There’s a southern expression, “I’ve been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked the pots clean.”
I was in Sorrow’s kitchen.
I mourned Martina, Fannie, the women’s movement, Juliann Young. You name it, I mourned it. The sadness that I’d stored away poured over me. No dragging around with tears in my eyes, though. I kept working.
Work is prayer. I prayed a lot.
Reflection comes hard to me since I exist triumphantly in the present, looking toward the future. I read history constantly, but I don’t think about my own history.
I did now.
Being sensate animals, we avoid pain. But being thinking animals, we must conquer pain.
The primary cause of pain, setting aside disease and disaster, is your own self. This is unwelcome knowledge. I knew it intellectually. I had to know it emotionally.
When I went out on the road for my tennis novel, Sudden Death, which I will always consider Judy Lacy’s book, the press whooped it up about my lesbianism. Big surprise. The literary people paid no attention to the novel since sport cannot be a proper metaphor to carry a novel. Simple reason: In sport you win or lose. Life is complicated, so complicated that you can lose when you win, win when you lose, lose completely yet win your soul.
Since athletes, like insects preserved in amber, live in games, which is adolescence, they cannot represent the journey to the soul. When they’re done for, they certainly can.
I wondered what I had done that was so awful. I’d loved a woman. I’d been getting kicked in the teeth for that since age fifteen and I hadn’t even loved anyone at that point. This wasn’t new information. The media spin was new. I watched with lurid fascination as they boosted their ratings, tittering over the subject. One of the least attractive aspects of our country is our shallow approach to sex and love.
The women’s movement had prepared me. I think I interviewed my interviewers more than they interviewed me. I wasn’t going to blab on about Martina except to say that she was straight now and that I wished her well. I did.
Book tours are like boot camp but with little sleep and less food. I’d survived a number of campaigns. I’d survive this one. I used it to gather information about how far gay people had come. Oh sure, I was the butt of the joke, but twenty years earlier the issue wouldn’t have been discussed at all in public.
This was a left-handed victory.
While I worked on the surface, I worked underneath. I tried to untangle what was me, my distinct character, from the times in which I lived. Where did I start and the twentieth century leave off? Where did I stand firm and Mom and Aunt Mimi fade? I’ll never know. If you know these answers about yourself, you’re way ahead of me.
I don’t know what I would have been like if I’d been born in 1744 in Swabia or 414 B.C. in Athens. My talents would be identical, but what would I have developed and what would lie fallow?
I had to untangle what I could. I paid a heavy price for my honesty. I thought I didn’t care, I was above it. I wasn’t. The subsequent isolation tainted me with a touch of self-righteousness. By God, I faced down the whole world; I had to be right because I was strong. Not so. The two are not connected.
Fighting for a large principle doesn’t necessarily make you a good person. I don’t think I would have wanted to dine with Robespierre.
My work was my life. That’s not enough. When few people would traffic with me, my work had to be my life. A writer is a small god. Our characters live or die at our prompting—although characters can and do take over. I had withdrawn into my work for obvious reasons, although they weren’t obvious to me then. That kid with the big brown eyes heard too many times that she was a stray cat. She worked to earn her place at the table.
Not only did I survive, I triumphed. I owned the goddamn table.
My triumph was my undoing.
I had to open those old wounds, letting out the bad blood. Maybe the doctors from the eighteenth century weren’t so far off when they applied leeches.
I remembered what I didn’t want to remember: how I’d stared in the mirror, wondering what I had done wrong. Why did my mother leave me? She kept Patty. Why didn’t my father find me? He lived less than ten miles away.
The answers are adult answers. Of course I know why. But the pain is the child’s pain and I had to feel it. Juts made sure I wouldn’t feel it around her. She hated weak things. For her pain was weakness.
Mom was wrong but you take people as you find them. I forgave her. She was too lovable at her best not to forgive her.
The person I couldn’t forgive was myself. Why didn’t I know everything? Why wasn’t I perfect? I was the strongest, the smartest, the best. Everyone told me so. I had track ribbons, tennis trophies and novels on the best-seller lists to prove it.
Victory isn’t peace.
Valor isn’t self-understanding.
My victories brought me to the point where I could examine my frailties. Had I not written those successful novels, I don’t know if I could have taken the time or energy to consider myself. The icon of success would have pulled me away.
The danger in dressing and addressing old wounds is self-indulgence. I fear that like the plague.
The person I thought about at this time was Senator Thomas Eagleton, chosen to be George McGovern’s running mate in 1972. The McGovern camp later discovered that Senator Eagleton had once sought help for depression. Eagleton was dumped. McGovern, a man I personally like, having met him three times, sank to his lowest. He hadn’t a prayer of winning the presidency anyway. Had he stuck by Eagleton he would have looked less “handled.”
That’s the trouble today. Public figures don’t follow their instincts, they follow opinion polls. Wimps.
Where is Harry S. Truman when we need him?
The reason I thought about Eagleton was that he was punished for seeking health. Had he broken his arm no one would have said a word when a doctor set the bone. His mind hurt him. He went to a doctor. He was crucified.
The fallacy is that to be president or to lead, you can’t admit weakness. I now fear the person who doesn’t know s/he can be broken. If you don’t know where your fault lines lie, that San Andreas of the heart, you will perish.
Certainly, I was afraid to admit weakness.
My struggle isn’t darkly glamorous. I didn’t take drugs, drink or become wildly promiscuous. I didn’t rush into therapy or a rest haven. I worked it out, day by day, puzzling, piecing together, looking inside.
Today people rush to television to display their insides, seeking absolution in publicity. I really think the Catholic Church is missing the boat. A show called Mea Culpa, a public confessional, would be the smash of the decade. My mea culpas aren’t that melodramatic.
I’m reserved and sometimes withdrawn.
I’d rather be the chief than the Indian.
I have trouble making room for other people’s frailties and I have zero tolerance for my own.
I have no self-doubt, even when it might be a prudent response.
I never understood the connection between sex and love until well into my thirties.
The job comes first with me. You can nurse your feelings later.
I am capable of evil just as I am capable of great good.
I like to think of myself as an angel with lice on her wings.
None of the above would earn me a berth on a talk show. Maybe we’re glued to those talk shows because a cannibal’s confession makes us feel better about our own flaws.
Truly, I loathe admitting I have flaws. People have been pointing them out since my birth, and I don’t see why I should waste my time doing it! But there are moments when the ironies of my own life, the ironies of being an American, give me the giggles.
We’ve got our pants on backward, so to speak. We confuse rigidity with strength. We want people without blemish.
Why are we punishing people for their lives? We punished Thomas Eagleton. We punished Adlai Stevenson because he was divorced. We punished Richard Nixon because he was unlovable.
In Oliver Stone’s movie Nixon, Henry Kissinger said, “What would he have been had he been loved?”
Nobody’s good enough. We raise up actors only to plunge them into the abyss because we’re tired of them or because their personal lives disappoint us.
Some people learn from their experiences. Some don’t. The ones who learn are the ones who can and should lead.
We want a leader who is faithful to his/her spouse, rarely drinks, doesn’t smoke, never smoked marijuana, never smashed up Dad’s car, etc., etc.
Who is this person?
The most boring human being you have ever met.
I have made some whopping mistakes. I’ve written down the ones I know. What don’t I know, or what mistakes am I making now? I’ll learn from them.
I am not the master of my fate but I am the captain of my soul.
I no longer have any desire to control my life. I simply want to live in divine chaos.
I trust that I will. I have to trust you, too. We aren’t going to get anywhere as individuals or as a nation if we don’t negotiate our differences with trust.
The dog-eat-dog way of thinking doesn’t work. It did for many centuries. It will lead us to mass destruction if we continue it. Hitler should have taught us that. “Us or them” is death. It’s “we.”
Those are the conclusions I drew from my two years of quiet reflection.
All the issues that I had thought were real, such as black and white, straight and gay, rich and poor, are fragmentations of the key issue. The only issue is life or death.
Are you here to save and nurture this planet or are you here to destroy it?