8 July, 2010
They say you shouldn't let it build, like it's the pressure you really need to be concerned about. And they say you should make yourself heard, as though failing to do so was just a disservice to yourself and your own interests.
But that is so self-absorbed as to be nearly pointless. It's not the disservice to myself that I ought to be concerned with. It's the dishonesty of the thing, the lie of it that I tell without even realizing I'm telling anything at all, let alone a lie. Walking along calmly and upright as though there were no pit bull sinking its teeth into my heels. Not even glancing as the mosquito pierces my skin.
I don't know where I learned to lie like that. Or where I learned to think so little of people as to suppose that they aren't tough enough to take the truth. Perhaps it isn't condescension, though, but fear of them, of losing them, of making them think less of me. Any number of explanations, all of them probably worthless.
There is so much to be undone. Fixing and wrecking and fixing again, with an unclear picture, in this case, of what the whole thing ought to look like. If the creature is limping, the parts are in place...
No, I don't really know what I'm doing. But I'll try really hard to do it.