It occurs to me that I never know what’s going on. When I seem to accomplish something that suggests otherwise, I feel it a trick being played on me. Of course I frequently offer reasons for what I do. I say I write to keep sane. I say I read to take pride in being pretentious. I say I revel in my likes and interests because the alternatives erase my soul. I claim to do dumb shit to keep things interesting.
All the reasons tend to pass. That is, no one has found the will to claim I’m downright incorrect in my assertions. Every once in a while perhaps I make a blanket presumptive statement about the course of the world that gets a bit of banter, but that tends to end fairly quickly. In that instant, you begin to wonder if the person responding to you is suffering the same problem. Did they really want to challenge me? Did they really care my opinion?
I’m considerably more confused about how and whether I get along with people than anything else. To this day, the best explanation I have for my best friends is they are as concerned with their own lives and feelings as I am mine. Another way to state that is I’m not their problem. They don’t blame me for talking or phrasing the way I do, joking the way I do, experimenting with or liking things they don’t care for. And it’s more than some simple societal notion of, clearly fake, respect we pretend to have for one another because the word “tolerate” comes across as rude.
If I were to pretend I wasn’t confused, then I would say the people who seem as up their own ass as I am mine make the most sense to me. I’ve referred to this as personal responsibility. You could describe it in terms of awareness. Immediately I feel I should interject that they aren’t all people who can be as forward or direct as me either. It’s not a kindred spirit convention where we desperately beg back and forth not to be judged. I would call each and every one of these interactions the ideal kind of friendship. You relate who and where you are. You pick up where you left off. You’re happy that this person even exists.
It’s perhaps not a secret to you that most relationships don’t seem to operate this way. Most relationships are about leverage. It’s not an accident that popular listicles and tabloids say the same things time and again about toxic behaviors and habits. We, by and large, have found no will, reason, or capacity to get over that game. We trap people. We emotionally manipulate under the guise of romance. We fetishize the story of togetherness to reinforce pop culture kiddie conceptions. We excitedly brush under the rug our fears and doubts because we believe in ill-defined “more.”
As I get older, the confusion grows. You get to spend time running your life experiment and testing what you’ve learned. Results don’t even retain the courtesy of being merely inconclusive; they play out in flatly contradictory ways. You can take a friendship between two guys who routinely get into fistfights only to discover they’d go to the grave for one another. Across town two gentlemen who claim friendship might experience a tussle 1/10th the degree and never speak again. This leaves you to only confidently claim that the word “friendship” is practically useless or so context specific as to be perfectly obscure.
This is of course how I arrived at my problem with the word “love.” It seems not a cold, nor mean, nor closed-minded position to say if a word means everything, it means nothing. But we retain feelings of that ill-defined “more.” Even if I hate the word, and genuinely don’t know what it means culturally, an irreverence or utterly compelling sensibility or awe or appreciation begets its usage. It speaks to the depth of our subjective sense. We are never more real or alive than the moments we want to claim love. In practice, that claim spans from your picturesc and cheesy facebook photos to your movie clichéd ideas about what you’re supposed to say under the moonlight. It runs across your food, pets, kids, hobbies, indulgences, and so forth. You fall in the deepest the moment you are able to hand yourself over to being defined by something that provoked the true depth of how you consider yourself.
But you don’t consider yourself confused. You don’t ask why you’re able to see the enduring and special majesty of your spouse, but someone else can’t. You don’t ask why you’re a dog person or love ice cream. You don’t watch each feeling move into a space to be accepted or rejected. You ride the stream hoping to avoid rapids.
For me, I often think of my confusion in terms of what other people have introduced into my life. I have friends with high anxiety. They’ve had that anxiety kick in after we hadn’t seen each other for a while and it seemed to be making their visit kind of a letdown. I recognize this as the emotional leverage game. Unintentionally and without malice, but unwisely, that friend wants me to find a way to assure them we’re still cool. Presumably, the choice is mine to determine us, but by extension, them. I almost certainly never play this game.
I had a friend who I defended from physical harm and gave money to who found more value in re-befriending the person who choked and tried to extort her than find even ground with me. I’ve had a friend who I’ve driven across several states to visit because they were lonely and we were “just that close,” who decided a year or so ago to just stop talking to me because I made a joke about a new boyfriend, or so the excuse that has never been expanded upon goes. I had a friend explicitly state how well they got along with me and my group and they weren’t just trying to “make their rounds” and disappear before they practically disappeared.
You begin to develop a sense that when you care, when you try, when you live up to some kind of valiant honor as depicted by timeless heroes, the quicker you will garner scorn. By enjoying yourself, having principles, or even remotely attempting to accurately account for your responsibility and perspective to the moment, the world will lash out at you and teach you to break. It becomes obvious why we seem desperate to see things play out in a morally expectant way in our stories. Why we love to bang the pots and pans of self-reliance and liberal progressivism; the “real” world makes us sick.
My confused speculation has posited that people hate themselves, and after several hours of listening to Sam Harris, aren’t even aware of it. Say what you will about consciousness or the depths of potential confusion regarding a personality, I know there’s a disproportionate level of vitriol I experience from the people I’ve chosen to try and give myself to. I didn’t perceive a line in the sand, I didn’t draw one, and as long as you remain concerned with taking responsibility for yourself, you’re never going to cross one in my mind. As long as it’s my feeling to examine and make a choice about, I have to extend the basic level of respect I hold for myself to you. Overwhelmingly, I understand, you don’t want it.
I don’t understand the capacity for prolonged disapproval or hatred for someone anymore. When I did understand it, I understood it as work. I knew it took reminding me of bad things to stoke the flames. I knew I was constantly looking for a reason to feel self-righteously invigorated. I knew that the future looked like it was going down in flames if things didn’t go my way and people didn’t agree with me. I can certainly still dislike people and want to remove myself from particularly bad ones, but I can’t maintain the machine that lets them define me. I go and look for something to be proactive about. I try to find a way to incorporate or discuss what puts me off if and when they’re open to it.
But again, in my confusion, I’m led to believe this is “mature,” “respectable,” “worthwhile,” “progress,” “accepting,” “friendly,” “loving,” etcetera. Instead, it makes you look like a rube. It makes you look weak. In fact, you are weak. You didn’t push the boulder over the top of the hill promising to squash who set you to the task. Moreover, you’re to blame. You made them something you should want to squash! If only you’d swallowed your hatred and let it play out like a normal person. If only you’d break something, or yell, or hit me instead of “act” like it’s all so very confusing. Like you didn’t do anything wrong!
It’ll probably be filed under things I’ve said a million times, but I’m always wrong. My state of being is wrong. I’m wrong when I try and especially when I don’t. I’m wrong when I’m too angry, but wrong when I’m feeling nothing. I’m wrong in my choice of language and when I eat like shit. I’m wrong in making any conditional statement that can only speak to a moment that has passed. If I post this in the wrong forum I’ll be told so rather quickly with prejudice.
If I’m so wrong, why aren’t they? Why aren’t you? Why am I open and willing to accept you when described by your worst features, but mine are unforgivable or not worth the effort; worthy of literally being shunned? I don’t mean as if I was the kind of person who routinely emotionally or physically abused our friendship. I don’t mean as someone who pathologically enjoys creating and seeing suffering. Like a desperate orphan crying out to the parents that abandoned it, why can’t you love me!? I don’t even believe in love; I’m making it all the easier for you!
The only way I can ask the question is in deeply appreciating the contrast. How do you know someone for years, have thousands of pages of conversations or countless hours of memories, and then one day you become an unrecognizable animal that they never understood how they gave it the time? If I’m confused with a whirlwind of thoughts, haphazardly collecting in blogs, what kind of Armageddon is going on in the other person’s mind? Have they just not known pain, or so much that it’s all they know how to operate in?
The ones who resembled my best friends are the most confusing. The ones who I’ve never been nor could see me in a fight with before they turn on me. The ones who’ve made heartfelt professions about who we’ll be to each other in the future before they storm out the door or talk to me like they’ve put their daycare center worker hat on. People grow up and priorities can certainly change, but as far as I go, I feel consistent. Consistent confusion, perhaps consistent mistakes, but who you met in college is likely who I’ll be when I show up to your funeral. If you’re not about that, please stop playing with me.
I get confused by my sadness. I claim often I don’t have hope. I don’t feel hopeful. I don’t speak in hopeful terms. But my body and mind break down and want to die as if I have more hope for everyone who’s ever beaten, ignored, or hurt me than I ever see them finding for themselves. I write in sheer defiance of the assumptions I operate under about how little I matter or frequently will be misunderstood. I don’t know why my mind won’t drop the ideas of anxiety or anger for what never was in the first place. I don’t know why it blames itself for being tricked or for trying.
I suppose it’s preferable to feeling nothing, but what do I know?
No comments:
Post a Comment