It’s been a few days I started the reading of “Memoirs of a Dutiful Girl”, by Simone de Beauvoir.
I felt like making a big leap in the past. All of a sudden, I felt the exaltation of my sweet sixteen again, when I discovered Sartre, and so many other philosophers that were to open my eyes on a new world, on new perspectives… I keep from this time a taste of peace and fever, countless hours of reading, long after darkness had fallen… I remember essays, passionate discussions with my classmates and teachers (I was your intellectual girl, always reading books ahead of her age, always knowing the writers before the lesson began…Always giving a n opinion, right or wrong, but never afraid of expression herself….). At that time, I felt like my only certitude was the way how my brain worked. I wasn’t popular enough to pretend having all the boyfriends I wanted, and to be honest, I put literature way up above carnal things. I think I was afraid of those things anyway. I couldn’t watch my body without feeling ashamed of it, seeing only graceless flesh and common face. I guess I hid behind a fake feeling of knowledge. I befriended with Baudelaire, Sartre and Celine, naively thinking they had written those books for me to enjoy them. I was not a schoolgirl anymore, but a romantic heroin, promised to great achievements.
How conceited I was…
I think that, blinded as I was by my certitudes, I couldn’t have seen any people genuinely giving me affection, or compassion. I built ivory walls around me, feeling comforted by the admiration I could get from my teachers, or the friends that systematically were outsmarted by my naive genius. I could wrapped ideas in beautiful sentences, using rhetoric and style as a screen hiding my lack of confidence.…. My writings were passionate outburst, swirling and whirling against what I called “the Injustice”. Politics were all fools, and my discussing issues with my friends only led me to heated debates. The only verity was in between kilometers of soft paper, 10 x 18 cm..
I used to say that books were my only friends. That they could not lie to me, could not betray me. Ten times have I found solace in between their pages, forgetting for an hour or two the problems and the sadness of adolescence. I remember my parents looking odd at that dark young girl their daughter had become. Always hiding in her room, while her friends were going out and “having a life”. I couldn’t stand those parties, loud music I detested. I couldn’t stand being the left-over, waiting along the dance floor while my friends were being kissed outside. Of course, I couldn’t tell my parents about it. To them I was perfect. Able to read books they couldn’t understand, able to get by (my parents never studied as I did), writing brilliantly and being appreciated, considered as a young responsible adult.
I think I never known how it was to be sixteen. When it happened, I was in third year of college. At nearly 23, I broke down. Telling my teacher I couldn’t go on. I felt lost, useless, and certainly not as gifted as my highschool teachers had thought. I now despised all the books, all the grades. I hid myself in paradises, struggling with fatigue to learn my lessons, but never being able to get more than the average marks. The one that allowed me to pass, but with a thin margin. Sometimes though, I sparkled a little. Bedazzling my classmate when it was about French classes. I hit 20/20 at my Literature examination. Too bad, for I lost my marksheet. Hence nobody ever believed me… Ironic, don’t you think? Whilst all my friends considered me average, books again were the one saving me….
I think the earnest crisis happened when I was a freshman. I skipped classes to lock myself in dark café’s, talking about literature and rummaging ideas away. Together with friends as academically lost as myself, I was reinventing the world. Mind world again. I keep of that period lots of books, that still make me smile now when I look at them…
And now?
Well, I know that I am not made for major things. I will never be the great writer I wanted to be, unable to plot new ideas, in some innovative way. I think that I am a better reader, anyway. And frankly, I feel happy with it. I think that, back in my longing for some glory, I was chasing after becoming myself, instead of fame and fortune. I always struggled to find some balance. I always felt ill at ease with a world I didn’t asked to be part of. (Not even talking about God issues, this could take a whole thread in itself..^^).
I think that now, I found my reason for living. In the person of a young man who isn’t my mirror, but my complement. Or as we say in French “Complice”, in its Latin meaning (“complex”, as “united, “advocate”. I become friends with books again. I do not want “to be”, I simply am. I irradiate with my qualities, and my flaws, but I think I finally am true to myself. Not afraid anymore of saying “I don’t know”.
It was a long way, though. It went through a lot of important meetings, important breaking up, too… As sad as they were, they made me grow up. They made me grow up feelings I could not have understood ten years ago. I learned to love someone is not possess him. I learned to trust people, at last. And to protect myself, too. To become less vulnerable.
* * *
As I read de Beauvoir Memoirs, I find out the same interrogations, the same worries…. I see her struggling with life, and most important of it, making a meaning out of it.
I think now I can say that I have no regret of the person I have become. I only have hopes, trying to learn more, to understand more, to love more….
To be, more….
