Finished At Last
Everything finally kicked in today. At some point, I realized that it is okay to be angry, and finally admit that some of the people I thought cared about me simply did not. Maybe they never did, and to that extent maybe they never will. I suppose I’m fortunate the very few people who truly cared about me cared deeply enough to leave me with love I can still draw from, even now. There have been people whose goodness stayed with me, and I will not erase them simply because so much else has hurt.
Yet, I am heartbroken by what I have finally had to accept. The last few people I allowed close dropped me hard. They abused the shit out of me. They lied, disappeared, and took what was vulnerable and treated it as though it were disposable and useless. And yet I am still standing. I have met death too many times to count. I have lived through things that should have changed me beyond recognition, and perhaps they did, but somehow I am still here.
What I am ready to throw away now, is hope of a different kind: the hope that friendship will suddenly become what I spent my life believing it could be, or that if I wait long enough I will finally encounter people who possess the integrity I kept assuming was normal, or common. I know the world contains good people. I am lucky enough to have a kind partner and Godmother as friends. But beyond them, when people speak so easily about human goodness, sometimes I feel as though they are describing a country or land I have never visited, but merely heard about through second hand. Others seem to know goodness in a way I simply don’t.
Nobody asks how I am or what is happening in my life, what I am carrying, whether I am frightened, whether I am succeeding, or whether I am falling apart. Somewhere in there, I stopped asking about anyone else’s world too. What I want now is very simple: I want to paint, draw, write, and I want to disappear into the work for hours and be left alone inside the only language that has never betrayed me. This world was not built with me in mind.
So …when I say goodbye, I mean goodbye to this way of showing myself. I won’t keep returning to explain myself to people who never ask, and I won’t continue offering pieces of my private life to an audience that does not particularly want to know me. Nobody says they’re sorry. Nobody shows that they give a shit. Eventually, you stop standing at the same locked door.
School, strangely and beautifully, has been different. The teachers have been wonderful, the staff have been wonderful, and the students are wonderful and very brave. Learning has been fun — genuinely fun — and one of the saddest realizations of my life is that I started so late. Everybody told me school was useless, and they were wrong. I could have been an eternal student, I love it. There is a kind of cool high in struggling with something until it suddenly gives way, in sitting in a room full of people who are trying, however imperfectly, to move toward something.
School has brought me closer to a goal at a time when my own body has been taking things away from me. I am so sick that my body can no longer remain in the positions it once could when painting or writing, and I have cried over this for years. I have felt utterly lost because I can no longer sit at a desk for twelve hours and simply disappear into work the way I once did. People may not understand what it is to mourn your own physical capacity, but I do. I have mourned mine. This feels like one last serious attempt to build a life that might bring me closer to my own work again, to find another road toward the thing I have always wanted. Without my work, I sometimes feel like a dead woman walking. It won’t be long.
There are moments when I feel so lost in this world that I no longer want any part of it. People have forgotten how to connect. Everything has become survival, self-protection, self-focus — people guarding their little territories, their attention, their appetites, and their convenience. I find it ugly, and I am tired of pretending I don’t.
I can despise most of what I’ve seen in people and still be stopped cold by a particular shade of blue. Woe.
I’ve decided this will be my last post along personal lines. Nobody particularly wants to know me, and I no longer feel compelled to divulge myself simply because this culture has convinced us that our private lives must constantly be converted into public material. My poetry will say enough, my essays will say enough, and the art will say what I cannot. Maybe nobody cares about that either, but I have reached the point where I don’t care very much whether they do.
Maybe some part of me really is dead inside. There is certainly a great deal of sadness in me, and there is anger too — a tremendous amount of anger. Some days I hate most everybody I ever met because they lied.
Sometimes I hate myself for the forgiving. And I’m still standing.
Marni Fraser
