Skin
I had a blank page and a text swirling in my mind for months. Or maybe not a text, an idiom, spinning with daggers and hurting, hurting, hurting… ”know your place”.
The pain is abstract and constant. In her Pain Scale, Eula Biss names them, those pains that are abstract and hard to put into numbers:
” The pain of feeling, the pain of caring, the pain of doubting, the pain of parting, the pain of paying.
Overlooking the pain of longing,the pain of desire, the pain of sore muscles, which I find pleasurable . . .
The pain of learning, and the pain of reading.
The pain of trying.
The pain of living.
A minor pain or a major pain?”
18 years ago, I almost died. It was August 6, I was watching the 60th commemoration of Hiroshima, and I was struggling to breathe, waiting for an ambulance to come. My skin was constricting, suddenly too small. An appropriate metaphor for knowing my place, acting my age, acting my wage, acting my station. Don’t be bigger than your skin. Know your place.
20 years ago, I heard the curse for the first time. “That kind of a person would not even look at someone like you.” He did. And then, years later, he didn’t anymore. I managed to break the curse and soar beyond my skin temporarily. `Hubris.
15 years ago, I got out of a crashed car, laughing. That was “my” accident. I survived it. I can dream again. Stepping out from the driver’s seat, it felt like I could yet again unfurl my wings and fly.
7 years ago, I chased a dream. It was not my dream. “You should have a kid.” That chase for a “place”, fitting in with the world and their expectations of me, made me lose myself. I never really got myself back. Not fully. There is a story behind it. Lately, I started telling it with a humorous spin: “How I became a sperm donor”. Don’t tell me I can’t be that. I have the donation document 😊 I can laugh at it now. At that place that I coveted and that wasn’t mine. Like a skin that did not fit me.
Everytime the wind supported my wings and brought me higher, the curse came back. This is not your place. You are <check all that apply> (from the poor periphery of a capital city / lower middle class / too fat / too old / too ambitious / …). You should not dream of being or becoming more. That is hubris, and hubris is punished, isn’t it?
Out of place.
Not really knowing how to keep my mouth shut on issues that annoy me.
Not really trying to be meek and quiet and nice.
Building wings for others, hoping that they would let me have mine. They don’t.
I have my wing supporters, the few that are cleaning the tar and giving me a push to try again and again to soar out of skin. But the pain of bursting from outside my skin, that place that I should learn to accept, is becoming a 10 of the pain scale. That level in which “devastation occurs”, as Biss calls it.
Out of place looking in at a world of privilege. The privilege of not having your wings clipped every single time.
The worse pain imaginable for me: impotence. The inability to act, because the die is cast, the roles are given, and my part, whether I like it or not, is such. I cannot change it. There is a poem by Szymborska about responsibility. But for me, it was always about knowing my place. My place as an understudy to privileged imposters who have the leading role because of their families, their money, their birth right. My place as an understudy to immoral cheaters. My place as an understudy without a right to dream to become the lead.
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
Mary Oliver’s poem keeps the sky open for imagination. But that is immeasurably cruel. It hurts to look at flying wild geese from a ditch where you are yet again confined. Wingless. Hurt. Out of place while in “my place”. With a skin that is simply too tight.