Of all of the classical mythology I’ve had to absorb over the years, courtesy of a liberal arts education, the birth of Athena stuck with me most vividly. When I learned, however many years ago, that the goddess of wisdom sprang fully formed from her father’s head, I suddenly imagined Zeus’s skull opening as if on a hinge. Athena, necessarily in miniature but still formidable, steps out: fully armed and ready to go.
Sometimes I wonder who all would step out of my head, were a hinge to be installed.
There are, of course, the various incarnations of self, whom I tend to name by their age. Eight arrives, skinny and tan, with a neat bowl cut. Thirteen has greasy bangs, small eyebrows, and is holding a book of Robert Frost’s collected poetry. Fifteen has platinum skunk stripes in her hair and black liner completely encircling each eye, about an eighth of an inch deep. Nineteen’s hair is long, of natural shading, and she seems to have relaxed, if only a little, sitting astride our Trek mountain bike. Each of these imagined incarnations tends to have something to contribute to my emotional processes, to such a degree that my internal monologue becomes more of a chorus, and not a terribly harmonious one at that.
But my various selves are not the only ones in there.
In the new territory of an adult, romantic relationship, I have come to some remarkable conclusions, which have applications in other realms. For instance, I indulged an anxiety recently, and my brain immediately wove an enormous fight out of a single worry; an imaginary fight in which I filled in all of my sweetheart’s lines to the point of our seemingly inevitable break up. Then I stopped short. I had to think about it carefully, because the most obvious conclusions for me tend to be the most slippery: I wasn’t actually having an argument with him. I was having an argument with myself. His imagined voice was my voice. I couldn’t predict how we were going to grow together or apart, and it was patently unfair of me to suppose I could predict how he would react and respond. I love him because he is very much not me. All I could do was take things a day at a time, love thoroughly, and be thoughtful.
As I told her this, my therapist seemed very close to bursting into applause. Progress!
Twenty-seven, whom I have yet to become, has managed to take up ghostly residence in my mind as well. I can think of no one else to credit for the surprisingly mature thoughts that occasionally formulate from practically nothing. I have no idea what she looks like, but she’s very patient and encouraging. She’s the one who nudges me to apply my newly gained insight to other, murkier areas.
Like my sister.
If Athena stepped fully armed from her father’s head, I feel as though my oldest sister steps out of my head armed only with a certain facial expression she has. It’s enough, though, to send me screaming—towards her with a metaphorical battle axe, away from her towards any convenient cliff, or towards the nearest wall against which I can beat my head.
Her expression is one of intense rationality. It drives me absolutely insane.
The specter of my sister, the one I carry around in my head, isn’t actually my sister. It’s a composite version of her: her eighteen year old arrogance, her twenty-two year old cruelty, and her twenty-seven year old judgment. I have internalized her voice as my inner judge: she archly questions my motives and doesn’t ever seem to think that I’m good enough as I am, as if she’s waiting me out until I become more like her. For many years she did make me feel like that, but I have to wonder where the emotional trauma stops and the echoes just keep going out of habit. I don’t believe that the entirety of my self-doubt can be traced back to her voice; it’s just that her composite is the easiest and sometimes most historically accurate name to put on it.
The problem with a composite is that it lacks any and all subtleties. I remember one particular instance, when my sister and I were fighting bitterly on a ski vacation. It was the worst kind of fight: one born of misunderstanding, old wounds, and things said with poor choice of words at the wrong time. When our mother got mad at us for fighting, we turned on her in unison: bound together by our right to hate each other in peace. It may be deeply screwed up, but it’s one of those subtleties that I miss when my sister simply fills the role of “villain” in my mind.
It’s a funny thing to realize: that two people’s similarities can cause them almost as much damage as their differences. The combination of problematic similarities and differences, especially among family, I have observed to be uniquely cataclysmic. After a particularly severe blowout about eighteen months ago, our relationship has been hobbling back to health. We check in maybe quarterly: I tell her a synopsis of my goings on, and she tells me what she’s teaching and non-food items her dog has been eating. She is not the person who lives in my head. She is the person who lives in Michigan and who can do her own part—which I can’t predict—to mend our relationship.
It’s a tense process. I have to conquer a vintage, desperate need to have her like me, to make her laugh, and she probably has to think carefully about the things she says so that she doesn’t accidentally tread on an old wound she may or may not have given me.
It’s also very difficult to recast her in my head, so to speak. Can I have a relatively successful relationship with who she is now, if who she was then still plays the villain in my mind? Somehow I doubt it. When it comes down to it, though, maybe that’s the best we can do: to have a relationship with each other as we are now, mindful of the past but not dwelling in it. Another observation I made in plaintive tones, which made my therapist laugh, is painfully obvious: Adult relationships are hard.
But who knows? Maybe my Twenty-seven and her Thirty-seven will get it right even more than we do now. We'll have to ask them when we get there.
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