Now I’m all worked up. I write a nice little diatribe about how much I can’t stand my brother, decide to send it to him, because, other than being antagonistic (you can only antagonize those incapable of introspection), but I don’t really talk shit behind backs and would want to know what people were saying about me. We go back and forth, I get all hot and bothered at the prospect of laying him out like a bitch, now I’m sitting here more excited than annoyed, but contemplating how many horrible relationships I have with people predicated on forcing some dishonest paradigm.
I insist on honesty. If I’m getting too fat, if you think I haven’t noticed, I could stand to have you tell me. If I’ve been stewing in my own sweat for 3 or or 4 days because my car doesn’t have a shower, it’s more okay for you to avoid hugs or pass me a bar a soap. If I’m a horribly antagonist evil degenerate who gets off on making people feel bad, you’re going to be the best gauge of whether or not that is more true or less true. If what I choose to focus and work on is a waste of my potential or too idealistic or some other facet that I’ve proven perfectly blind to seeing, it is your responsibility to help me see it. I’m not saying I won’t argue back, but if anything about me is niggling the back of your head (say, my insistence to use words you disagree with or every single time I move petty) consider it a cry for help.
There are people, in fact it’s most, and this is including friends, where I’ve never had a fight nor issue with. This isn’t because we forced smiles with each other and kept the conversation light. This is either because we’re so self-involved and disinterested in bullshit that it’s a fairly mute possibility, or it’s that we’ve every time chosen to discuss points of possible contention open and honestly and met discord with reason and patience eventually. While I’ve made pains to weed through people and pick the ones I’m willing to experiment with, thus rendering it a majority, this isn’t how life works. Life is uncomfortable forcing it, like at Thanksgiving, or in my life recently, a yearly Cubs game tradition.
I will never not ever applaud you if you’ve just made money. I will never look at you boasting about picking on a homeless man as worthy of my respect. It isn’t the right kind of sacrifice to “choke down” living in Indianapolis verses Chicago. So many times Jordan Peterson alludes to the idea of sorting yourself out, stopping saying things that make you weak, and the truth setting you free. You’re not sorted if the most interesting thing you can say is about nights out partying. You’re not sacrificing, and thus opening new roads to truth, by losing yourself in the details of your preferences. And if the worst things you can think to say about me are straight up lies or horrible misconstructions of your poor capacity to perceive relationships, I don’t need to know anything else about you to want nothing to do with that kind of mental slavery.
I envy those of you who got siblings you can get along with. I envy those of you with parents who both managed to not go insane and make it your problem. More power to you for having aunts and uncles who wouldn’t steal from you. You’re living a kind of truth that my family abandoned long ago. The irony of getting into pissing matches is that I don’t feel weak in expressing the truth of our fucked up dynamics. I feel emboldened. I feel motivated and significantly more likely to shine my light of spite on the godforsaken blight that constitutes my blood. I wear practically everything terrible I’ve ever done on my sleeve, and allude to the shit I still think I’d do, and the best you have is I do nothing and occasionally swap loans with my dad? Come on. How much easier of a target could I make myself?
I like that people like my brother make it so easy though. I like being able to make falsifiable checklists of when idiots speak to see who really has the upper hand in pissing the true straight line. If people are both unwilling to see what about them makes them weak, and those in their life have no capacity or desire to point it out, what to make of the appeal to stop saying things that make you weak? Who are you to decide, or as Jordan says, “What do you know?” if everything that constitutes you isn’t merely incidentally ignorant, but totally awash in a character immune to the outside world; possessed by ideology, religiosity, or the bro code?
