this is a feeling vow

It's raining today on my borough (well, across my brief window in only a corner of the whole shebang) and I like the sound of cars below skating through ponds of wet debris because it's all quite to-the-point. Despite my protest, despite my thinking I deserve sunshine happy joy always, here's grey, I'm to reckon with grey today. The clouds are not a personal affront because weather isn't emotional – it's today just another surface to project upon. And water reflects, easy-peasy.

It's the end of the school year now. It's a Tuesday. This is a pink room with pictures on the walls and it's still almost clean from a recent scour. I am a lady sitting in bed, and here's today's motif: Language is a flawed net with which we're tasked to communicate, make meaning, live – but alas, it's the only one we have (A Cited Source).

I am a lady in a pink room with pictures on the walls who thinks in words; I think in long strands of them, I think in sentences, I think in looped, circular, theory, I think in verbs and adjectives. We took a test in high-school sophomore psychology called “What Kind of Thinker Are You?” and I remember lots of people around me saying they perceived the world in images and I'm still mystified by this idea – for some reason, their way seems so much more clear and applicable. But I have a love affair with language! He's my svelte dance partner, my solipsistic counter-part, my compound word mailbox, my deep, guttural, entrenched, kindergarten, winsome, this-is-a-list-of-things-that-crack-on-your-tongue...

At the Tisch Salute yesterday (which I “worked” with the Unsinkable Molly Gillis), Brian Grazer told the graduating class his success' biggest secret: he is a man who works constantly to push himself out of his comfort zone. He used the word 'disrupt' and handed this down as a task – in order to expand (soul-wise) as individual artists in the modern world, we ought to exist in a constant stretch and rub up against discomfort and terror actively, consistently. And now I begin to think about how disruption and displacement talks to capital-s-Self, meaning here the lady in the pink room that's still mildly clean, the lady who thinks in words. Given: she wants to be whole, she aspires to be grand and graceful and competent and satisfied, loved and loving, she also desires to be stretched and tested. So where to direct this sage wisdom?

I am twenty now. I call myself 'becoming' and 'confused', I call myself 'literary' (my mind rotates on that English axis!), I call myself lots of things and call other things lots of things and begin to realize slowly the flaws in even this, my precious, sacred, capital-s-Self system of processing the entire universe around me. I know Brian Grazer wasn't directly suggesting “abandon all your norms and preconceived notions, go out and BE someone entirely different!” but at least in the capital I truck in, actions and existence ride a super similar wavelength. I think in language, I look at the world in language, and as a result I work and act and relate to others in language too, which means in a way that It is all of what I am. Follow? So if I am to really blow up Brittany and sacrifice her comfort to the altar of professional success and deep soul business, this MUST be where I start. In my library.

More proof:

I was with someone recently with whom I could never completely communicate. I felt like I never understood the things he said to me on this fundamental, tonal level – I never knew if he was joking or being serious, I never knew where we were standing on the planet. And predictably, I did the things I usually do when frightened and worried, fluttering around like a trapped bird – I spent minutes and hours and days attempting to boil my own feelings and my own opinions on our talks and the emotional undercurrent of all these talks (Follow?) into words, and because I hadn't yet understood this man I couldn't (didn't) do it. I flailed. Flailing reminded me of all my other stabs at something like love and the trappings of each journey, and I couldn't help but notice recurrent symptoms: being vulnerable with another person = discomfort = flakiness = inability to act in a human fashion. And ironically, my Brian-Grazer-disruption in all these instances led to a destruction of said sacred words (which are lonely things) and resultant complete terror, and ultimately bad juju all around. Bruised or broken hearts, bones, egos, mystified minds, long weeps on public transportation. The coda becomes that familiar why-haven't-I-learned-anything-in-all-my-life's-travels-YET...

There was a long period of not talking and not communicating (in the most psychiatric sense of the word) with this other person, all while I tried to foist feelings into adjectives and events into verbs. And to cut the crap, here's what happened: I hurt someone. And they hurt me. And I don't know why. And I remember this Holy mocking moment in our last phone call (which I conducted in the mist on St. Mark's place, shamefully away from the three page prepared speech I'd written earlier at Think Coffee...)
Him: So have you said everything, then? What else you got?
Me: (Long, long pause. Groping for....) No. I mean. I guess not.
The end of language. Conflation/ipso facto –The end of Brittany. Help me Brian Grazer, teach me how to pray!

The roads of my window/borough/universe are paved in lexicon (looking for synonyms here, bear with me) and as that's my most precious and problematic device, I understand, with a sinking dread, that I have been asked (as an extension of the graduating Tisch class of 2011) to abandon this. If even only for a little while. This is the scariest. I'm already aware of all these extra regions and the edges of things which can't be explained. I'm thinking back to all the spaces I've let widen between me and people I want (oh honestly I did want you, too, and I couldn't say it how dumb IS that you're dumb too I am so so hurt). And now I want to talk about how language and action meet and coexist and bleed into one another, and how my heart feels and wishes and how frightened I am of certain concrete milestones looming in my own personal next twelve months and the Alexander McQueen exhibit and dieting and my best friend's return from a faraway country and what it is to be crazy and and and –

Breathing. This is what top Hollywood producers mean by baby steps and we all know infants don't mince words.

PS ADDENDUM, ALSO SURPRISE -- There aren't words for some ways to feel. See?
Cold, sad, lonely, bright, hopeful, sheepish, ashamed, battered, cruel, objectified, mean, unfortunate, wishful, other parties, there will be other parties, other lovers, there will be other lovers, convincing, death, terror --
I mean, did you get any of that?