)
But in this cold-light-of-no-recent-absurd-bereavement day, when my father has been dead nearly 40 years, to speak now and to speak things I suspect will be incomprehensible to you well-balanced, probably-coping persons seems utterly preposterous.
As if I deserve to be heard, as if the act of speech has not filled me all my life with terrible speakers-remorse. Talking is uncomfortable and invariably leaves me with horrible feelings which float around like so many moths in a glass of flat lemonade at the bottom of an abandoned garden. I have spent my life stood under the jet engines of my certainty that I have no right to speak, the noise deafening, the heat unbearable, the force of the air making it difficult for me to remain upright. No, I don't know whether it's natural to me or taught by those who hated to hear my little itchy voice when I was tiny, but my word talking makes me come out in emotional hives.
I'm pausing here for the readers who know me - that sophisticated picture of me is for you. I'm allowing this gap so you can wipe the tea off your touchscreen, the tea which you have just snorted down your nose onto this blog, at the idea that I feel I don't have the right to speak.
And now I'm imagining that I was at an extended family party when I said that thing about not feeling as if I'm allowed to speak. We've had some drinks, the large fam and me, and by this point there was so much laughter and so many jokes about the idea of my being in any way unwilling or unable to speak, that I can probably sneak out of the room, put my coat on, slip out the front door and wander down the road to the pub. I'll order a double something and throw it down my throat, for starters.
By the way, back at the party they are still laughing at the idea that speaking pains me. They are struggling and laughing so much that they haven't even noticed I've gone.
You see, dear reader who has not spent 25 or more seconds in my company, I am a talker. Or maybe a Talker. I suspect many family members, ex-colleagues, erstwhile friends, might call me a TALKER. I feel I railroad conversations, arriving with one tedious anecdote or another, looking for chat and story and connection through words.
I have always been like this, first of all, before I could speak, in weird baby sounds, desperate to speak, to understand, to be part of whatever was going on. I hear I was maddeningly irritating for my older brother and sister, and their displeasure at, well, whatever fell between the considerable noise I made and my very existence, has travelled with me - my familiar jailer - into middle age. These days I mostly speak in actual words, it often involves me hurling myself about, but it contains lots of words too. Sometimes they get very out of my control and end up in a weird place pretty much entirely out of my control. And yet, words, words, words and words.
I not only listen when I listen but I listen when I speak. Maybe I should give that up. Not only am I thinking what I say before I say it but I'm listening when it comes out of my stupid face. Why should I have to listen to what I'm saying? I've been thinking it, whatever it is, this thing I'm saying, and now I can hear my mimsy voice banging on. Eugh.
And yet.
I talk. I talk to people in shops and banks and cinemas - I have got to know people in queues and in auditoria. I hope to visit a friend I made on a plane sometime at her home in Singapore; maybe I'll have a flat to myself in Melbourne one day which belongs to friends of friends I've banged on at. You get the picture. Talking is my home, words are where I reside, but if you've heard me talk about my home you'll know it's not exactly somewhere I have pride in. It's not comfortable, just as speaking is not comfortable... but that's a whole other blog, the state of my home and the state of me in it.
It seems to me that it's so awful, this feeling of standing under the jet engine of my own self-hatred as I speak, that if I'm going to say anything and be loathed for it, I may as well say a lot, make it funny, keep at it, not draw breath, not allow anyone to get a word in to tell me I'm a ghastly, hot-air-filled moron, and then split as soon as I'm done. Keep peddling, keep swimming, keep running, keep slipping, keep crawling, dragging myself along the superhighway of existence, hoping that either I get to slide off the hard shoulder and down the incline or roll onto the road and be hit by passing traffic.
I certainly do not have a right or an ability to write about anything. And not about Dad. Not about that. And though I speak endlessly about him, and it's hard to get through any given pint or casual greeting without me talking about my dad having died when I was a kid, I feel dreadful every time. To think that it's okay to be writing this now, that my feelings are acceptable or of use is an act of pure, lean, sinewy arrogance. Or narcissism. One of those Trumpesque things we are all having to define and discuss. One of those.
And all you have to do is listen for a short time to establish I am just a massive heap of feeling sorry for myself, and writing this is one thing, but putting it out there so that you can read it really does fit the category of me thinking I have it worse than anyone else or that I'm special or that I deserve some kind of sympathy. I have battled through the enormous, thorny hedge-wall (think sleeping beauty) of self-loathing with a plastic knife. And I don't think that telling this tale, whatever tale it turns out to be, is going to make me like myself. I think it'll make me dislike myself even more, which is why I've been deliberating for so long about writing about this and certainly about putting it out there in your face.
So I wonder why I'm doing it. Sometimes daylight can purify shame. Get out the thing which is driving your runaway shame bus and show it to people, point and laugh at it, get others to show you their shame machine, group together and point and laugh together at these things which are keeping you in a shoebox in a wine crate in a cabinet in a cupboard under the basement stairs of a house in the middle of nowhere. Or wherever it is your shame keeps you. If you experience shame. If you don't, really, keep it that way. It's a waste of time, it turns out.
After my first blog on this intractable matter, friends were kind and some suggested I ought to keep writing this blog (thank you, folks). However, this is not a fishing expedition. I am not, in fact, looking for sympathy or praise, though I'll accept either gift if they are bestowed upon me. All I am doing is trying to work out what on earth Dad went and did to me by one moment being there and the next moment being gone, mysterious chap.
By the way, they are still laughing - my family, at the party, which I slipped out of. They are helpless. Maybe one or two have actually died of hysteria by now. As some of them have died from my bizarre statement, in my imagination, the least I can do now is write some of what I think I might need to say in their memory: rest on peace, my imaginary loved ones, mown down in your prime by the cataplexy of laughter.
And to be clear, I'm not sure this can have any value at all, this writing. For so much of my life I've not believed I had a right to speak, writing didn't even come into it. Speech is ephemeral at least, there for those around you, but the idea of putting words in an order, on a virtual page and sending them out into the interweb seems audacious to me. A bold act of arrogance, claiming a front-and-centre position for me and my thoughts and my trauma and my version of Life As It Is. It's as if I believe there is something important for me to say, as if I deserve to be heard, that my feelings and beliefs have value.
(For the sake of full disclosure, I've blogged before when I was touring Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, the one-woman show I co-created about my real reaction to my real sister's real murder. I think the fire inside me after Kate died gave me audacity, I was pushed so hard to the wall then, it was either bury myself in the wall (which I tried very hard to do, but failed) or come out fighting. What's more, and certainly more importantly, I had a brilliant collaborator who told me I was allowed to speak on that subject, that I should speak on that subject, that many people wouldn't understand which is why I must speak on that subject, so I did. There was nothing pure about it, nothing virtuous, but I was angry enough with the world to feel it deserved my words, good or bad, so it had them like it or not.)
But in this cold-light-of-no-recent-absurd-bereavement day, when my father has been dead nearly 40 years, to speak now and to speak things I suspect will be incomprehensible to you well-balanced, probably-coping persons seems utterly preposterous.
As if I deserve to be heard, as if the act of speech has not filled me all my life with terrible speakers-remorse. Talking is uncomfortable and invariably leaves me with horrible feelings which float around like so many moths in a glass of flat lemonade at the bottom of an abandoned garden. I have spent my life stood under the jet engines of my certainty that I have no right to speak, the noise deafening, the heat unbearable, the force of the air making it difficult for me to remain upright. No, I don't know whether it's natural to me or taught by those who hated to hear my little itchy voice when I was tiny, but my word talking makes me come out in emotional hives.
I'm pausing here for the readers who know me - that sophisticated picture of me is for you. I'm allowing this gap so you can wipe the tea off your touchscreen, the tea which you have just snorted down your nose onto this blog, at the idea that I feel I don't have the right to speak.
And now I'm imagining that I was at an extended family party when I said that thing about not feeling as if I'm allowed to speak. We've had some drinks, the large fam and me, and by this point there was so much laughter and so many jokes about the idea of my being in any way unwilling or unable to speak, that I can probably sneak out of the room, put my coat on, slip out the front door and wander down the road to the pub. I'll order a double something and throw it down my throat, for starters.
By the way, back at the party they are still laughing at the idea that speaking pains me. They are struggling and laughing so much that they haven't even noticed I've gone.
You see, dear reader who has not spent 25 or more seconds in my company, I am a talker. Or maybe a Talker. I suspect many family members, ex-colleagues, erstwhile friends, might call me a TALKER. I feel I railroad conversations, arriving with one tedious anecdote or another, looking for chat and story and connection through words.
I have always been like this, first of all, before I could speak, in weird baby sounds, desperate to speak, to understand, to be part of whatever was going on. I hear I was maddeningly irritating for my older brother and sister, and their displeasure at, well, whatever fell between the considerable noise I made and my very existence, has travelled with me - my familiar jailer - into middle age. These days I mostly speak in actual words, it often involves me hurling myself about, but it contains lots of words too. Sometimes they get very out of my control and end up in a weird place pretty much entirely out of my control. And yet, words, words, words and words.
I not only listen when I listen but I listen when I speak. Maybe I should give that up. Not only am I thinking what I say before I say it but I'm listening when it comes out of my stupid face. Why should I have to listen to what I'm saying? I've been thinking it, whatever it is, this thing I'm saying, and now I can hear my mimsy voice banging on. Eugh.
And yet.
I talk. I talk to people in shops and banks and cinemas - I have got to know people in queues and in auditoria. I hope to visit a friend I made on a plane sometime at her home in Singapore; maybe I'll have a flat to myself in Melbourne one day which belongs to friends of friends I've banged on at. You get the picture. Talking is my home, words are where I reside, but if you've heard me talk about my home you'll know it's not exactly somewhere I have pride in. It's not comfortable, just as speaking is not comfortable... but that's a whole other blog, the state of my home and the state of me in it.
It seems to me that it's so awful, this feeling of standing under the jet engine of my own self-hatred as I speak, that if I'm going to say anything and be loathed for it, I may as well say a lot, make it funny, keep at it, not draw breath, not allow anyone to get a word in to tell me I'm a ghastly, hot-air-filled moron, and then split as soon as I'm done. Keep peddling, keep swimming, keep running, keep slipping, keep crawling, dragging myself along the superhighway of existence, hoping that either I get to slide off the hard shoulder and down the incline or roll onto the road and be hit by passing traffic.
I certainly do not have a right or an ability to write about anything. And not about Dad. Not about that. And though I speak endlessly about him, and it's hard to get through any given pint or casual greeting without me talking about my dad having died when I was a kid, I feel dreadful every time. To think that it's okay to be writing this now, that my feelings are acceptable or of use is an act of pure, lean, sinewy arrogance. Or narcissism. One of those Trumpesque things we are all having to define and discuss. One of those.
And all you have to do is listen for a short time to establish I am just a massive heap of feeling sorry for myself, and writing this is one thing, but putting it out there so that you can read it really does fit the category of me thinking I have it worse than anyone else or that I'm special or that I deserve some kind of sympathy. I have battled through the enormous, thorny hedge-wall (think sleeping beauty) of self-loathing with a plastic knife. And I don't think that telling this tale, whatever tale it turns out to be, is going to make me like myself. I think it'll make me dislike myself even more, which is why I've been deliberating for so long about writing about this and certainly about putting it out there in your face.
So I wonder why I'm doing it. Sometimes daylight can purify shame. Get out the thing which is driving your runaway shame bus and show it to people, point and laugh at it, get others to show you their shame machine, group together and point and laugh together at these things which are keeping you in a shoebox in a wine crate in a cabinet in a cupboard under the basement stairs of a house in the middle of nowhere. Or wherever it is your shame keeps you. If you experience shame. If you don't, really, keep it that way. It's a waste of time, it turns out.
After my first blog on this intractable matter, friends were kind and some suggested I ought to keep writing this blog (thank you, folks). However, this is not a fishing expedition. I am not, in fact, looking for sympathy or praise, though I'll accept either gift if they are bestowed upon me. All I am doing is trying to work out what on earth Dad went and did to me by one moment being there and the next moment being gone, mysterious chap.
By the way, they are still laughing - my family, at the party, which I slipped out of. They are helpless. Maybe one or two have actually died of hysteria by now. As some of them have died from my bizarre statement, in my imagination, the least I can do now is write some of what I think I might need to say in their memory: rest on peace, my imaginary loved ones, mown down in your prime by the cataplexy of laughter.
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