I have to say that this post is inspired by two other bloggers: Dana for the subject and by her poetic telling of it, and Mindy for her honesty.
I don't know how often in my life I've been truly honest. I mean truly honest...with my myself and others. It seems as if I was always getting myself into situations that I had to hide from, or felt I had to, or situations that I assumed other people in my life wouldn't approve of. As I ran around in early high school not caring what people thought of purple fishnets, I guess, looking back, I cared deeply what they thought about ME. I had all of these ideas... I had these dreams. Some of them ended up materializing in the future and some did not. For example, I knew for so many years that my best friend Martin and I were going to move to New York and he was going to dance and I was goin to act. Or stage manage. Or write. Or everything. Life is wide, wide open when you are young. I miss that. I miss the possibility of the impossible. I was going to leave Indiana, and never ever look back. I didn't need anyone there and they didn't need me. Maybe this seems sad. But in a way it was refreshing. I could go anywhere. What did happen was that I did move to a big city, although it wasn't New York. I moved with another good friend who I knew through theatre, but neither of us aspired to be actors or dancers or anything theatrical up here. In fact, I didn't really know what I aspired to be. And while I did leave Indiana and at this point don't know that I'll live there again, I still have ties there. They are stronger, even, then when I lived there. David's family keeps a part of me there. I love them. I, as Hallmark-y as this sounds, have his two sisters who are now my sisters, my two brother-in-laws, and his parents. They are a reason to be there. I didn't know that was going to happen. I didn't know that I would have a life partner and that we would share a mortgage. I didn't know. I wasn't expecting to have such a strained relationship with my mother, or with Martin. I guess I was disappointed by them. I didn't expect to be giving my life over to the career and field I am going into. When I peered into my future in middle and high scool, I didn't see myself weeping alone in my office after giving my first positive result as an HIV test counselor. I didn't see myself staying in Chicago for my family here, Jay and Dwayne. I didn't think I'd be pursuing such an archaic major, Social Justice, for Christ's sake, and I surely never thought I'd do something as normal as living with a man and having a mortgage and entertaining the idea of getting married.
When I told an ex-boyfriend that I wasn't going to major in theatre, he said I was "selling out." As if everyone who does not have a creative career is somehow a part of the system, The Man, and therefore not valid. Tell me how I can sell out by entering a career where I will work for the rights of others and make hardly any money. I knew that when he said it years ago... but at that point in my life, I let him say it. I let males tell me a lot of things then. I let men do a lot of things then. I went along, an unwilling but non-protesting victim. Some of you know about this awful time in my life, and some of you only knew the happy, passionate facade I used, as I hid by keeping myself busy doing theatre. I hid in my characteer's lives, painstakingly creating their lives so I did not have to face my own. I just wonder what if I had been consious all those years, what choices I would have made.
And here I am, now, a self-proclaimed feminist, I've worked with rape victims being tested for HIV, and there is a part of me that wants to cry with them, maybe harder than them, because unlike them, I am not still in shock. I want to tell them that it's alright and one day they may eve see it as an asset. Hell, I want to shout to them, it may make you change the world. But I don't. Because I know I wouldn't have understood it then and my last thoughts were about my future, because I didn't see my future. I was too busy hiding from the present.
What is the point of this post? I don't know. I've just been thinking about my life a lot lately, and how so many people don't really know me. Even those who think they do, who I consider my very best friends. And it gets heavy, this knowledge, this past, and I thought I'd let some of it, this fraction of it, go. Even if no one reads it, it is here and not here, with me. That was the point, I suppose.