by Motavenda Melchizedek
The other night I was working. Like many others on planet earth, this was not work I consciously desire for myself to be doing - if you know what I mean. Let’s face it. The human spirit is relentlessly resilient. As I said to a friend not long ago, “Why couldn’t I just get a lobotomy and be satisfied working at McDonalds’s?”. I mean really! Why the endless, merciless drive to become who I am? Not just in small ways, wherever my true self can sneak out and shine, but the full-blown 100% authentic me. Not a drop less. There is this unbreakable, unshakable need to exist here in my totality completely as the being that I am.
So, there I was. At the Country Club. Waiting on the local elite. Sickened by the concept. But, nonetheless, expressing, by the mere fact that I was there, that I am willing to do whatever, to get where I am going. To skim off my share and scurry home and sift through it hoping to find something there that I could use in my efforts to become me. To put toward my life. My dreams. My self actualization.
It was “Men’s Night.” A night I am not typically scheduled for as my tolerance for overt bigotry and misogyny is not quite up to the needed level. But there I was, tray in hand. Bringing rounds of doubles. Forcing my true self into its tattered box. Getting control of myself, when a short rolly polly man entered the room with a thick delinquent air about him. He carried a brief case in one hand and a video in the other. My heart dropped as I remembered overhearing once that these men sometimes watch porno films in the poker room downstairs.
“Great”, I thought. “This is all I need. There perfect insult to top a perfectly degrading scenario.” I couldn’t help but ask myself those unrelenting questions. “What is it going to take? What has to happen before I can let myself have the life I want? Where I am no longer made to participate in the pathetic recreations of other people’s unresolved miseries?” Not to mention my own.....
On one level I am totally aware. I consciously understood that this was tied into my own childhood nightmares. Those unfinished horror stories echoing through my life all these years. later. At a certain point, you just get to feeling that the whole equation is lacking basic fairness and decency.
You’re born. You’re violently abused on the most primal levels by the most powerful and important people in your world. You are forbidden, strictly forbidden, to be angry, to hurt or to grieve. There is that strong unspoken rule that you yourself must come to terms with this my using whatever means you may have. But those means must remain invisible. They must stay, at all times and at all costs, undercover. Any overt expression of the truth is swiftly struck down.
Everything exists underground. And underground it begins to fester and to feed upon itself. With nowhere to go, this energy - this beingness - has no choice but to grow in upon itself. To become what it is more and more every day. Like attracts like and so this powerful unspoken truth begins to pull toward itself reflections of its own existence. And this is allowed. It is allowed because we forgot and no longer admit that our outer lives are nothing more than perfect mirror images of our inner states of being. That we are looking inside ourselves. At those long buried stories.
And so, down the stairs I went. Into the poker room. Where the rolly polly man asked with a smirk, “Would you adjust the color for us please?”
