Guilt

Despite not having a stereotypical Jewish Mother—she wasn’t even Jewish—I somehow managed to acquire the overwhelming sense of guilt often ascribed to Jewish writers. Mine, however, is strictly a do-it-myself project, and I credit it to several factors:

First, my emotional development pretty much ground to a halt by the time I was five. A part of me still firmly believes, as all children believe, that I am, and deservedly so, the center of the universe and that I somehow have the power, and the right, to make things be as I want them. I’ve mentioned before the dream I had when I was very young of standing in some sort of power station, with endless rows of identical, flat-surfaced machines stretching away to the horizon, all with buttons and dials and switches and knobs and levers representing infinite power which I realized I had no idea of how to use. That was perhaps the most meaningful dream of my life and it is still vividly with me after all these far-too-many years.

It is partly because I am locked into emotional childhood that I became a writer. Books and stories and even blogs stem from the imagination, and imagination is the mother’s milk of a child’s mind. However, a vivid imagination is by nature antithetical to reality, and while others have allowed themselves to be beaten into submission by reality, I have fought it tooth and nail every day of my life. I cannot and do not deny reality’s existence, but I can and do resent it with every fiber of my being. I am truly and deeply divided between acknowledging the world around me and insisting expecting/wanting people and things to be what I want them to be.

To this day, I cannot comprehend why people are not the way I expect them to be. How can anyone not be honest, caring, courteous, kind, intelligent, loyal, and logical? Some are…at least in some combination of the above traits. And if some are, why isn’t everyone? It simply makes no sense to me. So I blunder through life with my eyes partially closed so as not to see what I do not want to see. As a result, I find myself so very easily confused and flustered and frustrated and angry, all of which I channel back into myself.

And thus the guilt. Because I want so badly to have some control over things which are largely uncontrollable, I automatically assume when anything happens that goes against what I would have it be, it is axiomatic (to me) that whatever it is has to be my fault for not having, or not being able to figure out how to exercise control over it. Something bad happens. I did not prevent it. Therefore, it is my fault.

To preserve my…well, “sanity” may not be the exact word, but it comes close…sometime around the turn of the millennium, my mind and emotions held a closed-door meeting, and when the door opened, Dorien emerged, thereby neatly dividing my being into two parts. For whatever reason, Roger is in charge of struggling with a legion of inner demons, to allow Dorien, my personalized imagination, to be totally free and unencumbered by the physical and more Freudian-id issues which would otherwise encumber him. It is Roger who deals with the his inadequacies and frustrations and guilt while Dorien goes outside and plays in the sunshine.

It works for me.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back.