I have a bad habit of starting creative projects and not finishing them. I've actually penned two full novel-length books but grown dissatisfied with them and never fixed them up. There's always sketches I never finish. Things like that.
When I was ten I actually did "Mango Manga", not published anywhere, just a comic for me. It was in manga style, of course. It was horrible and cheesy, but I did 50 pages of it (which, cramming lots of panels onto one sheet of printer paper, was quite a lot of Mango's adventures).
Even before that I used to do "Buggy Town", about a town of bugs. There was Anty and his sister Salant, and Butterfly and his son Butterball, and the bees who worked at the honey factory, and a caterpillar, and Spider who frequently tried to eat the insect children of the town and his wife Mrs. Spider who kept a broom mounted above the mantel, with which she used to beat him whenever he tried to eat the townsfolk. There was also a random mouse living there too, who came from out in the fields/swamp, where other mice and rats lived in their own separate society. This was all pre-Pixar mind you; no A Bug's Life influences there.
I tried my hand at another crappy, cheesy manga called Ashida which I gave up on after a few pages. I think I tried some others that I never did anything with.
I started the Doodlies and ran it nearly to 300 pages, more on it later. From the Doodlies spunoff Tivik, a dark and serious comic with a plot and pre-written scenes mostly consisting of confusing dialogue. I ended Tivik without warning when I just got tired of it and realized that none of what I had written before made enough sense to try to fix up by adding more to it.
The Doodlies almost completely ended unceremoniously in 2007/2008 due to my depression brought on by a lot of bad things happening all at once. What hit me hardest was my cat Zoe's death. She was a comic relief cast member of the comic, who was one of the talking animals in the cast. She was very sweet and her death was very violent and very unfair. No one else who's appeared in the comic has died. Granted, we are humans and some characters are entirely fictional, but it's...too jarring. What's worse is that I had two plotlines planned to happen in the Doodlies: one about my romance with Ian, and one about Zoe and MoonUnit suing a coffee company for not serving talking animals, which was mentioned as a throwaway joke when someone else got turned into a critter and tried to buy coffee. Then Ian was an asshole and I broke up with him, and Zoe was killed by a pack of dogs.
All of a sudden there was a horrible and ironic and mean void in my plans for the comic.
I had actually posted one comic about Ian and I promptly deleted it. He didn't matter to me enough to show that, and it was too awful to keep posted when it meant nothing anymore. Only Austin, of all the people I've dated, has had the honor of both appearing and remaining. Even though I did kill him off in the comic...but I guess in the back of my head he just respawned someplace as always, like the running gag always had him do; I just never illustrated this. Maybe I overreacted to him breaking up with me. It was my first love and the first time I'd had to lose love. It made me weird.
In any case...after Zoe died I barely updated. I officially declared the comic cancelled for a long time. Then I uploaded a handful of pages...but none of them were me. None of them were anyone. I stopped making comics about real people or even myself; just stick figures, fictional caricatures, non-people...
Maybe I'll try to carry it on, but it won't ever have the same tone anymore. The Doodlies were something I started when I was 12; most of them capture the innocence and bounciness and sociality I had in those years.
I'm not inspired to continue it on any kind of a serious schedule, and I don't bother trying to think of plots for it. I'm not motivated to work on it anymore. I'm sorry.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Music
Music has always been a part of my life. Since before I can remember, my mom would sing to me, and when I hear the songs again they evoke a little spark of memory that I can't ever quite place, but is comforting nonetheless.
My first memories revolve around my Papa and his piano. I don't think I enjoyed anything quite like sitting and listening to him play. Though I am told I was mischievous and would switch out his sheet music in the middle of a song; I don't think I meant it to be insulting, I think I was trying to challenge him to keep up. I can only speculate on something I don't even remember doing, though.
Fur Elise and Turkish Rondo were the first classical piano songs I really became acquainted with because his piano was electronic and had a setting where you could press a button and a song would play. I always liked the rondo better; I can't say why, I just do. They're both pretty repetitive now that I think about it.
My dad has a huge and still-growing music collection, and from a very young age I was exposed to Bobby Horton, Bob Marley, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, The Who, R.E.M., Cream, The Guess Who, Yes, Sinnead O'Connor, Sarah Brightman, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones...the list goes on. I was always more comfortable as a child listening to the oldies station (at the time it was Nine-tee se-ven oh one, KIS'N FM~) and my pop music familiarity extended only to the latest Britney Spears hit. Which, I admit, I still have on CD somewhere. Hey, they're catchy and "Lucky" is actually kind of moving; why throw away something someone has put effort into creating?
I've mentioned before that, during Civil War reenactments, everyone would take out their instruments and play and sing and have dances late into the night. Some of my best memories are those nights.
When I was about 11 or so, my dad spontaneously purchased an electric bass guitar. I thought it was hasty, but I didn't know he was already skilled in music. Not only was my Papa a pianist and my great-uncle Don a harmonica player (and my great-aunt Anne a pianist, banjoist, and fiddler), but my dad is a skilled guitarist and bassist as well. (There are more musicians in my family, but those are the ones I've met. Also my maternal half-brother plays piano and guitar as well.)
So, suddenly I became used to the sound of live music. Just not him practicing in the house (and now I can identify many classic rock songs by their bassline alone!), but also bands he joined coming to practice with him, or us going to their houses to listen to them play. All the musicians' families and friends would gather, and sometimes small acoustic instruments were handed off to the wives and children to play along. His first real band was the Rockhounds (originally Mojo Aman, named after a misheard lyric "Jojo was a man"), primarily a classic rock cover band. After that it was Sacred Fire, a Santana tribute band. After that, it was Irony, a blues and rock band that did all-original songs. They were all very skilled, and we have CDs from all of them.
At this time my mom became a booking agent for all the local bands in Oregon (though some of my dad's bands were after we moved to California; I speak of before the move). She coordinated with many venues and bands and set up concerts and, after 9/11, a massive five-location rotating-bands concert fundraiser. She was so driven to do this that she managed to pull it off in less than a few weeks' preparation.
I got used to going to places to listen to live music, of all kinds. Mostly rock, blues and jazz, and some reggae and big band swing as well. I got to collecting CDs and autographs, hoping each person would become famous. We knew pretty much every band in Oregon and some of Washington as well.
When I was 16 I got a violin; a bit later I got a better one' I'm about moderate at it. We still have Papa's piano, and I've learned it to an extent. I've never performed publicly except for one recital (and in church choirs, vocally only). I've downloaded a program called Anvil Studio with which to compose music, albeit all in midi form. I don't do it with any intention of making money at it. I simply enjoy music; I enjoy the capability to express myself in sound.
There isn't a point to this post other than to talk about something that makes me happy. As relieving as it is sometimes to get all my unhappy burdens off my chest, there just isn't enough joy being spoken about in this blog.
My first memories revolve around my Papa and his piano. I don't think I enjoyed anything quite like sitting and listening to him play. Though I am told I was mischievous and would switch out his sheet music in the middle of a song; I don't think I meant it to be insulting, I think I was trying to challenge him to keep up. I can only speculate on something I don't even remember doing, though.
Fur Elise and Turkish Rondo were the first classical piano songs I really became acquainted with because his piano was electronic and had a setting where you could press a button and a song would play. I always liked the rondo better; I can't say why, I just do. They're both pretty repetitive now that I think about it.
My dad has a huge and still-growing music collection, and from a very young age I was exposed to Bobby Horton, Bob Marley, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, The Who, R.E.M., Cream, The Guess Who, Yes, Sinnead O'Connor, Sarah Brightman, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones...the list goes on. I was always more comfortable as a child listening to the oldies station (at the time it was Nine-tee se-ven oh one, KIS'N FM~) and my pop music familiarity extended only to the latest Britney Spears hit. Which, I admit, I still have on CD somewhere. Hey, they're catchy and "Lucky" is actually kind of moving; why throw away something someone has put effort into creating?
I've mentioned before that, during Civil War reenactments, everyone would take out their instruments and play and sing and have dances late into the night. Some of my best memories are those nights.
When I was about 11 or so, my dad spontaneously purchased an electric bass guitar. I thought it was hasty, but I didn't know he was already skilled in music. Not only was my Papa a pianist and my great-uncle Don a harmonica player (and my great-aunt Anne a pianist, banjoist, and fiddler), but my dad is a skilled guitarist and bassist as well. (There are more musicians in my family, but those are the ones I've met. Also my maternal half-brother plays piano and guitar as well.)
So, suddenly I became used to the sound of live music. Just not him practicing in the house (and now I can identify many classic rock songs by their bassline alone!), but also bands he joined coming to practice with him, or us going to their houses to listen to them play. All the musicians' families and friends would gather, and sometimes small acoustic instruments were handed off to the wives and children to play along. His first real band was the Rockhounds (originally Mojo Aman, named after a misheard lyric "Jojo was a man"), primarily a classic rock cover band. After that it was Sacred Fire, a Santana tribute band. After that, it was Irony, a blues and rock band that did all-original songs. They were all very skilled, and we have CDs from all of them.
At this time my mom became a booking agent for all the local bands in Oregon (though some of my dad's bands were after we moved to California; I speak of before the move). She coordinated with many venues and bands and set up concerts and, after 9/11, a massive five-location rotating-bands concert fundraiser. She was so driven to do this that she managed to pull it off in less than a few weeks' preparation.
I got used to going to places to listen to live music, of all kinds. Mostly rock, blues and jazz, and some reggae and big band swing as well. I got to collecting CDs and autographs, hoping each person would become famous. We knew pretty much every band in Oregon and some of Washington as well.
When I was 16 I got a violin; a bit later I got a better one' I'm about moderate at it. We still have Papa's piano, and I've learned it to an extent. I've never performed publicly except for one recital (and in church choirs, vocally only). I've downloaded a program called Anvil Studio with which to compose music, albeit all in midi form. I don't do it with any intention of making money at it. I simply enjoy music; I enjoy the capability to express myself in sound.
There isn't a point to this post other than to talk about something that makes me happy. As relieving as it is sometimes to get all my unhappy burdens off my chest, there just isn't enough joy being spoken about in this blog.
Old self
I think at one point every person grows to where when they refer to "my old self" it could be many different people whose only consistency with one another may be name...if that much.
Sometimes I say my old self meaning when I was a very young child. I was both hectic to deal with yet at the same time increasingly quiet and eager to please.
Sometimes it's when I was a teenager, which depending on year or even month could describe an old self of mine where I might have been a social butterfly, friendly and flirtatious, or an embittered and self-destructive hermit.
Sometimes I mean before I was five, and sometimes I mean before I was eight, or twelve -- all ages which held tremendous milestones for me, not all of them good ones, yet not all of them bad ones either.
Sometimes I mean a week ago when I had a flu, or two weeks before that when I was on holiday. A person never has one old self; they have many.
Of more concern is how many new selves are we going to become, and how proud or ashamed of them will we be, considering how proud or ashamed we are of who we used to be before?
Sometimes I say my old self meaning when I was a very young child. I was both hectic to deal with yet at the same time increasingly quiet and eager to please.
Sometimes it's when I was a teenager, which depending on year or even month could describe an old self of mine where I might have been a social butterfly, friendly and flirtatious, or an embittered and self-destructive hermit.
Sometimes I mean before I was five, and sometimes I mean before I was eight, or twelve -- all ages which held tremendous milestones for me, not all of them good ones, yet not all of them bad ones either.
Sometimes I mean a week ago when I had a flu, or two weeks before that when I was on holiday. A person never has one old self; they have many.
Of more concern is how many new selves are we going to become, and how proud or ashamed of them will we be, considering how proud or ashamed we are of who we used to be before?
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Wind and Sun
One of my favorite things is being in my living room, whenever or whatever my living room happens to be, and watching the light dim and brighten in waves. At one moment all the walls are glowing with golden warmth, and the next cast into a peaceful gray that hedges on dusk but far less forboding. Gray and gold, gold and gray. A sunbeam lances through the shades and I see a slanted pillar of apricot motes moving lazily as if through water; the sunbeam fades and I feel the air cool pleasantly, like the seasons themselves are pressing their cycle through the minutes. I hear nothing but the wind that moves the clouds before the sun, sometimes the trees moving with them. I like it when this happens because every time it does, coming to mind is every other time it's happened before; it lets me feel like I'm in all of my homes again, one of the very few things that has remained constant from my earliest memories. The wind and the sun are ever the same anywhere in the world, in whatever conditions I'm living in. Everything else changes: where I am, what I look like, who is still alive or who has become alive, and what I expect to happen tomorrow, if there is enough stability in my life to even manage to expect anything at all. But the wind and the sun -- I know that wherever I go, they will be the same, and they will always let me remember something better when I might not like where I am right now.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Not that it's really your fault, though.
I hate it when people I have feelings for tell me about how great someone is that the have feelings for. I can't tell them how I feel because I know they will never, ever reciprocate. I have no illusions about the fact that there will never be anything between us due a wide variety of circumstances but mostly it just boils down to them just not feeling that way about me. If all other circumstances were fixed and everything was right -- it still would change nothing. I try to tell myself this, to turn off my own affections, to reduce it down to the platonic feelings that were there originally, but I've noticed that once you find yourself accidentally falling for someone you can't snap yourself back out of it.
I hate that as candid as I might be on this blog I can still never be completely honest about the things I want to say. So many Thems and This Persons where I might otherwise put an actual name; so many things that have to be left completely vague for my own sake and theirs. For my dignity, mostly. For our friendship as well. I value both greatly.
I can't tell you not to talk about these things to me because you trust me as the kind of person you can say these things to, and I feel so honored to mean even that much to you that I dare not remove myself from that circle and push you away from me just to protect my own feelings, even if I just want to ask you to please shut up about the other person and let me go cry like a coward.
I can't tell other people about these things because I'm afraid they might secretly feel the same way for me and I don't want to put anyone else through the same pain.
Of the numerous complaints I have in my life, this is a pretty minor one, but occasionally it doesn't feel so minor.
If you're someone I know and you don't know what I mean by all of this, it isn't your place to ask. If you know what I mean, it isn't your place to tell anyone else.
I'm sorry. It's one of those things I'm just going to have to be closed up about. Maybe far in the future there will be an opportunity to talk about it openly...but not now, and not here.
I hate that as candid as I might be on this blog I can still never be completely honest about the things I want to say. So many Thems and This Persons where I might otherwise put an actual name; so many things that have to be left completely vague for my own sake and theirs. For my dignity, mostly. For our friendship as well. I value both greatly.
I can't tell you not to talk about these things to me because you trust me as the kind of person you can say these things to, and I feel so honored to mean even that much to you that I dare not remove myself from that circle and push you away from me just to protect my own feelings, even if I just want to ask you to please shut up about the other person and let me go cry like a coward.
I can't tell other people about these things because I'm afraid they might secretly feel the same way for me and I don't want to put anyone else through the same pain.
Of the numerous complaints I have in my life, this is a pretty minor one, but occasionally it doesn't feel so minor.
If you're someone I know and you don't know what I mean by all of this, it isn't your place to ask. If you know what I mean, it isn't your place to tell anyone else.
I'm sorry. It's one of those things I'm just going to have to be closed up about. Maybe far in the future there will be an opportunity to talk about it openly...but not now, and not here.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Heather, part 2
The things that went wrong were so soft and subtle we did not place value on them until it was too late.
Small arguments between her and other people...specifically, between her and the males in the role-playing group. Reading extremely vitriolic misandronist writings for more than curiosity's sake. Becoming angry at small things. Being in a bad mood constantly. Troubles with her family, troubles with her boyfriend, troubles with her friends. Admitting she almost killed herself. Admitting she was drinking without social purposes. Small things, things that nobody knew all about, because not ONE person knew EVERYTHING about her at one time. Individuals knew individual things, and we didn't share her secrets with one another. There was no big picture for us to draw. We didn't know what it was leading to.
She was the de facto leader of the group, only because, if she decided someone was on her personal blacklist, then that person was on ALL of our blacklists. It should be of no surprise that all of the people that were shunted from the group this way were male. We did not want to argue with her. We wanted to be on her good side...suddenly, she'd become a force to be reckoned with, in a strange way; the person whose alliance made you safe and powerful, and whose anger made you alone. But her anger was sometimes random and unwarranted; we didn't know where it was coming from. It was turning us against each other, unwittingly, unintentionally. People fought amongst themselves, influenced by her growing bitterness, and no one really understood where any of anything was coming from.
At last, there was a final argument. Evan had made a chatroom and had not invited her...Sometimes, this happens. Sometimes we just forget. Sometimes we don't invite people we're not close to (Evan and Heather don't talk privately). Sometimes we don't think a person WANTS to be invited (she had been in a bad state lately and had at times turned down invitations; we thought we would leave her alone and not irritate her by making her play with us). Sometimes you just assume they'll get invited by someone else instead, in a sort of chain of invitations. Whatever the circumstances, he did not mean it to be insulting, but she took it as such. She berated him publicly in the chat, unapologetically, rather...the cruelest we had seen her. It was not a gentle ribbing or a light teasing. She was trying to make him feel horrible for something that had never been malicious nor intentional.
I called her on it, taking it to a private message and telling her that whatever was bothering her in real life had to stop coloring her vision, and that Evan, Curtis, Brian, Kyle, and all the other boys she had been kicking around lately were NOT her enemy. I told her that Evan was clearly sorry for not inviting her, and I pointed out that she did not get so angry when a -girl- forgot to invite her. She used everything I said as an excuse to get angrier, to become more acidic, to lay upon hate and anger against us all. I tried to calm her down, to tell her that none of us wanted to fight with her, and we were all sorry for hurting her, even on accident; I told her that the presence of her molester in her household was probably making her ansy and that she needed to sort things out with her family before the anger made her do anything she regretted. She rebuked me for suggesting that she was in the least affected by what had happened to her, but at some point I realized that she wasn't really making any sense anymore, she was just yelling, just saying angry things for the sake of being angry. And there was nothing I could do. She wanted to see me as an enemy I could not find my way back inside again.
The most painful thing I have ever had to say in my life was to tell my friend Heather to go away and fix her own wounds. I had to tell her I couldn't help her. She went away, and all of a sudden I was left with the nearly-as-painful and difficult task of explaining to the rest of the group that I had just made her leave. Suddenly there were dangling plot threads in the role-play and unfinished conversations and gaping holes where Heather would have been, and every time one of these came up I unpleasantly remembered that it was my fault. I had never told anyone to go away because their troubles were too much for me; I felt terrible. I cried that night, and I cried for a lot of other nights and days, and it started to hurt worse as time went on, worse than if she had died; it felt like I had killed her. Not just for me, but for EVERYone; I had sent away our friend of five years.
And that is part of what made 2007 a very bad year for me.
Small arguments between her and other people...specifically, between her and the males in the role-playing group. Reading extremely vitriolic misandronist writings for more than curiosity's sake. Becoming angry at small things. Being in a bad mood constantly. Troubles with her family, troubles with her boyfriend, troubles with her friends. Admitting she almost killed herself. Admitting she was drinking without social purposes. Small things, things that nobody knew all about, because not ONE person knew EVERYTHING about her at one time. Individuals knew individual things, and we didn't share her secrets with one another. There was no big picture for us to draw. We didn't know what it was leading to.
She was the de facto leader of the group, only because, if she decided someone was on her personal blacklist, then that person was on ALL of our blacklists. It should be of no surprise that all of the people that were shunted from the group this way were male. We did not want to argue with her. We wanted to be on her good side...suddenly, she'd become a force to be reckoned with, in a strange way; the person whose alliance made you safe and powerful, and whose anger made you alone. But her anger was sometimes random and unwarranted; we didn't know where it was coming from. It was turning us against each other, unwittingly, unintentionally. People fought amongst themselves, influenced by her growing bitterness, and no one really understood where any of anything was coming from.
At last, there was a final argument. Evan had made a chatroom and had not invited her...Sometimes, this happens. Sometimes we just forget. Sometimes we don't invite people we're not close to (Evan and Heather don't talk privately). Sometimes we don't think a person WANTS to be invited (she had been in a bad state lately and had at times turned down invitations; we thought we would leave her alone and not irritate her by making her play with us). Sometimes you just assume they'll get invited by someone else instead, in a sort of chain of invitations. Whatever the circumstances, he did not mean it to be insulting, but she took it as such. She berated him publicly in the chat, unapologetically, rather...the cruelest we had seen her. It was not a gentle ribbing or a light teasing. She was trying to make him feel horrible for something that had never been malicious nor intentional.
I called her on it, taking it to a private message and telling her that whatever was bothering her in real life had to stop coloring her vision, and that Evan, Curtis, Brian, Kyle, and all the other boys she had been kicking around lately were NOT her enemy. I told her that Evan was clearly sorry for not inviting her, and I pointed out that she did not get so angry when a -girl- forgot to invite her. She used everything I said as an excuse to get angrier, to become more acidic, to lay upon hate and anger against us all. I tried to calm her down, to tell her that none of us wanted to fight with her, and we were all sorry for hurting her, even on accident; I told her that the presence of her molester in her household was probably making her ansy and that she needed to sort things out with her family before the anger made her do anything she regretted. She rebuked me for suggesting that she was in the least affected by what had happened to her, but at some point I realized that she wasn't really making any sense anymore, she was just yelling, just saying angry things for the sake of being angry. And there was nothing I could do. She wanted to see me as an enemy I could not find my way back inside again.
The most painful thing I have ever had to say in my life was to tell my friend Heather to go away and fix her own wounds. I had to tell her I couldn't help her. She went away, and all of a sudden I was left with the nearly-as-painful and difficult task of explaining to the rest of the group that I had just made her leave. Suddenly there were dangling plot threads in the role-play and unfinished conversations and gaping holes where Heather would have been, and every time one of these came up I unpleasantly remembered that it was my fault. I had never told anyone to go away because their troubles were too much for me; I felt terrible. I cried that night, and I cried for a lot of other nights and days, and it started to hurt worse as time went on, worse than if she had died; it felt like I had killed her. Not just for me, but for EVERYone; I had sent away our friend of five years.
And that is part of what made 2007 a very bad year for me.
Heather, part 1
It's taken me a very long time to try to get back to 2007, which was easily when I had one of my worse depressions, partly because of the highly personal nature of all that went wrong, partly because it's so painful to talk about, and partly because of it's so layered and convoluted and it was just a mess of multiple circumstances running together to explode into many painful losses at once. And, also, because I haven't wanted to hurt my friends' feelings when the time came to mention the trouble I had with them -- trouble we've since gotten past, but which is still awful to think about. But, now, I think I may be ready, at least, to talk about this one. I asked her how much she would be comfortable with me saying, and she said that anything would be fine, and that there was no need for secrets if I had to get things off my chest.
I met my friend Heather online back in 2002, when I met my other online friends. She and I had been introduced by a mutual internet friend Lauren who met us both on Neopets back when Neopets allowed you to post advertisements for AIM role-playing groups. Heather was 14 and I was 12; she seemed infinitely more mature than I and I simultaneously admired and envied her. Her characters had rich backstories and she posted in gray or gold sans-serif font and her screenname had the words Infinity and Dream in it, and it all gave an image of wisdom and grace (as much as you can, on the internet, when you can't see faces or hear voices). We didn't actually talk much at all back then; we participated in the same chatrooms sometimes, but her characters usually had the more interesting plotlines going on with the other older players, while me and the other "babies" of the group had silly roleplays on our own that were mostly just an excuse to giggle and make dirty jokes.
She was the sort of person that you always want to be "inside" with...you can sense the distance and fortress-in-the-sky solitude and height of their character, and more years in their memory than they've actually been alive for, and such a coolness and confidence you can't help but want to be the person they talk to when they finally need to speak. Everyone knows people like this; they are the people to which the world is held eternally on the outside, and their words and memories are metered, the dosages of affection and secrets given are carefully monitored and no one can ever really know them, ever really touch them. When I was that young I didn't know why this was.
Of course, since then I realized I've become that way to some other people, and I've seen the invisible ladder of hierarchy of more and more untouchable people. I realized that it was only extremely personal trauma that does this. I noticed that to some people, I am that person who holds them on the outside -- but looking upwards, I see the gray layers of stone and the levels of an infinite social city of more and more layered fortress walls where people who've suffered much worse reside, and only very rarely do they invite people to see them in their privacy when they are most vulnerable.
You see, when I was five, my grandmother Kathy beat me during a summer vacation to her house. I was no longer on equal footing with other children my age from then on. I have never been on equal terms with anyone ever again, because experiencing that has erected an invisible fortress wall and pushed me on the ladder. It was an old and sometimes hard to remember event and it is a very small one compared to most people who live in fortresses, but it's put me at a distance from anyone who's never been hurt before. It's made me meter who can be "inside".
Heather was molested by her brother-in-law when she was 13, and a few more times since then. A family friend also raped her at some point after she was 13. It is why she lived in a fortress, in the sky, so high up on the ladder that most of us could barely see her feet. It was where she was safe. None of us knew what had happened to her until a few years after it did, and she did not tell her family until years after that. When the news finally reached her family it caused an explosive fissure of emotions and divisions between people who believed her, and people who didn't want to believe her. I don't know that this is something I can ever fully empathize with, for once I told my parents what had happened to me, they accepted it fully as the truth and have never doubted it -- partly because Kathy also beat my mom and uncles for all of their childhood as well.
Heather and I, over the years, became closer friends, and soon we were Those One Persons to each other...the one person who knows all of another person's secrets. You see, many of my friends know many things about me, but not ONE of them knows EVERYTHING except Heather. It is not something I do to hurt them, and oftentimes, I wish I had the willpower to let them in and let them know everything...but the wall of stone will always be there, keeping them out, making me meter how much of myself I can ever give to anyone. For Heather, that stone is thicker and colder, the wall is higher and harder to climb. Even for those of us living on the inside of the impregnable castles, it is just as difficult to escape to the outside world as it is for the outside world to get inside. I know I don't know everything about Heather, but I learned to accept that and to love her as deeply as possible regardless of what she tells me, or doesn't tell me.
It is why it was so difficult to lose her in 2007...the one person into whom I had placed all of my collective secrets, one of the very few people I had managed to keep close to me without pushing them away or letting them drift away.
In the summer of 2007, the fissures that had cracked her family life had affected her so deeply without the rest of us knowing that it was about to place a division between her and all of us that we never knew, at the time, if we would be able to get her back again.
I met my friend Heather online back in 2002, when I met my other online friends. She and I had been introduced by a mutual internet friend Lauren who met us both on Neopets back when Neopets allowed you to post advertisements for AIM role-playing groups. Heather was 14 and I was 12; she seemed infinitely more mature than I and I simultaneously admired and envied her. Her characters had rich backstories and she posted in gray or gold sans-serif font and her screenname had the words Infinity and Dream in it, and it all gave an image of wisdom and grace (as much as you can, on the internet, when you can't see faces or hear voices). We didn't actually talk much at all back then; we participated in the same chatrooms sometimes, but her characters usually had the more interesting plotlines going on with the other older players, while me and the other "babies" of the group had silly roleplays on our own that were mostly just an excuse to giggle and make dirty jokes.
She was the sort of person that you always want to be "inside" with...you can sense the distance and fortress-in-the-sky solitude and height of their character, and more years in their memory than they've actually been alive for, and such a coolness and confidence you can't help but want to be the person they talk to when they finally need to speak. Everyone knows people like this; they are the people to which the world is held eternally on the outside, and their words and memories are metered, the dosages of affection and secrets given are carefully monitored and no one can ever really know them, ever really touch them. When I was that young I didn't know why this was.
Of course, since then I realized I've become that way to some other people, and I've seen the invisible ladder of hierarchy of more and more untouchable people. I realized that it was only extremely personal trauma that does this. I noticed that to some people, I am that person who holds them on the outside -- but looking upwards, I see the gray layers of stone and the levels of an infinite social city of more and more layered fortress walls where people who've suffered much worse reside, and only very rarely do they invite people to see them in their privacy when they are most vulnerable.
You see, when I was five, my grandmother Kathy beat me during a summer vacation to her house. I was no longer on equal footing with other children my age from then on. I have never been on equal terms with anyone ever again, because experiencing that has erected an invisible fortress wall and pushed me on the ladder. It was an old and sometimes hard to remember event and it is a very small one compared to most people who live in fortresses, but it's put me at a distance from anyone who's never been hurt before. It's made me meter who can be "inside".
Heather was molested by her brother-in-law when she was 13, and a few more times since then. A family friend also raped her at some point after she was 13. It is why she lived in a fortress, in the sky, so high up on the ladder that most of us could barely see her feet. It was where she was safe. None of us knew what had happened to her until a few years after it did, and she did not tell her family until years after that. When the news finally reached her family it caused an explosive fissure of emotions and divisions between people who believed her, and people who didn't want to believe her. I don't know that this is something I can ever fully empathize with, for once I told my parents what had happened to me, they accepted it fully as the truth and have never doubted it -- partly because Kathy also beat my mom and uncles for all of their childhood as well.
Heather and I, over the years, became closer friends, and soon we were Those One Persons to each other...the one person who knows all of another person's secrets. You see, many of my friends know many things about me, but not ONE of them knows EVERYTHING except Heather. It is not something I do to hurt them, and oftentimes, I wish I had the willpower to let them in and let them know everything...but the wall of stone will always be there, keeping them out, making me meter how much of myself I can ever give to anyone. For Heather, that stone is thicker and colder, the wall is higher and harder to climb. Even for those of us living on the inside of the impregnable castles, it is just as difficult to escape to the outside world as it is for the outside world to get inside. I know I don't know everything about Heather, but I learned to accept that and to love her as deeply as possible regardless of what she tells me, or doesn't tell me.
It is why it was so difficult to lose her in 2007...the one person into whom I had placed all of my collective secrets, one of the very few people I had managed to keep close to me without pushing them away or letting them drift away.
In the summer of 2007, the fissures that had cracked her family life had affected her so deeply without the rest of us knowing that it was about to place a division between her and all of us that we never knew, at the time, if we would be able to get her back again.
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