Every true word transforms

Every True Word Transforms

Freire said, every true word transforms the world. What does an accumulation of lies do, to the world, to me?
Yesterday I spoke with Machi. Sammy's pregnant. By him. She doesn't like me, he said. Nobody likes me. There isn't going to be any family. He was angry. A man's anger isn't like a woman's anger, he said. Women might be able to just discharge their anger, he said. Men have to hit somebody. Women make everything impossible. There isn't going to be any family. I was hearing my Machi long ago at the age of three, that child voice echoing through the deep voice of the man, the boy's pain. I was the woman who made that first family impossible, who took his family away. So now I cry. Any time those words run through my head I cry. Sitting on the subway, walking down the street, lying in the bathtub. I sob.

There isn't going to be any family.
There isn't going to be any country of my own.
There isn't going to be any revolution.
There isn't going to be any new job.

All the energy I had the last few weeks to look for another job, where did it come from? Whose energy was it? I lied during the two three and a half hour interviews, put all my concentration on tracking the other person's mind, chameleoning myself to what my mind constructed they might want to hear. All for what?
You see, that last meeting when X attacked me, has got to be the last meeting I ever go to. She attacked me and I didn't fight back. Because I couldn't even tell I was being attacked until afterwards, when I found myself walking aimlessly from supermarket to health food store to street fruit vendor, unable to negotiate the shopping, the deciding, the lines, unable to get myself any food, unable to feel any hunger, even. And somewhere on 3rd avenue, the second pass at the health food store, I got it. X attacked me. I was the cowboy who walks into the saloon and gets humiliated by the big bully and fails to slam the shot glass on the bar, turn around, swing the gun and shoot it; or fails at least to tower over the bully shrinking him with a look.
I went inwardly awol; disappeared. My last clear memory was of X' ancestral slavemaster peeking at me through her gaze. Just the way my mother's ancestral abusers peeked at me through hers. Women possesed by ancestral abusers send me to flight.
That after all these years I am still unable to hold my own against my mother has sent me deeply under the bed. I can't do either of these jobs. I can barely do the job I've got.
There isn't going to be any new job.
I couldn't sustain the lying, the impersonation.
What happens to the wage slave after the submission reaches the core? After being beaten into stupidity? Then she can't be a wage slave anymore! She is obsolete. She can't even stud. What can she do?

Today I'm home sick. Today there was important work to be done at my job but I'm not there doing it. I can't transport myself there. I can't make myself think the necessary lying thoughts. I throw in the towel. I surrender. I concede. I am defeated. I can't keep up the fight.

I am too hungry, too angry, too lonely, too tired.

The blind date 20 or so years ago when I was single, being an artist having left Machi and Ori, told me the saddest story in the world (sadder than my own) and now It pops into my mind. (This was during the time when Ori and I were apart, the time when I was busy destroying Machi's family, looking for what? For a self that surely wasn't to be found in vegetarian restaurants with blind dates who were way too tall, too weird, too different than me.)
He had a wife he adored and both of them were devoted to a left party, one of the many communist sects. He wasn't clear on why they were both purged. His wife had been a red diaper baby, raised I think in the South by a pair of communists. After the purge she became agoraphobic. She wouldn't leave the house, then she wouldn't leave her room, then she wouldn't leave her closet. Not even to piss and shit. Somehow he figured out a way to take care of that. He didn't specify and I didn't want to picture it over my vegetarian mexican food. As a child the communist father or the mother used to lock her in a closet for discipline. When they lived in a suburb she wanted their front yard to be a meadow so they didn't mow the lawn. There were wild flowers and butterflies and they had their meals together in their meadow. But the neighbors wanted them to have a normal lawn. They accused them of bringing down the property values and defacing the neighborhood. They were hounded out. After I don't know how long hiding in the closet the wife killed herself.
Sometimes I imagine myself like the wife. I can't make myself roll out from under the bed where I hide, negotiate the small talk, the meeting talk, the thinking in between the meetings.
After all these years I haven't figured out how the burocrazy works. Maybe it isn't me! Maybe it's irrational and systemic and beyond my control. But X has mastered it. She makes it work. She has attained burocrazy hegemony. I imagine then that I might have as well. Except that I am not willing to channel my inner slavemaster. Is it that I don't have one? The other day I stepped briefly out of a meeting I was leading to make one of my job search phone calls, and when I came back in they (my subordinates) were in animated conversation, having thoughts that were fresh and dynamic about what we'd been planning (the very training I am absent from today),and I had a glimpse of my own repressive, oppressive presence. They thought much better when I was out of the room!
That glimpse, and that there is someone there who is smarter and better than me at what we do and really should be the one who is leading, or that either because some of them are intimidated by me and one of them intimidates me, I experience myself as unendurably alone, add up to my present sickness.
I have symptoms: stuffy, sore throaty, very tired. But I don't know whether or not I'm truly sick. Because I'd rather be sick than go to work and have those terrible feelings that I am about to be erased by the group, that with each word somebody else speaks I am being erased, that I have to show something of myself or disappear, and that whatever I end up showing is a lie.
I started out being a Freirean teacher. I started out being a revolutionary. I started out believing in true words. How did it come to this? Every word out of my mouth is a lie. Every word I write is wrong. There isn't going to be any true word. There isn't going to be any poem. There isn't going to be any Personal Ethnography of Wage Slavery.
There isn't going to be any family.
There was no mother.
There was no father.

What happens to the wage slave who can't sell herself anymore?