I would hate to, but am going to have to, consider that these feelings demonstrate a yearning for a return to structure. Somehow this registers as contradictory. Amongst all of the four-lettered phrases I got stuck with as a kid, the most memorable (and dearest to my heart) is Oppositional Defiance Disorder. To me, that translates as "fuck you I won't do what you tell me," and quite frankly I am
thankful, not resentful of this. Had I not opposed or defied certain less-than-legitimate or overtly arrogant authorities in my life, I believe I would be much worse off. It is a practice which I dutifully continue to this day and will carry out every day I?m alive. So my tendency is to equate the defiance of authority to the rejection of structure, unless the two are totally apples and oranges to each other. What I most cherish from the wilderness was purpose, meaning, self-direction, and likely some things that just can't come out in words; inarticulable gains, some of which could be lying in wait until some new challenge calls for their retrieval... but not necessarily structure. And although it was rewarding, if only temporarily, it was by no means easy, though it became easier over time. A memorable quote from the field:
"It doesn't really get good, but it gets better after a while."
If I was a structure whore, I think I'd have the college thing in the bag. The opposite is true. I?ve got all of the structure I could ever want right here, though not necessarily enforced from above, but from within, and on occasion from outside influence and expectation for performance and staying in line. School has been a trying experience more than it?s been a liberating one. I'm starting to dawn on what MGDP might have been thinking of... this is a rape victim, dreaming of his/her attacker, wanting to relive, reinvent, re-enact or reinsert the disaster into their now meticulous, mundane or ordinary existence. I've always prided myself on a certain soundness of mind, having been a reliable source of advice and compassion for my friends, my parents' friends, and even my own parents on a few occasions. But let's be realistic. Being absolutely and mercilessly uprooted and transplanted from home into something completely foreign and unfamiliar (despite my already having a fondness for the outdoors), followed by 6-8 weeks of "treatment," will "fuck" your mind, and especially at age 16, no matter who you are. A person's character or wherewithal might make them less susceptible, but never invulnerable.
I began reading a remarkable book, put out by a remarkable 'something' (they refuse the confines of any conventional category such as "publisher") called Recipes for Disaster. The un-entity partially responsible for said book ending up in my hands is called Crimethinc. I would now wish to quote something which makes what I am trying to say abundantly clearer than I ever could:
Once upon a time oil spills
and shootings were considered disasters; today these are
practically standard features of our society, built into the
social fabric and accounted for in advance. They are not
anomalies, but routines. Real interruptions in which the system
breaks down, on the other hand, such as blackouts and
bomb threats, are still described as disasters, whether or not
anyone dies. Already harrowed by the vicissitudes of the system
itself, we dutifully fear them, but those who have lived
through such disruptions know how sweet it can be when
Something Happens... but the real Disaster, the worst
one, is the Disaster we live every day: the emptiness of our
full schedules, the trivia that trivializes us, the machinery that
runs on rivers of blood. That would explain why we feel so
free whenever something, anything, however dangerous or
difficult, interrupts all this. Perhaps the excitement and immediacy
that break out in emergencies are simply indications of
a return to our natural state, in the break they herald from the
full scale slow motion train wreck that is our society. If that is
the case, then it is not disasters per se that are liberating?it
is, rather, a question of perspective: a ?disaster? that disrupts
a life of constraint is experienced as a moment of liberation,
when that ?normal life? is actually Disaster in disguise.
This was a welcome and an unwelcome change, as I?ll explain in a minute, but a violation all the same, leaving this stubborn stain on my conscience, desiring a return to upheaval. Walkabout was indeed a disaster in both the good and bad sense of the word, but away from and toward what exactly is what has taken time to discern. What did it bring about or put and end to? What was lost or found? Or with regard to structure, what did I need then that I don?t now, or vice versa? What did this interrupt me from and introduce me to, then and now?
Just prior to the kidnapping, I had taken some daring but long-overdue steps away from a home that had been wracked with chaos, family illness, and vicious dysfunction for a solid two to three years, by physically moving myself out of the picture. I was 16. No combination of any of our contributions or ideas, with or without therapy, had worked prior. My summers or vacations away from home, if only for a day or two, were always a welcome reprieve from the stress of being at home. So upon leaving for good, I began reaping the rewards of life away from incessant fighting and verbal abuse at home, out from under the oppressive (rather than protective) wing of my disassembled, defunct parents, along with the trying but emboldening consequences of bearing the full weight of (almost) all of my decisions. And I loved it. In coping with almost two years? worth of subsequent illness from each parent, falling like dominoes, one after the other, the added responsibility wasn?t foreign. The world which I was told I wasn?t "big" enough to handle on my own was well within my capability for how much of it I was trying to take on at once, especially with the help of the friend and his parents who took me in, no questions asked. I paced myself, kept the essentials of my well-being intact, the first and foremost of which was my sense of self, which returned to me like a dream when it was allowed to come out of the figurative cage my parents kept it in with ?because I?m the adult? and ?do as I say? ideologies. I?ll abbreviate a lot more background by mentioning that the credibility and character required for such parenting catch-phrases to function was trampled by repeated shows of outright disrespect and startlingly childish behaviors on the parts of my parents toward me, each other, and even guests in our home. Thus, things like ?because I said so? began to sound more like temper tantrums than words of wisdom. It was at the height of that emergence unto myself that I was plucked out of my world, one which I had begun for the first time to really mold with my own two hands, into one I could never have expected. It was retaliation. I had escaped the claws of a familial system I was sure would drive me to the ends of my sanity had I stayed, and the last laugh came in the form of a forced escort, a strip search, a full physical and a hot ride out to oblivion on graduation day, when many of my senior friends (I was a junior) would leave town for good.
I had succeeded in, or was beginning to succeed in escaping the greatest capital ?D? Disaster that had plagued all of us for years and years: my own family. Once I crept my fingers out from under the rug, my parents, my cunt of a therapist who broke confidentiality about me to my parents and to me about other patients regularly, and the proverbial ?Educational Consultant? (whom, as I?ve been reading, plays an integral part in assigning ill-fated ?troubled-teens? to their programs and profiting from it accordingly) collectively hacked off my fingers before they could feel for more than a single, liberating instant. They were to be replaced with a new hand (to draw out the metaphor) which would, as I?ve described in my first post, forever feel the world in a completely different way. I don?t know if it?s better or worse, I just know it?s different. This is what I will remember my parents for more than anything, because I feel its effects -- though I may not yet understand all of them -- in everything I do.
Structure.
I?ve gone a little belligerently off base here from the original topic of structure, so I?ll try to come back to it. I will admit that I feel as though this program did for me what I was content to do for myself at the time I was hauled off, and now I attribute my sense of self, my certitude about or comfort with the world and my place in it, as compliments of $15,000 spent by my parents and the work of a therapist and a bunch of Mormons in the desert, not me. If those bubbles of self-realization during the high points of the program were, in theory, the program giving me the tools with which to make manifest something already inside of me, something which I controlled and I had created, why am I now bereft of any idea of how to bring it back on my own? I?m trapped into thinking that they have my only formula for success locked in an 8-week thick profile in a filing cabinet in a warehouse in Lehi. I feel robbed of the promise I worked hard for, of being able to chart my own course, instead left with the worthless, vapid feeling that someone else did it for me. This is all getting into the ambiguous Lifetime TV realm of emotional verbal diarrhea, but I think some semblance of the point is there. Maybe I ought to start everything all over again from scratch and do what I?ve written about so many times:
Pile the new computer, the three bedroom apartment, the new mattress, the washer and dryer, dishwasher, the clothes, the $187 of groceries in the fridge, the designer hair products, the EXCESS, the money, the guilt, everything I?ve been given to make it seem as though this program was a gift and not a theft, everything my father?s soiled bank account has shoved in my mouth to make me forget prior transgressions, pile it in a heap outside my front door, lovingly douse it in gasoline, set it ablaze and walk naked in a straight line until God himself stops me.
One problem, and God how great it would be if I only had one, is that I don?t have the balls. I feel as though something must kick my feet out from under me again in order to begin to walk how, when, where and to whatever beat I want to. An even greater problem still is not knowing where to start. Ultimately, I bear the weight of my decisions just as I always have, as well as the even heavier weight of not making them.
