Mission: Impossible. Not the films, but the original TV series, from the 1960s. There was an episode – I can’t find out the name of it, if indeed it was named – that has stayed with me, all these years later, in the way some stories do. We only got that channel before we moved to the farm, so I’m remembering from a time when I was less than 8 years old. In the episode, Peter Graves’ character returns to his home town for who knows what reason other than it’s in the damned script, and a series of murders begin to happen or continue to occur from the days before he arrived, and – of course – he must solve them. His close friends from childhood are all suspects, say it ain’t so!! Quelle horreur!!
I believe I recall this episode because of the hometown tie; his, like mine, was rural, small, and a through line of the story was high school hurts coming back to haunt the present moment. I was sure, at 6 or 7, that I would – like the handsome, smooth-voiced Graves – remain friends forever with my childhood buddies; I was sure I would always love my school, and my hometown; I was sure about a lot of things.
In the Mission: Impossible episode the murderer is a woman (I remember being so shocked: a girl can do that??!!). She had been and still was poisonously jealous of the woman all the boys preferred to her lesser – less pretty – self. She began one by one to kill them all, stalking her prey in the dark, calling out ‘pretty girl, pretty girl’ before striking. She had been teased and tortured by the peers of her childhood era, but now, she was the one to inflict pain. Peter Graves’ character is devastated by it all, but also, especially, I remember his shock – this woman, a killer? This sweet, kind, not very attractive woman?
Do we ever get over high school? Do we ever recover from the intensity and insecurities of our adolescence, or the choices that we make when our brains weren’t even fully formed? I don’t think so. Author Robert Cormier (1925-2000), said, ‘I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.’ This seems about right to me, and the pain and horror that this episode of a (let’s admit it) pretty ridiculous TV show conveyed felt real to me as a child and again thinking of it in the present moment, that we could hold onto who we were and still essentially are, clasping close those teenaged hurts and ills and sillinesses throughout our lives – with caveats galore but yes, and yes, acting on or reacting to them, still, decades later.
My mission impossible today and every day is to understand what happened to me and how and why I made the choices I did throughout my childhood, adolescence and adulthood, in the whole of my life – and to forgive, let go, heal. Accepting with compassion for myself, and for all (if I can), the nitty gritty of who and how and what I was and am, and to fix what remains broken. To love and accept myself in all the stages of my life, regardless of the fucking disastrous messiness of some of it, much of it, occasionally including a few honest to goodness head bangers…(see any post including Mistake in its title)
Thinking about that episode, and my teenaged years, I wept. I wept because I came back to my hometown, to live and prosper still romanticizing the place and the doing, and wham – reality bites. And it kisses; I would never deny the kisses. Overall, however, it has been a complicated, twisted thing, and continues to be so because of what happened way back when, and how those occurrences, large and small, formed me.
I love my life – and, when I think about what was taken from me as a child, in this place, by the people – the adults – I trusted and was led to believe I could trust, I weep. I think about how much I loved school, how much I enjoyed the classes I took, and what I learned from the men who weeks later would sexually assault me in the days after I finished high school, and I rage and weep. Their selfishness added yet another layer of complication and pain to my story, to my life, already twisted by the acts of selfish men.
I think about how much I loved learning about the art and music of the renaissance, or of the baroque, and how the words of John Stuart Mill, Emerson, Epicurus, Locke, Hume, and others thrilled and inspired me, lightbulb moments galore; they inspire me still – and, because of what followed, they’re tainted. They’re tainted.
Was he already thinking about how to get me alone? How to finagle a ride home, a trip to our last gig? Did I take a dark road because it was already laid out before me, the only choice, inevitable due to the vituperative nature of others? One of these men engaged me in a debate regarding the differences between free-will, fatalism, and determinism. More irony. More plot twists.
Was I completely unaware? Or, already numbed by the incessant intrusions previously endured, the harassment even with my dad standing five or ten feet away, the constant call and pressure to let myself be touched, fucked, used, fondled? Did I never sense the danger all around me, hovering close, planning to strike, calling out ‘pretty girl, pretty girl’?
The work goes on, mission impossible?
If I know that my professor sees me not (only) as a student to be taught, but (also) as a body to be fucked, how self-possessed, how exuberant, can I feel sitting in his classroom? – Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex