To become finite

I think I'm generally starting to get sick of typing with my computer at my side. But that's where the reception is. Although when I blog I don't need reception... (until I post)

I'm feeling pretty down, mainly because I just watched a show on the universe that ended with the theory of the eventual destruction of everything as we currently know it... What doesn't seem to be enough to keep me feeling fine is the fact that these things will not happen in my life time or even anywhere remotely near it. What gets me is the ultimate implication that what I know is finite. Not eternal. I want what I know to be eternal... Even the physical world, it's hard for me to imagine a spiritual realm that isn't "bound" to the physical. I can't help but think of them both as coexisting, that in some sense the spiritual does occupy the physical. Maybe it doesn't but that is how it seems in me. All these feelings, in their present strength will pass, and I won't be upset about it for very long. But the right now part isn't so great.

I've been reading a book titled Starving Daughters Perfect Girls with a great subtitle, something like the new (something) of hating our bodies. Normalcy? bloody hell I'll go grab the book. I was close, the frightening new normalcy of hating your body. The title is in the opposite order of what I wrote. Important because the one leads to the other. It caught my attention when I was shelving at the library, hard title to pass up, especially when the title eerily reflects back to me a short, sweet, concise appraisal of my own life. (I still do have more of a tendency to starve than I would like.) But it is kind of vindicating in a lot of ways too. One is realizing that in a big sense my generation and those immediately around me are driven by the circumstances of our lives to be this way and it's incredibly wrong and I'm incredibly angry. Mostly at men at the moment. Because starting from the earliest days those voices around me influenced how I saw myself and my value it was boys and men who were speaking. Who were piece by piece pulling me apart and trying to reconstruct me as it suited their desires, without shame. I want to scream for all the damage I let them do, for the intense voice of self hate that I so early on adopted and that has damaged me so horrifically over my short life. I want to scream because I also know I'm not free yet, so much closer, but still those voices have power over me and my self-image, my value. In a sense I feel like a sell out, and like I've been a sell out since I was quite a young girl. I have a hard time believing I'll ever be truly free, that I will always on some level believe that my value comes from how beautiful and desirable I am. And that it's my fault if I don't do the work to be that perfect. There is a quote from the author Anna Quindlen that I'm going to include in this blog (To immortalize for myself):

"Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm over looking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. YOu will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all you life and have managed to met all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be."

What is so significant to me about that quote is that I want all the young men out there who have written most of the girls and women they have known off as deranged, crazy, prudish, what ever cruel and judgemental verdict that have not hesitated to brand her with to read those words and have some window in to the torture that this world unflinchingly applies to women. I want all those boys and men who have never had the maddening expectations of being perfect held over them constantly, relentlessly, with out pity, or love to wake up and feel like the wretches that most of them have been in their relationships. I apologize right of the bat to the few men that do occasionally subject themselves to my blog, these words in no way reflect you. It sounds like a harsh generalization because it is difficult to make such statements and carefully exclude the people that don't apply. I have known many men who are not at all like this. But I think that they have not enjoyed the luxury of being regarded as perfect without trying or earning it. They have suffered too. In my early years I did not enjoy the benefits of knowing such men. That might have salvaged a good deal of my self-esteem if I had.

The first time I was truly aware of a deep void in my core was at the age of seventeen. It was a god awful year and it led to many subsequent years of quiet despair. I don't think it's a black hole anymore, I've gained a lot of me to fill that massive, seemingly bottomless void. There is still a twinge of empty. But it's so mild, like an occasional prick. An old injury that reminds you there is still a sensitive scar, even if it has healed. The body never fully recovers, the nerves are forever gone where the scar is. But for the most part we've gotten used to it's presence, like a feature in our identity.

I feel better. Did some emotional purging.