Breaking & Entering

When I was a youth, maybe 10 to 14, my brother and I had a game that we played. It probably isn’t the kind of game that most kids should play. Most of the games my brother and I played were survival skills in disguise. We learned what plants were edible, how to find shelter, and how to fight. Most of the time, I was the one who lost the fight. While my mother was incredibly emotionally destructive, she never locked me out of the house like my dad did to my brother. My mom hit me for a while, but when I learned to fight back after a few years of my brother’s tutelage, she cut that shit out. Her attacks thereafter were largely targeted to disintegrate my will to fight back. My dad, however, was physically destructive. He beat him until my brother fought back. My dad locked my brother into small spaces until my brother learned to retaliate. Then, he started locking my brother out of places. My brother taught himself how to break in and, in his weird way, he wanted to care for me by teaching me what he learned. My childhood reflects a strong feeling of being trapped. So, I learned how to break into places.

In high school, I jumped on the growing trend of gothic style. There were a couple of girls at school who also displayed that style, so I tried to befriend them. Unfortunately I am terrible with the human equation and they found me really annoying. I was banned from being goth, as they said to me: “If you don’t listen to Marilyn Manson and like scaring people, then you’re not goth!” I always thought MM seemed like an asshole, and I wasn’t big on scaring people for a thrill. I guess I wasn’t goth after all. After high school, I met the third goth person I’d ever seen beside the two girls at school. This time, it was a guy who worked at a store my friend and I frequented. I tried to form a connection but he said that if I didn’t keep skeletons of animals in my house, I was not goth. Well, I respect the lifeforce of animals and have been oscillating between vegetarian, pescatarian, and eating chicken occasionally for the past 25 years. I don’t keep real skeletons, animal or otherwise, anywhere in my home and never have. I guess I was 0 for 2 on goth authenticity by these standards, again despite my continued aesthetic and music preferences. At 24, I was DJing at my Wednesday goth club gig (usually playing 2 or 3 gigs a week), and I saw one of the two girls from high school. I didn’t recognize her, she reminded me of who she had been. She asked if we could hang out because, back then, being friends with a DJ meant being invited to the best parties, meeting bands, and knowing the cool people. When I told her I wasn’t interested, I felt like I had accomplished something. I had out-gothed all the nay-sayers — done precisely what they said I had no right to do which was, essentially, be myself. Sorry, I win.

Part of my mom’s emotional abuse (that worked insanely well for a very long time) was to tell me that I wasn’t skilled enough to do anything well. She was always better at me than everything I tried to do, or so she said. I told her I wanted to do art, she told me she always drew well and took it up again. I told her I wanted to be a mom, and she told me how great of a mother she had been and that I would do well to learn from her example. I told her I wanted to write and she showed me the the memoir she was writing in her spare time. The shitty part of emotional abuse from childhood into your thirties is that you don’t recognize the abuser’s gaslighting as a blockade for your abilities, you instead believe them to be truths about yourself. Her biggest lie about me was that I was lazy and never stuck with anything. Once I saw these lies for what they were, I was enraged. How dare she try to confine me? My anger at her pushed me to do everything she said I could never do. Well mom, I went to UC Irvine on a full scholarship, graduated in the top 5%, taught a class there, got two writing fellowships, and won a school award. I broke those stupid shackles you placed on me. What’s more, I became everything you never could be. Ha! I think I win again.

I find that the truth of me is that I am only limited by what I believe of myself. It isn’t about what I’ve been capable of doing, because I never felt capable of anything (see above). I’ve spent the past week feeling like a failure, having been rejected from the following applications this year alone: three workshops, six publications (and 2 pending), three jobs, and seven graduate programs (with the final rejection on its way). Man, it is hard to be told AGAIN and AGAIN that I don’t stack up. With such a mountain of evidence that I am a truly terrible writer and my mom’s words echoing eternally inside me, I have to accept that maybe it is true that I don’t have what it takes. It seems that no one wants anything to do with a hybrid horror-memoir writer talking about trauma and domestic violence. I wonder who their other horror-memoirist is? Maybe someone who knows how to write better prepositions than me? Or are they not neurodiverse, and can look great on paper talking about themselves with all the support of a family behind them? Or, maybe, it really is just me that they don’t like. That is what I’ve believed this week.

Because of these rejections, I am convinced that I am actually a worse writer than a 19-year-old in Nebraska who had his mom post his acceptances online and got into SIX PROGRAMS (through MFA Draft if you know of it). What in the world could this kid be writing that blows the underwear off of six of the top programs in the nation at nineteen?! A person so timid of the world that they need their mom to post for them online… What?! I have to shake my head and laugh because that poor kid is going to get rolled by this world, by this career. While I want to turn inward and blame myself, just as good ol’ mom taught me to, I have to take a moment and laugh at these programs. This poor kid is what they are resting their hopes on while telling me that I cannot write well enough despite my awards, publications, and praise. The programs have missed out on a person who, at 40, decided to stick it to my mom by not only doing exactly what she said I couldn’t do, but by absolutely fucking slaughtering her limitations on me. Just like with my mom, I really could have done so much with the help a program could have given. But, again, I guess I am made to take the hard way. Who knows? Maybe I never will make them eat their words and continue to prove my mom wrong as much as I want to, but I can tell you one thing: I’ve gotten very good at breaking things, expectations are my specialty. If I can win, I will win. Sure, I was content to be a quaint little TA, thrilled even. I would have continued to be what professors have called a “brilliant student” in a cozy little cohort. I could have held the emotionally delicate, desperate for any ego stroke, and told them the good points of their dazed manuscript. I was happy to do things their way. But, frankly, my true nature is a blood-thirsty monster who learned how to pick locks at ten years old. I am someone who tore apart every limitation ever put upon me. Do you really think your conventions can ever truly hold me? I will get in one way or another and when I do, I will win.