Permanent Scares

I am more-than-afraid of permanence. I don't understand it. I don't know how to articulate it -- I don't even mean "more than afraid as in terrified," but as in something undefinable, some other emotion like fear that moves in a different place in me, uses a different muscle.

Maybe "freaked out" is the closest I can come to describing how I feel, but that's too casual, not ritual enough.

And part of the thing about permanence, part of my sense of the grotesque when I think of having my wisdom teeth removed, or an amputation, or of anything never being the same again, is the lack of ritual -- the antisepticism of the hospital, or the trauma of an accident triage field, or the everyday-ness of the horrors that build up over time to cut us off from who we are or were or could have been.

I don't feel the same way about scars; I like them. They add, even when they distort.

It's the subtraction of parts, or people, or ideas or things that puts me in the valley of the uncanny.

It could be abandonment issues, the idea of being left, or left out. I've certainly earned my right to them.

But my most frequent abandonments have not been permanent: my mother in the hospital and out again, my faith gone and back again, my brother at boot camp and free again (I assume). Permanence hangs over them like a specter, but never descends completely.

Recently, I've felt myself rearranging from the inside out, seen my past re-sort itself into one that makes sense out of the current me -- I've made decisions I never would have conscienced before.

I haven't become larger or more liberal, not really. I've become more specifically myself -- not my ideal idea of myself, not the innocent or holy or pure, conservative self I used to think I was (or could be or could have been), but some fuller version, some meaner, more openly hostile, more openly combatative and rebellious version -- it's like I've come into focus. Or am coming, anyway.

It's good. It's a good change. I was never that single-me, never accepting or integrating or grayed; I was all blacks-and-whites before. I'm less hostile now, less pent-up, less self-self-self because I've accepted more of the selves that kept me at conflict.

There's a terror in it, though, the terror of my sixth-grade self watching as she's demolished by integration, as her concerns become Mine, or irrelevant. What she cared about, what she loved, is worth my time and attention, but only that. It's not worth my allegiance anymore.

So what's left? Everything in me looks the same. What do I do with this lack of conflict? (How, then, shall I live?)

What rituals are there for this type of late coming-of-age?

In these times?