The results of some blood tests were bad, or rather, on the bad side. I have an appointment with my doctor tomorrow and we’ll analyze what to do then. For now, it’s hard for me to focus on anything other than that. I neglected to post this when I wrote it a few days ago.
Somewhere along the line I developed an idea of survival which is based on a concept of the self. I don’t have a word for it and there must be a term in psychology or philosophy that addresses this but I don’t know them, so I’ll have to describe it as best I can.
Roughly, it is this: there is something in YOU, a pure core of selfness, that is uncorrupted by the outside world. Nothing can touch it. Things, people, events, can come close to it, but nothing can ever really, truly, touch that pure, absolute core of the self. It’s always there, underneath the dross and the shit and the grime of what other humans, even well-intentioned ones, dump on you.
This is all very mystical and silly-sounding, and I’m not explaining it brilliantly, but that’s how I feel. At my worst moments, this belief has pulled me through. I am there, I am me, I am enough. Or sometimes, it is there, it is me, it is enough. Let it be. That sounds crazy and dissociative but it isn’t. There is a blessed unity. A paradox I don’t care to analyze. Let it be.
But there were many years in my youth that I grew dangerously out of touch with this pure core. I went on many job interviews (as a job-hopper, a lot of interviews, oh God…) I can look back on them now and laugh, but at the time they were central to the desperate struggle for survival, and what interviewers put you through isn’t funny.
One of the trendy questions back in the 80s was, “What accomplishment are you proudest of?”
And I would think, “I’m here dancing for a job, I hate myself, I have no accomplishments.” I’m not sure how I answered at first. Maybe I said, with a sickly smile, “I’m the first generation in my family to graduate from college.” I probably did say that (cringe!) because that’s an appropriately middle-class thing to say, and isn’t that what you want to be on a job interview? A nice middle-class schmuck who won’t rock the boat?
At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I squeaked, “quitting smoking.”
It seemed so ridiculous. Quitting smoking is not an accomplishment. You should never have started smoking in the first place, idiot!
Those were my corrupted, too-in-the-world thought patterns. Scrambling for survival, going on interviews, obsessed with the presentation of self in a contrived situation where you almost always lose (and when you win, what do you get? A prize in which you’ll be chained to a routine you hate around people you won’t remember five minutes after they are out of your life), I had grown so alienated from my inner core that I couldn’t even name one accomplishment.
The more I began saying that, the more comfortable with the answer I became, but it was only an actor’s comfort with a line, not a heartfelt emotion. (I should say that one woman-interviewer responded to my answer in an authentically positive and humane way. I’m not sure I got the job, but I must note that. Most of my interlocutors were puzzled by my answer, because my quitting smoking didn’t add up to someone’s profits. Or whatever.)
The other day, many years after those awful interviews, it hit me:
Quitting smoking is an accomplishment. I am proud that I quit smoking.
It’s damned hard.1 I failed many times until I succeeded and Mr. Dylan, in this case, there is success and I savor it.
This occurred to me because (a) I’ve been thinking about this for the past several weeks and (b) as a response to Eliza Mondegreen’s observation that “wokeness” has proven to be yet another way women are encouraged to diminish themselves: “Speaking as a cis woman…”)
I guess I must get off on a tangent about whether my denigration of my achievement has anything to do with my being a woman. I dunno—lots of men denigrate themselves. Isn’t there an entire genre of male-schnook-comedy? Who profit off it handsomely, but that’s a different story. The fact that (some) men “turn pain into cash”2 doesn’t disprove that women as a class are taught to denigrate themselves by definition.
OK. I just don’t think that much can be done about this by political action. I have an idea as to how to counteract this, but it’s a can of worms that I just don’t want to go into now. Sorry.
Anyway—there’s a special place in societal hell where gatekeepers tell women to be modest, self-effacing, and not to be proud of their accomplishments.
My own worst gatekeeper was a woman, a female therapist who was the most brilliant gaslighter I ever met. It took me years to disentangle mySELF from her bullshit.
Even so, wokeness also requires that white men constantly put themselves down, so in this case it’s race intersecting with gender, which adds up to a double whammy.
“Get along, go along” is an awful way to live but it makes sense if it gives you the temporary rewards of advancement and some stroking. When “get along go along” is met with scorn, derision, contempt and professional death, I do not understand why anyone would do it. But that’s me. I never went far in the conventional working world.
As I’ve already said, I believe “Sisterhood” is another failed universalistic creed, along with Marxism, Liberal Internationalism, the Brotherhood of Man, the Invisible Hand, and monotheistic religions but, being a copy of the preceding great universalist creeds, it had some decent goals in its early stages. “Cisterhood” has no decent goals. It is a wholly destructive force. “Cisterhood” is Sisterhood’s evil, illegitimate spawn. Cisters are monsters who want to rape your pure, inner core and defile it.
We will reap the whirlwind for giving into this, there will be hell to pay, choose your apocalyptic cliché. A hard rain’s a-gonna fall. Maybe it’s falling now. Let it fall. The sooner we’re into this, the sooner we’ll get through it, but one thing’s for sure: there is no way out but through.
Here is my old essay about feminism: “Why Feminism Will Always Fail.”
If you want advice as to how to quit smoking come to me. I really can help you.
Shhh….. the quote is from Woody Allen, whose recent interview with Alec Baldwin disgusts me.
Superbly written, especially the first few paragraphs, the inalienable, inarguable sense of self passage spoke to me deeply. Wishing you a "refuah shlemah" (a full recovery) from whatever ails you