Autobiography

I have been waiting for the perfect moment — the split in the sky, or the meeting of dimensions.  So much has happened it feels impossible to even know where to begin.  To name any single part of this journey as the beginning seems wrong somehow.  Like breaking something that has so seamlessly passed from one generation to the next in my family.  The beginning lies in another lifetime, so overflowing with the consequence of war that legions of men have worked tirelessly to conceal such brutality from young, impressionable minds of the future.  I feel torn between the dishonor that is to forget and the dishonor that is to tell a story no single participant therein could bear the thought of repeating.

So is, my life.  Grappling with something that is more alive and more powerful than any single life is capable of holding.  It comes to me and asks for an avenue to peace.  I break under the weight of it while smiling at strangers, then weep in shadows for as long as my mind can bear.  Over the years, that time has dwindled.  What my courageous young mind once spent hours wading through,  I can now hardly spend more than 30 seconds entertaining.  I still have the words.  I worked long and hard to build an empire of commemorations for the gift that is such overwhelming passion. It is important to take note however, before I even begin, that I could spend a lifetime drifting through the abyss and it still wouldn’t be enough.  If the living energy that commands my everyday waits until deathbed to the reach another, through my whole and absolute best efforts, a whisper will remind me that this means I have done something right.

It only seems fitting now to explain what has gone so long without personal scrutiny; one expression.  It is something I was taught before I could speak.  It’s a “pay close attention to the double (triple, go ahead Marie, show off, quadruple) meaning of this moment, and make me proud with how you remember it” expression.  It says everything and nothing all at once, and it inspires an inexplicable feeling of self-definace.  It’s employment in my life is rooted in pain.  On the rare occasion that I would allow myself to mumble at reality (in my deepest effervescent alto voice) words of near-irrelevance to match, someone always took notice. I can hear my father dramatically echoing “I am alpha” while adopting a theatric, show host persona as he said it.

I would laugh and suddenly find myself consumed by another feeling entirely, almost pretending that the moment of intensity I had pushed out into the room didn’t happen.  His timing was always perfect.  He knew exactly when to interject and redirect.  Thus, the birth of my confoundingly commanding and poignant moments of sociopolitical insight, followed by the pavlovian “I have no idea what you’re so taken by” demeanor accompanied by a Stepford Wives-like smile and laugh.  To anyone unfamiliar, this manner of dry humor is a stupefying paradigm, I’m sure.

At seventeen I was embarrassingly ignorant to my own demeanor. I spoke and people stared.  I interrupted conversations ten feet away simply by having one of my own.  I would raise my hand in class to speak shaking with nerves and when I was done everyone would stare at one another in silence — that was the “what the actual fuck” expression. The intrigue of molecular biology (which I had sworn was my life’s passion and purpose two months prior) was nothing compared to what I was experiencing now.

My sophomore year was a welcome evolution of purpose.  While still inspiring unusual reactions — though this was beginning to normalize in my mind — I was able to take upper division philosophy classes by switching majors; pre-law philosophy.  Despite self-identifying as a total loner, nerd, and awkward corner-sitter, I made good friends freshman year who I still connected with regularly. Outside of that I was a super hermit who spent hours reading (and rereading and highlighting and summarizing and arguing back in the margins) Hegel and Dewey for my frazzled, yet strikingly composed Philosophy of Truth professor who was the first to explain to me that my life’s mission was to “tame my mind.”  If only he knew.

For obvious reasons my passion for language and abstract thought doubled twice over at this point and there was next to nothing more entertaining than staring at blank walls post Kant/lemonade sugar-high contemplating the missed opportunity that was his musings on the categorical imperative.  I was determined to save the world from itself at this point.   Convinced that the secret to happiness had been buried by the 19th century marketing craze just like every other adolescent mind of my generation.  I was determined to make the abstract not only accessible, but desirable *and* scientifically grounded in quantum principles that had yet to be made widely accepted theory, but most assuredly explained the complex nature of social discord.  “If only people had motive and reason and time to dig deep enough….” my inner 5 year-old would pine.

Parallel to this passion was a budding epiphany, blossoming from a music history course I had decided to take my first semester as a sophomore.  By Christmas music was my decided medium for immortalizing my thoughts and disseminating them to the masses, and by the end of January I was knee deep in voice lessons, music theory and school choir.  I was going to be a musician and hell on earth would not (and did not) stop me.  I enrolled as a full time music student posing as a slightly older than usual college freshman.  To this day, among my happiest of moments committed to memory is that of sitting in choir late one Tuesday night singing a harmonized version of Grease’s “You’re the One That I Want.”

I was in the far back corner of the room on an upper riser behind everyone just looking around.  It was slightly chatty around me, the professor was absentmindedly half-engaged in a side conversation with another student as he flipped the pages deciding what to do next. I remember thinking, “Wow.  This is my life.  I did it.  I found it, what I want to feel for the rest of my life.  This is it.”  I was just taken. It was then that I knew I had made the right choice leaving the idea of law school behind. For reasons that have yet to grace the page, I had super nova rage buried in my gut and a painfully strong linguistic command of that energy.  Even from afar I could feel that law school was infuriatingly rigid and stifling.  This was a playground, and I was born for mind games.

I was fortunate.  My family had put in the work to give me a life of privilege that could have unfolded in a poetically ordinary way.  I made friends and quickly broadened my reach for female empowerment.  Started pursuing music production, doubled up on music theory like it was the bible, wrapped up two degrees and earned admission to the music department for a third.  I was about one semester out from transfer when I took conscious notice of being followed.  I do mean that metaphorically, but also, quite literally.  I couldn’t drive anywhere and not find a PI car to my left or in a rearview mirror.  I started memorizing license plates and taking mental note of my physical location when my phone camera was out.  I developed a recognition of certain patterns and started tying my experience to the international political sphere, finding ways of having discreet conversations with peers in an effort to gauge noticeability of such a shift.

The more I noticed, the more refined my attention to detail became, the more I changed, the more people noticed, and before long, I wasn’t just making passionate speeches to university ASB, I was immersed.  It was dèja vu hearing complex conversations find their way back to me in line for coffee, or hearing my name from across the room, and people were staring like I was some low-key figure poised to redefine political leadership.

I was totally dumbfounded.  Until it made perfect sense. Somehow, I had tapped into something with a current so strong there was no turning back.  I turned to family for help and understanding, but that only made matters worse.  Within a year of finishing my bachelors degree I couldn’t order french fries at a random drive thru window in Barstow without getting a visage de la guerre while stepping out. Beyond this, my person, my demeanor, my cadence of speech, my political obsessions du moment, my artistic color schemes, my musical themes, my everything was being mirrored back to me in media and in person.  In droves, people were walking around me wearing the colors of my latest single.

Yet not a single person would engage beyond this odd effort to distantly synchronize.  Most of them mocked me with not-so-subtle subterfuge riddled by envy. Some shared painful expressions of solidarity and sorrow, and still others, pure peril. Over and over and over.  At a certain point it was too difficult to handle the homogenous effort that seemed to serve no other purpose than fuck with my mind.  The seeds of suicidality sown, my body began shutting down for me within a few years — desperate and despondent reaction to my inability to save or protect myself from the pain of this derisive onslaught. July of 2022 was a breaking point, and everything since has been devastated acceptance fighting for peace.

My entire life, my peaceful moments of solitude contemplating the thoughts of great minds before me, raped and replaced with this.  With meaningless, pointless, useless insertions to my beautiful deer-in-the-headlights, hermity bliss.  From what felt like literally every single person I ever interacted with.  I was convinced of living in a twilight zone designed by sadists who either ignorantly perpetuated a narrative forged by patriarchal superiority complexes, or willingly supported such values in an effort to maintain social and financial dominance.  In the end it doesn’t matter what motivated them (or didn’t) the point remains that even the friends and family I turned to for salvation stared blankly.  I had one family member scream at me, “oh, why don’t you just kill yourself and make everyone’s life easier.”

Overnight I felt I had literally lost everything. Every intimate relationship I held close to heart was riddled with distrust and undertones of betrayal. My grandfather passed away, my aunt kicked me out of her apartment and I was homeless for a few weeks while saving up for rent. Beyond the factually discernible and comprehensible, something indescribably weird as fuck was going on, and no one knew what to say. They were as dumbfounded as I was, and by consequence, I felt utterly alone.

Skeptical of every motive around me, I didn’t realize it at the time that they likely lived in fear greater than my own. Yet, all I could think was something along the lines of “Disney can read your phone screen from remote satellite, don’t get me started on Black Ops mind control or radio-rooted memory loss, and so those f***ing dodgers eh?” etc.. A feedback loop of ambiguous expression is ridiculous when all it does is leave me vulnerable to distorted interpretation. The wrong story told to the wrong person, ultimately having nothing to do with me..i could wind up dead because of this absurdity. My God is the world fucking me over.” And fuck they did.

I was roofied twice in starbucks (haven’t gone back), fell asleep at my office desk because of god knows what in a Famous Star, drugged with fish gel capsules purchased at whole foods (thankfully teaching yourself to throw up is all but a young American right of passage *does three hail marys*), abruptly cut off in the fast lane on freeways with oddly increasing frequency, the list goes on.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was psychological warfare in its purest state of vexing ignorance.  My personal experience so acutely paralleled the patterns of mind-manipulation I recognized in the Hillary-Turmp campaign, it didn’t matter if it was blue-eyed family or Chinese cyber-soldiers or cartel-driven Mexican social networks designed to “erase and replace,” my life was reduced to a collection of experiences that could only be interpreted one way: no longer worth living.   I have never been so consumed by pain.

The outward sense of entitlement, and complete disregard for my pursuit of happiness, has been formative.  Details of those ramifications do matter, but that story is for another day, far from this one.  The main point, is that innate human tendencies continue to be exploited by power, and once again people like me with a bone to pick and a decent mind for doing it are being destroyed by the stupidity of emotional erraticism made fashionable by consumerism. Things have tempered as time has passed, but the pain remains utterly beyond description. I landed in the ER asking for morphine drips, temporarily lost the ability to walk, woke from nightmares pitch black blind, died in dreams more times than I can count, etc.

All because I’ve embraced the tendency to exist. Audacious, I know. With passion and conviction, at a time when others felt at a loss for where to even begin, or suffered from such a gross sense of entitelment and privilege the very idea of supplementing self-empowerment with apoplexy or pain was laughable. What a scattered utopian dream to imagine someone so motivated to reach the world and redefine social values with nothing more than a thirst for language and love affair with music.

Thus, a fleeting spark of defiance I shall be. I have literally spent my entire life searching for a saving grace in the duplicity of my heritage, reaping the consequences of misunderstanding, and grounding my identity in what it would feel like not to be stopped at the airport because US customs accidentally saw my French passport — yes, despite my immaculate english and American passport sitting right on top of it. Come at me.