Sorry Speeches

Whenever I read a review of an author's lifetime work, it often includes certain themes the author revisits time and again.  Stephen King, in his earlier work, often wrote about childhood innocence and coming of age.  The author I'm reading now, Haruki Murakami, often writes about loneliness.  Jorge Luis Borges focused on the labyrinths of time and memory.  It's funny, because I think it was in King's memoir On Writing where he talks about hating when people ask him if there's a theme to his writing.  That could have been in any number of interviews with various authors I've read over the years, though.  Regardless of whether an author realizes it or not, often there is a moral or consciousness the author returns to, and sometimes it isn't recognizable until long after that author is gone.

I think quite often about what the themes of my writing would be.  I understand the process of writing to be cathartic, and authors are really working through the issues they have with the world at large, or within themselves.  I think one such issue I have is with regret or remorse.

There are often scenes in stories, television shows, and movies where a character, let's name him Bill, hurts the feelings of a second character, who shall be named Sally.  Bill makes Sally cry herself to sleep, perhaps unintentionally.  Sally shoulders the weight of her feelings for a long time, possibly years.  Maybe she only shoulders that weight for twenty seconds, but the point is she shoulders it in a way Bill, at the time, doesn't, because he is most likely unaware or uncaring of how he made Sally feel.  Eventually, Sally feels the need to expunge this weight from her chest and so, in a tearful and emotion-filled speech, she unburdens herself in Bill's face.  Normally, within the context of storytelling, Bill will reach an epiphany about his actions and apologize, sincerely, to Sally.  He will then endeavor to be more careful with Sally's feelings.

I call bullshit. 

I call this, because in my own experience no one apologizes even when the injured person shines light on the past behavior.  I know I can't base all writing on my own experiences, but personally, whenever I'm the audience for said scene, it just makes me angry and frustrated.  I've never received an apology when I've told someone how he or she made me feel.  It doesn't matter the situation. 

Usually, the other person will instead justify why they performed said behavior.  It can never be his fault.  Someone else's feelings can never be his responsibility.  It has become such a sore point in my life that I actually fear confronting someone who has hurt me because I know it will end in more pain for me.  There was a reason said behavior was necessary, and no matter how prepared I am to combat any response, the other person is ready with more justification, or just ends the conversation by walking away, brushing me off, or calling me names.  In most instances, instead of confronting the person, I retreat into my bedroom and cry in a ball, mentally enacting the scene from above with that person as Bill and myself as Sally, because the only apology I'll ever receieve is an imaginary one.

Professors in college asked me, time and again, why I had written the stories I had written.  Most young authors give a flippant response, or a response that is so intense and pretentious it's almost laughable, because life for them is still a ball of chaos and confusion.  I had no idea who I was or what I needed when I was twenty.  I still don't completely understrand my own life.  Whenever I get a rejection letter from a magazine I often get a hand-written note telling me it's well-written but that something is missing.  I'm slowly concluding that something is purpose.

There are other themes I revisit.  Imagination, longing, and identity are all tangled up with this idea of regret and remorse.  They all seem to go hand-in-hand.  I went through a writer's block for a very long time, so long I'm just now recovering from it, because for years I struggled with my identity as a writer, mainly because I was struggling with identity in general.  Even now, I regret allowing any other person to try to define me, but that's what happened and why I became blocked.  I imagined up a pseudonym, to the point of almost allowing that personality to take over my own personality.  I'm leaving that imaginary person behind now and examining what it means to be myself. 

I suppose that when I wait for an apology when someone hurts me, really I'm just waiting for that other person to define me.  I also suppose I'm waiting to give a definition to that person.  I want that person to justify my identity in the same way he or she is justifying his or her own identity by denying the behavior was wrong.  The right thing for me to do would be to confront that person, but once I've confronted her, let her own subsequent behavior be what it will be without expectation.  But to paraphrase Dumbledore, what is right is seldom what is easy.

I'm sure I will write scenes where Bill apologizes to Sally.  I think maybe those scenes are written as some kind of guidance toward what is right.  But real people often choose what is easy.  But since my writing is, after all, fiction, and in fiction characters don't have to be realistic, I suppose I can try to define a behavior, I suppose I'm really the one defining these fictional people.  As a catharsis for defining myself.