I wanted to tell them: freedom is a length of rope, God wants you to hang yourself with it.

[momebie]

I never really knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Oh, I had the usual string of dream jobs on hold: astronaut, paleontologist, famous author, etc. I just never actualized them in my mind as solid possibilities. I was mimicking the people around me, as all children do. Until about the age of 17 it didn’t occur to me that I might live through my senior year of high school. It’s not that I was suicidal—that came later—it was merely that the idea of being an independent human being, separate of the structures I’d built for myself, didn’t appeal to me. So I dismissed the thought. Time would stop.

Of course, time didn’t stop. In the last ten years I’ve gone from ignoring the idea of the future to dwelling on it too intently. I can’t sleep some nights. (I didn’t sleep last night, which is why you’re getting this instead of more fiction.) There’s a tag in this journal for ‘the dreaded future’ for a very good reason. The future terrifies me. It terrifies me because everything is going to change and I am going to have to be the one to make some of those changes and I am ultimately responsible for where I end up. That crushing responsibility, above all else, is what I believe in now.

I took a lot of philosophy and religion classes in college. It was the only way to productively work through my fear of free will and how it related (poorly) to my Calvinist theological upbringing. If things are predestined and predetermined, why spend so much time dragging myself through life? I still haven’t found a reliable answer to that one. My solution was to eschew theology altogether, which is a tailspin of a feeling if you were raised with all of the comforting, violent, gilded words of a specific religion.

At that point it was the existentialists that caught me. In them I found the desperate explanation of life that I’d been looking for. It’s all on me. Regardless of whether there are gods in the sky or the earth or the perfume ads they stuff into women’s magazines, I’m still responsible for myself. I have to create a meaning. I have to create myself every day. Every day. Sartre is my boyfriend and Camus is my mistress and even though it means that sometimes I don’t sleep at night, I’m most comfortable when living through the illusion that I’m in control.

And it is an illusion. The world is large and dense and sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter how much of a path I manage to forge through the brambles, the Universe can come through and just as easily drown me out through no fault of my own. As a child I was taught that it happened to the people Noah didn’t have room for. It can happen to me. So even though I’ve built myself a world of lonely, commanding words, I have to leave room for eventualities. I’m not hedging my bets as much as it sounds like I might be, but in a lot of ways I still am and always will be a little girl, pretending to know what I want to be when I grow up.

There’s a tattoo I’ve been planning for several years now. And those of you who know me will raise your eyebrows and go ‘a tattoo? you want every tattoo’, which is true, but this one is special. This one I’m reserving for a moment when I take one of those large, startling leaps. Right now I go back and forth between deciding whether I want to get it when I move across country or when I graduate grad school. Both are things I’m feeling compelled to do. (Don’t you find that sometimes, as you’re making your way through life, certain decisions feel like they travel in well worn grooves in your soul? They come to you and you wonder in what life you’d ever choose the other option?) I haven’t settled on a design, but I know exactly what it will say.

Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.

It’s a quote from the Alan Moore comic Watchmen. (Yeah, not only am I an insufferable pretentious douchebag, but I’m also an insufferable pretentious comic book geek. You all probably noticed that by now, though. I just really like Batman, okay?) I wish I could share the panel the line comes from with you, but I don’t have my copy on me and my quick Google search hasn’t turned it up. (Thanks to edincoat it's now at the bottom of the post!) Long story short, one of the characters realizes time as being simultaneous, so he doesn’t feel he’s moving through it linearly so much as bumping up against events as they happen at all points. And I don’t have a giant blue penis, but sometimes, in spite of everything I believe about making me me, that’s how I feel. I’m a blank slate. I’m an ornate statue. I’m a weather worn, pock marked rock. I've blinked out.

I am already who I’ve made myself, and sometimes that futility will just keep you up nights.




This post was written for Topic 25: Uncarved Block at therealljidol. I know there's been a lot of meta lately about fiction vs. non-fiction and how some people feel like they don't really get to know those of us who write fiction. I'd be interested in knowing if you feel like this tells you more about me than my fiction did. As always, I welcome all comments and questions.

Comments

[theemdash]

I never really thought about Calvinist vs. Catholic upbringing, but I can really see that now. Interesting. Hmm.

Also, I feel like you show this face quite clearly in your fiction. Though showing this in fiction could just be the result of research rather than the result of feeling. So... there is no "better," but there is information.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

There's a whole paragraph that I ended up deleting about the cognitive dissonance created in 8 year olds by being told that people who don't go to church can't go to heaven and then told that it's ALREADY DECIDED who's going. How does that even make sense, oh Calvin of the ludicrous haircut? Then you get into the whole debate of, are you already chosen because you're the kind of person who WILL follow God's law to the tee, or can you really do whatever you want? Not that I really think predestination trumps free will. Just because I know the actions a person is likely to take does not mean that they haven't chosen to take those actions of their own accord. If a God were to be truly omniscient it's entirely possible he's simply reading the output at the end of everything and just taking liner notes. I think the part of that I struggled with as a kid was that he then got in his time machine and brought those liner notes BACK IN TIME to bully us with. It's a very delicate conversation that I feel was handled by a great deal of clumsy people in my youth. But yeah, I didn't want to dwell on the religion thing. ;)

I think that when I show this in my fiction it's sometimes pure feeling and it's sometimes research. For the BDESFN it's pretty heavily both, in that I know my feelings and have extensively researched the philosophies that informed them. I want that project to be aware of what it is. I like reading things like that, so it's by design there. In the serial and other one offs I've written, or even how things might come out of the Steampunk characters sometimes, it's more about how I was feeling on any given day when I was writing.

[tentaclecore]

The Calvinist church sounds amazingly confusing to me, especially that fiddly bit there about having repercussions and then apparently taking them away because there's already a guest list of somesort.

Does the church have their own Bible or Manual or something one can skim through to get an idea of what the basics are? Like the Mormons have their Book of Mormon, etc? I'm curious, but am not willing to trust Wikipedia on anything re: religion at this point.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

Hm. We always just used the regular old Bible. Old and New testaments of course. Apparently there's some kind of ultra conservative Orthodox Presbytery, but my church was the average old PCUSA type. Granted, I find that it was more traditional than some other Presbyterian churches I've attended in the way we do call and response and how we give communion and all. Some Presbyterian churches are downright Methodist, which just isn't right. ;)

[tentaclecore]

Weeeeeeird. I always assumed that things like predestination and such would be listed in whatever book they label as their major text. I've read both versions of the bible--yay Catholicism, urgh--and honestly don't recall Saint Peter having a list and checking it twice >_>;;;; But then again, might've missed it. I spent a lot of time while reading the New Testament in particular raging about how unfair it was towards women and minorities. And the twisted bartering system, what the everloving hell made Constantine think that shit was a good idea to put in?!

lol Methodist. Aren't they the ones with their own personal relationship with God? Or was that a different Christian sect? GDI I know more about ancient religions than current ones, what what what.

[theemdash]

I don't think I learned about predestination until I was in high school, so my formative thoughts and opinions were based around free will and life having end-consequences, so predestination never made much sense to me (because I too was thinking "if it's predetermined, how does that influence your actions?"). I think it's an interesting concept, but doesn't seem very useful practically (I have always believed religion is designed to teach morality on the basic level of "This is why you shouldn't be a dick to other people.").

(You know, sometimes I read my thoughts and wonder how on Earth I made it through 13 years of Catholic school.)


I think it's difficult to hide too much in fiction. I mean, what you write is inside your head in some way. Maybe it's not something you'd do (steal people's faces), but the idea that someone could has obviously occurred to you.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

I really sometimes wonder what I would have thought of predestination if it just hadn't been a tenet of How Things Were. Like, I find most forms of Western Christian Mysticism kind of charming because I learned about them in college. I might have thought the same thing about predestination if it hadn't been such a bug in my ass this whole time.

And I agree, of course. Most religions do boil down to 'Don't Be a Dick', which is why I get so frustrated when that's the one thing people DON'T get out of them!

I also think it's difficult to hide too much in fiction. For me anyway. I'm sure there are people out there who are all 'I can totally write stories about things I wouldn't do set in worlds my beliefs have no authority over!' But, you know, I wouldn't want to work that way. That would take most of the things I enjoy about stories so much out of the process entirely. And please ignore this bucket of faces. Are you using that nose?

[theemdash]

Most religions do boil down to 'Don't Be a Dick', which is why I get so frustrated when that's the one thing people DON'T get out of them!

Mmm, yeeeeeeep.

I don't know how the author doesn't influence writing/worlds. This is a HORRIBLE example, but I'm having trouble thinking of a good one since work is all distracting: I mean I think I could write Spring Heeled Jack because I can figure out the motivation to tear a woman apart. But that doesn't mean that I would, just that I can intellectualize that and feel that. THEREFORE, given certain circumstances maybe I could tear a woman apart. WHO KNOWS.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

One of the great things about human beings is that under the right circumstances we're capable of ANYTHING. It's why I'm so preoccupied with identity. It's a fragile thing, if you think about it.

[theemdash]

It really is. I mean, when I think about how much high school fucked me up, how insanely minor events are still screwing with my head, it's a wonder we're not all insane.

[momebie.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. I mean, the reason I react so much more negatively to Karofsky than I think a lot of people do is because I identify too heavily with who he was to Kurt. And Kurt's getting over that, but I'm not, which is clearly all on me. But still. Ugh. And this is all because one person was a bag of dicks eleven years ago.

This is the part of the conversation where I find the Carl Sagan idea that we're made of star stuff immensely comforting. We're older than we can even imagine and probably carry some of that with us, as well as how we'll never really be eliminated entirely, since matter cannot be created or destroyed. We're just bits of things that will become bits of other things. It helps me feel larger rather than smaller.