This is what my life is now...

.......that is the phrase that keeps going through my head over and over and over.......

Reciting it in my head, kept me from bursting into tears.

I just watched a program that we had recorded quite some time ago, from my Museum....I still call it "my" museum, even though it has been 10 years since I've worked there.   The program is entitled, "Engineering Evil: The Holocaust."  Two men that I once worked with, and knew personally, are in the program.  Michael Berenbaum, and Peter Black.

I can tell you that Michael Berenbaum is an amazingly intelligent person...he's written a lot of books about the Holocaust.  However, I can also tell you that he really likes to hear himself talk and is a bit of an egomaniac...not many people like him.  In fact, he left the Museum after several conflicts with coworkers to go to the Shoah Foundation to work with Spielberg, and apparently Spielberg didn't really like him much either.  He thinks he's the ONLY TRUE EXPERT about this history. This is what I was told by Berenbaum's ex-wife, Linda, whom I dog-sat for in her house in Silver Spring, MD for a week. The dog's name is Kelev....which is Hebrew, for "dog."  That house was spooky and I did NOT enjoy that week one bit.  I did, however, enjoy the extra money, and the dog was pretty cool.

Peter Black, however, is much more likable and humble in his interest in the Holocaust.  I worked with him on a project of transcribing Survivor testimony cassette tapes so they could be put on CDs.  He works in the Center of Advanced Holocaust Studies, on the 5th floor of the Museum. (We called it the "ivory tower." Lots of bookish-wormy people there, who don't have much social prowess, and they think they are the ONLY intelligent ones in the whole place.  They thought they were better than everybody else, really, and it rubbed a lot of people that I worked with, quite wrong).  BUT, Peter Black was very easy to work with, very decent, and did NOT have an ego problem at all, that I could tell.  I really liked and respected him a lot.  He and the Chief of Staff, Bill Parsons, were my 2 favorite men of authority in that whole entire Museum.  If you were to contact them both, they would remember me.  We had a decent rapor, and even afterwards when I left the Museum, I attended a couple Holiday parties and talked with them both because they still liked me.

I watched this program tonight, and despite my trying very hard to avoid it, I noticed that two tears escaped down my face...one from each eye.  I have that choked up feeling in my throat even now, and it was with me the entire time I watched it.  Pete was sitting next to me.  He reached over at one point and held my hand for a few minutes.  I don't think he really knows or understands the depths of my pain about it, but he does try to comfort me at least.

I am not Jewish.  I don't have a family who perished in the Holocaust.  I know absolutely nobody personally who went anywhere near those places during World War II.  My grandpa was in Brazil.  I don't know why the hell I have been obsessed with the Holocaust all my life, and frankly it annoys me sometimes, because it just kills me.  The more I learn about it, the more I am horrified, and morbidly fascinated, and disgusted because I want to know even more, and then I am in a state of guilt and self-loathing all over again for leaving the Museum so abruptly on 9/11.  I'm like this sick and twisted sponge, wanting to soak up every detail I possibly can, memorize every fact, every name, every date, every minute detail of every concentration camp, everything...

But.....this is what my life is now.

I walked from the living room, after the program ended, to the laundry room, and stood there, looking at the stacked washer and dryer in this tiny closet space, and I just stared at it blankly.  This is what my life is now.

Do you have those moments too?  Do you reminisce occasionally about the fun you had with Journey, and miss it so much that it aches inside your heart, to the point where you have to remind yourself that "this is what your life is now" in order to prevent the pain from enveloping you all over again??  Or am I just the only slob in the universe who goes through this shit??  Why the hell am I the one who has to go through this shit, when I'm not even Jewish??  Why do I CARE so much about this history??

I have no fucking idea.  I really don't.  It just plagues me, haunts me, gnaws at me, and makes me crazy.

I should be doing more things like I used to do, regarding the Holocaust.  But I'm not.  It's one of those things in life where, you want it so much and so badly that it aches, but at the same time, you're afraid to get too close to it because you know somehow it'll just hurt you to the core of your entire being.  Yet you still want it.  Maybe that's the definition of addiction, I don't know.

I just know that it hurts me, it causes me this horrific pain all through my body, a sick hurtful irrational pain that won't go away, no matter if 10 years go by, or 20, or more.  It always hurts me.  It always has, and it always will.  And here's the bizarre thing about it...

The Holocaust, in my opinion, SHOULD hurt everybody, all the time, for eternity.

Maybe I'm a masochist.  I wouldn't be surprised if I have some of that in me.  I don't crave the pain of learning more about this history---I don't crave pain at all, not even in BDSM.  But, I do crave the truths, and the answers, and the why's, and wherefore's, and as much knowledge as I possibly can get about this history, despite not knowing or understanding WHY the hell I crave it, and yet, at the same time, I have tried to put some distance between myself and my heart and my craving, and my missing of the Museum. I can't have it, I can't work there anymore, they won't let me, even though it's the only thing in this whole miserable life of mine that I ever truly wanted and worked very hard to get.  It's gone, and that's that.

The distance, however, doesn't always keep itself far away.  It diminishes every time I see a program like that, or every time I see a book or a film or snippet of the Museum somewhere on t.v., or wherever.  The distance is no longer there, because the dagger is once again embedded in my heart, and the pain is brand new all over again, and deep.  It is almost like taking a band-aid off of a wound that has not yet healed.  The pain of it is still there, you thought maybe it had gone away, but surprise, there it is again, all ripe and bloody and nasty like it happened yesterday.

I thought maybe my visiting the Museum after 10 years, with Pete, would cure me of this pain.  However, much to my surprise and dismay, it killed me and I cried like a blubbering idiot through the entire exhibition.  I was wailing, I was hysterical, I felt like my soul was being trampled on with every step I made through every hallway, and every doorway of that place.  I literally felt a stabbing pain in my guts the entire time I was there.  Every face that stared out at me in those photographs, those people I felt I knew so well, in those hallways that I wandered through and worked in every day for 6 years, was there again, staring and almost accusing me of desertion, of no longer caring about them, of no longer doing anything for them.  Abandonment.  That is what they whispered.  I abandoned them.

No matter how many tears I shed, that pain will never go away in my gut.

The pain is....I know with all my heart and soul, that I belong in that Museum, just like YOU belong in Journey, but dammit, something ripped our life's purpose right out of both our hands, unexpectedly, out of nowhere, and left us in shock, pain, and numbness.  Our lives were happily buried in those things, for so many years, we were so immersed in it, every day, and suddenly, that life and that purpose was just abruptly taken away from us.

Have you managed to get over the pain of it, Stephen?  Or are you like me, thinking maybe enough time has lapsed that it doesn't bother you anymore, you can move forward and get on with other things...only to stumble onto something you remembered about a tour or a song or a photograph and suddenly the pain is all around you, brand new again and inside you, stabbing at your heart---and it won't let up??  Is that what you've been going through, with this Greatest Hits 2 and all the interviews you've been doing lately??

You can tell me, because I know exactly how that feels.  Maybe you're in the same boat as me, where you're surrounded by people who claim they love you, yet they just don't understand what you're feeling or going through inside, at all.  They don't know the depths of your pain, or what is causing it, or why. They don't have any clue at all about the aching and craving and the missing of something so huge that your life once was.  Sure, everybody feels old sometimes, and misses being young.  Maybe that's the closest they can get to what you and I have experienced as pain.

Everybody goes through SOME kind of pain in this life, and pain comes in a myriad of forms.  Why then, can't every human being understand that about each other, and try to HELP each other through it?  Why do we keep it locked up inside ourselves, and try to avoid it, and deny it, and move on and think that we can get over it?  Why don't other people even bother to try to understand it and help somehow?

Do you see the immigration laws in our country right now and the whole Alabama mess with their new laws regarding immigrants, and how they are now so scared they won't let their kids go to school anymore, and how the crops aren't being harvested because they are too afraid to go out of their homes... politicians yelling "build walls to keep them out," and all this FUCKED UP GARBAGE-----THAT is exactly how the Holocaust began.  Society needs a scapegoat to blame the bad economy on, one that is nearby, close enough to hurt and berate and criticize and condemn...so in our country RIGHT NOW, immigrants are being targeted.  Muslims are being targeted.  Hate crimes are skyrocketing in number.  Hate GROUPS have grown to over 1,000.  Think of that.  One THOUSAND hate groups---groups of hundreds of people...even thousands....who perpetrate hate crimes on people who are not considered "white," or "American."

Never mind that this entire country of ours was BASED on immigrants coming here to start a new life, from all countries!   We wonderful Americans FUCKING took this country away from the American Indian much in the same way that Hitler took away the Jews' rights and put THEM into ghettos (reservations) as a holding tank until they could figure out what to do with them.  In the American Indians case, they were given lots of alcohol, and drugs, but their hopes and dreams were crushed for so many years, that now most of them are just in a stupor and can't do much except open casinos.  One more step, and they would be completely annihilated, just like the Jews were.  I don't know which scenario is worse, really, giving people the means and encouragement of self-destruction, or being the Nazi who had a gun and lots of bullets in a camp full of Jews.

I am sickened by the way our country is going right now.  I see the big picture of how it could happen again, even after all my hard work and study, and teaching "Never Again" to so many people for so many years.  It breaks my heart.  Broken, that's really what the pain is...I feel so broken inside.

Hey, I know I am not the only person in this world who feels this type of pain, so do most other empathic people, compassionate people, good people.  I'm just one of millions.  I'm no different from anybody else really.  Nothing special about me at all.  I don't like being self-absorbed like this, and I don't like venting to my favorite singer about shit like this either.  I wanted to keep this blog light and fun and silly and just enjoyable for you.

But there you go.  This is me.  I can't help it.  I'm sorry for being in such a downer mood.

I have to go now.  I need to go get a drink or something.  Chocolate.  Macaroni and cheese.  Valium.

Love, Rebecca