Bye

Imagine you reside in a dollhouse that sits atop a grassy pasture located on the outskirts of human consciousness. In the attic you are always alone and there’s a freedom in that but sometimes you get bored. Below the attic, on the first story of the dollhouse, you are on display like you are in a museum or a gallery. It’s Show and Tell everyday. Everyone can see you but they can only see the shiniest, most eloquent and artful parts of you, the parts you’ve curated and want everyone to see. You are alone with others in a way that produces a sheen and makes you appear like you are nice and shiny all the time, when you are in fact not nice and shiny all the time.

In the basement, you are alone with others in total darkness, in an underworld. Nobody can see you, except the other freaks down there, illuminating each other’s ugliness that you’d never want anybody upstairs to see. It’s night time all the time in the basement. People aren’t that nice in the basement. They are shady people congregating with other shady people. To go from the first floor to the basement, you have to locate a hole in the floor. That hole is causing leaks. You can plug it or you can go down the hole. You choose to go down there.

Both the first floor and the basement are replete with everything from a sauna to a tennis court, but none of the bedrooms in the house are furnished. With each bedroom, you have to start from the beginning, furnishing it with new stuff. Your roommates bring all of their stuff, too. You get enmeshed with your roommates until you become totally estranged from them.

Nobody forces you to go down there, but you may wish later on that someone had stopped you. You couldn’t stop yourself because you are nosy and shady and have poor boundaries and a flimsy self-conception, so of course you slid down the stripper pole into the basement. No arm strength is required to slide down, but arm strength is required to get back up the pole. If your spirit isn’t killed down there, you will come back upstairs stronger. You are free to go back again but you’ll likely choose to stay on the first floor, which beats your spirit in a less accelerated way than the basement. It’s the difference between the first world and the third world. It’s the difference between a pencil sharpener and an industrial incinerator.

You can play any role down in the basement: a bitch, a lover, a child, a mother, a sinner, saint, an essayist. And you do in fact feel ashamed, contrary to the song by Meredith Brooks often mistakenly attributed to Alanis Morrissette. Instances of mistaken identity and mistaken attribution happen when there are too many people in the basement together at the same time. Everyone is applying a lens, unnecessarily intellectualizing and philosophizing, or glamorizing and sexualizing. The gimmick interventions of the modern world, including all the sociological language for things you can understand without words, is all that matters in the basement. When you’re specifically in the Bunny Hole, the basement looks like a night club or a wrestling ring. You’re taking your clothes off or fighting with your clothes off. When you are in the Rabbit Hole, the basement can take the form of a call center, a detective agency, a psych ward or a library. In the Rabbit Hole, you can use knowledge acquired from dubious sources as a replacement for a complete knowledge. You desire a complete knowledge to get control over all that you can’t see, to get certainty over what you don’t know, and you’re under the delusion—and so is everyone in the basement—that you can find it in a book or in others. In the call center, you are coaxing knowledge out of others on the phone, demanding it. They don’t have the answers and they don’t have the energy to keep going back and forth with you. In the psych ward, you are self-diagnosing and being diagnosed by unlicensed therapists and analysts. You are getting down to the bottom of the rabbit hole with other people at the bottom of society. And everyone is taking out their frustrations on each other because you’ve become a family, when in fact none of you should know each other. You each belong in your own individual life.

Performing all the time gets exhausting. The only escape is choosing to pretend to be normal again by going upstairs to the first floor where everyone is shiny and affable, or going to the attic to escape performance and perception altogether, including escaping the pretending to be normal part. There is no performance of self required in the attic; it’s opaque and unknowable from the outside. In the attic, you are your integrated, abnormal self because you can be that peacefully there. You are the darkness and the light. You are the main character of the story and the default player in the game. Most of the time you don’t even have thoughts, but when your thoughts begin to overpower your feelings, you begin having doubts about everything again.

You can embrace the fullness and depth of your character in the basement but it’s scary down there because you can also over-indulge in the shadow aspects of what it means to be human, which means you are rendered less of a good person down there, just like you are rendered less of a good human on the first floor where you are performing to be seen as a good person all the time. The only place you can exist frictionlessly and authentically, the only place you can truly be a good person—where that added layer of performance, and that added layer of people egging each other on to be less good humans is removed—is in the attic.

I wanna disappear when I think about how low I must have valued myself to have found myself in the basement for the last fifteen years, performing my identity instead of being it. And I am still there now, just with an awareness that I finally want to exist in the attic. In the attic, I am no longer a hanger-on of a girl who only exists in relation to other people but not to herself, and nothing bad happens. I don’t become less real just because I am not being witnessed.

In the new year, I will be having my first and last brand activation. It’s called Brand Activation. I have chosen Girl Insides, My’Kayle Pugh, Philomena Marie and Duha to represent me on this platform, so all of the posts related to the upcoming event will be directly from them. And then there will be no more posts after that, except meaningful life updates in the distant future. The Princess Babygirl Detective Agency is still real because I will be taking the rest of my life to figure out how I let it get this way. The girl-noir, Garrison Keillor dream is alive in my heart forever. At the moment, I sort of just want to exist as just myself and not a digital self or any other self. That, and I want to complete my novel. Thanks you. -pbg