Transformative Language: Riding the Line Between Death and Creation (1/3)

Riding the Line Between Death and Creation

I can’t fake it. I get afraid. I get afraid they’re going to take it all away from me again – that I’m going to let them. I’m afraid of opening myself up for the loss. I’m human. I’m not perfect. And these are scary sentiments for me to admit, no matter how simplistic and obvious they may be. But it’s shut me down.

As I was driving to NY to see my friends on New Year’s Eve (after almost talking myself out of doing the same exact thing), I began fiddling through the radio stations and fell upon this one song:

“I remember years ago
Someone told me I should take
Caution when it comes to love
I did, I did
…

Tell them all I know now
Shout it from the roof tops
Write it on the sky line
All we had is gone now

Tell them I was happy
And my heart is broken
All my scars are open
Tell them what I hoped would be the
Impossible, impossible
Impossible, impossible

Falling out of love is hard
Falling for betrayal is worst
Broken trust and broken hearts
I know, I know”
- excerpts of Impossible by Shontelle

I had never heard this song before – probably because I usually don’t listen to the radio too much – but I couldn’t help but think it was the perfect song to summarize my 2010 experience. Not in the cliché romantic “I lost a great love sense,” but “I gave all the love I had, and the world around me warped it. I had such high beliefs, and the world crushed me. I was so great in all I wanted to give, and was shattered by the same strength of my own ignorance for what the world had in store for me.”

Most people who know me will identify me as one of the most passionate people they know. I use to love this, revel in it – it was who I was – if I was going to be invested in something, I was going to do it fully. Even in high school – a teacher wanted 6 poems in the portfolio? I DID TWELVE. You want a research paper? I’M GOING TO READ ALL BOOKS, RATHER THAN STUDIES. Ambition and passion are qualities that seem to occur in me naturally, but seem to backfire when I don’t know my own limits – when ambition and passion forgo self-care.

So, let me sum up 2010 in all its destructiveness (and out of all the best intentions it may have been orchestrated):

I started the year in the midst of transitioning: from the fall semester of my senior year to the spring one. My fall semester ended with me somehow miraculously getting all A’s and an incomplete, with me recovering from a semester of continuous nausea and migraines that lead to a severe weight drop, where I sat firmly at 103 pounds and could consume nothing other than smoothies and medicinal marijuana products. That’s right, so severe that I had gotten a medicinal marijuana license for it (and even though I’m in a different state now, I still keep it in my wallet, because no one believes me). I then spent my whole winter break divided between working 20 hours a week and working on my 50 page paper for the Independent Study I got an Incomplete in. I got an A on that too. I kept the year of 2010 going with taking 20 credits and working 13-18 hours a week (which is surely downsizing from 24 credits the prior semester). I left school so burnt out that I still don’t write and read as much as I used to. After graduating, all I did was go to work and then go home and watch netflix. I somehow still kept my GPA up, but my passion sure took a beating. I graduated college in three years, despite Fort Lewis being my third college, despite moving from NY to MA to NY to IL to CO, despite personal issues, and still did it with honors. I formed my own major. It would really stand as the definition of impressive if I didn’t hate it all so much. I hated all of undergrad. Even after I made my own major, I couldn’t get invested in my classes too thoroughly. And it was that last factor that was heartbreaking to me. That I was spending all this time and energy on things I was supposed to love – until learning became systemized, until passion became constrained to due dates, until what I felt was important had to be passed and proved in front of an administration who then capped what I could and couldn’t do with my studies based off what they had available and thought was okay. My own vision didn’t matter in my own major. At the end of college, there was nothing left of me: my love, my good intentions, my passion.

My personal relationships fell to shit – 2010 was one bipolar fit after another (literally), and in one existential crisis after the next, I realized I was surrounding myself with all the wrong people. And I lashed out at them for this. And they lashed right back at me. I was not even slightly compatible for the environment I was in.

My body fell apart – after recovering from chronic migraines and nausea, and severe weight loss, I would be hospitalized for severe insomnia. I’d bounce back from that and my migraines would come back and dissipate in waves.

My version of love became hard to get a hold of. I looked towards all the wrong sources. I became so confused – living under the assumption that life just had to get better, that I’d learn things and apply them and never make the same mistakes again, that I’d progress – you know, linearly. I figured I could approach new situations with clarity and some sense of calm neuroticism, being able to distinguish between “do” and “do not do,” and furthermore, “who will be a loving person,” and “who will be an abusive person.” Towards the end of 2009, I discovered a person who I thought was very much a loving person (and treated me the best of any guy I had dated) was very much an abusive person to someone else. This put me in a world of very self-loathing-confused grey for the majority of 2010. That was my new version of “love,” and it was being tossed down right back down the drain.

And no matter what happened, I frequently kept running on energy I didn’t have – I’d take on projects and volunteer for efforts I couldn’t put my all into. I kept trying to convince myself things would just go back to normal now that I was no longer in school. I began working a job with the conviction that it was something I wanted to do until I realized that my combination of neuroticism, passion, and ambition was going to kill me again – I was caring so much about everyone and everything else in my life other than basic needs of my own: such as doctor’s appointments and rest. Burnt out. I’ve lost track of how many older adults I’ve spoken with recently who assume I’m 26-27 just by the way I talk, and what I talk about, and how stressed I am.

"I remember years ago
Someone told me I should take
Caution when it comes to love
I did, I did
…

Tell them all I know now
Shout it from the roof tops
Write it on the sky line
All we had is gone now

In the summer of 2009, I was so hopeful. Hopeful for my new major, hopeful that I was getting emotionally better (since it seemed I was making better decisions with my romantic life), hopeful about my new apartment, about my senior year. I was ready to make a world of difference. Until the world collapsed upon me. And my feet were sticking out. And someone stole my goddamned ruby red slippers.

"Tell them I was happy
And my heart is broken
All my scars are open
Tell them what I hoped would be the
Impossible, impossible
Impossible, impossible

Falling out of love is hard
Falling for betrayal is worst
Broken trust and broken hearts
I know, I know”


The best way I can come to terms with all of this is recognizing and explaining to others that I feel like I’m riding the thin line between death and creation: both metaphorically and somewhat literally, with every moment caught in the anxious fibers of how to create the next moment. For, the more I do what the typical me would do/would’ve done, I almost feel like I’m setting myself up for eulogizing. I feel like I’m paying tribute to the past that died. Old Victoria did this and Old Victoria collapsed from doing it. It becomes a very dangerous “should.” “I feel like I should go to the art galleries, I feel like I should be writing a blog post on this, I feel like I should be emailing and networking and ahead of the game like I always am.” But New Victoria?

What does New Victoria want? New Victoria gets very scared, as aforementioned above: “I can’t fake it. I get afraid. I get afraid they’re going to take it all away from me again – that I’m going to let them. I’m afraid of opening myself up for the loss. I’m human. I’m not perfect. And these are scary sentiments for me to admit, no matter how simplistic and obvious they may be. But it’s shut me down.” New Victoria looks at Old Victoria and thinks, “You put me through a world full of shit.” New Victoria gets afraid of the amount of responsibility Old Victoria took on, and wonders how Old Victoria got so freakin responsible so young anyway.

New Victoria gets inundated with deep, philosophical, and political questions on formspring that Old Victoria would love to field, but New Victoria thinks “psshh, I just want to live my life, man. Don’t make me some sort of leader. Don’t follow my example – I might break you too, I might hurt you. I could give you the worst possible advice and neither of us would even know it! Why are you people asking me anyway? What is it that makes me so reliable and wise to you?”

My dilemma is that I still desperately hope for and want to believe in a world where words can transform us, where social deviance is valuable, where love and respect are vital components of how we treat each other and form our relationships, where disadvantaged and abused populations get the treatment and advocates they need that can support them. I still desperately want to believe in a world that believes, deep down, it’s valuable to give everyone the voice they need to have to live a life worth living. But then I couldn’t find it anymore, that belief – in 2010, it felt like I lost everything I believed in. And now, when I’m on the next playing field in life, about to head off to grad school and start off my professional career, I find myself running on the hope that I will somehow learn to reinvent myself so that I can integrate the passion I used to have with a renewed belief that I have not yet been able to retrieve. And since my old approach backfired, New Victoria isn’t even sure how to go about it.

Which isn’t to say new Victoria isn’t trying. New Victoria is slowly getting back on track, and is at least now able to solidly feel a life purpose. And reads a little bit everyday. And pushes herself to write entries like this. Entries that only begin a mission of self-exploration: Cut and differentiated for length and subject purposes, but all interwoven for a sense of commonality.

Continued on:
Transformative Language part 2
Transformative Language part 3