These past days, I’ve been wondering what is that holds me back. I have ideas, I have plans and desires, I have dreams. And yet, it seems that I spend most of my time distracting myself and wasting time.
Then, yesterday, riding the train to the city, I put the book I was reading down for a moment (Carol Shields’s Collected stories, just at the beginning of Mrs. Turner cutting the grass) and I turned my head. There she was. My guilt was looking at me from behind, watching my every move.
She was silent, but clearly questioning my trip to the city. “Stop looking at me that way, I need that backpack that can hold my laptop and my camera,” I said. “No, you don’t. All the bags you have are perfectly fine.” I perceived what she was really saying: “You don’t deserve it.” You don’t deserve to travel with your computer and your camera. You don’t deserve to do what you like. You don’t deserve to have dreams.
(Who is she? As much as I strain my neck, I can never make her face up. She is always behind me.) “Just wait a little longer,” she told me in silence. “All will end and you won’t have anything to worry about. All the angst about what to do with your life will be behind you. As a matter of fact, it’s already behind you. it’s already too late.”
I suspect she has been with me for a long time. Perhaps from the beginning, before I could speak and even before I learned there was a world outside of myself. She’s followed me in all my moves from one place to the next, as I left behind family, friends, lovers, homes, pets, and possessions. She is the one that has always suggested me to wait and to ask for permission before trying: “Perhaps you need to ask around, just to make sure that you are not deluding yourself. You know, I just don’t want you to fail and get hurt.”
Perhaps you too have your guilt following you all the times. It’s easy to know when she is there. You can feel her breathing behind you and you are surprised every time a police car goes by without stopping you.
But why?
* * * * *
For some reason, she grew up believing that preserving things was better than using them. She learned how to save energy and stuff. Her mother told her periodically of a box of chocolate she received when she was a child. She loved chocolate with a passion and yet she exercised great constrain and disciplined herself to eat not more than a piece of chocolate a week until the chocolate became white and stale and had to been thrown away.
She behaved as she expected to lose everything she had at any moment; as if nothing was to be taken for granted. It’s strange, because her family was never that poor or economically unstable. Her family wasn’t very rich, but always in good enough shape, even at the beginning, where her dad was earning little money, was still looking for a stable job, and they owned a tiny white Fiat 500.
She never had to skip a meal, although she remembered that one time when she stumbled walking from the kitchen to the dining room and dropped a plate of penne pasta on the floor. It wasn’t her fault but her father got really angry at her. The plate must have not been broken, because he ordered her to pick up every single penna from the marble floor and put then back in the plate. “This is your dinner,” he said. (It’s possible that her mother had complained, with no result. It’s unlikely, though; when it came to disputes with the children, her mother would take a break from arguing with her husband and take his side).
Perhaps, her psychotherapist suggested, she did lack something. Love, recognition, understanding, safety. Safety. That would explain it, wouldn’t it? Even if she had enough to eat today, she didn’t feel it was safe to expect that she would in the future. Perhaps her family would split, or her mother would send her away as she did when her sister was born, or her parents would die.
At that time she was probably 7 or 8 years old. When her parents were out she would start imagining what would happen to her if they had an accident and died. She would probably move with her grandmother. What would she bring with her? How would her grandma know? Luckily, she knew where to find her phone number. Grandma it’s a long ways away. She would have to take the train. Where would she find the money? And how would she get to the station? Could she find something to eat? How long would she able to survive?
Making plans. Preserving energy. Be prepared. She always traveled with a backpack that would have enough to survive for a week. Several pens and paper—that was essential. Some money, a book, phone numbers, keys. The case for her contact lenses, in case she had to spend the night out. You never know. You can never be too prepared.