The shell game June 27, 2013

 


 

Her most recent poem stunned me in a different way that the one she posted two weeks ago, partly because she has exposed herself in an unexpected way – just the way the trickle up poem did, and less disguised in its openness than her poem about change of priorities in 2003.

Not only does the current poem raise the question as to who she really is once you strip away all the masks she typically wears, but also why she decided to reveal herself now, and to whom she is really revealing herself in this poem.

The tone and subtext suggest that she is once more moving on, stepping out from one avatar and preparing to adopt a new face, although in the past she mostly did this when something dramatic occurred, the failed restaurant in New York, or the fire that gutted her apartment upstate, affairs falling to pieces and her need to pursue some new career from dancer to horse trainer.

Yet from the exterior, nothing of the sorts seems to have occurred in her life just now if you discount the sex poem and her need to prop up some man’s ego, which also suggests she is looking elsewhere for something else to do with her life.

For how long this identity theft has been going on, it is difficult to tell, maybe as far back as school where she got picked on as a dork, and decided not to let people get at her real self (whomever that might be) and decided to take on roles, masks she could put on and take off, keeping her real self locked away in a vault deep inside herself.

She refers to these as “borrowed lives”, which suggests she took them from somewhere o someone, and makes me think again of the old woman on that cruise long ago who taught her a whole new way of living, acting out a role that allows her to survive without the risk of revealing her true self.

Even thought she talked about her six windowed residence as home, her real home (if one actually exists) is the current shell she’s adopted, like a hermit crab or more like a turtle, a home she carries around with her until she no longer needs it, or for some other reason has become less inhabitable, at which point she abandons it for another shell, another persona.

It seems a times she may use the same persona in relation to a number of people, such as the cub reporter in search of a mentor which she used with me, and more successfully with our former temporary boss.

She seems to have played other parts in other places for other people, expanding on the basic concept of psychology where if you do all those things are role would require, you eventually become that role – at lease, for most people, yet apparently, not for her.

She rarely comes to believe in herself as the person or position she is acting out, and this disbelief creates what is called “role distance,” where you don’t quite take yourself seriously, though must maintain the act if only to save face, and when others begin to doubt you in that role, you need to abandon it, or drive yourself crazy.

I’m sure she will eventually adopt a role she actually believes, but clearly, from this poem, she has not yet done so, and is forced to leave on shell for another, testing each new situation to see if the shell fits her better, and can give her confidence enough to believe she can adopt it as her shell, her home, for the rest of her life.

The poem coming now suggests she has serious doubts about the role she is currently playing and is looking for a way to abandon it.


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