When in school and very upset, I’d often resolve to not talk in class. This silence would be so out of character that someone would say at the end, “are you okay?” This never came to pass because class always cheered me up, and more importantly, I love to talk. I love public speaking. After starting anti-depressants, I felt I had become an absolute chatterbox, like I could never shut up, not just in school but in my personal life as well. But apparently I’ve always been like that.
I have nightmares where I’m telling someone something and they don’t believe me. They’ve been happening more lately because I recently came out as trans to my parents, and they don’t believe me. Yet the dreams are not new. Maybe because lying fascinated me as a kid and I did it all the time, testing what was too outlandish, too unbelievable. I stand by this as natural. The key to truth-telling, or getting away with lying, is a witness, as anyone who has ever seen a mafia movie already knows. It is harder to deny the testimony of two people, three, four. It’s easier to rely on two memories of an event, as one can get distorted.
It is hard to integrate traumatic memories into your daily life; we naturally suppress them. Perhaps that’s why memories of my childhood are scant—that or the fact that I was young. This is an issue because my dad has never remembered the instances that build consistencies and patterns over a person’s life, he only remembers big stuff, and my mom is in denial about forcing herself to forget. Now we’re all hunting for truth and not finding it or at least not capturing it confidently or satisfactorily. I ask things like, “why did I go to therapy as a kid?” and they don’t know. I loved my childhood therapist, on 91st and Central Park West. She helped me sleep.
I am an honest person because I value honesty or at least in an autistic sense find it easier than lying, weaving the webs of caring for people, though I do also care for people. I also love the absolving wash that comes over me when I tell the truth and come clean, if I’ve lied. Perhaps in chasing this naughty feeling of lying I was in fact chasing this cleansing feeling that came after. My mother says that she once heard me say “I lie to my parents all the time.” I can think of nothing I lied to them about, except maybe watching inappropriate TV and movies, or what I was eating, or how I was feeling, or what I liked, or going on the internet, or lying to each one about the other, the way divorce makes kids do. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I eventually told the truth.
The problem now is that there are things for which I cannot reach or achieve honesty. I have always had a deeply honest relationship with my parents which it is now time to dissolve, as precedents of constant honesty have caused us to insist on hearing painful truths, which may just be filling, untrue stuffing, for the questions with no answer.
When I think and talk about shame, I am working with the sharp sword of shame and pride connected with success and humbleness, the shame of privilege, the shame of poverty, the shame of waste. The shame of weakness which grows War of the Worlds-like alien legs, tall and frightening, stop-motion Nightmare Before Christmas knee bends, weakness grows like this.
I want someone to make every decision for me so I am spared the worst shame of all, which is to make the wrong decision, the wrong choice, from what coffee to drink to where to live to what school to go to, to what to want to do. What am I meant to call the shame that this is? It is not sexual, not circumstantial. In the end it is just a job poorly done, a life poorly lived, padded with excuses. It requires a high level of self-knowledge to know what you want and need, and bravery to admit it.
I have made so many decisions but I remember vividly making the biggest one at the time when I had to test into high school in New York City. Every student in the city is ranked by their test score on the single entrance exam. The students each rank the schools in order of preference. Then, the administrators go down the list of students; as long as the score is high enough, anyone can go to their first choice school, until they fill up. The higher the score, the more likely the student will attend their first choice school. I played the system, attempting to bet on my performance, putting the best school first and my top choice second. I needed for this decision to pass without actually making it.
It didn’t matter where I went, though at the time I truly thought it did. I am generally unhappy everywhere, with every choice, helplessly, chronically, and I keep choosing, choosing, as though some day one decision may be right. To go out or stay home each day, when to jaywalk, when to cross.
There is nothing original or unusual about decision fatigue—that’s what they call it now that it bogs down even the healthiest career women, mothers, and wives. It’s probably an unavoidable symptom of the twenty-first century or whatever. Maybe that’s what I want instead; not someone to make decisions for me but the power to make a decision without thinking. I’m thinking, I’m thinking when I’m choosing, thinking for hours after and months before, thinking wrong. Impulsivity would be a gift, poor judgement, rather than this excellent judgement, Solomon slicing babies like pizzas on a Domino’s conveyor belt.
Perhaps if I had been wrong that fateful ranking day I wouldn’t yearn to be right again, but even that is a false memory. I didn’t test high enough to get a choice. False confidence; that decision-non-decision was made for me by my performance. I went to my second choice, which was in fact my first.
When did we stop resisting fate and start manipulating chance and building things like airplanes and international students? When I was a child I didn’t understand the difference between fate and chance. Is fate so random that it is, in effect, a force like chance, or is chance, or what feels like chance, in fact a planned trick of fate, pre-ordained at every turn? Perhaps I’ve lost the thread here. I’m only concerned with what they feel like.