Living with a family of unhappy people.
Thoughts about a movie about a recent college graduate moving back home from somebody who’s been there—twice.
I’m going to blog here now.
Los Angeles is full of the most interesting, hard-working unemployed people anywhere. I don’t understand how they are so unfazed by constant uncertainty over jobs and their career paths. It’s intimidating to see just how well they deal with it, refusing to leave Los Angeles despite struggling for years, and yet I lose my mind and turn into this listless drag after two weeks of waiting to start an internship that I should at least be secure in knowing I have. Instead, it’s the unanswered emails I let wear at me, and the botched interviews, and other chaff.
But that’s just because I miss a certain feeling of safety that I rightly turned my back on in order to be here in the first place. My refusal to settle for anything less than I value myself at has pointed me towards a business where it’s unwise to get too comfortable or “settled” with one’s present employment. I don’t feel prepared, however, to fight upstream for years and years. I get discouraged far too easily, and when I do I become too susceptible to the lure of easy comforts that ultimately falter and leave me even further from where I really want to be.
I think it will prove impossible for me to rely on my career as a grounding mechanism in my life, and I think it’s unfair for me to try to hold it to that task. But I can’t say for sure that I know how to gain a foothold and maintain my confidence in such a dicey environment, and I wonder if continuing to fight the cynical urge to say “fuck it” will lead to promising growth or just go to prove that it wasn’t worth it to begin with.
Psychology was my least favorite subject in high school. I wasn’t bad at it – in fact I aced every test that I took, but ultimately failed the course because I hadn’t kept a “Dream Journal” that amounted to something like 35% of my final grade. Rather than scramble to compile the journal on the night before it was due (as many students opted to do), I chose to spare myself the dreadful task of colossal eleventh-hour bullshitting simply to make the grade, which in my eyes was the greatest psychological lesson of all and why that “F” never haunted me. Because, seriously, a dream journal?
I suppose I never started on the journal because the very idea of it made me boil over with cynicism. Psychology seemed so easy and second-nature to me as a subject to be understood, and yet the last thing on Earth I wanted to do was use it as a tool to understand, least of all if I was the guinea pig.
I’m having the same feeling creep over me as I attempt for the second time to read Harville Hendrix’ book about relationships, Keeping the Love You Find (I can barely type the title without feeling a vague sense of disenchantment and anger). The book is torture. Chapter One, entitled “What’s wrong with being single?” and containing a brief testimonial from a thirty-year-old New York ad-copy writer who the author identifies as having “the ideal single life” (living in a high-rise on the Upper East Side, beginning to lose interest in sexual conquests and “just having someone to go out with on a Saturday night,” etc.), is torture. I can’t help but bristle with more cynicism as I read, feeling as though I might as well be reading a pamphlet about the lifestyle of aliens from another galaxy and nothing that applies to my own existence — swindling myself.
But a particular sentence in Chapter Two, contained in a section titled “Enter the Unconscious”, arrives with a merciful knockout blow: “Here was the new individual, reveling in his freedom from the collective and in his view of himself as, above all, rational and autonomous, confronted by the notion that a large part of his hard-won free will was illusory.”
Piqued at the mention of Freud – that fucking “F” – I put the book down and wonder, what was I dreaming about anyway, when I was so reticent to write about my dreams to try to understand myself? I can only remember incoherent, garbled nonsense. I can only remember bullshit. It’s only been in the last few weeks that it’s felt like my dreams have achieved something akin to coherency and clarity. It’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve realized how much more from life I owe myself.
My better judgment finally winning out, I bite down hard on my lip, pick up the book and keep reading, pushing every pang of self-doubt aside and hoping the pain isn’t for nothing.
When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was home from school in Texas and she had just moved to Colorado. She told me the news over the phone, trying to maintain the stoic reserve so typical of my immediate family when having to deal with crisis but finally breaking down in tears just before saying goodbye. I am only now beginning to realize that it wasn’t the physical hundreds of miles between us that got to her. How do you comfort the people who love you most when the family rules have always necessitated putting on a brave front in the face of any personal plight or tragedy? I had my own bottled up frustrations that had never been aired, just like every other member of the family, and so when a tragedy struck that could not be emotionally repressed, the afflicted no doubt felt pangs of guilt in simply asking for what was owed to them—support and the opportunity to honestly communicate their feelings. An environment that demanded exhibiting unhealthy amounts of emotional restraint had made open and honest communication not only taboo, but also potentially dangerous to the self.
But I didn’t think about any of this at the time. I remember trying to think of something I could do for my mom and feeling cold and heartless when I drew a blank. In retrospect, though, I had no example from which to draw on from my own experiences with tribulation. The worst part was that even if there hadn’t been hundreds of miles between my mom and me, I likely would have felt the same way. And even if I could have mustered the emotional support my mom surely needed, and which many in my family no doubt still need but are afraid to ask for, what good would it have done if it forced me to put my own needs on hold for that much longer? What could that have possibly bred but further feelings of detachment or even anger? Such was the hole we had all dug ourselves.
I have always thought of myself as a caring and loving person but never thought to direct that care towards myself before attempting to send it outward. Now I see the necessity of it. I simply cannot stand being again and again in situations like the time I learned my mom had cancer and having a vague feeling of wanting to help but not finding it in myself to provide assistance or care of any real substance. Like my mom, I instinctually downplay my emotions on the assumption that there is no real comfort to be had but that which we destructively ransack ourselves for, if only to put on a brave front before inevitably breaking down. We all owe each other more, though we owe it to ourselves first.
My dad and I are different. He is thick-skinned and practical-minded, and I’m emotional and sensitive. I have always been able to count on him to get me out of any practical jam I manage to get myself into—usually it relates to money and my inability to make any. Because my dad is so down-to-earth, I have been allowed to keep my head in the clouds for my entire life. But instead of appreciating him for who he is, I would come close to resenting him when he couldn’t be there for me in times of emotional crisis. Growing up, he could never understand my moods, or why I didn’t have more friends, or why I didn’t like summer camp, and we would clash often because of it. I didn’t really come to appreciate him for who he is until last Christmas Eve, as we were driving home to Houston after visiting my grandmother in California.
The roads in North Texas were iced over, and the wind had been whipping the snow across the plains all day, occasionally reducing visibility to practically nothing. My dad and I had hoped to make it home to Houston by that night, but the weather and road conditions were making that seem increasingly unlikely. All the snow and ice was a complete oddity for Texas; it shouldn’t have been surprising to see so many cars stuck in the ditch by the side of the road.
At about 3 PM, my dad and I came to a stop in traffic about 15 miles north of Wichita Falls. There had been accidents and stoppages all day, so at first we assumed things would get moving after maybe a few minutes, or an hour at most. About two or three hours later, we learned that an 18-wheeler had jackknifed on the ice, blocking both lanes of traffic. As it became dark, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we could be stranded on the road all night, though we hoped it wouldn’t come to that. By the time the clock struck midnight and Christmas Eve became Christmas, we were stuck in a full-on nightmare—trapped in the car in an 18 degree freeze in the middle of nowhere, praying that a quarter-tank of gas and some Ritz crackers would be enough to sustain us for however long we were gonna be out there (mostly I was doing the praying; my dad did a lot of howling expletives), pissing in the privacy afforded by the space between us and the car in front of us, petting the dog in the back to keep our sanity even though she was as miserable as we were, and not sleeping, because every now and then the row of cars would creep forward only to stop again after maybe 20 or 30 feet. Stop and start. In the ice, in the dark. For 16 hours.
If it had just been me in that situation, I would have no doubt given up in the first hour. My dad, who had already done most of the driving since we set out at 6 AM that morning, somehow managed to stay awake all night without ever once pulling the car to the side of the road and calling it a night like literally hundreds of motorists ended up doing. The initial wreck cleared, but the problem became the miles and miles of backed up cars that ended up clogging the highway. There didn’t appear to be any way through.
At some point during the whole ordeal, maybe in hour eight or nine, I remember sitting in the passenger’s seat thinking, there’s no way this is ever going to end, there’s no way we’re ever getting out of this. But we did, and I had my dad and his superhuman practical skills to thank. Never once did he ever come close to losing control over the situation, and never once did he think of calling it quits for the night, even to the point where common sense might have seemed to necessitate it. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated my dad as much as the moment we dragged into Wichita Falls at 7 AM Christmas morning and proceeded to crash in some moldy motel room. Nobody but my dad, as far as I was concerned, could have gotten us there any sooner, and no less worse for wear.
I think about this now as I go through my own version of this situation. My dad and I are different, but I hope we’re the same in the ways that count.
ROSE
Huh
