Somebody Somewhere (11 page)

I
stood before the housing boards at the university in front of identical advertisements for apartments. I needed somewhere to live.

I had been ripped off again and again, paying in flesh, in labor, in money, in possessions, but most of all in trust. In a defensive state I rarely put any two events together to form a conclusion or a future plan of action, I had gone into each new venture with the naïveté of a newborn. I didn't want another disastrous living arrangement. I asked the housing worker for help.

“I can't tell who to trust from who not to,” I said. The issue of trust was finally now relevant. “I don't know how to judge. I generally end up in trouble, sharing a place.”

“What do you think you want?” she said, seeming very understanding. “You haven't got what I wanted,” I replied. “What would that be then?” she asked. “I want a flat or a bungalow on a property with lots of land, like a farm, not too far outside of the suburbs. I want a place with a garden and animals and children, so I can feel I can trust the owners.”

The woman left the room and returned with a card that had not been put up on display. “These owners are looking for a very special tenant,” she said. “Someone quiet who keeps to themselves and likes animals and children.” They lived on a farm in the surrounding suburbs, where they had an apartment to let on the property. My face came to life like the sparkles of a chandelier. I was overjoyed. “The world” wasn't always such a shithole.

I got the apartment. The floor was red and the walls and roof were white. Red made me excited. It would be a place of high motivation. There was a wall-to-wall, white-louvred wardrobe, a mirror in the bathroom to say hi to each day, and a view of a gum tree outside my window.

I had nothing to move in so I went out and bought a green fold-out couch-bed, a coffee table, and a yucky orange desk from the Salvation Army for seventy dollars. The people from the house
loaned me a bar fridge, and it wasn't long before I found a rusty, moldy, but nevertheless functioning fridge of my own for another seventy dollars. I got a big, cheap, clunky, green typewriter secondhand, and I was set. I put my postcards up on the wall along with notes to tell me to remember various things like eating. I unpacked my cardboard boxes of things and I had myself a home once again.

It was summertime and I awoke to the morning sunrise breaking through the branches of the gum tree and to the sound of birds. There were kookaburras, rabbits, and I even heard a snake slither past my doorway in time to turn and see it. There were horses down in the fields and there were trees, shrubs, and flowers of all kinds. At the base of the horse paddock was a tiny forest of pine trees, where the ground was orange with dead pine needles and dotted with fallen pinecones. There was a soggy compost heap full of mega-long earthworms. There were fluffy red bottlebrushes, and banksias, but best of all, there was a rose garden.

I ran with the horses and lay in the sun in the long grass. I played with the stringy bark from the gum trees and made tiny weed bouquets from the different types of grasses. I went walking in the rose garden: red, yellow, pink, orange, white. I moved among the colors.

I
had arranged to see Dr. Marek every three weeks or so. He thought he could help me find different ways to tackle various problem situations. I couldn't really see how he could help, though. I would learn how to tackle a given situation in one context but be lost when confronted by the same situation in another context. Things just didn't translate. If I learned something while I was standing with a woman in a kitchen and it was summer and it was daytime, the lesson wouldn't be triggered in a similar situation if I was standing with a man in another room and it was winter and it was nighttime. Things were stored but the compulsive overcategorization
of them was so refined that events had to be close to identical to be considered comparable.

What I wanted from Dr. Marek were rules I could carry around with me that applied to all situations, regardless of context. I wanted rules with no exceptions. It was like saying I would only be able to tell right from left if we did away with left.

I didn't want to change my personality. I had had enough cosmetic surgery performed upon my personality. I simply wanted to know what pieces or concepts I was missing that stopped me from being able to change my own behavior and use my own resources.

March 1991

Dr. Marek,

…As far as the original idea of giving me solutions to specific situations, my difficulties generalizing mean that it is better to begin with generalizations (I like to find rules and guarantees and remember them).

This is difficult for you I suppose because you'd have to choose your words really carefully for me not to spend the next ten years saying, “It's true because you said it was a rule.”

I felt a bit disappointed that when you explained things, I couldn't understand them in the right way very easily. If people like me were easy to teach, we wouldn't have so many problems I suppose.

I guess you, like many people, think that because I can talk well that I can learn well through language. I learn from others by reflecting them and can learn from them by their reflecting me (I've probably spent too many years in front of the mirror). Otherwise,

I try now to learn by recombining what information I've got, but I don't have the ingredients necessary for some of the answers.

One good thing is that I don't have to say “yes, yes, yes” when I talk to you and so I can say, “Sorry I don't get it” and “Can you say it another way?” You also don't talk too fast and speak with a fairly consistent tone and rhythm (which is less distracting and confusing). You should give talking lessons to some of my lecturers.

The other thing that has helped in our appointments is a sense
of responsibility to answer for my own progress. It helps me not to give in to my own defenses. It's like a rule that, once made, can't be broken (only new ones can be made to overrule old ones). It is also a way of keeping time.

One thing, by the way, is I'd like you to outline what things I will need to accept that won't change and what things will (if you know)…. I push myself to the breaking point and beyond, too much, I think. I can't get off my own back…

Thanks,

      Donna.

I considered all the things I was missing that other people seemed to have and made a list:

• connectedness to my body, my feelings, and my past

• attachment, trust, and familiarity

• friendships in which I would feel equal and not aware of my differentness

• an ability to stop combatting and withdrawing into myself

• an understanding of when to give up and who to give up on

• a place I can belong without withdrawing into myself

• acceptance of “the world” without guarantees

• a knowledge of the future without what others have

I took out my list and Dr. Marek seemed to laugh a bit.

“What's so funny?” I asked him. “Nothing's funny,” he said. “What you did was very sensible.” Why, I wondered, would someone find it so amusing to be sensible?

I wanted to know why people laughed at me. I knew I was funny but I didn't know why. “Give me an example,” said Dr. Marek. I gave him the example of a reaction to my reaction over a pair of shoes.

They were shiny patent leather and cost five dollars. I thought they were wonderful. I loved the smell, the smoothness, and the shininess. They looked edible. I had smelled them and brushed the smooth surface along my cheek. I carried them in my arms looking at them as I walked along. The person with me watched.

My companion looked sort of sad but smiled a bit. “Are they your best friend?” I was asked. I thought about that strange expression. I came to wonder if this person somehow felt sorry for me and I wondered why she would.

A year earlier, I wouldn't have wondered at such an expression. It would have required only to be mirrored. Carol would have acted as if she understood what the expression meant, as though acting were no different than actually knowing. I had felt it was others who were missing out by not seeing things the way I did. Right now, however, a feeling began to crawl over me like ivy, choking me into recognition and awareness. I had begun to wonder if it was not others who were missing out, but me. If it was true, what was I supposed to do about twenty-eight wasted years?

The chair fell over because I walked into it. Logically this was proof that it had felt me knock it. I sat on a chair and the cushion went down. The chair clearly knew how heavy I was. I felt sorry for sitting on a chair sometimes. It was as though I was imposing. My feet made indentations on the carpet as I walked across it. It obviously felt I was there. “Hi carpet,” I said, glad to be home.

My bed was my friend, my coat protected me and kept me inside, things that made noise had their own unique voices which said
vroom, ping
, or whatever. Windows looked outside at the day, curtains kept the light from coming inside, trees waved, the wind blew and whistled, leaves danced, and water ran. I told my shoes where they were going so they would take me there.

A tin came down from the shelf. I laughed. It looked like it was committing suicide as it suddenly jumped away from the wall. Things never thought or felt anything complex but they gave me a sense of being in company. I felt secure in being able to be in company in “the world,” even if it was with things. There was space in “my world” for the awareness of people but people were always third-person; they imposed upon an already present sense of company.

Everything had its own, if limited, volition. Whether a thing was stationary or movable depended more on the thing's readiness to move than on the person's decision to move it. Statements like “it
won't budge” only confirmed this assumed reality. It had never occurred to me to ask myself how objects knew or felt, nor was I interested. For me it had been an unquestioned assumption.

The assumption had begun long before I knew the words “know” and “feel” were more than combinations of sounds. The words “know” and “feel” were like “it” and “of” and “by”—you couldn't see them or touch them, so the meaning wasn't significant. People cannot show you a “know” and you cannot see what “feel” looks like. I learned to use the words “know” and “feel” like a blind person uses the word “see” and a deaf person uses the word “hear.” Sometimes I could grasp these unseeable, untouchable concepts, but without inner pictures they would drift away again like wispy clouds. Until I could see “know” or “feel,” the question just didn't arise to ask what had “knowing” and what had “feeling” and what didn't.

Carol had asked questions to make people say what she wanted to hear. There seemed no point in asking questions about things you didn't know when you couldn't hear consistently with meaning: “Well Donna…things…and when…see…and then…you understand.” “Yeah, sure. That really clears things up. I never thought about it like that. Can you suggest any books on the subject?” (Thanks for assaulting my ears again with noise and blah-blah. God, I am a hopeless deaf shit. What an idiot. Act “normal,” just act “normal” and they won't know.) Asking questions seemed as pointless as the totally blind person saying, “draw it for me in color,” or the totally deaf person asking to listen to the sound of your voice.

Questioning was also a strategy to avoid answering any of their questions (the jump-out-the-cupboard-before-they-open-the-door-on-you strategy). Questioning was more of a game than anything else.

Dr. Marek challenged my logic, my belief system, my world. He was tackling what to him probably seemed like language and behavior problems. In fact, he was treading upon my very perception of my self, my relationship to my body and everything around me. He was challenging my entire reality, past and present, in order to change the course of its future. He threatened to throw me headlong into a
reality I had never even known was there. I had given up my war, but he was asking me to disarm myself.