For Promise
Excerpts from a letter to my step-father, 12/29/1997
words accost me when i need them most. words strangle me when i want to be unstrangled. untangled. words silence when i wish to speak. the rest gets played out in metaphors. (history relies upon dissonance, upon discontinued familiarity, a fading into metaphors: the substitution of book for body, the colors that remind of him, the sounds that have become her)
metaphor: to substitute one thing for another. something vanishes from your life, and thus you fill the empty space with symbols. like a song that reminds you of someone, or a street name, a number, a certain time of day. things that are important to some, not to others. arbitrary concrete signifiers, with which we attempt to fill the vacancies in our lives.
they are not the things themselves, but rather the empty spaces, the feelings, they represent.
i struggle with words, because i cannot trust them. i know how unreliable language is; i speak too many of them to still believe in some absolute truth. culture shapes language. experience shapes language. also, language shapes us. the reason why i ran into your bedroom, crying, nearly 8 years ago, is not because i didn’t know how to write. it was because i couldn’t find the words to express what i meant to say.
it was because language betrayed me. over and over again, i wrote down sentences and phrases, somehow trying to capture thoughts and feelings with words, and my experience seemed cheapened. it was another falling into consciousness. another heart-break.
i have learned that language itself is not truth. i have learned that everything outside of language is truth. and this is what liberated me. finally. it has taken me years, and sometimes i still hate the fact that language cannot be pure. i hate that words are untrustworthy, yet i rely on them so much.
metaphor: to substitute one thing for another.
i see language as one of the most pervasive metaphors in my life. i substitute language for all the sacred things in my life that i cannot express. like love. like sadness. and this is why i write.
you see, i did not shave my head to shock the world. metaphor: to substitute one thing for another. hair is very symbolic, very metaphorical. hair signifies so many different things–it is beauty, sex, power, and it is feminine. i used to resent people for identifying me with my hair, for seeing me as the girl with the beautiful hair.
you know what i realized? i realized that, more than other people identifying me with my hair, i identified myself with my hair. my hair was my own metaphor; it symbolized something that was missing. once i understood this, i became very afraid. i couldn’t imagine my life without hair; i couldn’t separate my own identity from it. the thought of having it all gone was so frightening, i had no other option but to shave it all off. i had to get rid of it in order to know that there was still a person underneath it all once it was not there anymore.
about a month after i shaved it all away i had a panic attack. i cried and mourned over all my beautiful hair that is now gone. and i have to say that it has made me stronger. i had to learn how to love myself, how to face the person i am inside, not the image and the representation of the woman with the beautiful hair.
even if i grow it back to its original length, at least i am certain now that i carry some inherent truth within. i had to know for sure.
