Satan’s Suburbs

I can’t stand the suburbs. It’s where people go to die.
Let’s backtrack…

Just like residual feelings of being raised in the Catholic church, I was aware that I had plenty of bias from too much associated pain. The middle-class suburbs of the ’80’s and ’90’s hadn’t exactly been that of a culture that excepted me. Being more than a little bit of a challenge and having an outside the box personality, I had constantly been told that who I was at my core was wrong and that I needed to change. So I tried. I tried really hard. I was desperate for love.
All I ever saw of that world was close-minded conformity that was full of underlying expectations to live in a little box that got smaller and smaller. So did the thinking of the people in it. Well, if it could be called “thinking”. Sheep “thinking” where people turn into little more than a channel for what was being pumped into their brain. Work consisted of being a number in some company where someone else was getting rich for the work others were killing themselves to do. Hey, you earned $5MM for the company this month? Here’s a plaque and a $200 bonus.
It was a culture full of stay at home wives and mothers whose husbands took them for granted and were MIA most of the time. If they weren’t working 80 a week they were off with some mistress while the Mrs. was home nursing sick kids and chasing antidepressants with a bottle of pinot gris while judging others who were doing the exact same thing. Judgmental (note the irony that I call that out while writing this), narrow-minded and superficial two-faced people who couldn’t understand why they weren’t happy. Outside the box people like me were a threat. Why? Because we made them think for themselves? Or look at themselves? I kind of get it. I also kind of don’t.
Of course, that wasn’t always the case. It just was way too much of the time. The few people I did find to love me during those dark days literally saved my life. I struggled with suicide.
Saying I didn’t like the suburbs was kind of like how I would say that I didn’t like kids. It wasn’t as simple as that. Some kids really were little assholes. Some, though, were so cute it hurt. The real problem was that I didn’t like being expected to swoon at the sight of every one and that I was “supposed” to have them just like I was “supposed” to follow the other rules of that society. A society that misogynistic baby boomers hadcreated after a history that was already racist, sexist and treated those like me as witches. Sorry, no. All that world represented to me was giving up on myself. Captive to a society that didn’t even want me and for my voice to disappear again when I had only just found it.
Back to the kid thing, my mom accidentally said once that if I had them, my family wouldn’t live a traditional life. Her unintentional help with that realization put enough peace in my heart to stop thinking it would be the end of the world and that maybe I wouldn’t have to join the suburb BS if I got pregnant. What about the chemical imbalance that was a genetic monster in our family though? How could I live with myself if I brought someone into this world who I loved more than anything only to watch them grow up with the kind of pain I did? A nonstop struggle of not only being cruelly blacklisted from the world around them but also having to survive it while the demons inside were tearing them apart. I hadn’t seen any signs that my sister and brother had taken that into account when having my super rad nieces but I sure would. I was the one who went through it though and I resented it all.
I could have bet that most from the world of my past would have been shocked to find out about the community that made me feel accepted and supported for the first time. Getting away from mid-level middle-class and to the top 1% of New Money, those who had made their way through creativity and innovation, they had been the people who first seemed to understand me. More specifically, while I had found some of it in San Diego, it had been those I met working and hanging in San Francisco and later on, in the Burning Man community, who set me up to fly. They seemed bewildered by the people of my past. My ideas and the way I thought, it made sense to them. My dreams were big and plenty realistic. Even my way of thinking was indeed on the right course to make those happen. People did it all the time, so why not me? I may have never found the mentor I had so desperately preyed for growing up but I had eventually found them. It took until my thirties and a couple seizures accidentally getting me on the right meds, but I finally started to really live.
Maybe I would get over the hurt and negative associations I had. I wanted to. If I did, though, it wasn’t going to happen for a very long time. Getting older, some of the people in my life had gone back to that world and at one point had started pulling me back in. It hadn’t been too long since I had found my way out of the dark abyss that had imprisoned me for so long and it was back. I resented them for it. Not only for that but also for becoming that kind of person. I felt abandoned and betrayed. We were already understanding each other less and less, the intimacy we one had getting farther and farther away. It was only a matter of time until they started seeing me as “wrong”. I suppose until we both did.