Head rambles

I just watched a movie called Angel Eyes, about a guy who's pulled out of his wrecked car by a cop whom he meets a year later and rescues in return. He saves her from being shot by a gunman; then they fall in love. Then she finds out his wife and kid were killed in the wreck and he's too traumatized to be able to get beyond it. Her childhood abuse and family stuff come up as well, and both of them start to come back to life again from the relationship.

I realise I'm drawn to the story on a number of levels. The guy is too traumatized to be able to even function, and he's lost himself and the things he loves as he's tried to suppress his memories, and just can't get down to the feelings, so hard they are to process. He feels such terrible guilt over the death of his family in the wreck. He has survivor guilt.

Not only does it make me remember my own survivor guilt about traumatic events in my own life, but it made me see something of the difficult to process traumas in family members. So many of us carry around terrible emotional wounds, yet at the same time we form bonds with others from the need to find intimacy.

I could see so much of myself in this character, as I can the character in the movie K-Pax, who's suffered similar terrible emotional loss.

I'm acting in - and writing - some monologues for a forthcoming producttion, and I want to write something important - something that's on these lines.

But I'm realising, as I write, that I don't want to tell someone else's story. What I want to write is my own. But I just don't know how to, at least properly. Or to be more accurate: I haven't known how to write it yet. The memories and feelings are so jumbled, that I haven't been able to unravel them enough to express them coherently. And I'm so tired of that feeling.

What is my story? I really wish I knew.

Talking to I guy I met recently about the murder of his girlfriend, he said that he found that nobody really wants to hear such stories. He'd written an autobiography about his expereience, but he couldn't find a publisher.

What's so sad is that nowadays so few people want to know about real life experiences or real people and their life traumas. So many of us just want the illusion of confidence and success and some kind of certainty in life that's illusional. So many people just want to meet famous people, rather than recognise what humanity really is in all of us.

How many people want to meet these actors - "J Lo" and the actor that played this poor, wounded soul, rather than the "real thing". The chances are that "the real thing" are the people we see wandering around in a daze, or wearing police uniforms, or living next door to us, putting on a brave face and occasionally breaking down.

I thought, too, about some of the responses I had from my criticism of the recently executed murderer "Tookie". Again, it's people having sympathy for the murderers, and seeing their (legitimate) stories, but not recognising the very legitimate stories of the many many people who live with terrible internal traumas every day.

The guy in the movie was a great trumpet player. I recognised his humanity - in the way he played, and the soul he put into his music. I recognised how it is that some people just live right at the edge of life, by really squeezing every bit of soul and beauty from experience and love. It's these people that say "yes" to live, embracing the beauty of it so fully.

Is it that those people end up feeling the most hurt, as well as the most elated, and in love? Are the abusers just the ones who "daren't go deeper"?

I rambled: I'm trying to make sense of what goes on in my head.