White Oleanders in my Head

Someday you've got to reconcile the self you are with the self you were.

I feel like Astrid Magnussen. No longer soft with perfect and good intentions. When people meet me they think I’m hard; a self assured b***h. When I was younger people saw me for what I was. Dreamy, strange, goth: someone, unlike them, not afraid of sadness. Who knows how we get like this. I spent my whole childhood building up my defenses and then I got older and couldn’t figure out how it there and how to take it off. Sometimes you just can’t. The armor has melded to your skin. You can’t be different because you’ve been mixed with a different substance. You’re no longer the same solution. The people who knew me as a child can’t reconcile the person I’ve become and the people who know me now can’t or won’t see all that I am. But I’m a people pleaser so I make it easy for them, being who they think I should be for however long they want me around. I wish I knew my roots. How I got to be the way I am. And thinking about it, would I have changed it anyway? Who are we without our flaws? I used to wish away my anxiety in highschool but then I questioned who I would be without it. Maybe I’d be more confident. Maybe I’d be less complicated. Maybe I’d like drinking and getting stoned and dancing in clubs on Friday nights. Why do I want that? I realized long ago it’s because I’m told to want them. My internalized problem with authority doesn’t like that; it hates me for it. The things I actually like doing, the people I actually like being with, the life I actually like leading, without any agenda has just never really been what is considered normal. That in its self makes me feel wrong. I wish I were stupid. I wish I were uncomplicated. I wish I were happy to be the doting housewife to some bloated, entitled, white man in our three bedroom, ranch style, suburban home. So removed from the troubles of the world. Poverty, abuse, political dissent, inequality. None of it would touch me there. It would be a foreign land to me. I would donate to charities twice a year, alleviating my white guilt with little to no inconvenience to me. Content in the thought that I was “helping” those less fortunate. And I would be happy in an unfulfilled kind of way. Never knowing or wanting to educate myself better; keeping it the “problem that has no name”. 

But I’m not that. I’ll never be that. I am Pygmalion. I am Frankenstein’s monster.