There are simple fears and larger ones. Insecurity driving so many of them, but what does it come to? We are scared, scared of loss, scared of being replaced.
If, as I am, you've got a few things going on out of the hetero/neuro-normative (bi, trans, polyamorous/RA, autistic, is there anything else? It'll come to me; oh yeah, teacher, that counts right?), then you get a few of the fears going on. If your partner meets someone new, you get the Fear. Just a bit. No matter how many jealousy techniques you have going on, no matter how much you face your Abyss, your Chapel Perilous, you're still going to get the stabby feeling every so often.
And the form of it is so endlessly changeable. We all have a universe of them to wake up to; are they better than me? Younger? Hotter? Look better in heels? (Not the last one, I look better in heels than all of you). Or perhaps not as crazy? Less inclined to slur words after 1030 at night? Able to take things not completely literally and not to recite production details for The Prisoner during after dinner chat?
Perhaps it's not new relationship fear. Perhaps it's the fear at the end of the street, the sense that when you leave your house, you don't come home again. The fear of getting lost in yourself. Once, saddened and drunk, I sat down on a street corner at 3AM and considered how easy it would be just to stay there forever. I was a long way from home, literally and figuratively.
What is it? I can't speak for you, but what is the nature of my fear? I interrogate it. I talk to it, coax it out, provoke it with images. It's my fear, mine and mine alone...but maybe it might speak to some of you as well. And as I talked to fright, I understood a few tiny aspects of part of my Shadow (one of my partners is SO into Jung).
That shadow is the shadow of Forgetting.
I am scared of being Forgotten.
Being forgotten...my gods, all our culture is devoted to telling us that this is the worst possible outcome for a human life! Abramic religions make reference to being forgotten by various Old Testament style manifestations. The rise of printed media fills us with dread - what if we aren't written down? The postal service! We are forgotten! No letters today. Empty mail slot on Valentine's day, Christmas, Birthday. They never wrote back after the interview. We lost your test results. There has been an error, please re-submit your details. What was your name again?
Dickens, telling us not to forget the poor, reminding us that the economically lost are forgotten too. Remember the dead of Verdun and a hundred thousand other places, but live in terror of the shadow of the Unknown Soldier, symbol of the worst thing; we lost your son in the mud. Never seen again.
The force of ages. The weight of years. Our history is designed to get lost in, and we now fill it with fame and notoriety. To be Remembered, and this won't be a simplistic rant on the transitory nature of celebrity, with all those classist overtones. Because why do half of us write and paint, if not to be Remembered, to cling to some form of existence as imagined/implied author?
Oh, there are many people who act in the sheer joy of creation - I'm lucky enough to know so many, but what about me? Does the fact that I operate behind a pseudonym absolve me of a desire to be Remembered? I'm guessing that my deep fears suggest not, not at all.
To be Forgotten. To not matter to those you love the most. Nonsense, I know rationally. But I'm human, mainly. My mind generates odd little lizard thoughts. Tells me that those I adore are human too...I will drift from their attention, a little further each time...
But here's the thing.
We say Being Forgotten is terrible.
We're wrong.
Memory is our ego. Memory is our desire to hang on. Can you name every pupil in your English class when you were 13? Can you name every cloud you ever looked at? The shapes of them? Our lives are generated by processes of physics and biology, which can be understood mathematically, as can a cloud; we see no purpose in memorising each facet of the sky. Let them move on.
Not that I want to forget. I want to recall every last possible second of my loves. I want to remember everything, till my mind cascades. But I can't, anymore than the world recalls the name of the bricklayer who built the wall of this room 112 years ago.
My loves will not forget me, though they will get distracted every now and again. They are very, very attractive people. They are likely to get frequently distracted. This makes me happy. I can be forgotten for an afternoon. Old friends will think on me less and it won't change me where I am right now.
When we choose to be forgotten, perhaps only for a weekend or an hour, it's one of the most powerful things we can accomplish. The strongest moment of being ourselves.
We choose to be ourselves, the limit of our own senses, with nothing to support us, no illusions of immortality. We Are.
I can't always manage this; I'm not always that strong. But I understand a little better...even though I just wrote all this knowing very few people will ever read it, perhaps not even any of those it was intended for, that it will get lost. I write this because it makes me feel better to write it.
That said, I still intend to raise statues in my name, so maybe don't take any of this too seriously?
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