Non-compliance

I don’t know who this is for. Maybe it is for one person. Maybe it is just for me.

I dream:

I have two roles at a major network.  One is as a newscaster. The other is as a supporting and generic domesticated “Mom” character in some badly written sit-com.

I am assigned to live in corporate approved housing – dorm like, cinder blocks, paid for by the network. My wardrobe is also determined and sent over by the network.

I am supposed to be grateful for these jobs. I know many people clamor and struggle for them. For the status, for the income, for the fame, for the “big-break.”  None of that is an incentive for me.

 I just want to wear my own clothes and inhabit my own space.  

The network doesn't know what to do with me. I have stopped reporting for my scheduled scenes and shoots. I am simultaneously refusing to comply and trying to avoid getting fired.

In front sits a wild woman on the hood of an old car.  In the dream I call her a "rough girl." Her skin is browned by the sun, she wears a bandana tied around her forehead and mirrored sunglasses. She wears thick silver chains and a tank top. She is drinking whisky nips. She might be drunk.

She has many larger tattoos and in all the "empty" spaces in between there are drawn tiny, delicate astrological and alchemical symbols, all equidistant apart, as if a chart or a map has been inscribed on her skin.  Enfleshed talismans, every inch of her is protected by some wild, extreme power.  She frightens me.

Back in my dorm I avoid the calls of the network executives. I decide I will hide in the closet if they come to coerce or confront me. I realize I have hidden some of my own clothes in the back of the closet, in the dark, where the light does not reach. I look for a soft black jersey dress, but it has fallen off the hanger, and feel around on the floor for it.

I wake and think of the dream for the rest of the day.

I decide to wear the exact loose black cotton jersey dress that fell of its hanger in the dream over a pair of leggings. I tie it in a knot at my waist when I go for a bike ride.

I think of all the networks I have quit, all the organizations and institutions.  All the cliques and choirs, churches, clubs and social circles, all the schools and training institutes I left or simply refused to join.  How they all insisted they saw themselves as a family, how they offered the promise of belonging if only I would abandon myself. How often I took the bait and then spit it out.

I remember all the spaces that were excited by me, that invited me in, and sometimes even lifted me up, but only if I hid my capacities and deferred or complied as I was expected to.

I recalled how often I tried to adapt to these systems, to excel, to shine and how I was never willing to pay the price that everyone else seems to pay happily, never able to submit, to go along, to dumb myself down, to kiss the right ass, play the game properly or to suffer fools.

I was simply and truly not capable of compromising myself -  sometimes in even ridiculously minor ways -  no matter what I might lose, or how high the stakes, no matter the opportunity that closed itself to me or the detriment I would absorb.

I thought about the years, the decades that I spent believing that I failed to adapt to these structures when the truth was probably that I shouldn't have bothered at all.

I think through the day of the rough girl, this golden witchy biker chick, sitting under the sky and her magic tattoos.  She is beyond control. She lives outside of any network and has jumped every track. The more I sit with the memory of her, the less she frightens me and the more fascinating she becomes.

The only grid she obeys is engraved on her body.

I think about her tangled hair and the sunglasses, like mirrors, which show me my own reflection. I think of the power she holds; how extreme she appears and of my fear of her. Her tolerance of danger. Her capacity for aggression. Her lack of fucks to give.

I think about how she is sitting outside in the sunshine, while I am hiding in a closet.

I think of all my kind, direct:  I’m-so-sorry-but-that-doesn’t- feel-right-for-me’s. My polite: No-thank-you’s.  Or when all else fails my avoidant and bottom line:  Sorry-I-won’t-be-there’s. I remember how all of these customary and small refusals  have so often been responded to as shocking acts of defiance.  And how silly and tame these minor rebellions would seem to this feral star woman.

Why did I spend so much of my life trying to walk a path that was "still in and yet a little out" rather than simply riding with the outlaws? I think also of all the ways I diverge from this rebel girl. I'm not a feral biker chick.

Those aren’t my clothes either.

The jersey knit dress I am searching for, and end up wearing for the day is black, and buttons from neck to hem with grey metal buttons. It is soft as butter, loose and stretchy with ample pockets. It is neither flattering nor unflattering. I toss it on over a pair of leggings, and wish I had three or four more of them in different colors.

I wonder what networks I am embedded in that still try to control me. I wonder where I am hiding. I wonder what roles I need to reject, and what I jobs still need to quit and liberate myself from. I wonder how much more there is left for me to possibly give up.

 I sometimes think there is nothing left.

 I wonder how much more out there I could become and remain myself.

I think about the ways I can still be lured into trying to challenge and reform toxic systems, to press them and make them sweat and feel shame for they ways they lie to themselves about the grotesque harms their illusions of unity rest upon. And how futile and martyring that work has been every time I have attempted it.

I remember that there a part of me that lives outside of their reach, and who knows there is nothing to be had inside such institutional illusions. I remember my impact is often most powerful when I sit outside these proscribed paths and networks and show others that they can leave them behind too.

The map drawn in my flesh is enough to chart my course with - it doesn't matter what others want or expect. Suspicious of all human authority, my body obeys the laws of the universe, the blueprint of the sky, the cycles of the earth.

There are greater forces I willingly submit to - that so many others seem to ignore or dismiss - that never require that I become something I am not, but only ask us all to become more of what we are, in all our foolishness and error, fully alive.