December 28, 2002:
How do peoples' identities form?
Mine was in large measure the result of conflict. Incompetent and disinterested parental units and other adult authorities fought to impose identities of their choosing, while repressing those symptoms of selfhood that emerged from my own experience, or my own blood chemistry. As my resistance developed, the battle became permanent, and increasingly vicious, a war based on disrespect, seeking not just destruction but annihilation.
Apartment interior, San Diego, early 1970s. Faux wooden furniture: lamps and tables of dark brown plastic manufactured to look like "Danish Modern" from a distance. Mismatched bookshelves filled to overflowing with sci-fi and fantasy, and Jane Austin, and Shakespeare. Cheap portable stereo with detachable shelf-sized speakers and a handle on top. LPs in a plastic stand: Otto Klemperer conducting Beethoven; and Mancini's "Mr. Lucky." Cigarette ashes cover every surface. A small portable black and white television is on, sound off.
Thin woman sits in a poorly-upholstered green armchair, bought at a garage sale. Wiry hair of indeterminate color, currently died reddish. Butterfly-wing glasses from the '50s. Cat in her lap, cigarette in one hand, telephone receiver in the other. There's a long-distance argument in progress.
You're in your room, listening through the door. Although you're fifteen she believes you should not be present when the adults discuss serious matters. You're the serious matter under discussion this time. In one of your first overt acts of rebellion, you're boycotting Christmas. No presents, no cards, no little thank-you notes for the obligatory presents relatives send you anyway, despite your opposition. Right now, thank-you notes are the issue requiring adult intervention.
Why Christmas? Because the hypocrisy and the shallowness of forced gift-giving seem so nakedly hypocritical. That obligatory gifts are meaningless. That the substitution of money for obligatory gifts is both meaningless and insulting. That Jesus, the fellow who threw the money-changers out of the Temple, would probably not approve.
Money is the height of this hypocrisy. Giving someone money for their mandatory Christmas gift is like writing a note which says, "I don't know you. I don't want to know you. But, I have to do this."
Thin woman in the green chair is not supportive. She lives in terror that adult authorities will brand her a "bad mother", and take you away. The irony being that by denying your sense of yourself, she encourages you to walk away, in self-defense.
Her father and stepmother are insulted. Instead of a thank-you note, you tore up their check and mailed it back to them. $100, quite a lot of money to a fifteen-year-old in 1970, almost half of your annual allowance.
Excuses. She's the Mistress of Rationalization. She won't defend you. She could have avoided the conflict altogether if she'd explained your difficult moral decision to her family ahead of time. Instead she ignored it, hoping it would go away. Now she reaps the whirlwind.
"It's a phase he's going through." You expected that, although, when it comes, it's painful anyway.
Then the egregious and reprehensible lie which forever rings in your ears, even today, thirty years later. Spoken matter-of-factly, with a drag on the ever-present cigarette. "All the other kids are doing it."
In an odd way, the concept of "identity" became the core of my identity. To this day I refuse invitations to costume parties. Defensively, I refuse to be anyone but me, ever, even in play. And I've never lost my contempt for the people who fought to deny me.