Two Conversations

18:55, 09 May 2003

The Piyush Conversation
Today I was emailing Cybele, who has been exceedingly helpful in soothing my Piyush-related anxieties, since she has survived similar experiences with her Indian boyfriend. It is my chats with my therapist and with Cybele that have helped me keep such an evenkeeled perspective on the whole relationship.

I've determined that if Piyush were a house, he'd be a fixer-upper. As Cybele did with her boyfriend, I'd need to adjust his attitude/expectations towards me/our relationship. I'm not stressed about it now, since he's leaving in July, but if there were no deadline to this relationship, I would definitely be strapping on my toolbelt.

I figure that while I've got him, I might as well do some retrofitting. Therapist thinks I'm probably the first girl that has put up resistance to his little regime. Yes, he had a two-year relationship with a girl in Cardiff, but I tell you, if he was like he is now, she must have been the world's most obsequious doormat to last that long.

I was saying the other day about how I thought he might be intimidated by me. I mentioned this to Therapist and she thought that was totally right. She said this is probably such a new and deeper type of relationship than he's ever been in before. That sounded good to me, because do you know what I want when he leaves? I want to haunt his mind like a ghost. I want to drag my chains around in a clinking cacaphony in his head every time a girl hits on him. I want to be the new standard to which all others are compared. Doesn't everyone want to be a ghost in someone else's mind?

To that end, I must deal with control, and his ambivalence about it. He doesn't know what he wants. I was talking to him at dinner the other day about his mom: he said she does everything he wants her to do, when she visits she goes where he wants to take her, etc. He basically illustrated that she is allowed no autonomy. So he tells me this and then says that he regrets that he has been so controlling to his mom all these years because now she doesn't even try to have preferences... she just does what he says, is happy with what he wants, etc. OK, weirdo, I think, so why are you trying to control me, then, if you regret supressing your mom into a smiling sheep? Why are you trying to quash my autonomy as well?

I conclude that he wants to assert control overtly but cede it covertly. Classic, along the dominatrix model. The extreme is high-powered men who weild power all day want leather-clad women to beat them with whips at night. To keep with the sexual imagery here, there is a reason why Piyush wants to act like he's controlling me all day and then always wants me to climb on top of him when we're hooking up.

So he tries to control me-- tries to push me-- to see if I'll push back. He doesn't want a girl that takes it; he wants a girl that will laugh in his face and do her own thing sometimes. I find this especially true because he won't push me that far if I disagree. He'll be like: "My way!" and I say, "Nope, my way!" And he'll stamp his foot like a pouty child and say "MY way!" and I'll just be like, "Sorry, dude. My way." and he'll sort of grumble but it's obvious that he doesn't mind.

Therefore, I have chosen some battles. I refuse to go to Taco Bell with him, for example. He loves that god-forsaken palace of cast-off dogmeat and I refuse to go. In a relationship with the average person, I would make a compromise one day and go, just to be fair... but that's not the way to play with Piyush. He always says "we're going to Taco bell today, for sure" and I'm just like, "Uh huh, yeah, OK. So what are you going to order when we go to Doughboys?"

The only problem with this is that all this assertive, I'll-do-what-I-want sass is not me, especially not in relationships. I have a nasty tendency to go doormat with guys I like. To do anything they want to please them. I was heading that way with Piyush, getting all depressed about his criticisms and deciding I was just going to do whatever he wanted so he'd like me. Then Cybele stepped in and saved me with her email advice. I suppose it is good for me to practice having a bit of a backbone, huh? I mean, not just with Piyush, but in general. I just keep trying to do the impossible: please all the people all the time so everybody likes me. (And isn't it ironic, then, that I don't have any friends! hahahaha).

The Diary Conversation
Someone who reads this diary emailed me with a surprising question: "Ever since I was young, I have been taught to distinguish author from narrator. (My mom was an English teacher). I am not completely sure that your diary is not a fantasy, because everything just runs so...prose-like and fluently, as though your life was created rather than lived."

In other words, is my diary fiction? This surprised me, to say the least. That anyone would ever think that never entered my mind, probably because I know that I have never succeeded in writing anything fictional because the characters and plots of my stories, like magnets, snap back to autobiography no matter how hard I try to write them otherwise.

But beyond that little-known detail, I was simultaneously flattered and insulted by the question. I've always assumed that all of you know it is decidedly nonfiction. In fact, it is the most nonfiction thing I have ever done. I may not live my life honestly, but I do write it honestly. I found it disconcerting to find the realest me seen as fictional.

The sting, however, did not last long and I chose to accept the question as a compliment. What is writing if it is not taking the rough edges of what we call life and smoothing it into a fluid story, a chronology woven with threads of theme and habit and motivation and reaction and transition. That someone saw my diary as fiction only tells me that my writing may possibly be good enough to shape my own life into such a coherent and accessible description and explanation and exhibition of one life in progress. I take extra pride in that since it is harder to write about things as they happen than it is to write with 20/20 hindsight. "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," said George Orwell. I like to think I do the best I can in that capacity.

And finally, how could my life be fiction? This stuff is so totally crazy I just don't think someone could make it up if they tried!