Rememory

Here I sit, one week after I finished my last law school exam. I left it shaking so hard that my fingers dialed "Mo" instead of "Mom." Convinced I failed and just so disappointed that yet again I felt unprepared for the questions I was pressed to answer, I sobbed to my poor mom over the phone. I'm sure she's had many sleepless nights worrying about me these past few years. I've since calmed down a bit, or maybe I just succumbed to helpless apathy. Anything is possible at this school, with these professors (or so it seems), so I know I won't fall asleep easily until I see passing grades posted online.

I've spent the week feeling a new kind of antsy insecurity. What am I supposed to be doing now, now that I've committed to giving myself two weeks off from the job search and I literally have nothing to do. What are all the other people doing on a trail run at 10 a.m. on a Monday? Why is there traffic at approximately 11:30 a.m.? Who are all these people having white wine spritzers with a 2:30 p.m. lunch? After told firmly by a friend, "You're being too hard on yourself. Give yourself a break." I think I am finally starting to unwind. I know it'll take me months to fully unwind. My goal: to have someone tell me (as they used to!) that I'm really laid back. Can you imagine?

Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.
I plan my days around a run. I stop at the grocery store almost every day to get ingredients for a meal I decide to make an hour before I get hungry. I sit in my chair and listen to my favorite news radio show every afternoon at 2 p.m. It took me a good six days before I even wanted - or had the attention span - to read the newspaper. I go for walks listening to my "quiet" mix every evening. I sneak a beer into the park to enjoy while watching the sunset. I watch the whole sunset.

I think it will take me a long time to find myself and to gain back my confidence and energy. I don't just feel burned out, I feel beat up. I feel like I lost myself somewhere in the last there years. I forgot simple things, like that I am not a boring person and I can laugh. Fortunately, human coping mechanisms are amazing. I'll get back to the point where I believe other people when they tell me I am smart. I already find that I've forgotten just how miserable I have felt because my coping mechanisms tend to block out the horrible and only remember the good. In eager anticipation of wakeless nights, I suppress all traumatic rememory and welcome any healing retelling of the story of Who I Am.*

* "Rememory" is a term that Toni Morrison made up in her book, Beloved. It is a kind of psychic haunting in which the specifics of a traumatic incident are told and retold, even as the teller tries to block their full emergence into the conscious mind. Through compulsive repetition, one's narrative is constantly being both torn apart and reconstituted. Memories are constantly being both exhumed and buried, and the mind of the storyteller is both imprisoned and set free in the act of retelling. Rememory is both a reconciliation and a vexation, both a healing and a wounding. Read the book or see more here.

Joan Didion's essay, "On Self Respect", is an excellent read.

You can find it here.

Some nibbles to entice you:

"The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without."

"In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues."

"To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."

"To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect."