Why Norway. An attempt to explain myself.

Debbie said to me two months ago that because I was beginning my trip in kindness, it would be successful.  She also used the word "pilgrimage" to describe it, and I think that was fair, at least for the trip to Norway.

I hear some of you saying huh.  So I'm going to try to describe the Norway thing a bit, but for the full skinny, you will have to wait for my book.

It started with a picture in a social studies book in grade school of a fjord.  I thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen.  I love the word and its odd conjunction of an F and a J.  I had never heard of Norway before and didn't know anyone who was Norwegian (or so I thought).  I would turn back to that page in class and stare at it whenever I could.

I was lonely as a kid.  I didn't fit.  I think most of us feel that way, but that feeling went from embarrassment (which I could handle) to despair (which I could not).  As adolescence approached, I started to care less about being the smartest kid in the class (my compensation for loneliness in grade school), and began to actually worry about being alone.  This, even as I was, in fact, beginning to have more good friends, some of whom I still call my friends.  I became scared of the future, and I got more scared with the growing realization I wasn't straight.  I had a good family, parents who adored me, a pretty good mind, and, in high school, wonderful friends.  But the loneliness was deeper, and it was connected to knowing I would have to leave all of that if I wanted to find any happiness or fulfillment in the world.  And I didn't think I could do it.  All the yearnings I had to act and write, to find a place and people who could see me unmasked and love me, to figure out what I believed and not what I thought I should believe, to find love--they all spelled isolation and terror to me.

Then I read Fear of Flying.  While my friends and I giggled over the notion of a "zipless fuck," I started looking up some of the people quoted in the chapter headings in the book:  Colette, Sylvia Plath, Simone deBeauvoir.  I memorized poems by Plath, and one of my first published poems was an homage to her poem "Ariel."  Through my intellectual curiosity, I began to discover that wider world in terms I could control--through my intelligence and my imagination.

Then, somehow, Liv Ullmann came into my consciousness.  I suppose, to be honest, it was that "funny feeling" I got but knew I shouldn't talk about when I saw her photo on the cover of the script to Face to Face at B. Dalton Booksellers in the mall.  When her autobiography Changing came out I bought it.  I don't know where I got the money.  I don't know how, in a town without movie theatres and with a library that mostly stocked children's books and mystery novels I even recognized her name, but I bought the book and I found my lifeline.  The way she talked about the need to be recognized seared me, exposed me, and reassured me that the longings I felt weren't crazy, that loneliness was not to be feared, but to be incorporated as one aspect of learning to be at all, and that being different or, even "cast out" (as I began to feel about my relationship to my home) was an opportunity of unknown proportion, not a death sentence.  One could be sad, and find joy.  One could be unlike others, but still be worthwhile as a human.

I followed Liv Ullmann and my curiosity to Bergman, then Strindberg, then Ibsen.  I learned how to use the library at Valpo University.  I ordered books like Son of a Servant and Madman's Defense and Bergman on Bergman from interlibrary loan.  I'm pretty sure I saw every image from Persona that ever found print long before I saw the movie in college.  Burrowing into these Scandinavian cultural giants and my own insatiable intellect I believe quite literally saved my life.

I suppose the fact that Liv Ullmann was Norwegian was incidental, really, to what her words and following her career (especially her humanitarian work) meant to me in the ensuing years, but somehow her nationality enhanced the picture I had of Norway, which by then had become the land of my imagination.  In my small world, Norway was my secret destination, "Liv Ullmann" the promise that I could, indeed, someday find someone who would "recognize" me (I still love how Liv says that word!).  I held my imaginary country, my stranger-friend, close in my mind with my other secrets, and began to fear what was within me and where those feelings would lead me in the world less and less.

I could not explain to my friends why I had to go to Norway any more than I can explain why I am a lesbian.  I had to, and I am, and somehow knowing the one was out there made the other easier to embrace 30-odd years ago.  Of course, who I am is much more complicated than that one bit of my identity which loomed so large as an adolescent, but there is still much in me that is unsettled, "unrecognized."  I think often of the line from Housekeeping, "hers was a soul all unaccompanied, like his own."

I did find a peaceful spot in Flåm at the edge of fjord.  I expected to be hit with some lightning bolt revelation, and I was not.  Instead, I watched clouds move across a patch of sky and find their more vibrant reflection in the water.  I jumped out of bed in the morning, not because I had an appointment to make, but because I didn't want to miss a moment of the morning color.  I was unknown and alone in a red cabin in a tiny town, and every minute of every day was mine alone.

"You found your true home," Pauline said when she looked at the pictures I had taken from my window on the Aurlandsfjord.