I’m currently thinking about personal responsibility and want to see if I can elaborate on a thought about why we don’t exhibit it.
There appears to be a greater difference between seeing ourselves do or say something than what happens when we abstain. That alone isn’t particularly new and the, “First they came for the [enemy] and I said nothing” line rings over and over in my head.
There’s a phrase that comes up often in relationships, and noteably from the Norwegian teen drama “Skam” I’m watching as well as “Girlboss.” They combined with some thoughts I was having about my last relationship. The line goes, “You hurt me so bad.” Concordant to thinking about my past and watching these shows, I’ve got a friend battling through some abusive games and mental ties to which there’s a whole catalog of phrases and feelings that can slosh between the mediums.
Often enough, the response comes from a lie. The person who was hurt was betrayed. Betrayal is something I’ve incidentally read about, and it’s as real a physiological impact as you could ask for. A broken heart isn’t solely a metaphor. Overwhelmingly that lie is centered around sex or the thinly veiled “hook up” seemingly designed to torture the person who desperately needs to hear every needling detail.
So what if you break something that doesn’t tend to heal correctly? Your nose always points a little crooked. Your knee acts up in cold weather. You’ve got a bit of a hunch from a slipped disk. You’ll never really “get over it” and no one’s going to point fingers and laugh that you walk funny.
At the same time, say you’re physically broken and it causes you a ton of anxiety or stress. Are there ways to approach the pain that doesn’t indict the errant snicker or comment? When might an extreme measure like plastic surgery or joint replacement take effect? Internally it’s a different story. How do you describe the emotional work to better appreciate the look you want and feeling on the inside?
This topic is important to me because I think it’s one more road that brings me to advocating for the “cold, dark truth.” In my estimation, well independent of your love and hopes and dreams about who you and who you care about are supposed to be to each other, there’s an endless sea of tales that describe why you’re doomed. If that’s something of an inevitability, the only proper way to go about that is as honestly as possible.
What a depressing and hopeless sentiment! Except, if you’re doing it right, it’s the exact opposite of that. What makes me forever sad when I think about relationships that failed isn’t that my life was so intertwined I didn’t have some sense of identity. It’s not that I was so overwhelmed with positive emotion that attempting to supplement that would reduce me to a junky. What breaks my heart over and over again is the idea that it wasn’t honest. Because I was.
Here, of course, is the time to defensively dig in. Here’s where both of you must have been honest at some point or you never would have lasted as long or never would have gotten married or had such and such great time when those times were to be had. Emotionality is fickle that way. The realest you’ve ever felt can betray months of little lies that became too heavy.
You can also be confused and blinded by your ideals. This is why I’m so ardent about talking out every minute detail about why I approach friendships, relationships, or whatever else. I remember being the suffering (moreso) idealist and the pure exhilarating torture of trying to force something that didn’t fit. I don’t know precisely when it clicked that I needed a better story, a more comprehensive and appreciable take on my own irrational feelings, that I could acknowledge before placing on the “for consideration” shelf away from the machinery that would drive my decisions.
So, if only to not be like whiny cliched TV, I’m not going to let your sexuality be what triggers me. And that took work. I can call myself slutty until the cows come home, but it will be as weak a qualifier as to how I approach sex as when it’s slung between teenagers. You certainly have the capacity to hurt me, and the only way that goes away is with a proactive approach to honesty.
An important distinction should be made here as well. There’s honesty at the end of your rope and there’s honesty in pursuit of the heart of the truth. “Did you cheat on me!?” The character cries into the face of the boy who lies to her. The next episode it all unravels that she’s left to pick up the pieces. Friends and parents offer hugs and shrugs and tell her she deserves better. Are either of them better off for the discovery having come to light? Did they learn anything, or just do the dance?
I recently said that perspective needs to be forced, and it was a wholly non-elaborted sentiment. Because the shit hitting the fan is certainly a forced perspective. Perhaps forced is the wrong word. You need to build within you a compulsion. You need to feel the head of what you want and who you are pull an Alien and try to burst from your chest. Blogs are provoked by headaches or imitation novelty. But what I’m trying to say rests in my chest. At any point I can throw up my hands and offer a slew of taken-for-granted bullshit about pain or struggle that might be true. If it’s just lips flapping in the wind because I’m feeling selfish and bored, well, you’ve seen that episode before.
The main reason we don’t look or recognize that Alien truth is because IT’S A FUCKING ALIEN! You don’t know if it will burst out and kill you and everything around it. You don’t know what it eats. No one you grew up with and barely any of your friends have experience dealing with aliens. So while it lays not-quite dormant inside of you all the time listening and learning why it’s so dangerous, a feedback loop ensues and you figure out it’s best just not to deal with it at all.
I take a certain and specific amount of pride in when and why I may hurt someone. It wasn’t an accident then. I don’t look at you dumbfounded that you “just don’t get” what you did to deserve it. But what TV portrays, and yes, what I mostly get from the people around me, is this kind of childish blank yet afraid stare. A complete non-registering of any agency or responsibility. A reflexively tit-for-tat or leverage brokering. A rousing skip through a garden as every flower is crushed and giggling can be heard farther and farther into the trees.
So fail. Be dumb. Get hurt and confused and walk funny. But try to do it deliberately. Realize that you can go your entire life never really engaging the honestly horrifying monster in your chest that can certainly reorient your world. It can happen in stages and with proper tools, or it can happen all at once and totally corrupt not just the landscape that was, but anything you try to build in the future.
It’s the consequences from inaction or inattention that really do the damage. Whether you’re leaving the bathroom dirty, scared shitless about about mass scientific illiteracy and lack of representation, or just smiling and nodding when you feel you’ve been punched, it’s the same fear and ego driven narrative you have about yourself to hide behind to blame. That’s how you hurt you and the only time I’ll feel comfortable claiming you hurt me.
