i, wrobot

People born into a culture of alienation, fear, or repression express their humynity in bizarre ways.
Displacement behaviors, misplaced aggression...compensating for inner pains they're only hazily aware of, if at all. You know the words - commitment-phobe, pathological liar, eating disorder, anger issues, control issues, addictive personality, abuser, energy vampire, suicidal, cutter, anhedonist...and on and on and on...
If a dysfunctional culture's institutions of socialization are strong enough, suppressed trauma can stay deeply buried. Fifty years ago, our cultural institutions were much stronger. The growth of freedom since then is a beautiful thing...but also destabilizing and occasionally terrifying.
Men are still taught to direct their aggression outward, and women inward. Of course, women are becoming more like men. There may be good in that; there certainly is bad.
And me?
When i was young, i would have laughed at the notion that i had any "displacement behaviors". I was the happiest person in the world, and you couldn't have told me otherwise. If you'd suggested that i were afraid or insecure, i'd have laughed. If you'd told me i was touch- or sex-deprived, i might have agreed, but assured you that my day was coming. Ah, the power of positive thinking...or rationalization and denial, for you can make a compelling case that my entire life was one walking displacement behavior. An alienation intimacy-deprived identity crisis gone steroidal, melding seamlessly with a savior complex.
Having long pursued the path of self-awareness, it's rare when any new realization startles me. But yesterday i stepped into a biggie.
I've never told someone they're hurting me.
Not in all contexts, mind you! In less intimate relationships, even family, i've made such declarations. But in romance, this society's most intimate arena, i've never told someone they're hurting me.
Astounding.
Mind you, it's not like i've been disconnected from my pain. In many ways, i've been more in touch than most. But that's on an impersonal level...understanding how as a baby and child, this culture of fear (and circumcision) crippled my capacity to trust. Then, from adolescence, how being unfucked and untouched for months or years will damage anyone irreparably. And finally, how an almost total lack of daily, unconditional communal nurturing turns all of us into hollowed-out caricatures of humyn beings.
I've never told a lover she's hurting me.
The reasons are myriad. My pathologically-happy teenage transformation. Then as a young adult, i began a process of collecting ever-larger perspectives that make one realize how most of the things we all get upset about, are nonsense. I became one of the "strong ones", a rock of reliability. I don't wish to disparage those qualities out of hand; they've made me who i am, and there is good in them. Somewhere along my quixotic path, i also began to embody asimov's First Law of Robotics, the one that prohibits allowing any humyn to come to harm. Not that i imagined myself some sort of robot...but when i read those words, they subconsciously affirmed something in me. That trait melded with my feminism, which longed to make right (or make amends) for the thousands of years of incomprehensibly brutal dehumynization of wimyn, and created in me a very giving attitude in matters of the heart. It made me content, even eager, to take more than my share of sacrifice or hurt. Yet i also became (never by choice) more loner than lothario. My singular ways have pushed me far enough from the mainstream, that i've had only three deeply intimate romances. All of which has contributed to me never...
...tell a lover she's hurting me.
And i know that's not even the right way to say it! It's better to say "I'm hurt when such and such blah blah..." Heck, i'm fairly sure i figured that one out even before it made its way into popular consciousness. But i realized this week that when someone's actions are hurting you, it can feel insincere to deflect the blame off them. Even if you realize that blame isn't appropriate or productive, it still can be HARD to not shout, "You're hurting me!!"
It turns out that i, like everyone else, have spent much of my life as little more than a robot, emotionally. If you're not out in the street once a day, screaming your outrage to the moon or dog or postal carrier, then part of you isn't quite alive.
You're hurting me!
Not you, reader. Like everyone, you're doing your best.
I wish i could tell you that's enough.
But if we're going to save this playful, loving species of ours, we're all probably going to have to start doing better than our best.
That's not unrealistic, is it?
I love you all.