Telly from Sesame Street, remember? Most people don’t. He was the purple monster (I think I learned in later years — our tv was black and white) who worried all the time. He walked around like a muttering animated fur covered ulcer feeling awful, guilty, and worried about e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. He was constantly being talked down from ledges and explained to that everything was going to be ok.
Telly was my favorite, even though I hated his scenes.
I really felt him. I understood those overpowering huge feelings — unquenchable terribleness concerning anything and everything — in my little two and a half foot tall body. On the inside I was more often than not like Telly as a kid. I don’t think I’ve outgrown him, but the Telly inside me and I are better friends than we used to be.
Inside me there are settings that look very black and white. Yet I don’t believe in such dichotomies. The dimmer switch doesn’t work that well, it jumps around turning the lights on and off jarringly. Life is complex and even though we are constantly trying to hold on to some sort of “truth” to keep the fear of hopelessness and meaninglessness at bay, we are also lunging forward every day with mistakes and experiments. Our animal selves are reaching out to connect with one another in the most meaningful and inappropriate ways, and our brains are making rational decisions irrationally based off a chart of “acceptable ethics” we didn’t each actually internally create.
When I’m emotionally strong and feeling well I celebrate my feral deeds with hedonistic campfires and the barbaric yawp of an animal in heat, victorious in my fuckall war against repression — crystal clear about the effigy burnt up made of shame. When I am low, depressed, shaky, or weak inside, out come the tears and quivers, begging forgiveness for what I have done, thought, or risked, infected with remorse and self loathing at my counter-understanding of the the world, different from what I’ve been taught… Fear bleeds and creeps under my skin and I lie awake terrorized at who I might be: in fact who I am. What I’ve done for the freedom of my soul and the pleasure of my skin, I wring hands over moments later awash in guilt and shame. The concept that I should ever become an anybody terrifies me when I realize I might be crushed under the weight of facing this monster publicly who is me…
Neither of these, of course, represents truth. My mind ravages my body, my body in turn continually finds time to overpower my mind. Each of these moments an ultimatum for my heart, poor beatup civilian in the middle, to take sides. My stomach seethes and rebels, trying to shut the whole system down, while my head chatters incessantly allowing me no repair and no rest, so my heart (Maria or Gordan in this story), searches for the answer to this chaos, the understanding which will bring meaning to each of these feelings, mellowing out to find the line I can live with somewhere in between. Inside there are many wars being raged every day.
Why, even as a young child, did I perseverate so deeply, disquietly questioning the very basic impetus to remain tethered within my own skin? Why such intense and early connection to guilt and shame. I had (have) a ton of it.
When I found out about the concept of reincarnation I was appalled and depressed for days. I worried that there was any truth to it because “WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO DO THIS AGAIN?!?!?!!!!” I was staunchly aware that I didn’t. Life was not weight which should be borne again and again, one time was enough! Maybe even too much. To imagine rediscovering all the pain that emotions bring, again and again, even once, seemed too much for my young mind. Later on in High School I read Camus and learned his theory of the “Theater of the Absurd”: nothing was, nor ever will be again, this window of living is but an absurd moment in chaos. Theater. I was finally pacified, satisfied, and hopeful about my eventual nothingness.
I’ve gotten older though and I want to travel the world outside of storybooks, and I doubt I’ll be able to see as much as I desire. I probably won’t build that house with my own hands. I don’t think I’ll have children. There is a growing list of professions and experiences I’d like to have which I never shall wrap my hands around, a list of mouths I’ll never kiss, stages I’ll never touch, levels of ecstasy I’ll never reach, plateaus of peace I’ll never find…
In this life I’m living I’ve repeatedly made mistakes, gone too far, felt remorse, cut myself off, pushed boundaries I felt were important to push, trusted my instincts, fallen on my face, picked myself back up better skilled, and championed the challenge. I am teasing free this ball of twisty knotted line and it is chaos theory, way way bigger than only me. The older I get the more easily I recognize the cycle of it all too. I can, from further and further distances away, observe my moments of burning high flight before the fall. I recognize myself bottoming out. I know I am not in truthful territory during these highs and lows. But there’s Art there. Struggle is integral to seeing complexity and finding undiscovered degrees of perspective. I connect with ideas that are beyond me, larger than the sum of of my experiences, feelings I could not follow were I not here now in the middle of the up and down agony of… whatever it is I’m flying and crashing about right now.
The up and down agony of reality. Nothing about our lives is ultimately controllable, yet without our struggle to organize, life is not energetically sustainable.
So I come to my theory of perfect tension. The meaning of life is, I think, to find proper tension. Adjusting constantly, tendrils snaking out to each body one is connected to, keeping time with the cyclical humming we are all a part of/immersed in. Now tighter, now loosening up, now hold it firmly and breathe, breathe together, let go slowly, don’t fall if you can help it… We’re balancing in our separate corners with the million lines to one another continually supporting and threatening each other as we go. I am feral. I want to be loved. I am perverse and sexual. I want no shame within my vulnerability. I must trust. There are walls. No one will catch me but me. Autonomy. Interconnectedness. It is a mess to be born of atoms, and a challenging blessed practice to be.
Does it matter that I cheated on my vocab test in second grade? I was a wreck for weeks. I didn’t tell anyone until now. Really. The shame of being a disappointment to my parents. Whispered promises to a god I don’t believe in begging for some peace from this feeling of inner decay. I begged to that anonymous bigger thing in high school too, worried so deeply, hoping I’d start to bleed. I find myself there in adulthood about saying the wrong words to people I love, or afraid I’ll have a heart attack from eating the wrong recreational thing, or when worried I’ll find myself exploited for my mistakes which might look like tresspasses to the people not inside me… Of course I do better on my strong days, a purring lion-faerie riding dandelion seeds on the wind. On those days nothing can harm me, for I believe above all in my reasons for doing what I have done, in my own intentions and decisive jumps. Still, moments, weeks, years, decades later I can locate each rotted gut feeling, tendril upon tendril of tension wracked with guilt and disharmony carried alongside me still, worried I did the wrong thing. It is a messy gaping bag of cancer I haven’t figured out how yet to set free.
This is the struggle of humanity. Born alone, dying alone, with all of these others that we feel around us — so deeply, so tenderly, so savagely, so cuttingly, so movingly (for better and worse) — in between.
I’ve been told more than once that I’m a path cutter, wielding my machete and hacking into wilderness, looking for the more that there is. Covered in scrapes and bruises, falls, twisted ankles, yet also sitting in wonder at the solitude and beauty I find when the moon is just right and the animals and insects around breathe with me.
I make mistakes, I’ll never stop. I try things I’ve been told not to and creep toward being a better more understanding animal. I stand up for my beliefs and hold a tense line when I must in the face of judgemental reproach. And I am weary some days. I am wrong now and again. I get crazy ideas and start racing head down into the unknown future: danger be damned! This is ultimately all I know how to do, and yes, I know it ain’t pretty… But when I stop and listen: “Human child” I hear my heart say, “there is no other way it is possible to be”.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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