Genesis

If you haven't been around since the genesis of my blog then you won't know why I started it. I deleted all of that. But I keep feeling compelled to put it back in.....to explain myself. You see, that's why I'm here in the first place....to be open. So I'm going to put it back, "my genesis" and leave it once and for all....

It all started when my sister died. She had always been the expressive, emotional one. I have a sister who is three years older and a brother who is one year older and, to my mind, they always seemed to be alternate versions of myself. They were sort of "what ifs". My sister was what I would have been if I hadn't been afraid of all the scrutiny and punishment we experienced as children. I admired her because she had the courage to face her deepest desires and to express them to others and to hope, actually hope, that those desires could be met. Well, it was either courage or lack of self control. This doesn't make any sense, does it? Let me start again...

We were raised by our grandmother. She was a good woman in her way; a smart and brilliant woman. But she was the product of an old southern "slave culture", and when under duress she reverted back to that. She raised her own 15 children the way white slave owners raised children: with strictness and without affection. But she knew in heart that was wrong so she tried to temper it as much as she could.

When she took us three away from our mother for reasons of her own, she was way too tired and stressed to bother with trying to be gentle, what with having to raise 15 kids of her own. So she raised us three with almost no gentleness and no affection, not as a white slave-owner would raise their own children, but as actual slaves. I didn't understand this until I read the work of Frederick Douglas and realized that the descriptions of his own childhood sounded almost identical to my own even though I grew up in the 70's and 80's. I won't go into any more detail than that. If you want to know more about it read his autobiography. But the end result was that we three were raised as subhuman with almost no understanding of what a human being ought to want and feel. So we had to figure out our humanity on our own, in our own ways.

My sister went about doing that by seeking physical affection from whomever would offer it. She was always writing love letters and poetry. She left herself wide open and vulnerable. She was often punished, beaten, or ridiculed for her troubles but that never seemed to deter her, as if her creativity had a life of its own that was worth risking her well-being. I saw her behavior as a lesson in what not to do. My reaction was to do the opposite. No one knew what I was feeling or thinking if I could help it. I was very guarded, very protective. I trusted no one and everyone in a way, with a very limited trust, because I wouldn't let anyone get close enough to actually hurt me. She, on the other hand, was constantly being hurt. I can't say that I envied her, but she did live, in my mind, a life of much greater freedom than I did. She was always taking huge risks and exposing herself, but she did exactly what she wanted. I was very cautious and took the path of surest success regardless of what I actually wanted to do. She danced, wrote songs, wrote poetry, stripped, club-hopped. I focused on school, got straight A's, got the easiest scholarship available to me, went away to college and took up engineering because I knew it would allow me to support myself. It didn't matter that I had a greater interest in english literature, politics, and journalism. Law school was too expensive and might require me to go into debt. Journalism paid too little and would require me to be more creative than I thought was possible. My pleasure never figured into a single decision I made and her pleasure was the sole basis for every decision she made.

When she died I realized that I hadn't needed to explore pleasure because she had been doing it for both of us. With her gone, I felt cut off from the world. I finally had to face how closed off I was and I didn't like it. I felt starved for self-expression. I missed her poetry and her songs. I needed something. So I started this blog to learn to become more open; to trust people; to take the risk of exposing myself and to face the fear and know that I could live through it.