Twenty Five Years Ago

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 08 October 2009 11:32:51

I learnt not to talk. Some years ago I heard a discussion about how people think, and that some people think first and then speak, as you might naively expect, but that others speak first, and can't actually think without speaking. And I realized that I mostly fall in that strange second group. So many of my beliefs now only clarified themselves through the process of articulating them. One such idea was articulated after the first few times that my now-wife but then-fiancee met my parents. I had been getting increasingly distressed by the fact that she would actually try to talk to my parents, and even say things to them, things that might actually convey some meaning, some content. At first I was too much in shock to be able to deal appropriately with this, but in time I got over that and took the step of explaining that this must not be done. And in the explaining I found myself saying that anything said to my mum would, sooner or later, be turned by her into a source of regret. Either she would twist it, or mock it, or use it to say the wrong thing to the wrong people at the wrong time, or by any of a number of other strategies that I'm sure I never fully discovered, she would make you regret saying it. As I think back, I see that this thought, while not articulated and so not coherent, dictated my actions from about the time when I was 14 or 15. I'm not sure if it was then that I made the connection between action and consequence, or if it was that around that time my mother started reacting that way, perhaps in response to my adolescence. But from that point on I never properly spoke to my mother, and won't ever. (It's nice and dramatic to be able to make such a definitive negative prophecy, but it's simply that through the wonder that is alzheimers, my mother is already effectively dead and gone even though her body is still alive). A lot changed around that time. I suppose this is normal, but I tend to think of my life as having been not exactly satisfactory, but at least mostly bearable and stable, for the first 12 or 13 years, and then massively shaken up for the next five years, until, at university, I was able to (re)build a life that I could be happy with, a life where I could be moderately content with myself, and where things were in order - the right priorities, the right way up - just in order. And I find myself thinking now, some twenty odd years later, that since most of my life has been in this orderly state, that most of my outlook on life, most of core beliefs, should be based on this state. But as those years have progressed, what I've found more and more, is that what I built was a facade, and what I really am is the disappointment of those first dozen years, compounded by the serious screwing up of the following five. So while on the outside things still seem to be in order - I seem to know what I'm doing, what I'm about, and why - I actually find that my needs and my deep beliefs are woefully different. And one of the things that's coming to the fore now is that I dare not talk. What my mum taught me all those years ago seems to apply to everyone. I seem to believe that everyone will twist my words and mock me and make me regret saying anything. I suppose the humour that I constantly resort to is a way of deflecting this and ensuring that nothing that passes my lips actually touches my heart. But in so doing I ensure that I connect with no-one, and no-one connects with me. So I find myself thinking that every man is, in fact, an island, and that the saying to the contrary is Leibnizian blind optimism.