I heard a story about a student who visited a wise man and said, "I want to begin the path to enlightenment. What is your advice?" The wise man answered, "Don't start."
I have to ease into speaking.
***
I drove to a chain bookstore that wasn’t here when I left, found the fiction section in a location similar to the location of the chain bookstore in Tampa, looked in Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, scanned either the introduction or the first few pages--I don't remember what I read--and closed it.
That’s how I lived my first one year and ten months after returning to my hometown in the mountains after twenty-three years in the subtropics. To the truth of what happened or of what I felt about it, I closed.
I had not known I followed the closed rule here when I was a kid, too--closing down, closing off, closed closet doors, bedroom doors, front doors. Sometimes closed hearts and closed minds. I thought that was normal, the way everyone lived.
I carried the closed rule through the marriage that started in my hometown and ended seventeen years later in divorce in Tampa. For the next six years there, I practiced opening. By the time I left, I thought open was the rule. I thought I could carry my open self to my hometown with me.
Not only is closing a cultural norm in my hometown, and the-don’t-tell-silence that comes with it, but closing is a norm in my family. We had sit-down family dinners and frequent, lengthy, meandering living room conversations. About ideas, about information, about thoughts. Never, ever about feelings. That subject was closed.
What I, and most people under a be-closed, don’t-feel rule do is dissociate. The human self separates--dissociates—itself from the human function. It’s a natural human trait considered to have evolved to separate the head from the heart so that action can be taken even in the midst of, even especially in the midst of, the fear that screams when life is threatened.
With a life-time’s worth of practice, I became adept and skilled at separating what I felt from what I did so automatically that I even became unaware I had a self that felt. I was all function, all doing. Only in guerrilla bursts--watching a student in a play, seeing a work of art, driving to work, jogging in the rain--did my feeling self emit a single sob, then re-flee.
My mother got a master’s degree in counseling when I was thirteen; I remember one of the lines she quoted from a case study: “She ran out of script.” When I found I was unable to conceive a child, I didn't know what to do. I left my marriage, not because I didn’t love my husband, but because the lights were on, the audience was leaving, and I didn’t have a new role. The play was over.
Four decades of containerhood spilled. The newspapers stacked to a man’s height in my new apartment as I slogged and slipped and wept.
Sometimes, while driving in Tampa, the dark clouds would be heavy on the horizon, with bright sky above them. For a moment, my breath would catch. Was I held in the hands of mountains again? No, I was living the song’s cloud’s illusions. Then I would cry.
My husband and I separated in 1999. By the time I left Tampa in July, 2006 to return to the mountains, my feeling self and my doing self were no longer dissociated, but side-by-side. One felt. The other, informed by feeling, did stuff. I was open.
In July, 2006, I returned to my complex hometown, my complex family, to the longed for hands of the mountains.
I fell unconsciously into closure. I followed the unspoken, unbroken rule of silence.
In September 2006, a guy who graduated from the same high school I did gunned down first a security officer, then a policeman on the Huckleberry Trail where the leaves were just starting to turn. A few weeks later, the guy who was the manager at the swim club where I tanned every summer in my bikini was revealed to have a thirty-year history of sexual abuse of children. In February 2007, my own student, in my own classroom, pushed me. In April 2007, a guy who went to the same college I did killed thirty-two people and then himself. Five months later, in September, my own student, in my own classroom, threatened to shoot me.
How does one do what seems cannot be done?
- Go home again.
- Watch parents age on their way to death.
- Lose a calling.
- Bear rape of those one knows.
- Bear a mass murder.
- Live a life of meaning, no matter where, no matter what.
I have always sought the one true thing. I have been warned a thousand times about the peril of absolutes, instructed a thousand times about the continuum of this or that, about ambivalence, about greyness over black and whitehood. My yearning remains unchecked.
If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I want to say that I think there’s one true thing.
Open.
Not closed.
, David Guterson’s work of fiction, a mother’s decision to allow her son to cry has harrowing results.