It was brought to my attention yesterday that I say this a lot. And until my friend said something about it (not in a negative way, just a “so funny, that is your line” kind of way) I never really realized it.
I guess if my life had a motto that might be it. It kinds sums it all up for me. A place that I seem to return to over and over and over again. Me doing my best to live life, hitting what feels like obstacle after obstacle and me feeling like “FUCK THAT!” is really the only fair response.
First of all the word fuck is powerful. Studies have been done and results tallied and reported. The word carried gravitas. It carries depth and weight. For me, it immediately gives me a feeling of power, when I feel most incompetent, inept, foundering, lost, confused, unsure, lonely, scared. All of the above at the same time. FUCK THAT kind of sums up what I do with all of those feelings.
Now “THAT” pretty much covers everything. You. Men. My kids. The job. Slow drivers in the fast lane. The dogs doing dog things that irritate me. People who just seem to turn and walk out of my life without a care or concern. People whom I thought were friends that were apparently only placeholders. Or perhaps it was I that was the placeholder, the time filler...
FUCK THAT really seems to be a good cover for my sensitivity and how often my feelings get hurt by everyone, like all the time. I think I have developed this trite, and now brought to my attention, over used saying. It is my alphabetic bandaid for when I am injured emotionally. And I didn’t even know it until yesterday...
FUCK THAT!
Except what I see now is that FUCK THAT doesn’t really help do anything but disconnect me from my feelings. It doesn’t change them really, it just allows for me to redirect them in a safer direction. Into a historic response to life and all the things that happen to us that hurt so very much. It is a cover story for how much and how deeply the things that happen to us, maim us. Or maybe it is just me. I don’t think so because I have, so far in life, never found anything I have felt or thought that was just me. I have always found at least one other human that feels or has felt the way that I do or did about something.
I realized yesterday that FUCK THAT is the thing I say before I emotionally disconnect with someone who I have been trying, albeit now evidently unsuccessfully, to connect with. Just writing that made my stomach do that thing it does when I know I have just spoken a truth that I did not want to feel or acknowledge. That some really horrific truth has just come into my consciousness. Now the very hard work of not shoving it away, holding it down, and attempting to bury it under a million FUCK THATS. Wow, that is actually acutely painful.
But like everything else in my life that is painful, I just have to find a way to make peace with it. It is the only thing to do with other beings: make amends to them or forgive them. And I hate this fact more than anything in life really. If I was not on this spiritual growth tangent, I would very loudly say FUCK THAT! But as I have now been enlightened, FUCK THAT is only a poor cover story for me. And now that my attention has been gained, my eyes opened, I am now aware of how very thin it is.
FUCKING THAT doesn’t really help get me anywhere at all. Except a very old place that I have been for eons and do not enjoy, like, or want. And I didn’t see it until right fucking now. FUCK THAT doesn’t really help at all, except now it will be a lightning rod for me to see that I am wounded and I need to stop, drop and roll and put out the flames that have been lit by another’s conduct that has just injured me in some way, shape or form. And after I have successfully extinguished the flames of ego and cover up, I need to just sit with the burns left, and assess the damage.
Perhaps this time I have been successful in getting the flames out before they really got going, so there is no lingering damage. Or perhaps I just have some superficial wounds that will heal with a little attention and some time. Or maybe, perhaps, FUCK THAT so burned me that I have charred right through all the nerve endings and that is why I am able to go on as if nothing hurts, I have disconnected from the source and therefore been led to believe that FUCK THAT didn’t really wound me so deeply, the evidence that that is a lie, etched permanently on my flesh.
Someone told me the other day that I was an over thinker. And that may be true. But what if everyone else is an under thinker? What if other people’s lack of examination is really the issue? What if others failure to examine themselves and all their facets is really the underlying issue? Likely it is both, my overactive imagination telling story after story that is loosely based on fact. And perhaps your unwillingness or inability to really look at what you do and why and just how very painful that might be to me, or someone else.
I am not sure why my long standing coping strategy of FUCK THAT is being rendered impotent. I just know that it is. And I am unclear and unsure what might come in its place. FUCK THIS seems like a ready alternative, but unfortunately that, I can see, seems to have the same long standing effect. Which in a word FUCKING sucks.
So I start this day at 1 am, awakened from a fitful sleep because of a couple of people’s behavior that I find troubling and apparently my head thought it would be a great idea to get up and overthink everything. I can tell you it is only now 2:09 am and I have a going inventory of several people whose current behavior is troubling to me and makes me want to run. Shut the fuck down and run screaming from the confines of whatever is left of our relation while yelling FUCK THAT! as loudly as I possibly can.
But no. I am instead sitting in my bed, writing this all down. Evidence of my internal conflict and crazy to share with whomever dares to read it come morning. Well I guess technically, it is morning now, but I mean the part of morning that less crazy and sleepless people experience.
And me, I am left after the words have emptied themselves onto this page, I am left with what remains. Disappointment, some heartbreak, uncertainty, grief, sadness and a very strong inclination to run. I really detest being so fragile, so delicate in my interiority. I have spent my lifetime thus far attempting to toughen up and deny this squishiness that is my true center. But today, FUCK THAT being stripped from me, leaves me only with that soft, supple, spongey interior that I have worked so very hard to avoid all my life. Just me and my quaggy interior that feels so porous that I might get sucked in and never be seen or heard from again.
When people asked what became of me, they would say that no one is really sure. She seemed to be doing just fine, then one day it appears that her insides just consumed her, drown her in the pulpous flesh of her own soul.
Overly dramatic I know.
But this is how I FEEL without FUCK THAT being there to save me from this experience of myself. FUCK THAT was always at the ready to smooth it over and provide some support and structure, some sinew in the ever present bogginess of my being.
So that is what I am left with this morning in the wee hours. A soggy mess. Me, I am a squidgy shape of myself. Sitting here tapping out the pain that I know not what to do with. Giving it to all of you in some sort of verbal explosive vomiting of my poor scared and terrified soul. A soul that has shed yet another cover...and lies barren, exposed, and not really loving that too much.
But beneath the pulpy remnants of who I was when I began this missive, I can see the nascent budding of something stronger, something harder and less spongelike than I was just an hour ago. I worry that the old stiffness will return leaving me feeling hollowed out and kiln dried. Brittle and hard and unbendable.
But this morning as my fingers tap out pain and frustration and disappointment and fear, something else is evident beneath all the FUCK THAT as it evaporates with each word. I can barely identify it really. It is just this foreign feeling. This ill used and poorly formed self concept of worthiness that clamors for sunlight and fiber. I can feel it but I cannot see it yet. I just know it is there much like I know my dresser sits at the end of my bed, even though in all this darkness I cannot actually view it.
Something new is taking root and while I cannot see its shape and form yet, I know that it is there. Existing in the dark periphery of my soul. Undetectable for all these years buried under a million FUCK THATS. Now laid open and offered up as the soft white underbelly of my actual truth...people hurt me. And terrify me. And wound me with their carelessness. I am sensitive. And I am tired of pretending, finally, that I am otherwise.
It is this same sensitivity that causes me to run into ancient woods and fall in love with trees. Hug them tightly to my body. Kiss their bark and gaze upwards into the overstory. It is this same sensitiveness that causes me to turn toward my children and hug them tightly for no apparent reason except that I am keenly aware that one of us needs this right fucking now. It is the thing that gives me the ability to see the energy shift and change and spill out all over the room, and gives me the ability to acknowledge it, to feel it and see it as it gently meanders its way across the floor.
I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want to be this sensitive. Believe me, I would much rather have things glance off me, and skitter away and hit the distant wall with a pleasant thud. But that is not my life. That is not who I am.
If there is one thing I can say that I know about life and living so far is that it has been a constantly slicing away of all the shit that I have heaped on top of myself in some misguided effort to provide an armor or preventative gear. And life, it seems, is hell bent on ensuring that in the end, whenever that might be, I am left standing naked, raw and triumphantly myself even if that leaves me with only dogs and cats and goats as witnesses.
And the old me, the one that I woke up with this morning at 1 am, she would have said FUCK THAT! And gotten on with it. But who I am now no longer has any FUCK THATs left. Instead I am left only with FUCK!
FUCK this is painful
FUCK this hurts
FUCK there is nothing I can do with this other than to feel it
FUCK I hate that
And so begins Friday, with many fucks given, but no FUCK THAT’s left. And so it is...whatever that means.
FUCK THAT! goes down in flames...
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