Sunday, June 10, 2012

dichotomy: survivor v. whore



This painting was titled "Survivor" when I completed it last autumn. It was Archer who named it. I was playing around with generic names like 'dancing girl' - names that just described the picture, without speaking to the power or emotion of it. I had painted it, but I didn't know what to think of it, yet. Then he suggested "Survivor." That's what it made him think of. He saw me in that painting. He saw me as a survivor.

It fit the painting. The name, once spoken in front of the painting, latched onto the artwork like an acrylic seal, forevermore inseparable. It stuck.

~

Archer bought that painting from me last November. He loves it.

~

Then, it happened. That thing, which I've mentioned before but never been able to talk about. Yeah. That.

Last December. I had flown to Iowa, with my child, to visit my mother. Archer was supposed to follow a few days later, so he could meet my family. I still am not going into the nitty gritty on this one. In a sense, it has become another blocked memory. I recall vividly the pain, the fear, feeling-of-rock-bottom, and sound of Archer - angry, righteous and drunk, his voice turning the phone into a weapon. He was right; I had lied to him. Earlier in our relationship, I had cheated on him. I had excuses, but not reasons. I had been fearful. I hadn't trusted him. I hadn't believed that, if given the truth, that he would understand it or believe it, or love me. And maybe he wouldn't have, I don't know. But of course he deserved to decide that for himself. At the time, I was in a furtive sort of survival mode; I was reeling from ending my second marriage, and reeling more from having been in that marriage at all. I didn't trust anybody. I didn't yet believe he loved me at all. I suspected I was an experiment to him. He was embedded in the traditional, vanilla, straight-man, suburban mindset, and he expressed a desire to understand my very-different background. His interest was guided by a genuine desire to understand the woman he already loved, but at the time I thought he was only interested in dissecting me. When he was done, when he had passed the negative verdict I expected, I would be yesterday's news, just another fucked up kid with no future and no value. Someone to tell jokes about at the next suburban gathering. I didn't believe in his integrity. I didn't believe in his love.

All these: excuses, but nothing that actually excuses the act. There is no reason for treating a person the way I treated him. Even if I had been right about him, I should have been right in my own actions.

I was too weak.

In the night before Archer was to fly to Iowa, these things came to a head; he decided not to come. Our relationship seemed unlikely to survive the week. Devastated does not begin to describe what I felt, having finally been forced to face how my fears had affected my treatment of him. I realized, then, that I had finally found a lover who was everything he said he was - trustworthy, true, driven by his ethics, and in love with me - and I had pushed that lover away in the most dramatic, decisive way possible. He should have left me then. By some miracle, he didn't. I considered leaving him, for several days. I believed he should have left me, and I was prepared to leave him if he lingered. Not because I couldn't bear to face the shame of being with the person I had wronged - if there's anything I am accustomed to, it's shame - but because I believed it would be right for him to leave me, and I wanted very much to do "right." I have never been so blessed as I was in the moment he decided to stay, and I lacked the courage to leave. Maybe it wasn't so much a lack of courage as a realization that this was my chance - he actually understood why I had lied, that I did love him, and that I was very, very wounded; he actually Loved me. I wasn't an experiment. I wasn't a project or an orphan to be saved. He wanted to help.

I came home from Iowa the day after New Year's Day, spiritually bloodied, literally shaken, and completely fearful. But also, stronger. Not stronger yet, but with a glimmer of hope that I could be strong, and that I could be the person I wanted to be. I don't remember having ever been so certain that I needed to and would work to become me. It was a tenuous start, but I knew I had to do it. I was afraid of doing it alone, but would have if it had been necessary. I'm very, very lucky that it wasn't necessary. Archer has been there, every step of the way, and his support has become stronger and more capable as he understands more of my psychoses.

~

This was written shortly after Archer told me he had renamed my painting "Eala the Whore."

Eala is me. That's my spiritual name, and the name I sign my paintings with.

Eala the Whore. He renamed it while I was Iowa, when he was angry. Three weeks later, he told me. He mentioned it casually, like 'yeah, that's what I was thinking when I was angry.' It wasn't a big deal to him. I cried when he told me. Fresh salt on a grave wound that had hardly begun to heal. A reminder of the pain I had caused him.

I don't think he still thinks of the painting that way. He's gone back to calling it Survivor, I think. But I can't. Every time I see it, I think of the new name, and I cringe inside. It's a symbol of the pain I inflicted on him, and myself. I can't look at that painting anymore. It hurts too much.

~

Somehow, I have to find a way to face it. I have to find a way to rectify that dichotomy. Am I a survivor, or a whore? This is the next step on my journey. I don't know where my foot will land.

I asked my cards how I go about healing this hurt.

This was their answer:

1 Fire Dragon
2 Otter
3 Owl

Remember, the first card is the instigator, the second is the emotional manifestation, and the third is the concrete manifestation. 

The Fire Dragon energizes us and encourages us to overcome obstacles; he ignites inner fires to give us the energy we need to face problems and solve them.

The Otter is an invitation to stop worrying too much, to relax and let life happen. Remember to play; it's ok to 'be a kid again' sometimes. Try not to force things to happen unnaturally.

The Owl's story is one of overcoming obstacles, but not just overcoming them - the Owl turns disadvantages into advantages, and by so doing, succeeds.

I'm not sure, yet, how to use that advice. Am I worrying too much about how Archer saw that painting when he was angry? Can I really just - let it go? Or... can I overcome this hurt by embracing the memory of what happened as a stepping stone, rather than looking at it as a weapon?

... I'm going to sleep on this one. And ask Archer. I need his wisdom right now.

7 comments:

  1. That was indeed the thing that turned our relationship around. It gave him a better understanding of the world I came from, and made him realize that it wasn't a toxic world, as he had believed before. It was a major turning point, and the first thing that actually solidified our relationship. Until that event, we had a very tenuous hold on "us." We probably wouldn't have made it, without that happening.

    I hadn't realized that it was three months ago... although, I think the 10 March event was actually our second such soiree? I can't remember for sure.

    Anyway, here's what I decided on all this: I'm good at letting things go; in the past, I have completely ignored patterned and intentional hurts dealt by people who weren't half the human being that Archer is... and now, I'm hanging on to something that was NOT intended to be cruel, and is not part of a pattern - it's actually counter to Archer's behavioral patterns, because he's extremely concerned with my welfare in all ways. I need to just let this go.

    My powers of denial are astounding, and this time I get to use them for Good!

    And Dr. Luscious, no sadness allowed for you. :-*

    ReplyDelete
  2. The dichotomy you have described, between the survivor and the whore, does not exist for me in that way. I perceive sex work, especially sex work that is degrading, as the epithet "whore" implies, as the ultimate in survival. When a person is reduced to their most essential resources, their body, their dignity, their human sexual response, when a person is reduced to using such base tools, literally and societally naked, to make a living, well, to me that is the ultimate in "survival" economies.

    The horrible things that have peeled you apart, alienated you from people, men, even while propelling your empty shell of a body and emotional zombie presence toward them, ESP. Husband #2, these things put you into survival mode. Your actions were cruel to me, callous and low. This is how people function in survival mode, one is ready to sell anything, because everything is impermanent. It's like burning your furnitu

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's like burning your furniture to cook your food because you know that as soon as you go to sleep someone will come and steal it anyway. In the survivors world, nothing is sacred, because everything has been raped already.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The great pride a survivor takes is solely in thwarting what always feels like imminent annihilation. The pains and insults become badges of pride, " look what I can withstand!". "I thought surely this bit would have snapped me in two, but look! I'm still here! Hmm let's see how much MORE I can take! ". It has resonance in some BDSM sub themes. But it is a perverse celebration of the rule of evil in ones life, it becomes an enabler of such evil, being stically durable in the face of evil and enabling it via tacit approval, become one in action and effect, while the one mindset holds itself high in its embrace of utter shit

    ReplyDelete
  5. I was with you until the third section of your comment... for me, there was no pride in surviving those events. I wasn't sure I had survived, really, because I knew I was progressively less intact after each one. I had not survived as a whole person. I had lost parts of myself, until there was very little left. There was no pride in having 'survived' in that manner. There wasn't even relief. Instead there was a very deep sort of depression (little d, not the illness, but the emotion), because I knew I wasn't surviving in the spiritual sense.

    I do think I understand what you're saying, and I've seen that represented in others, but I don't think it applies wholly to me. Maybe in part, but not in whole. By that, I mean that I have adopted that mantle of pride, as a sort of protection against the scrutiny of others, but it was barely skin deep. It wasn't a true emotion.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Then you were and are even less diminished by that life

    ReplyDelete
  7. You were well on your way out of "hell" on your own, before we met. You had had enough, but had not yet found a clear new path to take up your decisive departure upon. You were not half rotted, as I have said: you were always pure and good, that's why the bad stuff never made sense to you, you survived, but not in a way or in a world or according to norms that were natural to you. You were a stranger in a strange land, waiting to come home

    ReplyDelete