I just finished a letter and sent it. A letter of unloading on my mom's husband, daring him to make amends.
Been thinking of blogging for days - I've had these thoughts in my head for a while now, and they need to be written, 'cause that's how I get places - I write myself there. Haven't been writing them though, 'cause it's a bit of an iffy subject. Touchy, even. Mostly, because I need to watch my mouth - my sarcasm tends to miss people who don't know me well. Which is the very beauty of it, according to me - which doesn't keep it from getting me into trouble though. Just like the thing with my letter - in it, I am asking for reparations.
My friend A., who screened it before I sent it off, found that particular piece of vocabulary ill-chosen, stating "my grandma [who survived the holocaust] gets reparations". Yeah, reparations are a way of making amends after an act of war, of immense injustice. Just ride the metaphor with me, let's not make it about the suffering of the Jewish people...
So what I've been thinking about is this book I recently read, Man's Search For Meaning by the psychologist Viktor E. Frankl, who himself was a holocaust survivor. The book's German title translates to something like "Saying yes to life despite everything" - it's a book I've had lying around forever without ever even considering reading it. The title just always made me go "Yeah, sure." A friend recently gave me another copy of it as a Thank You-gift (a plant or something woulda done it, too). I told my therapist about it, saying I still felt no desire to read it. Then I got bored.
To make a long story short, I saw my therapist last week, told her I read it, summarizing my opinion with two words: "Yeah, sure."
'cause here's the thing, this is where my thoughts come in. And where I need to watch how I say things because people always get so touchy when it comes to concentration camps. So let me say this once, beforehand, so that I shall hopefully not have to clarify it again: I do think the holocaust was a horrible, horrible thing to happen. Yet, I still see this particular book as a description of what happens to humans when they suffer immense trauma - basically, humans under extreme psychological conditions of suffering and traumatization. Under no circumstance would I compare my youth to spending time in a concentration camp, it does, however make me able relate to certain extreme conditions. I hope we can work with that.
Back to sharing my thoughts. There were a lot of things in that book I could relate to, really well. Mostly, it was Frankl's way of describing what freedom felt like, how he didn't quite know what to do with it. Frankl emphasizes quite a bit how when put under extreme conditions of suffering, in order to survive, one must pick a reason for surviving, something to live for, something to live towards. I can relate to that, totally. For me, that reason was coming back home, for five years during which my crazy witch of a mother had my passport on lockdown and forbade all contact to my friends and relatives here in Europe. So you pick a why, and then the how becomes a little more bearable, Frankl states. True that, true that. I don't know if I'd survive half the things I've seen, had I not lived for coming back here. While enduring, one finds that suddenly, how one goes about doing things, differentiating between right and wrong becomes the last resort. A flight into a noble heroism, if you will. Once one is released, Frankl goes on to say, freedom can become a problem and pose many a challenge: for if, after enduring so much for so long, those survivors are met with indifference or disappointed by finding what they fought for exists no longer, they become a serious challenge for their respective therapists. And that's pretty much were he leaves it, for those who endured for nothing, so to say, life pretty much sucks.
Yeah. Sure.
It's not a bad book, it's quite an important piece of literature - both from a historic as well as from a psychological point of view. If I may abuse the English title though: where is the meaning for those who fall through the cracks? 'cause, seriously, I would like to know. I picked a new why, 'cause the how wasn't all that awesome here either, at first anyway. I can't tell if it's getting better 'cause I'm still all caught up, attacking the attacking things back. And though I do, always, attempt to pick the high road, I am not seeing how it pays off. I'm not.
Here's what I've learned, here's what I have known for so long, I can't even put a date on it: everyone is expendable. It's sad. You do miss people. But the sad thing is, even those who you thought you could never take another breath without, even without them you can make do. It ain't much more than making do, though. You find new people, new interests. But there's always the knowledge that they are expendable. Knowing that, you live differently. You love differently. And the thing is: all the therapy in the world can't make you forget that. And none of the pills, either.
So: where is the meaning? I do think there is a limit to "despite everything". I mean, there's not much more life can bring that I ain't seen already, feeling-wise. Like Frankl says, we can endure basically anything, one can't even imagine the things that can be endured as long as there is a reason. And I have said yes despite everything, many a time. I think of my new borrowed why, my dog. I watched Hachiko recently, a sad Richard Gere movie that had me bawling my eyes out for a straight half hour, about a dog that waits on his deceased owner for ten years. (True story.) (I love saying "True Story.") I do think even my dog would be fine without me though. That's why I call him my borrowed why. No worries though, I'm big on the responisbility. I ain't going nowhere, I'd just like to know why to stay.
