{"id":2972,"date":"2012-07-24T09:55:49","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T13:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2972"},"modified":"2015-06-29T09:22:02","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T13:22:02","slug":"dialogue-with-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=2972","title":{"rendered":"September 1993: Dialogue with Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Written in September 1993)
\nI talked about the feeling I got from Verna, I once described it in a journal entry calling her a cannibal, that there was something I had that she wanted, that she would just suck it out of me if she could, that I could feel pressure from her to teach her how to write like me.\u00a0 Something about Verna reminded me of Granny, how she would tell me how “wonderful” I was, and how confusing it was for me because I felt that she wanted me to do something for her, but I didn’t know what it was, and also that she didn’t see me clearly, so her “wonderful” couldn’t apply to me.\u00a0 (I see now that I experienced “you’re wonderful” as a manipulative expectation, but I didn’t have that concept to understand it and ended up feeling inadequate.)
\nExploring this stuff with my therapist, I saw the enormous baffled pain of being a child that is wiser than the adults around her, you see better ways to do things, or at least that theirs is disfunctional, so you can’t rest on their authority, but when you try to help, they invalidate your viewpoint so you learn not to trust your own perceptions either.\u00a0 And that deep wish to help (the natural response of an adult to a child she sees is floundering) is turned into a feeling of failure and hopelessness, because although you have the greater wisdom, you are only a small child and haven’t skills or concepts to articulate what you see, and they have big bodies and big voices and all the authority of being “grownup” and they are threatened by what little you do manage to say and of course have to make you wrong.
\n[I see now, it’s not so much that the child is “wise”, that I was “wise”, it was just that I saw the truths which my parents were spending their lives denying<\/em>.\u00a0 Oct93]
\nI saw that part of what kept sucking me in to “try to fix it” for Verna was my inability to validate my own perception that she is deep in denial.\u00a0 She is so charming, so plausible, she has even said she admires my writing and would like to write like that.\u00a0 So I get sucked into trying to teach her how, I start doing my “song-and-dance” about honesty at which point, of course, I cease to be honest.\u00a0 (Later it became clear that what I had to do was embody<\/span> honesty and keep my mouth shut.)\u00a0 Verna will never be able to write like me until she shifts her life orientation from “putting a good face on it” to a willingness to see the truth.\u00a0 There’s nothing I can do about that.\u00a0 [And of course, what I would really want for her is not that she would “write like me” but that she would write like herself.<\/em>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Verna was the mother of a friend.\u00a0 She came to my writing group.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting about this journal entry is my effort to \u201cfigure it out\u201d and also the comments I make from the future.\u00a0 Part of my process with my journal was to reread it occasionally and make comments from my present viewpoint.\u00a0 I always wrote on the righthand pages, leaving the lefthand ones as space for comments.\u00a0 This developed into a dialogue between older and younger selves.\u00a0 In this passage, the comments added when I was typing up a month later are in square brackets and italicized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Written in September 1993) I talked about the feeling I got from Verna, I once described it in a journal entry calling her a cannibal, that there was something I had that she wanted, that she would just suck it … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}