One More Perspective

I was on my way to a conference in a location about which I was completely unexcited, except for a handful of people I would get to see.  I was deep into my thoughts about my latest mistakes and sleep-deprived,  as usual.  I half-heartedly scrolled through the airline entertainment carousel when the cover of the 2025 film Bugonia caught my attention.  It is the kind of movie, like Promising Young Woman, with a cover that tells me the movie will be graphic and suspenseful, which spells:  way out of my league.  I wanted to watch the trailer nonetheless, with confidence I wouldn’t be up for much more than that.  From the trailer came an unexpected lightning bolt, however.  I was transfixed and wanted to know exactly what each word was that had cut right through to my core, so I asked Gemini Pro (whatever version my subscription is on) to find it.  Here is what the main character, Michelle, so compellingly says:

The most important thing I want to stress to you right now is I never want to put this behind us. Never. What happened is part of all of us now. And it doesn’t go away, and it doesn’t get swept under the rug, and it doesn’t get excused. Not on my watch. This one sticks. Forever.

Whoa.  Though not in the context of the movie but as a standalone sentiment, this is powerfully representative of what I feel right now, in the middle of my latest time-out.  I don’t ever want to forget the present moment.  I don’t want to forget the choices I made that got me exactly where I am.  I don’t want to forget my epiphanies, the way I failed my loved ones and myself, and the things I actually did well, the ways in with which I helped others.  I want to practice these into lessons-learned that stand the test of time. 

I grew up in Families and environments that demanded conformance with their preordained narratives.  From my first years of life onward, I was judged for how well I could fit into other people’s boxes and appear to be happy about it.  I can only think of a handful of situations in my whole life this wasn’t true.  I fondly recall those generous souls who didn’t see me as an obnoxious entity behind my flailing Octopus tentacles (my attempts at expressing my reality in the moment), but could instead see me as the three-dimensional, alarmed, vulnerable creature desperately seeking to be seen, to have a genuine connection, but often executing in poor ways.  I am also programmed to feel shame for fighting for my voice and my reality, to grovel to that person and make sure everything is OK, then to accept whatever they now will rightfully dish out because I was the asshole who couldn’t just let them have whatever narrow interpretation of a situation that involved me they wanted to have. 

The Bugonia quote was a lightning strike for me and when I returned from travel, it was still on loud replay in my head.  I looked around in the apartment I will soon inhabit by myself.  I stared at the giant wedding canvases that were displayed prominently there, as they had been for the last nearly eight years in our house in Washington DC.  We were happy in that moment, and that mattered.  That day was a fact of my life.  My Children’s lives.  I realized not only did I not want to take those pictures down despite what was happening between divorce Attorneys we had hired and with the local court, I actually wanted to display many more pictures just like those.  Pictures from all of my weddings, of significant moments from across my entire life.  Pictures of my Children from across the decades, because it was their early years no one else seems to remember now, that has always been the meaning in my life.   

Not having pictures on display from other eras of my life, of our lives, was part of my repression, and it also ultimately became part of my suppression of my Children’s realities.  I was following the formula for a manicured life I was long-ago taught I needed to present to the world, in some cases for my Family’s safety (in Communist Hungary), but mostly to maintain a socially acceptable, sanitized facade, and a comfortable environment for my subsequent Spouses.  That very thing now feels like was also actively suffocating me.  It played into my Imago Turtle Spouses getting to dictate my reality, and I shamefully complied.  After all, how fucked up does one have to be to be married four times?  That’s the universal certificate of personal failure. 

So there it is.  …and “I Never Want to Put This Behind Us.”

As of this weekend, my new home (well, apartment technically) will contain proud displays of all of my journeys, all of the marriages and memories that helped me arrive to this version of me.  …and this version of me is so very messy and undeserving, yet the most whole and visible to myself I have ever been.  I don’t ever want to lose that clarity.  It’s owning all of what occurred, the choices I made, the survival programming I permitted to run my inner world, that now I want for myself, front and center, visible each day to me to whomever may visit me. 

It was all real and the only way to arrive at my present present, is to learn to live with what I had pushed into the shadows, way out in the open.  It’s the visual parallel to the internal work I have been doing, acknowledging lost parts of myself and learning to show up for myself the way I needed someone to show up for me at many points in my life.  I am that someone.