Newton’s Third Law
Sometimes you know something intellectually. Cause and effect. I am this way because of that. The reason I feel this way is because of that other thing.
But sometimes knowing something on an intellectual level isn’t the same thing as knowing it.
I had a breakthrough during the last five minutes of therapy last night. (Why do these things always happen in the last five minutes?) It left me enraged. Walking to the subway afterwards, I wanted to scream and kick something. But there were people around. So instead I punched my messenger bag, hoping that nobody thought I was crazy.
We were discussing why I’m so sensitive to the passage of time. I always have been. Time’s constantly slipping away. Nearly 31 years old now, and 30 has gone by like *that*. I’m constantly trying to slow it down, recapture it, so I can… do what? Catch up, perhaps. And yet no matter how much I try to catch up, I never feel like I am. But the target isn’t moving further and further away from me; the problem is, I’m not even looking at the right target.
“I just wish I could… slow it down, go back,” I said.
“What time do you want to go back to?”
“Childhood,” I said instantly.
Well, duh. I’ve been in therapy on and off since I was 17. I long ago figured out these things, and understood my regrets and how things could have gone differently. I’ve known it forever.
But last night I said, “Childhood,” and then a stream of sentences flew out of me. I was saying things I already knew and had discussed before. But suddenly I didn’t just know these things. I felt them.
I was fucking angry as hell.
Then the session ended, and I told her it had been a great session, and I walked out onto the street and wanted to yell and kick things. I hoped that this white-hot feeling would last, that I could hold it in my hands and gaze at its facets before it diffused into the rainy streets and dark sky and anonymous people around me and I forgot what it felt like.
I wanted to say a big fuck you.
Fuck you to my childhood. Fuck you to all the pressure. Fuck you to my teachers, especially the one who told me she was surprised that I of all people loved to watch TV. Fuck me for not letting myself feel it was 100 percent okay to have fun. Fuck you to my dad for making me scared all the time. Fuck you to my parents for never being satisfied. Fuck me for making myself compete with M.C. and his competitive mom who kept pressing my mom to tell her my SAT scores. Fuck you to my parents for wanting me to take the test again because my verbals could have been higher. Fuck me for spending so many years afraid of being gay. Fuck me for being terrified of sex until I was 24.
And on. There’s more. But yeah.
But — there’s nobody to blame. That’s the most frustrating thing about it. Nobody was being evil. Everyone had the best of intentions. My parents and I have had many long talks, and they’ve realized what they did wrong and I’ve realized what they did right.
But it’s all still out there. In me. I spend so much time rebelling against who I used to be and then feeling bad about rebelling. I’m trying to be the rule-maker and the rule-breaker at the same time. I bounce like a ping-pong ball. I’m buffeted by outside forces instead of listening to my core. Do I even have a core?
How many years of catching up do I have to do before I get those years back? But they will never come back, ever. I won’t get a do-over. And those years flowed into later years, which flow into now. I can’t win by catching up. I lose before I start.
The next step is to figure out how to sort all this shit out. There’s so much action/reaction going on inside me that’s been distracting me from what’s real.
So next I have to learn to be okay with being me.
Not rebelling or obeying, but being.
