I was a stick of dynamite and it was just a matter of time
Jane Marczewski
“I was a stick of dynamite and it was just a matter of time‘, a line from the song ‘It’s ok’ byJane Marczewski, exactly describes me, my life and how I feel about the past and what, if anything is next. When I first heard that song I had it on repeat for the rest of the week. This is how songs, books and tv show work for me. I see or hear them and something connects and I almost can’t stop myself from watching, reading or listening over and over until it kind of sinks in. ‘I was a stick of dynamite and it was just a matter of time‘, I think I have assumed that everybody feels this way, that everybody, most of the time is only just hanging on, sometimes by our finger tips, sometimes by a thread and sometimes the only thing that keeps me here at all are the hands of someone else who has grabbed me and refuses to let go.
I did not know if everybody feels this way, I had hoped it wasn’t just me, however I have only recently discovered that most people don’t have a ‘secret part of themselves’ at least not a significant one. I guess everybody has a few secrets, perhaps some embarrassing thoughts or experiences but I had no idea they don’t have a vault full waiting for the right person or circumstance to help them unlock it. Honestly I thought everybody carried around a kind of safe room inside, full of thoughts, feelings, experiences, memories, desires, fears and hopes that so far need to be secret from everybody else. Some of those things seem to be buried so deep under the pile they are hidden even from me with only brief flashes so brief I can’t seem to grasp, let alone understand them.
As to how this secret room is formed and gradually filled up, I think I’ve learned more about that over the years. The room itself is a product of childhood. I don’t think we start out with it already built from birth. Somewhere, as we begin to develop our awareness of others and ourself we start to notice disconnects with what we see and what is said. Perhaps a parent or older sibling or relative, maybe all of them but we learn that what is said and what is done are two different things. As time goes on and our ability to read social cues begins to develop, we start to see and feel tensions in our home, perhaps they’re subtle but they’re there. Parents with uncomfortable smiles, their face saying ‘all is well’ but their presence, their body language tells us something else. We are not supposed to notice these inconsistencies, parents are usually doing the best they can to protect you from whatever is happening ‘behind the scenes’. I believe this is where the first building blocks of the ‘hidden room’ are put in place.
We are beginning to learn about hiding things, we don’t know what things are hidden but whatever they, whatever these things we are supposed to hide are, one thing becomes clear, we hide the things that don’t feel very good.
Until this year I honestly thought everybody experiences this, that everybody has a hidden room, a vault where all those things that don’t feel very good get stored away, out of site and out of mind…but not out of effect.
RD
It takes energy to keep those things locked away, to keep that uncomfortable smile on my face, to sound like all is well and I’m just excited to be here. Do that enough, keep that smile for long enough and this becomes who you are, the happy, committed person, subtly adjusting the smile to trigger the best possible response from others. I have noticed some people are not as skilled at getting the best possible responses from others but I don’t know why. I’ve wondered if they have less stored up in their vault and have less chaos to hide and maybe that means they don’t have to try so hard. Maybe they have more and it just keeps pushing out, maybe they learnt that it’s ok not to be ok, or maybe they just don’t care. I don’t know.
Years turn into decades and the energy to keep that hidden room hidden reaches a peak so that most of my energy is used to keep the doors closed. It’s like an increasing debt and the interest payments now take up 80% of my income. A deep weariness is now ever present. I think it’s partly the weariness of age but there’s more to it than age. At 57 years old I look back and I can see the hidden room began at around 3 to 5 years old. If that’s true then it has been more than 50 years I have been holding the weight, the pressure of that room, five decades is a long time to hold the door closed, the weariness, even exhaustion is inevitable. Just now, as I write that bit and feel the pressure against the door of the vault I can feel some sadness, maybe it’s even grief that this journey has to be a solo one. I almost wish others had the same experience, maybe that way we could be able to allow access to each other’s vault, safe in the knowledge of a kind of ‘mutually assured destruction’.
From childhood through the teen years and into adulthood some of us learn what a good person looks like and that we are all supposed to be good. Should being that good person be out of reach, what should I do, how can I survive? I think, at least to some degree the answer to that might depend on their circumstances. The one who finds themselves in a place that expects less of them, a circumstance where there are few if any expectations then perhaps they keep less hidden and, in a way, come to live a more honest life.
The one that finds themselves in circumstances where being a good person is the expectation then that person, surrounded by many good people, longs for the acceptance that can only come from being seen as a good person, there is little choice but to begin pushing the not so good into that hidden room. Feelings and thoughts that don’t belong in the world of good people must be put in that room, hidden away from others and hidden from the person who knows they don’t belong in this world. Soon it is too late to let go and leave that good world. There is too much at stake, too much to lose and by now I may not feel like I belong but I want more than anything for that to change, so I can belong here. I set about being better and working on becoming like the others here. Perhaps it was possible to be a good person.
In my case I dug deeper and deeper into my faith. I studied and read and learned. Morning devotions, memorising bible verses, whole chapters, daily prayer and learning how to talk about my faith and the bible and God. It was a furious time of development, that’s for sure. I grew in my desire to be like the good people and learned that I should want to be more like God so I turned my focus on God. I put my learning skills into learning how to belong and how to say I want to be like God so much so that I began to actually want to be more like God. More loving, kind, forgiving all those qualities I had read about God I wanted in my own character.
I learnt about the theology of ‘The Problem of Evil’ which, in simple terms states that everybody is as sinful as everybody else. No-one is free from sin and anyone who says they have no sin is a liar. There are a lot of bible verses that back this up and it speaks to the core understanding of the doctrine of ‘Original Sin’, that from conception we are sinful. This doctrine speaks to the ‘noun’ of sin rather than the ‘verb’, to put it in my own words. Original Sin means that sin is in our DNA and even if we didn’t do anything ‘sinful’ for our entire life we are still just as much a sinner as the worst person.
I loved that doctrine and like the songs, books and tv shows, I found myself reading over and over finding a sense of deep relief that is hard to put into words. What I didn’t know then but have come to understand is that this doctrine does not mean there are not some who are ‘better’ than others. I say better because I struggle to find words that represent what I’m seeing. I think that it’s likely we are all born pretty much the same in terms of the basic building blocks. Sure some have some physical issues but our humanity, as far as I can tell is the same.
The circumstances we are born into is where I have noticed things begin to differentiate us from one another. It would be wrong to imagine this is about the divide between ‘The Rich and The Poor’, I really don’t think that is the key point of difference. Having lots of money certainly can make many things easier and can mitigate some difficult circumstances, but there are plenty of broken people, rich and poor alike.
So far I’ve come to believe that we all grow up with our own experience and that experience has an individual effect on each of us. There’s an old saying that no children grow up in the same family, meaning that each child, even in the same family experiences it differently and I agree.
These circumstances, whatever they are, become normal to us, they have to, it’s all we know. When I was a kid most people smoked in the house. My sister reminded me recently that we used to play games in the smoke, it was great fun waving our arms through the blue cigarette smoke no doubt breathing it all in as we played. That was normal for a lot of people. I still remember coming out to the kitchen early in the morning seeing my dad sitting on a chair in his pjs having a smoke and a long neck beer. This was normal, it wasn’t unusual but even back then in early primary school I still felt something wasn’t good. Normal but not good. What does a kid do with that feeling? I know I couldn’t process it, I couldn’t understand it and it’s only now that I realise what I did with it at the time, I opened the doors to my vault and put that experience in there. Now and then the pressure on that vault builds up and out pops that memory, or another one of the many I’ve shoved in there over the years.
The thing is with these vaults, these hidden rooms is that when they get fully loaded there is a constant pressure pushing from the inside on the doors and sometimes that builds up so much that the doors give way and there’s a rush of all that hidden stuff into my consciousness. In more technical terms, it happens when the things I have repressed, the memories and feelings I’ve buried to survive can no longer be held down. These are dangerous times for those of us who have a full vault, it messes with my mental health, I become unstable and more than a little self destructive. I’ll reach for the nearest thing to help push it all back and slam the doors shut. Over the years I have found the fastest thing is alcohol. Thankfully it’s not a constant thing otherwise I have no doubt at all I’d have become an alcoholic, no doubt at all. Cigarettes have been another thing I guess because it was so present when I was young. When the vault doors burst open I am at my most vulnerable and prone to making pretty bad decisions.
There have been times however when I’ve chosen well, I’ve managed to get myself to a therapist and talked it out. I have found talking therapy very helpful over the years but it hasn’t always been helpful. I once accepted the offer of therapy from a person I also worked with, a senior person to me but it wasn’t a good idea in the end and shut me down for many years. It started ok and I felt a great deal of trust, so much so that I really did open up and share what was at the time one of my most painful and troubling memories. He chuckled and I felt humiliated, deep and lasting humiliation, even now as I write this my face is turning red and I feel sick. The thing is that even in that moment I didn’t speak up, I didn’t complain or even ask why this was funny to him. I joined in and pretended I thought it was funny. That experience led to some pretty terrible years where I lived with shame almost constantly, some because of that experience and some because of how I coped with it gnawing at me every day.
This story reminds me that I am responsible for my own mental and physical health. I was not able to protect myself that day and many days since. I don’t think this is because I am weak so much as I just never developed the kind of skills and awareness I have seen in many other people over the years. When I see people defend themselves I feel so uncomfortable that it causes a visceral reaction, I think that’s because I’m just so underdeveloped in this way. I’ve had a go at protecting myself of course but it is clumsy and poorly timed. I’m not sure about this but I think I might have felt unprotected when I was young. That didn’t mean I wasn’t protected, it may just mean that’s just how I felt. I know there were many times I felt terror watching or hearing things and as far as I can remember I felt alone with the only way out to disappear into another world. I believe to this day there’s some part of me that is waiting to be rescued from all that. Thankfully I have grown enough to know that won’t happen, not because no-one would want to rescue me but because it’s just not possible. Time travel isn’t a thing yet and until it is our history is our history.
All the stuff pushed down into that vault is why the words in that song are so potent to me. All that hidden stuff is ‘A stick of dynamite and it’s just a matter of time’, it’s always been just a matter of time.
RD
I have come to believe that even though all these things are true and I will likely wrestle with it all for as long as I remain vertical, that, in another line of that song, ‘it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok if you’re lost we’re all a little lost and it’s ok’. Some of us are certainly more lost than others, there’s no denying it. Some of us are ‘good people’, but it doesn’t matter how they got to be and they have pretty ugly thoughts I’m sure, it’s just that somehow they have managed not to act on those thoughts and that is a good thing. I was saying to my best friend today that ‘We may all want to rob a bank but only a few go ahead and do it. It’s better not to go ahead with it, actions cause harm in the real world’. Yes thoughts can lead to actions but what differentiates us from one another is some mange to restrain themselves, while others don’t. Feeling shame about this is of little help to anyone especially the person feeling the shame. It’s been a hard road but I’m gradually feeling less shame and the less shame I feel the clearer I can see myself.
I’m not a ‘good person’, I don’t feel shame about this, I would just like to be a good person like the others are. I know why I’m not good and I know the way out, I know what to do to change that. Can I change? Can I be consistent enough to get there? Honestly I doubt it but What else am I to do.
RD
It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok , it’s ok, if you’re lost we’re all a little lost and it’s ok.
Jane Marczewski