The Swung

Disclaimer: I started writing this at 5:45 am on a Tuesday night. Some people might call that a “Wednesday morning,” but those people are called “Dull Working Stiffs.” The time of day alone should indicate to you that this will be a fumbling post full of introspection that probably reveals too much, but if you read my blog before, you probably expect nothing less.

This post was originally going to be an insomniac feminist review of Swingers, fifteen years late and deeply misguided. Bear with me– we’ll get to that.

More filling than my writing!

Tonight, I fell asleep on the couch watching Netflix after getting off work, and woke up with all the lights on in the middle of the night. I then lazily decided to surrender myself to bed for real, which is pretty standard weeknight fare. What immediately followed was also standard weeknight fare: laying in bed awake, trying to get back to sleep but instead reviewing the mental game tapes of past heartbreaks to try and get what feels like a lonesome, losing season back on track. Maybe that’s a poor analogy for my love life, which is fine because I’m about to switch into several others. If you’re accustomed to reading my blog, then you won’t be surprised by how I mix metaphors so sloppily that they become a veritable metaphor stew.

The one thread that ties this sports metaphor into every other comparison I’m about to make is this: the idea of power over your own situation. If I’m leading a team, then my ragtag bunch of misfit recruits are my Tripartite Soul (or my Head, Heart, and Lady Parts, for those of you who don’t typically read my essays), and good God are they the worst kind of Bad News Bears a coach could ever deal with. Trying to wrangle these nerds into any win– let alone one with a sense of sportsmanship or pride– is just about as easy as cutting an onion with your eyelashes. It’s times like these (and by that I mean “all the times in my adult life”) that I feel so overwhelmed with hopelessness that I start throwing Hail Mary’s and realize it’s only the first quarter. That’s because when it comes down to it, I feel that my only chance is luck. I don’t feel like I have any power over my situation. And that is a horrible, shitty, no-good way for anyone to feel.

You're alone and can't do anything about it? You're not special.

Twenty-one-year-old Mickayla would have taken this opportunity to say how awful it is that women feel this way. She would have argued that a male-dominated society has oppressed us and conspired to take away our power. Twenty-one-year-old Mickayla was always convincing, and to be honest it was her that made me get out of bed and start writing. However, she also had a drastic tendency to spend her days complaining and raging against the machine because that’s how she dealt with feeling powerless. She didn’t understand that this is something everyone feels regardless of gender, sexuality, age, or any other factor. She didn’t understand the true definition of the word lament, which I recently discussed with a close friend who is a member of AA. To lament something is not merely to mourn it or express grief over it. To lament something is the act of feeling and expressing grief over something this is a normal part of the human condition. Is it unfair? Yes. Does it hurt? Yes. Is that valid? Yes. Are you the only person in the world it has ever happened to? No. Will everyone feel this exact pain at some, probably several, points in their lives? The answer is both fortunately and unfortunately, absolutely yes.

From being close to someone in AA, I learn a lot from her. I have learned that we all have our vices and particular struggles and there are healthy and unhealthy ways of dealing with it. While I’ve never had too much trouble with substance abuse, I do have a constant battle inside of me over the issue of power and control in my personal relationships. Two things have recently brought this struggle into sharper focus:

• First, lightly, I finally got around to watching the movie Swingers about fifteen years after everyone else did. It’s a shame that
  

  Google Image Searching "Swingers" goes pretty much exactly how you think it will.

  I waited this long, as I absolutely adore everything Jon Favreau writes or directs. He has an immaculate sense of comedic timing that shines through brilliantly whenever he’s behind the scenes. What really motivated me to get up and write this was Twenty-one-year-old Mickayla chiding Twenty-seven-year-old Mickayla a week later, suddenly and violently, for liking that movie.  Here’s why: At the end of the movie, Mike finally finds his power after Trent’s speech about him being a big bear with huge paws and fangs who can easily pounce on that scared, beautiful, baby bunny. He sees Lorraine sitting at the bar from across the room and for a second, he envisions her as a little quivering rabbit on a barstool. He then goes in for the kill. Twenty-one-year-old Mickayla realized in her sleepless delirium that all a woman can do is sit around and wait for big bear to come along and KILL HER. Which is pretty fucked up. So she got up to start writing this blog about it, and then Twenty-seven-year-old Mickayla took over and has this to say: Yes, it’s a horrible analogy that only an asshole would use. Which is why Favreau, as a writer, had the characters Trent and Sue deliver it. Mike spends the whole movie broken and powerless. To get back to a sports metaphor– when Mike steps up to the plate and takes a swing at Lorraine, she isn’t just the ball, the swung instead of a swinger. She’s a swinger too. She’s playful and flirty, then honest. Then, she entices him onto the dance floor, and for a few moments he’s really vulnerable and powerless again. I’m in awe of how well written, acted, and directed that scene was. Twenty-one-year-old Mickayla would have never seen it that way. She was too caught up in her own power struggles to see that everyone on Earth is struggling too.

• And so, secondly, less lightly, my most recent romantic entanglement has stumbled to an awkward close. It was an entanglement that hinged purely around power, and in retrospect I see that’s an all-too-common theme in my pseudo-relationships. This is the internet, so you’ll get no further details, but suffice it to say that after writing this I feel more compassion for him. He didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did I.  But earlier when I described Twenty-one-year-old me and her grappling with society in order to deal with being powerless, it brought thirty-something him into a light I hadn’t yet realized. If you have a problem with power and control, and you get into an ongoing power struggle with someone and it turns both of you on, then it’s incredibly short-sighted to think they don’t also have a huge issue with control as well. After all, we all have our vices.