Running for Home - 27. November 21, 2021

November 21, 2021

I am having one of those days where I’ve almost given up all hope that I’ll be able to do any substantial writing without going crazy. A journalistic opinion piece here and there has been okay, but anything more substantial than that has become too much to juggle. I’m not willing to sacrifice my personal and social time, not too much of it. I need it. I know it’s helping to keep me sane, because I feel so much better right now than I ever did over the last couple years living almost like a hermit with Dominik.

Beyond just the time constraints from my job, I’m just not connecting with any of the novel ideas I was working on back in L.A. I am not sure if it’s writer’s block, or something more significant. Maybe I’ve moved passed whatever emotions and internal issues I held that gave me the impetus to write those stories. My life has changed so much in the past few months it’s hard to believe. When I go back and look at who I was six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago… I mean, it’s me, but in some ways I’m having trouble connecting to the ‘me of the past’. Most telling, perhaps, is that I feel most connected to the memories of myself while I was studying at UCLA, when Dominik was in prison and I was completely free and on my own.

What does that mean for me? I guess I feel like I’m making personal progress of a sort. I'm more connected with the phase of my life when I was probably most self-actualized, even if I had some major ups and downs, emotionally-speaking. I was so fucking focused on getting better, on making myself the best goddamn author that I could be, that sometimes I crashed out. I put myself under too much pressure. I was ridiculously self-critical. I mean, I've always been self-critical to a fault. I sure as hell drove Bobby nuts whenever I'd stay up agonizing over stupid details about my writing whenever we had a paper or story or whatever due for one of our classes. Fuck, he used to call in Jubes or Pete to calm me down sometimes because by the time we hit my last year there he was too close and I felt like I couldn't rely on him seeing things completely from the outside anymore. Worse, because I held myself to such high standards I expected everyone else to work hard too. No one wanted me to peer review their work because it would come back to them so covered in red ink that you'd think it was taken from a bloody crime scene. Yeah, that shit was stupid and bad but I took it to a whole new level during my degree if that was even possible.

The big difference between high school and UCLA was... well, there were a lot of differences. For one thing, I was already in my thirties. I wasn't a teen/early twenty-something with all the immaturity that comes with that. I was an adult, a full-fledged one, and I had all the baggage to prove it. More baggage than most people. Back in high school, even though I was really hard on myself about my writing, there wasn't really that pressure on me to really go that extra mile. They always expected 110% from everyone at Xavier's, but when suddenly your writing is the entire focus of your education and you are in a damn good school surrounded by other people full of talent and piss and vinegar, 150% feels like it's barely enough. I wanted to get every damn thing I could out of my education. It cost a fucking fortune, but I had a dream, a vision for my life and I knew what I had to lose if I failed. On top of that, there were even more expectations from my professors because of the very fact that I was a mature, adult student. My classmates had these expectations too - instead of being the one no one wanted to review their work and give them feedback, now I had people actually vying for my attention because they thought just because I was older I'd be better than they were. Well, overall they were right in that assessment, but there were some real talents among my classmates. Unlike high school, my peers - the ones who cared to be better, anyway - appreciated the details of feedback I gave. They were smart enough to have a thicker skin, talk through my opinions with me and decide for themselves what advice they wanted to take and what they would leave alone. I respected them for that, and I asked them for the same. It was good for all of us, and it's shown in our careers. Well, it did for a while, anyway. In my case, things kind of petered out.

I'd love to blame it on Dominik's return but there were a lot of factors involved, at least as far as my journalism side is concerned. It stung a bit, too, considering that some of the best of my peers have gone on to be regular writers for the NY Times, the Washington Post, and a scattering of other big names. I could bear it, though. Journalism is important to me, but it wasn't the only thing I had going for me and I never pinned the totality of my hopes and dreams on becoming some big shot household name. I just wanted, and still want, to make contributions that matter. Things that can frame events from my perspective as a mutant, as a former terrorist, as a former government dog. As far as my books, though? If I'm being honest when Dom got out of jail my well was already drying up, and I was starting to have to shove the pump around to find the last pools of inspiration to get things rolling. It's why I struggled to finish the projects I'd started - something was missing. Maybe it was the loss of the pressure I felt in university. Maybe it was time for me to set off on another experiential journey, one that got cut off before it could even start because of the decisions I made about having a life with Dominik still in it.

I guess I just crumpled at that point. I'm not sure, really. I was still working, still getting things done, right? It just wasn't the same anymore. Looking back now, I can see that I'd started to feel some of the same all-too-familiar tension that I felt in high school and on into my time in the Brotherhood. The tension that something wasn't right, that I needed to do something, but there was nothing to be done. There was no magic fix-it, no easy-mode button to press, no way to just pop the trunk and see what was wrong with the engine. You'd think after all the time I spent in therapy after the Iraq debacle that I would have had some sort of insight into myself and what was making me tick. Or not tick, maybe.

I was making myself feel like shit day in and day out because things weren't 'what they were supposed to be' anymore, and Dom certainly wasn't helping with that. But he was really only a side worry. What kind of a person was I, who couldn't succeed at anything or see anything through? I was a failure as a terrorist, making shit worse for mutants instead of better. I was a failure in Freedom Force and became such a huge liability that the government left me to rot after I was captured. I graduated summa cum fucking laude from UCLA Journalism and still wasn't good enough or talented enough or publishable enough to get steady work. I resented myself as much as anything else, and it made me want to lash out. It made me want to lash out so badly. It's a miracle that I kept a lid on myself and didn't go out and do something stupid.

I won't lie and say that it didn't affect my relationship with Dominik, either. Everything that goes on in someone's head affects their relationships in one way or another. Sometimes I wonder if the reason his indolence and blaming of the rest of the world for his employment troubles bothered me so much is because I could see within him an echo of my parents. My father. No, it was deeper than that. I could see a part of myself, my inner self, reflected and it felt inescapable.

“When the killing stops, St. John, what do you have left?”

Destiny once asked me that question. I'd forgotten that conversation until just now. Well, I guess it's been there, buried deep in the recesses of my memories for the last eight or nine years. Irene probably knew the answer flat out, but was being cryptic as usual. She was an insanely powerful precognitive (hence the 'Destiny' moniker), but only revealed things about the future when it suited her to meet certain goals she had in mind. I think she also liked toying with me almost as much as Mystique did. I remember how uncomfortable that question made me, even though I just brushed it off with annoyance at the time. I did spend the rest of that day trying to escape a lot of dark thoughts in my mind, none of which were really true. After a couple days of it crawling around in my head I just let it go. I wasn’t sure what the answer to her question was, if there even was an answer.

Everything is different now, though. I’m doing something with my life and it has a meaning beyond survival, martyrdom or war. I’m no longer someone else’s lackey, a slave to their whims and ideology. I’m not as angry and miserable all the time. I have friends again, friends who care about me and that I care about in return. There’s a voice in my head that questions whether or not I’m selling out, losing my edge, but I am starting to be able to reject that full on. My life isn’t in any way normal, in any way typical. I’m not settling.

My powers don’t define me anymore. At least, I don’t let them define me. They haven’t since I got out of that hospital. That was another thing I thought about a lot while I was convalescing. Before Iraq, during it, that’s all I allowed myself to be - a vessel for my powers. A vessel that channeled all his emotions into fighting and fucking and just about nothing else. I had no real direction, not on my own. I thought I did, thought I was making decisions for myself, but in truth I was just finding the path that let me survive or catered to my inflated ego. I think leaving Xavier’s for the Brotherhood was the worst of those. I let Magneto, that fucking megalomaniac, charm me with his charisma and tell me what I wanted to hear. I let him stoke the fires of all the suppressed rage and frustration and hurt I had built up from my life with my parents and my life with Bobby as my roommate, and let him guide me into channeling those emotions into a hatred for flatscan humans. The powerless to be brought down under the heel of the powered. I let him convince me that we would always be persecuted and executed until mutants held the balance of power. That the evolution of the human species from Homo sapiens into Homo superior was a foregone conclusion, and that we should be Mother Nature’s hands in helping to speed along that process to ensure our survival and dominance.

Joining Freedom Force was just an exercise in survival. I did what I had to do because they were waving a carrot in front of my face. It was a chance to get out of jail before something worse than the beatings I took at the hands of other inmates along with the guards themselves became any worse. To be honest, I think the majority beatings I received from the other inmates in that mutant prison were paid out by the guards with contraband being snuck in for them and other favours. I trusted Mystique, too. Even if it was working for the government, if she was the one leading the operation I figured I’d be okay.

Well, we weren’t. We have a number of ghosts who would attest to that, and I have the scars to show it. None of that was Mystique’s fault, though. Before Scotland, we’d always had Destiny to give us guidance and it was worth it in spades. After she died saving Mystique and I… Between the grief and the loss of Destiny’s precognition, our team wasn’t performing the way we should have. Of course the assholes in the government didn’t care. We were expendable. That’s why the mission in Scotland started to crumble in the first place, and why Kuwait and Iraq were essentially suicide missions. Those of us who survived were lucky to get out alive. I was lucky.

Fucking lucky.

It’s hard, some days, to believe that. It’s hard, some days, to put what happened to me in perspective. But I am, and I am doing my best to use my goddamn luck to build myself a better life. I discarded Pyro, the identity I’d given myself for so long, and just became St. John Allerdyce once again. It’s taken me years now, but Irene? I think I finally have an answer for you, one that I feel confident in giving. What do I have once I am done being a soldier, once the killing stops?

This.

I have this.

My writing. My teaching. My life.

I have this.