Manticores and Tsetse Flies

My friend Jeff made this image for me, when he was thinking about the trip to Uganda I'm planning for the end of November. Kind of a resonant doodle. It's interesting to me that this is what emerged for him... something about one of the ways he sees me. It really sort of wrenches at me... evokes thoughts about the ways that we want to be seen, the gaps between what we feel we can really live into and how other people might see us.

It's been a really emotionally overladen few months. Some intense joy, and some energy for doing things after more or less finishing my phd (still just finalizing some tedious proofreader type changes) that is simultaneously about a Great Unblocking and a bit of manic snatching at all sorts of possibilities. Mostly all of this coalesces around different travels, and the travels as a kind of enactment of different versions of where I want to really shape myself.

I never really blogged very much about my trip to Europe -- I doodled while I was there, but didn't write much about the meaning I was making of it. It was too... active... in some ways. I think the basic narrative is that I went to Germany partly to face some demons, my trip through the cave of Jung, as remembered through the writing of Robertson Davies. Facing self and my manticore.

I think the trip was about my own myth-making, a desire to grab the pen, stop annotating old stories and start writing new versions. There was a lot about the two years we spent in Germany that was "formative" in all senses of the word -- my parents' marriage broke up, and I learned about anger and a kind of humiliating sense of exposure, of Wrongness, somehow. A sense that at 9, I was radiating a kind of misery that the small community around us didn't know how to handle, a kind of misery that I sort of tucked around me like a sleeping bag and never really learned to be buoyant about.

So many core stories in that time, and so many of them continually looping back through my life. I conceived of this jaunt after having a powerful conversation with my friend P about where we develop the rifts of free-floating anxiety in the soft jelly of our brains, give it words that become the shorthand for every other fear we have. "Abandonment, invisibility, not being taken care of" -- all of these fears that we learned when we were kids to be hyper-vigilant for, and never learned how to let that flag down. Preemptive pushing at the walls in some futile attempt to avert -- which of course, paradoxically, just exhausts the people we love. An endless loop.

So I decided that visiting The Scene might free some of this. And in many ways -- it did. The fact that I couldn't "feel" the memory of place, or recognize the site of where I lived except as if from a dream or a novel -- this was really freeing. This was the building I lived in -- and while I could recognize it, I had the street number wrong all these years, and I didn't ... feel it. Certainly didn't have the sensations that I thought I might, the whimpering on my parents' bed while a babysitter tried uselessly to address my broken wrist by wrapping it in gauze. (Kind of shocked when I think about it, that my parents -- and other people's -- would go away for days to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia and leave us with 16 and 17 year olds who didn't have cars or any phones!)

It was a good thing to do, this trip, even if I didn't have any epic kinds of revelations. The dimness of the memories really shouted at me -- THESE STORIES DON'T HAVE TO BE THE DEFINING ONES! Which is, I guess, a revelation of sorts -- even if not all that poetic.

I think, though, more than this, the trip underlined for me that all of this rewriting, claiming desired self, living into what I want to live into -- is actually an ACTIVE process of rewriting. There are reminders, and milestones, and frames, and metaphors -- stories like "I went to germany because I don't want to keep reliving some of those 9 year old self stories anymore" -- and those are good things. But the insights and the frames don't change things unless you keep them active.

I had a crappy week last week, for a bunch of reasons -- a road trip with F that should have been kind of magical was instead ragged and tiring for both of us, partly because I let my old anxiety stories be completely foregrounded, couldn't pull forward some of the other ones I'm writing. The familiar misery that comes out of anxiety dominated, and then I looped into the kind of remorse that just keeps me fixated on the thing that upset me in the first place. Not a good pattern. No magic to the insight -- just recognition that there is always a need to keep writing, actively create. I was just talking about this with my younger sister S -- that growing up is a process of actively learning and stretching and making decisions -- that it's not, to borrow an image from Carolyn Knapp, like sticking a turkey in the oven and watching it emerge roasted without any more effort.

When I step back, all of this travel IS about a new self I'm crafting, the baby steps toward living the kind of adventurous life that I've armchair-envied reading endless books about women riding their bicycles around the world solo for years. The Uganda trip is part of that -- there are some things that are kind of worrying about it (ranging from the obvious discomforts of travel in a land filled with car crashes and malaria to concern about making it productive for the work with the kids, to hoping that the history with the founder of the orphanage, who is no longer involved, doesn't lead to some Drama). But I'm also trying to grab at the adventure, trying to add a trip to Bwindi National Park to track gorillas, trying to not just go along for the ride.

I've been reading one of Jane Goodall's books about her work with chimpanzees in Tanzania, and I'm just blown away by her casual comments like "my blood became immune to the poison of the tsetse fly, and I no longer swelled up with every bite." So much "soldiering on" encompassed in that tiny statement. I take it to heart, and vow to keep trying to be that person who no longer swells up with every bite.