I had
the strangest feeling today. It was something combined with hope and fear that
over fill my sense of being. I’d like to say that it was a fear of success but
I’m not sure that statement would be accurate. I sometimes look in the mirror
and I wonder what could have been but that’s never how I’ve lived my life or at
the very least been something better. But in the other hand, what’s stopping
me? I’m always torn between this area of right and wrong. When you need sit
down and count your loses but for me it never seems like a valid choice. I keep
going and I keep running up that hill. I’ve been searching for a reason.
But
like all things in this world it’s a matter of choice but the choice can’t
always be mine.
It was
a cold night sometime in November as I played with my pencil on yet another
boring class. I had been in class for a three hour stretch and still exhausted
from working late the night before but this class was worth it. The Doc had
always tried to push me harder than most and I respected that. It’s one of
those reasons I kept taking his class. He didn’t buy the dumb blonde act I had
tried so hard to sell to others and it was a relief. The class was about horror
(or at least the concept of) in horror films. This wasn’t just a class to
finish my degree but to me, it was another way to understand the human
condition.
The sun
would be setting soon and the crisp fall air would soon turn frigid. I was
enjoying as much as I could. The lessons for the day had been covered a number
of times throughout my education but I knew there might be a fresh point of
view. Many people call it the “deus ex machina” a lazy intervention for a
writer because the meaning always stays the same. It’s a plot device where an
impossible serious of events is inexplicably
He
assigned the reading based on the misconceptions of women of woman and the
symbolism behind it. The notion of the “Other” was something that hung heavily
in the air of every society. We, as humans know it in our nature to fear that
which we view as unnatural because we are as attracted to as we are repulsed by
it. But as much as we loathe and seduce the idea of the ‘Other,” we need the
concept that we need the “deus ex machina” to save us from the other.
I had
the problem of being that tool in real life. I’m an intense person and with
that intensity comes a certain amount of cool clarity in emergency situations.
It frightens people at times at how clear, calm and functioning I can be in the
eye of the storm but it’s who I am. My inner creedo has always been you can cry
about it later, do what you have to do now. To me, there is no other choice.
Tapping my pencil against the thick paper, I thought about “deus ex machine”
and how often it had been used in literature and in my own life.
I let
it slip through my mind that this is the person I needed to be in order to
accept my reality but this has created an element of becoming the “Other” that
people fear so much. If there had been someone like me in the past who had been
more like me, maybe my life would have been a little easier and the pain not as
bad. We all have our own motivations for being the people we are today and up
until now; I’d always figured I did it because it was who I am. But now I understand that the projection I
give my self is something I think I can save someone from the heart break and
nightmares I suffer from now.
It
comes to an understanding between myself and the lives I lead that it is not
the moments or nightmares I live, but the duality of self that is the place
that I claim as my own. At the end of the day, it up to me to be able to look
myself in the eyes and be okay with the lives I lead. I am many roles because
that is what I need to be. Whether it is cool and calm or hot and angry, I am
Eden ex machine, the other.
