Posted September 7th, 2003 by Michelle

The year is 1986. I am thirteen, Sean is fifteen, and our family has just disintegrated. We are living with my mom in a condo we couldn’t afford in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Sean and I share the master bedroom (him on the top bunk of his bunk bed, me on a futon mattress on the floor). We are talking, I am lamenting (great surprise!!) the loss of some guy. Or maybe Sean is lamenting the loss of some girl. Actually, we are probably talking about something totally random, since we both were able to procure pretty much anything we wanted, if only briefly. So Sean says something like, “I can’t believe that he/she did/said that about so-and-so”. Apparently I quite nonchalantly replied, “Well, everyone always knows the truth about everything, we just choose to believe the lies we tell ourselves.”

Sean still quotes this, and quite literally mentioned it today. This was the same year that I joked, “To love someone is to change everything about yourself for them”. Oh, the things I had figured out at thirteen. It was also the same year that my dad came to pick me up for a day and found me passed out in the living room with about ten people he’d never seen before and the remains of a night filled with fuzzy navels. The sheer amount of empty bottles of booze in the kitchen could have been enough to put him over the edge; it is greatly to his credit that he just laughed about it and figured I’d come out okay in the end.

The idea of believing your own lies, which I’ve done a few too many times in my own life, ties in with another tragedy of being a thirteen-genXer. We are now fully capable of making informed decisions on who we spend time with. In our world, there are no arranged marriages, no proper code of courting, no rules really other than taking your own time to get to know someone. Obviously, we still fail, fail all the time, but that is often not because we don’t make an informed decision but because we choose what we, deep down, know is wrong or doomed. Again, believing the lies we tell ourselves.

My problem, you know, in the top 20 things in my life that give me pause, is that I don’t lie to myself as much as I reinvent other people. The only people who are real and true in my life, as in the only people who have not been altered by my mind are my family. My mom, my brothers, my three “sisters”, and my dad are the only people who I haven’t reinvented into something foreign to who they really are. These are the only people who I really know, and also the only people who continually surprise me with their kindness, goodness, and humor. Which is telling, because if I didn’t reinvent the others in my life then maybe they could surprise me rather than disappoint.

I don’t do this so much with my friends. I know I do it to some extent, but it is usually that I am quick to believe that my friends are simply wonderful. They are then bound to disappoint, which hurts me, but brings me back to the idea that I’ve idealized them and so can’t be hurt when they are human. The place where this tendency of mine does the most damage is in my relationship with men. I always knew how dangerous my long-distance relationship with Wayne was because when he wasn’t there I could believe he was the best, most brilliant man on earth. Before him, I would keep my men at an arm’s length or choose men who would keep me just as far away. I could then invent who I thought that person was and love him all the more.

I’ve also been prone to putting all the misery of my world onto the idea of a person, and used that as my catalyst, my button, my touchstone of dread. I lie to myself and the world, saying if this one thing was good, if I could have this one thing, then everything else would fall into place. And, in the meantime, reinventing this person into being the absolute best one, the only one for me, the answer to everything. I’ve done this more than once, and I’m going to try to not do it again.

I would like to officially take responsibility for everything I’ve done, for all the joy and misery in my life, for my terrible mistakes and for all the good things I’ve been able to do. I’d like to acknowledge, once again, that I live with both feet in my mouth, and I never, never, never want to be the cause of someone else’s pain, even inadvertently. There is so much shame in my life, and that is partly why I write this blog. I’m shaming my shame in public, exorcising it, acknowledging it for all the world (or rather, the twelve people who might read this blog) to see. I don’t want to reinvent people anymore, and I don’t want to make anyone into something they’re not.

I got my third PAP results back last week, and it turns out that the cells on my cervix are behaving even worse than they were a month ago. My doctor told the colpo doctors that I had to be seen as soon as possible, and the colpo doctors made space to fit me in the next day, which was last Thursday. Well I woke that morning with my period, so I am now having a colposcopy and biopsy of my cervix on Tuesday. I believe in a body/mind connection to some degree, and always believed I could talk my body out of cancer. I’ll know much more after Tuesday but I feel like it’s worth it to examine my life and think about what I can do to make my cervix happier.

I just got home from work… yes, it’s 3 AM… and I turned onto my block and the very familar smell of a burnt house almost knocked me over. I was terrified that it would be my own, but instead, as soon as I got home, the fire trucks started crashing through my neighborhood. It may be the only thing I brought with me when I stopped working for the Red Cross, but I will always be able to pick out that smell.