Retorciendome

8,5,06

Nobody gets it. Nobody believes it. They think it's a session but it's real. (That's how it feels). I manage to cover it up, act like life goes on, but interiorly I know I won't live through it. Oh, I'll appear to live through it, but interiorly I'll be dying. Dying, cumulatively dying, until one of these Mondays I'll truly fully be dead.

Dying at work.

I can't go back there. Don't make me go back there. Say I don't have to go back there. If you got it, if you believed me, you'd say I don't have to go. You'd save me from this torture. (So the recording goes.)

Interiorly I am retorciendome, writhing, cringing, closing my eyes and pushing my fists into my eyes and curling, spiraling inward, toward numbness. Numbness is my best hope.

I don't want to go there. Say I don't have to go.

When is this? Now I'm guessing it's going to school in Chicago, second grade. I knew no English. The year the hell began, or the year I remember hell beginning. My Mother had a job at Montgomery Ward's catalogue store while my Father was in McCormick seminary. My earliest memories of beatings, my Mother throwing her shoes at me across the room, hitting me with the heel of her shoe, wanting to kill me. And then, having to walk the freezing windtunnels to second grade. Going from being the daughter of the Pastor, central in the Escuela Presbiteriana de Sancti Spiritus, to being invisible uninteligible and unable to understand.

Is this what having to go to school felt like to that little girl?

In the present my job is hard, having a job because others don't makes for a lot of io, confusion, harshness. We serve people whose lives are hanging by a thread and we are chief among the puppeteers pulling the thread. Our own work lives are always hanging by a thread. The speed up is unrelenting as the tracking, herding and controlling of the poor mushrooms, our agency constantly inventing its own necessity.

The harshness grows: unjust firings, absurd wheelbarrows of paper, time wasting directives, mountains of work to track irrational program closings and irrational program startups.

I can't bear to go back there. There are too many battles I can't fight, I can't win.

Interiorly I'm getting agitated, the writhing begins, the urge to curl up, away, spiral inward, run away.

And then there's R who has no job.

Here it comes, like one more vomit bout in a stomach virus: Say I don't have to go. I won't live. Don't make me go. You don't believe me. You think it's a session but it's real. If you believed me you would save me. (I sobbed when I read the part in Sybil where the good psychiatrist whom she believes has finally got it, got what's happening to her, whom she believes will surely save her, fails to do so, lets her go back to the torture hell with her Mother. So is that it, is it having to return to my Mother? Is it the place where the other longing to go home,to escape the torture of oppression, where the unbearable longing to go home crashes into the reality of home torture, and there is no escape anywhere. The outside world is one hell and home another.

Here it comes, the vomit of terror and pain rising from my core. Interiorly retorciendome. I can't bear this feeling yet again. (No feeling will kill me. TJ said so in the dvd I was watching yesterday. This is the feeling I try to numb with sugar.