Absolution
I was just reading Tara's "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" thread. Actually I was rereading it, because it was haunting me this morning.
How tempting it is, the thought of just putting down all the responsibilities and wandering in some bleary oblivion. How luxurious it seems for Rasputin to have been able to stay alive for years on the back of some hardworking saps. Then I review all the hardships he went through. Loneliness, hunger, cold, fear. I spend time thinking about how miserable he is. He pulled a little scam on me right after Christmas. Once I plugged the holes, my mind went right back to feeling sorry for him and his condition. But the blues have been creeping up on me. As I was in a very disorganized way trying to make myself ready to tackle the day, I came to the strange realization that my face and neck were wet. Dang. I'd been crying and not even realizing it. What was that all about? "What the hell's the matter with ME?" I ask.
I'm cold. I can't afford to run the heat because I can't pay for it. I'm hungry. I filled the scam holes with my grocery money. I'm lonely. Something in me still demands that I be everyone else's brick. I can't bring myself to ask my friends to listen to my terrors. I'm scared. I don't know from day to day how I'm going to keep all the plates in the air.
In the middle of all this self pity, the marquis of the liquor store up the street keeps flashing through my mind. How easy it would be to make it all go away. How easy to just lie down and die. This isn't the first time I've been here. I wonder vaguely how many hundred times I've felt this way and got dressed and went to work.
I luxuriated over the holidays. I bought five 50cent novels at the thrift store and read them every one. For the most part, it was lovely to be nowhere near me while I was reading. But in one of them, a passage exploded in my head.
"I felt gratefully that he was generous, but I felt nonetheless still guilty. Absolution, it had always seemed to me, was a fake. To err was human, to be easily forgiven was to be sentimentally set free to err again. To be repeatedly forgiven destroyed the soul."
"Tony" from PROOF by Dick Francis
I recognized the way I think. I wondered how I can keep forgiving, when I don't expect or want it for myself. I can't lie down and drink. I don't believe in absolution. What kind of saint complex must I have that I would repeatedly give to someone else what I don't ask for myself? What the hell's the matter with me?
Now some of you good people are going want to grant me absolution. You might even want to say that I have not been sanctimonious at all. You might consider, as I might if I read this from someone else, that it's some higher goodness that makes me put myself and my feelings last always. Just at the moment I'm thinking that's wrong. There's some kind of arrogance in a double standard like this. I have to toe the line, but I will forgive the poor weak incapable schmuck who's not as strong and honorable as ME over and over. His pain must be greater or more significant somehow.
Now I don't know what to do with all these thoughts. I don't know how to quell the part of me that absolves. If I take things in the other direction, and decide it's okay for me to have a go to pieces, where would we be?
This is just me coming unglued... a little. Now maybe I can work on the notion that not everything Rasputin does that hurts me, no matter what desperation it's born of, is always and infinitely and indefinitely forgivable. A little.
Thanks.
Dop