#performative identity

the ring and the eyeliner and the coat i wear every day - the smiles i flash. these are the little rituals we construct, the little ceremonies we have to try and will ourselves into being. life is action, acting, constantly. the construction of self. where’s the boundary line between instinctive and elaborately performed behaviors? sure, the difference between the two may sound self evident. but truthfully, they’re both tools honed and softened by years of use. familiar. comfortable. are behaviors somehow rendered less sincere for the artistry that went into making them?

i’d like to think not. too much of -

no, strike that: nearly all of my life has been spent making my own responses. watching the faces of expressive people fascinates me. could i even imagine being that unselfconscious? i’m peculiarly charmed by the faintest snarl that appears around someone’s lips when an unwanted guest appears, by the aborted sigh and half-rolled eyes of someone attempting politeness.

i remember rolling my eyes once. i hadn’t even realized i’d done it at the time — truth be told, i’m still not sure i did — but my father certainly had. he had plenty to tell me about my disrespect, about my attitude problem. i didn’t roll my eyes again for years — and i certainly wouldn’t do it accidentally ever again

I’m not saying I’ve the botox-perfect rigidity, half-smile half-grimace. but i will say that most micro-expressions you spot are ones i’m strangely hyperaware of. i’ve practiced them, you see. tilt my head this way, angle my eyes away from whatever pair i can feel against my skin. laugh high, lashes low, bashful downward glance. i didn’t realize i spend most of my life still ducking, expression-wise. i thought only my sister still did that.

she flinches from hugs, standing petrified in my arms. i don’t know if she hugs my mother differently; i don’t see them hug often enough, and never think to examine them when they do. i’m too busy sulking, eyes low, shoulders tense. i become a teenager whenever i’m in the room with them both. with just one or the other, i usually seem okay. i seem better. my mother and i have a wonderful dynamic; good hugs and long talks and wine nights with charcuterie boards and roasted almonds.

my sister and i have rare, staccato starts and false-stops and “maybe..?” connections. we have sitting on the kitchen floor one sunny summer afternoon, when the light splayed languidly against the dining room walls and everything stretched sweet and still, a taffy-perfect moment of time. the first and possibly only time i’ve felt like a sister.

the implication of “sister” — one in relation to the other, a part of a whole set — has always been a sensation that escaped me. whatever belonging i could’ve had with my sister seemed, for years, to have been hijacked by the favoritism of my surly ex-Catholic psychologist father (just as winning a combination as it might sound.) he claimed me as part of his “whole,” as the sidekick to kick back in the passenger seat of his pickup with a baseball cap and a Mountain Dew, singing all his favorite songs and laughing at all his jokes.

my sister and i have been like. like what?

opposing magnets, moving gently out of each other’s way. alternatively: too-close contact between the two of us prompts abrupt and explosive separations

neighboring apartment tenants in a NYC walkup. politely averted eye contact, a few held-doors when their hands are full

the way you walk unseeingly around people on a crowded sidewalk. consideration without connection.

“strictly business, nothing more” 

maybe she’s the start of my love affair with people who close the door and cry? oh my god. maybe she’s why i’m so desperate to take care of people who’ll let me. all that pent-up momentum to murmur and soothe, to console, to hug and prescribe and therapize. something i was never granted. i don’t know

that afternoon was the only time i ever felt like maybe, somehow, we clicked. that, and the time i called her after those drunk women at work fell over themselves in the lobby, crawling like cockroaches, swearing and grabbing and grinding and snarling through laughs. belonging with each other, to each other.

i called her after in tears, asking why we’re always so goddamn nice to people who take advantage of us? who make us feel like nothing? why do we allow our senses of self to be overrun, over and over again? we have boundaries less like border walls and more like finish lines: chalked-up grass trampled flat and muddy.

she apologizes for it, constantly. i don’t know how to be friends with her. i certainly don’t know how to be sisters. maybe she doesn’t, either, but more often that not it seemed that she did know how to connect with all her high school friends. she just didn’t want to connect to me.

maybe this is why i’m still, perpetually, surprised by some people’s friendship. still a little starry-eyed by people choosing, actively, to keep connecting with me.

what a lonely thought.

in my handwriting, a horribly careless cursive scrawl, the slant of my “v”s and “n”s slope together. lonely and lovely look exactly the same. i realize i like the synonymical quality

i like the mercurial shape of myself. like my earrings, from chelsea market. like the earrings my aunt gave us once, when we were younger and new earrings not from claires were a shocking mark of maturity. they both changed color to match the surrounding light, filtering through the colors of our sweaters and our hair and our blushing, giddy cheeks.

(whenever i feel the cold brush of someone’s hands, no matter how much a stranger they may be, i instinctively cradle them to my overheated cheeks. there’s a metaphor there, i’m sure, but i don’t want to write it. so i’ll just politely avert eye contact and give it a nice berth on the sidewalk.)

my earrings and my smiles and my expressions, reflecting the rooms i’m in. i like being flexible. having synonyms. i like the different colors.

it makes it fascinating, renders soul-searching an act of psychological archaeology. realizing, today, now, why I like Jukebox the Ghost and Miracle Musical songs because of their fascinating similarities and differences to Owl City, to Panic! at the Disco, to the music of my day-dream childhood and sun-soaked adolescence. all those long car rides to shimmering shopping malls and airports. all the nights spent running barefoot over cracked asphalt. it’s so easy to romanticize! and i still can’t tell if it’s me or Adam Young’s idea of Florida writing these words.

how’s that for meta? is the cause for my romanticism of a sparkling-hot state from my listening to a boy in the cold middle of the country who stared at postcards and constructed an idea of a coastline, imagined himself beaches and tennis courts and saltwater rooms to wander in?

and here; even if that is the cause for my romanticism, is the habit and the emotions it inspires any less genuine for the degrees of separation required to construct the feeling?

like Stoker. “Just as the skirt needs the wind to billow, I'm not formed by things that are of myself alone. I wear my father's belt tied around my mother's blouse, and shoes which are from my uncle. This is me. Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for what we have come to be. Only once you realize this do you become free, and to become adult is to become free.”

not to imply i’ll go murder anyone. but rather: the flower has no bearing over it’s color.