Who & What Defines Us? A Preface In Poetic Prose

Who And What Defines Us?

Who and what can define us? The onus is on us. Be on the qui vive for wanton marauders, whose millstone will shackle, pulverize and grind, and will bottle you as a kickback, to grease their behinds. Solemn and syrupy, they will sodomize your mind. Our essence is our selfhood. It orbits around kith and kin, our level of education, what we do for a living, what we pilot to procure, our get up and go, the sidekicks we endear, and whether or not, we are bankrolled in dough.

Customarily, our portrayal is trussed up in family, and the semblance of order within. For some, it is in subduing a mammoth – and becoming a survivor of calamity and havoc, such as addiction, illness, accident, divorce, or a fall into some other harrowing abyss. Establishing a career is a pilgrimage. It can traipse us across a praiseworthy promenade, pitch us a salient hot potato, or place us in a ponderous pickle. Financial stability and net worth are worthwhile ambitions – because they bring challenge, peace of mind, veneration, and an enhanced lifestyle. Fair enough.

Change comes through all kinds of upheaval. There is opportunity for cerebration, rumination, reflection, and hindsight to wax the wheels of change. Fluky or fortuitous – those defining demarcations, are but thumbnail sketches of life as we know it, and can splinter or rupture, into a jumble of rubble. Detour and take the divergent route, lugging and dragging a convoy of paraphernalia and baggage, and even so, we are wrestling the wind. Rein in and buckle down for vital acclimatization, distended and magnified, when you envisage yourself as a pawn or memento.

As though soaked and sodden, steeped in lumps and oodles, blended and amalgamated, joined and entwined, thrust into the pandemonium of a hooligan’s hokum. Discern it. Don’t deny it. Don’t acquiesce, or permit it to pillage you further. For soon there is a juncture, from engulfed and submerged, as it sequentially sinks in – then ascends to a conversion, and will augment migration.

One of life’s central battles is to define our own purpose for existence. There can be ferocity in the resistance one meets, just in making a choice to live your own life. Every stage of development we go through in life is a step toward asserting our own autonomy.

Unfortunately there are those who grow up lacking the perimeters to sustain internal cohesion, in relation to their own autonomy. It is a type of arrested development. The resulting intrinsic insecurity causes controlling, dominating, and manipulative behaviors. What they want supersedes the rights of other people. They cling to a malignant self-love as a form of self-exaltation. Self becomes the monument and simultaneously their worldview shrinks. They are gummed up in a bubble of delusion.

Bullies insist on targeting, limiting, assaulting in a variety of ways, defining and exploiting others for their own gain. They manipulate until they are blue in the face, and it will never be enough. At the end of the day – this is what defines them. We are ultimately defined by our own character traits. Almost everything else is transient.

What superficially defines us can be clawed away, to bring us vis-a-vis with the nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre so bleakly wrote about in “Being And Nothingness”. But he did converge upon the urgency to overcome conniving and dismal, onerous, backbreaking and confining, tyrannical, superincumbent, oppressive forces – in order to live an authentic life. The upsurge within us, scintillates the brain waves, to reconcile for ourselves, who and what enlightens and emboldens us.

For slamming the door in the face of the Exclusive Brethren teacher at last, they condemn me to the depths of wickedness and the vehement blaze of eternal damnation. They cannot contain or conceal the smoldering animosity toward me. They justify penance around accusations of me being the cause of an incessant rumble. The battle encompasses rebuffing the teacher and his dog-eared refusal to take no for an answer. The dinky deduction is to make me the disturbance, even though it ejaculated from his own shrinking loins.

They redefined me as the designated and devoted doyenne of fighting and fracas for fraying the finery of a fibbing disaster. I have transformed into a provocateur with a hitch and become a problematic snafu. A whistling quandary to be contained and restrained, or cease to exist.

They chew it as sinew to prolong the affliction. They seek to seclude, to ambush again, with a paroxysm of more sonorous suffering. They shrink into a desolate domicile, by stunting and stuffing, slurping on swagger, and suffocating sensibilities, for sick selfish reasons.

They are prepared to do combat and will keep right on clashing, until they stumble into a sweeping fiasco. The teacher wants an orifice for a consummate conclusion. The unease they perceive as a menace, crowning this compulsion, prompting surveillance or minding – is provoked by the scant bounty of what I am thinking.

The point of convergence in all of my thinking is to stop the madness, abort the injustice, and transform this aberration into an acknowledgment of the fundamental rights of others, particularly women and children. They have no right to make acceptance in my own family conditional upon the Exclusive Brethren bulldozer teacher being my au pair and daddy-god. They counterfeit themselves as venerating religious fundamentalists, yet they flubbed the nitty-gritty nuances, to become a figment, a yarn entwined in ballyhoo and knotted in hoopla.

Sooner or later the authentic self rises from an intrinsic driving force, giving direction until you arrive at, and acknowledge that existential place of nothingness. It took until I came to that place of acceptance on being nothing, knowing when we die we must let go of it all anyway, and in understanding that once we are born, we exist in this world and have as much right to be here as anyone else…

Copyright Valerie J. Hayes and Quiet West (2023). Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Valerie J. Hayes and Quiet West with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.