Mien

Nietzsche states that mien, a person's look or manner, is an aspect of language.  We employ an unconsciously inculcated mien.  Social background, training and conditioning all come across through our mien.  I'm sure mine comes across, too.  Bad experiences can also rearrange one's identity, in some parts stronger, weaker here or there.

I had bad experiences with gender.  (irony follows, on which the whole text balances) People said it was my mien that attracted those.   I had negative energy.  Whoops!  A bad result.*  In fact, my energy was the repression of negative energy -- hence NIL.  A negation of negativity at my own hand.

Socially I had a repressed mien as I was preserving other people's psychological integrity that way.  To speak was to risk anger as a consequence of evoking the negative.  What was negative you ask?

There were a few things, primary among these was our migration.  I viewed this neutrally, so my repression of acknowledgement of migration was in service of others.  I didn't have a way into their reasons.  They were adult prohibitions relating to war.  I was child, seen but not heard and cordoned off in my own world --locked into childhood by virtue of not knowing, and took state of being as the burden of my adult responsibility.  But you don't know why you are doing what you're doing.  That makes you still a child when you try to explain your 'reasons'.  My reasons were my parents' reasons but they hadn't seen fit to tell you of their nature.   They've locked the box that holds their secrets, as an adult political decision (i.e.not mine).

I must have developed a repressed mien as a consequence of that.   I'd never known the joys of adolescent frivolity because I had to bear up under the pressure of not knowing the essential principles that were governing my life.   These made no sense from any considered perspective, but I couldn't begin using for the keys that life would later give me without first being given clues as to the questions I should start to ask.

That's how it was for the longest time.   I was the child, the naif in knowledge, who had to exist not knowing what was what, with repressed demeanor lest I inadvertently reveal a secret that would cause our family excruciating shame.

Certainly, I was willing to pay the price until the cost was more than I was able to afford.  Chronic fatigue syndrome obviously didn't seem like to much of a cost to pay.  Not for me or others.  I paid it that way for many a year.  Then the charges came more relentlessly.  People were angry at me for seeming not to know things and said I was putting it all on.   I tried to make a life for myself, but somehow even doing this was taking too much back.  My father became irate and asserted that I'd overestimated his 'tolerance'.

Then there was the workplace bullying -- and that took all I had remaining.  I had nothing left to pay.  They kept saying I was a child in an adult's body and my only response to that had been, "I do not know.'

I had been given this tremendous adult responsibility to make the migration adjustment work, not just on behalf of me but for my parents, who knew nothing of how to live this new pattern of life.  I was their primary flagship and if I failed, everyone would fail.

But now I'd failed, and it was absolutely too late for me.  I'd tried to keep the water out but it had all got in. I'd tried to be the adult, but I hadn't been able to learn the ropes -- not quickly enough.  So I began bailing. I threw things out.  First was the assumption I could save my parents.  I restricted myself to saving only myself.

I didn't know any other method at this point than reverse engineering.  If what I had been doing had led me to these troubled waters, I would do the opposite.  Bailing, at least, could be fun -- and pleasure was one thing I hadn't had in all of my so-called 'adult' life.

So, I did the opposite.  I stopped aiming for perfection and started aiming for chaos and dissolution.  I through out all the trappings of adulthood -- all the heavy weights of shouldered responsibility, that had done me absolutely no good at all.

I threw them out merrily and gleefully.  For the first time in my adult life, I felt like a child again.   Woosh!  Here goes a chair.  Ka-ploosh!  There goes a heavily laden desk.

I tossed everything that I could think of into the waiting ocean.  I was no longer compliant.

Not that everyone had to know that straight away.  I was slowly reversing the engines, and the pumping station, and everything that I could think of.  This was enjoyable.

Lying was fun, too.

I'd told the people what was true for far too long and no-one had believed me.  So,I'd start telling them what was untrue.  Who knows!  That might work!  Anything better than this.

I was defending myself for the first time in my adult existence.  I had been taught nothing, so was learning it the hard way -- as one might say from a semi-submerged existence.

I experimented with trivial facts.  If I didn't like something, I asserted that I liked it -- just to see how that would feel.   If I misplaced something and I knew that I had done so, I would say that I had no idea who might have taken it.  I was tired of having all the blame of the office deflected onto me.  I would give them some of their polluted water, for a change.

They didn't like white people from Zimbabwe, so I would be something else.  I would experiment with the fluidity of existence.  "Here's some more dirty water for you!  Hope it helps to purify your sight!"

So I got the old engines working for the first time and was no longer simply wind driven.

A narcissistic and dysfunctional workplace can inflict such damage that....suddenly one is alert.

I call this my shamanic awakening.

That was the first instance when I had an inkling about unconscious social dynamics and how they influence us.    I learned that despite my vacuous illusions that I was completely free,  I hadn't even begun the process of taking control of my unconscious mind.

I still had all sorts of ...Rhodesian patriarchy and feminine dutifulness in my psyche, which I had never detected -- at least not until I was almost destroyed and overturned.

At the time I was attacked most heavily, I had been taking on water for over a decade.  My immune system was shot and I'd been suffering from debilitating chronic fatigue.

When they nearly destroyed me and I started to fight back, I had succumbed to an chronic digestive disturbance, which meant restrictions on my diet and preferably only mushy food.  This -- until now, when these ailments have finally subsided.

Until recently, I thought Western culture as such was narcissistic and have been on the defense against it.

It certainly made me attack myself -- but ultimately this was for the good.  I'm no longer a Rhodesian lady in my soul and the belief that I'm responsible for family secrets holds no water for me.

---

I was the ideal obeisant rule follower, female child of an extreme patriarchy, and it was said by those who were insistent on maintaining the status quo that I had somehow attracted negative life experiences.  By following their rules.  That was the logical dissection of the matter.

This was one of many experiments I conducted.  And certainly I conducted  many experiments of this sort.

*I would say, “people” in the context of this story, is an unreliable narrator. To the extreme. We must not rely on “people”, given the outcome of the story: what has been learned.