In the last post, I talked about how an ex dumped me because I was honest about my opinion of Pulp Fiction. After he dumped me, we remained friends. Well, let me be honest. I wanted to get back together with him–why, I do not know–
Actually, I do. It’s because my mother hammered it into my head since I was very young that a girl’s sole purpose was to, in order, A) get a man. And, yes, specifically a man. That was made excruciatingly clear when I came out to her as bisexual. She’s a psychologist and had been very accepting of my cousin when he came out to her as gay. That was a few days before I came out to her.
When I came out to her, she reacted very badly. She made a face that I have now come to think of as sucking on lemons. It’s her reaction when she’s upset about something. Or disgusted. Or any other negative feeling. She will not flat-out say that she doesn’t like something (that’s cultural, too), but she will make it very clear to anyone paying attention. I can read her like a book. Every pause, every sigh, every flinch–I know what she means by them.
The first thing she said to me when I told her I was bi (and, by the way, I learned over time never to tell her anything important) was, “But you’ve always been so boy crazy!” Which doesn’t really matter in the context of being bisexual. I answered, “I still am. I’m just girl crazy as well.” Not a great answer for many reasons including limiting myself to the binary, but it was the best I could come up with at the time. Now, I would tell her that it had nothing to do with being bisexual. Acutally, I wouldn’t have told her in the first place because, frankly, it’s none of her business.
I think it was Captain Awward who said that reasons are for reasonable people. If she did not come up with it, she at least says it regularly. I completely agree. We want to be kind to the people in our lives, yes, but we also need to be clear-eyed about the people in our lives. From the time I was a tiny child, my mother made it clear that I was supposed to be a clone of her. Even though she was miserable beacuse she had made choices that her mother had coerced her to make. Not physically, but verbally and emotionally.
I was so fucked up for the first three decades of my life beacuse I was so sure I was a complete and abject failure for not living up to my mother’s standards. Once I realized that it was ok to not want what she had (and resented having), it made life much easier. But, it also made it harder because I had so much rage at my mother for pushing her shit on me. And I had to find a way to detach from her without it tearing me apart.
I realized that the only way for me to deal with her was to not think of her as my mother. If I viewed her in that category, then the anger flowed through me. Along with the pain, disappointment, and the buried sadness. If I just thought of her as a deeply flawed old woman who was in the final part of her journey and who was never going to change, one who had been given a bad hand and never tried to make it better, one who at age eighty had to struggle with a husband with ever-worsening dementia, I could find a modicum of compassion for her.
As long as I didn’t allow my brain or heart to think of her as my mother. I had to keep that line drawn in bright red and never get close to it or I would lose my mind.
Back to my ex. We were great in bed together, but we were terrible as a couple. I can see that now. I knew it on some level then, but I ignored it because he was a man with a pulse. That was all that was required for him to be better than nothing. That’s not doing him any favors, either, by the way. But it certainly wasn’t doing me any.
His childish reaction to my opinions on three movies he really liked and I didn’t scarred me. I refused to talk about my movie opinions witnh my next boyfriend because I was skittish. Until we saw The Matrix together (again, many years after it came out and at a midnight theater. There were like five people in the theater). I had avoided seeing the movie because my first Taiji teacher, a major creep and shady guy, had gushed about it being the ultimate Taiji movie. Everything he said was cringy and eye-rolling, including how it’s such a groundbreaking movie.
I went to see it with my then-boyfriend who liked it, but wasn’t pushing me to like it. It was…fine? A decent action movie? I guess, but nothing mindshattering. I was enjoying the pulchritude of the leads (that’s what I do when a movie isn’t grabbing me) until near the end. Neo dies and Trinity kisses him, which brings him back to life. I bolted upright in my chair, then actually stood up and blurted out, “That’s bullshit!” Why? Because for a movie that is all about stepping outside of the matrix, they used the tiredest and hoariest of tropes–a kiss bringing someone back to life.
My then-boyfriend was not offended at all, but he did pull me back down and shushed me. Fair. Even though there were only three or four people in the theater, they should be able to watch the movie in peace.
I have no idea where this post is going. It started out being about gatekeping, but quickly went off the rails. That’s my style, though. If there’s something in my brain, I ‘m going to talk about it. In this case, it’s me being a weirdo and not really giving a shit about it.
It does mean, however, that I don’t really talk about what I like and don’t like except with close friends. I see what happens when someone goes against the grain, and it’s not something I need to take on. I don’t give a shit about Star Wars, for example. More to the point, I hated it when I first saw it. Granted, I was a child, but any time I’ve seen parts of it later on, it doesn’t appeal to me at all. It’s white people doing white people shit–in space. Any time the basic premise is white people doing white people shit, I don’t care. I just don’t.
I know someone is my people if they don’t freak out when I don’t like what they like and are actively interested in what I do like–even if it’s not something of interest to them. That doesn’t mean I have to be allowed to go on and on about it, but at least ask a perfunctory question and listen to the answer. That isn’t too much to ask.