Status Updates From Upprepningen

Another read for the Mad Women Book Club and I'm obsessed.

The pace of this rapidly increased for me.

Aside from place names and those sorts of conventions I've been able to undertand everything mentioned until - 'Strindbergian statement:' ...... definitely going to have to Google that one.

The mind will hit a wall and when I write, I chip away at it, that is why I write. I work on the wall to discover which parts have substance and significance ... I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly ... in order to process and understand or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement. I summon up my parents ... We were never indifferent to each other. But they were frightened of me and so they should be.

After their liberating, conciliatory, and unifying conversation, I became the unexploded bomb. And in the years that followed, I noticed their growing unease towards me. I felt it, but didn't understand it, because, in contrast to my opponents, whose fate and mine were tied together, I didn't know the landscape in which I was living.

I always chose essay questions that were about debating an issue, the case for and against disarmament, etc, and in time I developed methods to trick my monitors, a coded language that allowed me to express what was in my heart and on my mind without them being able to detect it. But it was a long and circumstantial process and it took years to develop the method and to discover what was in my heart and on my mind.

I remembered what I had decided on my way to Helle's house days ago, my resolution to take my time with things I normally did quickly, to become more aware of what was happening and the effect it had on me. It was hard. ... But I didn't want to imagine it because what I imagined in advance never turned out the way I had hoped and had imagined; if I imagined it, the chances it might happen as I'd hoped would dwindle.

Soon, however, as early as Monday morning, my Saturday transgressions of beer drinking and tongue-kissing appeared in a different and more distressing light, how easily I had broken the commandments, and again I felt the fear of impending corruption which mum had succeeded in instilling in me, a fear that I had not been fearful enough when faced with danger, what was next for me, drugs and sudden death?

But later she would knock on my door, open it, astand in the doorway and accuse me of being the cause of all her worries...the next day the same thing would happen, hysteria and screaming and arguing, and she didn't understand that she fed what she was trying to prevent, that her fears and the promises she forced me to make homed in on and pointed to something I wanted deep down something I desired.