“autobiography immune to confession”

Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am”

As I’ve opened up this avenue for posting, I find I’m inclined toward more of a circa-2002 LiveJournal-style public diary, including raw revelations of my internal emotions. I’ve always traced that desire to having been trained to journal publicly by the adolescent-digital culture of the early 2000s. Not a photographic attempt at presentability, but a textual attempt at sentimentality or “truth” — often just as manipulative as an instagram smile.

But then Derrida comes out of a crowd of animals to connect autobiography itself to Christian confession — and I remember my training, the early-life admonition to pray to god, to whisper internally a list of my crimes and desires and to beg forgiveness. Somehow after all of this time (with my memory punched through repeatedly by the moths of depression), I hadn’t connected the thread back that far. At the same time as I want badly to just type freely about how bad I feel and why, and then to post it publicly for my friends and unknown future enemies, I then turn around and face down the inclination for likely-good reasons. But in the depth of my wiring, in the primordial soup of my consciousness, there’s the toxic waste of christianity leeching out in every direction.

Catholic confession is in part a power mechanism; tell the priests about your sins, and they can leverage the community and hold power. Private confession in the Baptist style makes you your own jailer; or, in many prominent christians, it apparently makes you immune to restraint or regret. If you can do whatever you like, and then be forgiven by the ghost voice of your own internal god, then nothing is off the table.

God doesn’t live in my head anymore; but the litany of wrongs runs constantly, uselessly, and the desire to seek sympathy from external sources is a bottleneck on my entire life. Otto Rank said somewhere that eventually we become the keepers of our parents’ voices, or of god’s; eventually we have to become our own parent, our own god, or else the voice of recrimination and judgment takes on a life of its own and strangles out the more productive voices.

There is still a frowning god mumbling somewhere within me; and more-readily, the ignorant condescension and irritation of my parents. I seem to want to submit my thoughts for consideration before a jury of my peers, both to hear myself more clearly, and to possibly have someone say, “You’re right!”

One of the last lengthy text things I posted publicly (almost 2 years before starting this site) felt good to get out of my brain. Multiple friends said they really appreciated it. A stranger said it made them love me. But then my mother saw it, and texted to say she thought I sounded insane. The truth was my mother never learned to hear me clearly, for whatever combination of reasons. But I was still a few steps away from entirely rejecting her voice as an influence in my life, and that chastisement was so effective that I shut down again, when I could have been blooming. As I had done so many times before.

I put my own aims for my life on hold for most of a decade simply because my parents’ expectations were so narrow, and loudly-doubtful, that I assumed I must be wrong and needed to adjust myself to accommodate them. Before that, I wasted another decade trying to divine the will of god and live according to conservative control structures. It’s hard for me to look back on any of my life with anything but resentment and grief. I think I have been a happy child, a bright student, an insightful friend, and a prolific creator. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve hardly ever gotten to meet my real self, the one who has continually tried to rise up out from under these root-smothering sheets. I know lots of other people feel varying forms of this, because we were raised in a garbage culture of authoritarian control.

I continue to feel that writing helps bring me closer to myself. For whatever combination of reasons, it’s easier to write if there’s the possibility someone else will read it. This also introduces the danger of judgment; of appearing weak, unstable, or bewildering. Unmarketable. I may be all of those things sometimes. But I have difficulty reaching the rest of myself if I can’t look at and set down the messy surface of my mind.

Derrida also says, “Things would be too simple altogether, […] there would even be the risk that domestication has already come into effect, if I were to give in to my own melancholy.”

I have absolutely given in to my own melancholy, as well as to the melancholies and manipulations of familial and social structures, and been domesticated to the point of docility before my own death. I don’t know how many lives I was born with, but I’m tired of lying down silently to lose them. I need some of the wildness of “truth,” confessed to the screaming unyielding sun, to the meaning-free constellations of our lineless gods, to whichever fellow animals will hear me and tilt their heads in recognition. I need to believe in my own voice, to believe that I need it, to believe that it isn’t simply hateful noise that needs to be suppressed in order to work to pay off the debts I owe to our monstrous systems simply to sustain my viability as a laborer.

So. Let’s put one word in front of another and believe the page leads somewhere. Even if it has to be expressed partly through the mechanics of control I was given as a child and from which I may never fully escape. I’m just what I am, and I’ve got to endure the parts I despise in order to sustain the parts I sometimes have the energy to love.