Third Person

I'm exhausted. I really am. I'm going to bed at 8:00 when I can swing it, and sleeping till an extravagant 8 a.m. whenever possible. Unfortunately, those two times never coincide to allow me a full 12 hours of sleep, a magic number I'm convinced will heal me.

I think the problem is that I'm turning my head on like high beams during class and homework, and then what I've been doing at my job is utterly numbing and repetitive. Thankfully, that part ended yesterday, so hopefully I'll have some spare wattage of personality to wring into my writing and my life in general.

Which brings me to the problem: I'm trying to write about Saudi Arabia, specifically my time there as an angsty teen, and I'm having trouble doing it. The age-old Method acting theory that you must first try to access how you felt at the time in order to express it now? Totally not working. I can remember how I felt, or how I think I felt, and the problem is that stunned disorientation only works for a couple of pages. Plus I get stuck in the sadness of what eventually happened, how I got kicked out of boarding school and went into a deep depression and cut off almost all ties with the people I knew at that time in my life.

I'm learning that what's needed is my eye on these things from the vantage point of Now, but I've let the whole story cauterize itself off into this separate memory-tumor inside me. For many years, I believed it was a bad omen, the whole thing, the whole story, and that if I allowed myself to organically process it, to connect back to some of those people and those memories, it would infect all the rest of my life. It's hard not to see it that way because so much of the story coincides with adolescence, which is painful period most of us would like to separate ourselves from anyway. I felt like I had a grip on who I was before we moved there, and then for this period of two or three years I completely lost my hold on it and was stuck being this girl I didn't recognize. And then I slowly got me back as I finished high school and went into college. In many ways, I feel closer now to my 12-year-old self than I do to my 16-year-old self. They're wildly different people.

So this is what I'm thinking now-- I may write the story third person about my 16-year-old self and see if I can't muster some emotion for her beyond sadness and pity, because the way I write it now everything reads like a bad emo song.

As an exercise, things I liked about 16-year-old me:

1) She learned her way around airports really quickly and figured out that "douche" meant "shower" in the Amsterdam airport. She loved airports. They had more signage than any other place.

2) She was blissfully unaware of her own ass and of the width of her hips.

3) She read "Slaughterhouse Five" and quoted it very briefly and simply-- "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt"-- in her high school yearbook in the place reserved for lists of stupid inside jokes.

4) She had a great friend that she walked to school with every day. These walks started out from convenience, I guess-- he went the same way-- but eventually they waited for each other and often this was the only time in the day when she said what she really meant.

5) She loved the noon prayer call. She would hear it walking to and from lunch break at school with this friend, and it always struck her as beautiful. I googled it a few years ago and when I heard it, it brought tears to my eyes.

6) She adjusted to the heat. She learned a way of breathing it in with her body and radiating it back. She would go rollerblading for miles in the heat of the day, slicing through the wall of it like a wire through clay.

7) She had a sober way of sitting and thinking about things, turning them over and over in her mind. This later developed into something that was a source of joy and peace, but initially it was almost grimly meditative and slow. The only thing I can compare it to is how Zen Buddhists talk about sitting zazen, and how awkward and difficult it is at first to be still for 15 minutes at a time.

8) She knew then that she was a good artist. It was one of her few certainties. She was always confident with her hands.

9) She learned to function without corrective lenses. This was a dumb compromise-- her gas permeable contact lenses were always getting eyelashes and grains of sand in them and she got tired of her face suddenly torquing up like Popeye's when her eyes went all stabby painful. She had glasses, but they magically changed her back into her 8th grade dork self, so she never bothered to get the prescription updated. Hence, she developed the remarkable ability to recognize people by their walks, and thus to predict with a certain degree of accuracy which fuzzy colored blobs she should wave at. (This skill also helped her become a great auditory note taker later on.)

10) I go back and forth on whether or not I liked this last thing about her, so that's why it's last. She developed the habit of keeping her mouth shut. Initially she hoped this would allow her to escape detection in social situations, but unfortunately all it did was lend her an air of mystery and encourage people around her to project ideas onto her even more vigorously. Keeping her mouth shut taught her, though, the extent to which someone will reveal what it is they want and what it is they fear if they are presented with enough silences. The problem, of course, is taking this mouth shutting thing too far-- not speaking up when the occasion cries out for it, not asking for help. Not telling the truth mostly, but not because she meant to lie, just because she was so far removed from telling, and from connecting to someone else through the telling, that she didn't know how to start.

My mom, bless her, is sending a giant box of crap 16-year-old me saved, a kind of time capsule, perhaps, for occasions just like this-- when I care about telling and getting it right, when I finally feel like giving her a voice.