| from: | Linda |
| to: | WB |
| date: | Dec 10, 2011, 3:11 AM |
| preliminary remark: | I stayed overnight at my friend WB’s in downtown Montreal. I don’t recall the exact phrase she uttered that should make me thus vexed; presumably it’s an insignificant quarrel over nothing after all. My guess, judging from what’s hinted at in the email and my own temperament, is that as she was busy in preparing material for her work the next morning, she didn’t have the time nor the energy to deal with my quirky personality and probably said ‘Linda, behave like an adult!’ or something alike. And that broke something in me. |
Dear WB,
It is a shame that I departed in haste without so much as a thank you for the two sojourns you (and other ladies of the House) have kindly accorded me. Whatever grudge I have harboured the night before should not preclude this social duty from being paid. Pray accept my apology and my penitent acknowledgment of your kindness.
Rethinking about yesterday, however ungracious of me it may be to profess so directly, I felt rather offended (or hurt, I know not how to qualify this feeling of unpleasantness) in a multitude of subtle ways, hence my decision to remain silence after the claim ‘Linda is unhappy; Linda doesn’t want to speak to WB’ was openly made. No logical reason can be produced to explain the nature of the abhorrence I felt, which was vaguely suggested in the form of infantile tantrums and voluntary mutism, and the effect of which was too strong to obliterate what had occurred to my mind in the course of one night. I gather I have in the past offended a great many individuals with my lack of regard or consideration and my at times acrimonious critics of others, much in the same fashion as I myself prove obnoxious to everyone’s displeasure. So by the end of the night I came to the conclusion that I myself was at fault to have incurred such an offence and submitted with a stubborn resignation to my old belief that the whole world would be a better place to live had I not been thrown into it.
I know not how many times that thought of disappearance has come to me lately; it seems that the more people I am acquainted with, the unhappier I become. I have considered withdrawal from this world on several occasions, yet never was able to determine whether to adopt the hermitic mode of living, as I did a number of years ago, would be tantamount to safeguarding me or to further devastating others in the wantonness of my avoidance tendency. I can easily disavow my acquaintanceship with one whose disposition I judge incompatible with my own without giving an explanation, or keep my mouth sealed for another who had mortified my moral character, on the ground that the offender does not deserve my attention. That I am still reluctant to apply the same measures on you does not imply that my vexation was in no way genuine or further exacerbated by my failure at knowing why I must be thus vexed, full of blither and fury, acting as a hopeless self-loathing idiot ruining everything and vexing you in return with her indelible defects incoherent to her rational principles — so this is Christmas, I could hardly have chosen a more unpropitious moment of the year for being punitive!
I need to specify that my past comments here and there in defiance of humanity and the value of communication were never directed against you; rather, they were due to the whole society’s shared expectation for everyone being fully capable of social interaction, of producing unbroken stream of spoken words without stumble, or of strict observance of all rules of social decorum, to which no one can be exception. In direct confrontation my coping strategy is almost always the cessation of conversation as a response to traumatic memories — partly confabulated, to be sure — relating to speaking experience under circumstantial difficulties in my youth, mostly ignored or criticised by those who could but have no idea, even remotely, of how mentally, physically, intellectually, demanding it could be for an atypical person who did not follow a normal development pathway to acquire partial proficiency in the art of communal living. The infuriating frustration, not unmixed with utter abomination which I have been forced to experience and re-experience, has long since made me yielding to some untoward bias that such demand as ‘speaking like everyone’ or ‘behaving as others’ has for the object of eliciting the grave sense of shame and humiliation that had fallen upon on childhood Linda.
Fruitless labour was made in my most dire health condition to resolve the incidences of unwanted offence to which I still greet with either repellent clamour or dead silence; clearly I have not got the proportions of things entirely adjusted. The soothing precepts of your humanising faith are simply inadequate to sustain the life of one who can readily bound herself in a nutshell for a work still in progress for weeks, seeing no one, uttering no word.
I will try to quench my vexation and may I hope that the desire to speak will resume by the next time we meet (if we ever meet again). I like you always, but I fear that one day I will have to disappoint you by opting to disappear — after all, my social intelligence never bypasses that of a 4-year-old child, i.e. I never know what to do with myself.
Yours ever (& frustratingly),
Linda
LINDA’S ARTWORLD 