essaysbysean.blogspot.com
Welcome
to my life and blog. I see Marina Nemat has come out with another book. Her
first book, Prisoner of Tehran, I had
read with the safely channeled emotions of a survivor, like a “wartime” reader would.
Her latest, After Tehran, is much
harder on me. Partly because, living for decades in “peacetime,” I am processing
my past. I myself, without actually having my fingers broken, lived through the
last scene of Bladerunner, something
I only disclosed, “war is over,” to a friend as recently as January of 2016.
Reading
her book, I felt sad for Marina, my fellow peacetime Canadian who, after years
in this country, years of passing for normal, began to discard the “false self”
and unfreeze her emotions, began to remember and to break the silence… of
surviving two years in a torture prison. Now she’s come alive… and my life?
Today I’d like to blog that one of my joys in life is “passing.” Not passing for being heterosexual, no, I mean
passing for normal: As if I’ve always been healthy and happy… just the way I (almost)
am now. In fact, a young student who knew me at university and Toastmasters,
asked me twice if I was always as happy as when she saw me. (No) No one ever
asks me if I was ever in trouble, and occasionally someone even asks me if I was
ever married. And then I go home and my heart swells with happiness because “I
must be doing something right.” Of course I don’t tell anyone this. They
wouldn’t “get it.” Even the experts don’t.
This I know because I
recently read of experts interviewed for a newspaper article about tracking
survivors of childhood Leukemia. The news leaves me feeling blank, perhaps
because various emotions are canceling each other out. The experts noted that
statistically the survivors would marry “a lot later” and a large number would
not marry at all. (My boss’s son, now cancer free, has told her he would marry
late) The experts said this was because their hospital time caused them to fall
behind other kids in terms of socialization. I disagree, but I hope they’re right.
I hope I’m wrong because, for me, thinking the experts “just don’t get it”
would feel too lonely.
My optimistic view is that
kids are always changing to new schools, towns and time zones. I remember how
Sarah Connor’s boy John, on his first day in a new town, complained to his
mother how the other guys in his school all wear cowboy boots. Of course the
Connors had to move again, yet if John had stayed around, I’m sure he would
have blended in and worn in his new cowboy boots just fine. After all, how long
does it take to learn the local slang, who the newest teen heartthrob is, or
what you’re “supposed to” think about last year’s “Hollywood has-been?” Part of
youth, for sure, is believing in “friends” and “teenage conforming” which means
pressuring all friends to swiftly conform and swiftly get socialized too.
So it seems to me the issue
for leukemia survivors would not be the “socialization time missed during
hospital,” something to be swiftly made up, but rather, the lonely conformist
survivor time “after hospital.”
The problem with conforming,
for me, is you have to be “passing” which means … pretending something that was
so excruciating to you, something that left dear friends at the hospital
“forever young” … never happened.
I once passed for normal by
keeping silent as my college department head told me she laughed—she laughed!—during the scene in Judgment Day
where Sarah Connor gets white hot with anger and leaps over the desk to say,
“It happens!” My professor thought it was real funny. I couldn’t laugh one
little bit; I have silently shared that same anger (It happened!) all too often.
Ah, anger. I remember once
talking to a blond “acquaintance” in a corner of the college
cafeteria. Our relationship changed to “friend” as soon as I said, “I bet you
would go to bed and need a block of wood between your teeth.” And she said,
“Yes! I use to squeeze the sheets so hard I’d put holes in them. Mother got mad
thinking I wasn’t cutting my toenails.” We talked a little more—then we went
home together.
Years later, at university,
I had a dark, dark semester from taking a class in Survey of Emotional (not
physical) Disabilities. I couldn’t
bring myself to say how I had known people, socially, from not some, not most,
but from every single one of the disabilities we were studying.
One of my classmates was
struck by, and had to tell us all about, her practicum where she rode around in
a van that offered help to prostitutes. (Our city has a number of “strolls.”) I couldn’t bring myself to tell the
class that I, along with two sex trade workers whom I liked, had found a safe place
to move in together.
I couldn’t tell about my
best friend. (O.K, I did try to, trying to disguise stuff about my friend, and just
making a mess of things.) I didn’t say how my friend was a survivor of various
sorts of abuse, including long-term incest, yet now she was raising two young
children, while divorced on welfare, and happily collecting memorabilia of her
hero, Marilyn Monroe.
I
didn’t feel the least bit angry at my classmates for being innocent. No, I just
felt sad.
And throughout that
semester, that night with no candles, I wouldn’t have ever “chatted up” (hit
on) a glamorous “normal” Marilyn Monroe. But I would have firmly hugged Norma
Jean.
Sean Crawford
God
bless the beasts and children
On
the lone prairie
Summer,
2016
Footnote:
Actually, I guess I can’t really speak with authority about how much teenagers
peer pressure each other: I got through those teen years by being quiet and
solitary. (Like Max and Lain in my essay Silence
and Three Nerd Heroes, archived May 2013)
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