I'm in a weird mood, so let's see what there is to say about it.
I'm not negative. I've managed to persuade what is formally a group of friends that I am. To my knowledge, “negative” means that I speak to things that are less than fun or exciting on too frequent a basis and it affects their mood. I'm assuming there is no distinction between saying negative things and being a negative person for the purposes of their description.
It's worth noting, this isn't a charge I hear routinely from anyone else I spent as much or more time with. If it's shared across my relationships, this emboldened cache decided to build up the significance of my impact into a pretense for no longer talking to me. Something important as well, this is a group of people who say things like, “I completely agree” or “I totally understand” before hours later finding themselves cursing at me or name calling.
I know it's not just about them. I hasten to remove their names from any digressions I go into picking their words apart. I know it's not just about me. No healthy individual, in my view, should be so moved to end all contact with you for being methodical and polite in trying to ask questions or explain where you're coming from. There is no other option for people to relate at all, let alone well, unless time and patience is taken to listen close and try to empathize. When that makes you blindingly mad, it's just not my fault.
I love that this has been a problem long enough that there's a discernible pattern, and I'm so relieved that clinical psychologists, of course including my favorite Jordan Peterson, document this behavior as well. The first 5 or so minutes of this speak explicitly too it. I don't have to rely on my own selfish motives in protecting my ego or oversell their example as something indicative of a personal greater moral or intellectual failing. They aren't special. With respect to the world at large and the things I choose to talk about, let alone how, neither am I.
I find it at the base of the reasons I think I'll feel genuinely more relieved than scared when it's my turn to die, provided it doesn't happen in some dramatic and painful fashion, that every little joy or proper expression of dopamine I manage in a day is extremely hard fought. If this is me negative, I hesitate to spend too much time mulling over where my head was at under my abusive mom. I struggle to place where the teenager prepared to blow up cars and shoot up living rooms (with paint balls) fits in the greater “negative” story of my life. To label someone harkens to wearing an A on your chest in that abortion story I'm not going to bother googling. You're forever and only this one thing for how it makes the people around you feel.
When I think about the list of things that I've managed to make people feel bad over, I see confounding results. Offering money and drinks has garnered shit-talking, resentment, and fights. People feel inadequate or poor. Offering places to stay has never motivated a person quicker to seek an escape route. The idea that it's my couch or living room registers as a certain kind of pain. I once made a girl cry for asking a question about her ex-boyfriend. Certain people practically snarl when I offer an explanation for anything I do, let alone try to describe a feeling. It's rarely if ever physical intimidation that even garners a flinch. I can string together a list of profanity, and people take it more as a joyous parlor trick.
I know what the conflict is. I know people feel fundamentally inadequate. I know I surrounded myself with those cliché “smart” kids who got too fat or comfortable or old and pay lip service to a handful of figures that made it to the top. I know that people are scared about how little they feel or how their feelings change, and they don't have the words for dealing with them any quicker than I might find them over the course of a dozen blogs on the subject. I know that the language we do adopt to describe ourselves is overwrought and impossible to live up to. It's deliberately misleading and manically hopeful, so the more we presume to know what we're talking about in adopting that language, the more we spiral out of control. I know people are jealous of other people's facade. No matter how much I bitch, ten seconds later I might be talking about an OKCupid hookup with the sexless depressive. No matter how many times I tweak my back or overspend trying to make my land a cool place to be, it'll be mine, and no one will feel they have a stake in it.
It's the kind of problem described when people run through de-cluttering self-help books or when someone offers a dozen reasons they never learned an instrument. “Talented” musicians are most often obsessive-compulsives who put that tick towards their instrument. They started young so the years and years of class or instruction get summed up as “cool piano player” in the eyes of everyone who proclaims they wish they could do the same thing. Do you? Do you want to play the same dozen notes several thousand times over the course of a few years? No. To want something in earnest is to want the journey and the work. They opt for the grind of an RPG or rungs of their corporate ladder. They hold their job in their hands, ask if it brings them joy, and default to ideas about benefits and free lunch to aid in throwing out gnawing dreams.
What confuses me is that, in our own minds, I think we all work “as hard.” This could be me giving them too much credit. At the very least, I know people are tired and disenfranchised. I know they have about 2 minutes of conversation before the story of their debt appears. I know they still manage to make that god forsaken one time a year base touch with all of their “loves” and “friends.” But they don't want to get anywhere together. They want to struggle alone and pretend their shame is hidden. They want to keep playing into the personal identity story they were maybe sold on as children.
For my part, at the end of my 80 hour week, I need to believe that sooner than later, I'll never have to do that again unless it's in service to something I'm infatuated with. But for them? Garnished paychecks, growing health issues, scared of the wrong catastrophe hitting at the wrong time of month? To kill yourself at a job and not see the future would be unbearable. For my purposes, if it is unbearable, if you are suffering, if you are tired, if you think you're doing too much or care so hard, why does that need to become my fault? I don't substitute my “I feel like death” sentiments with me smiling in the park on a snowy day, so I'm negative?
However bad I'm feeling about any particular day or my place in the world, it doesn't get better when I try to pretend otherwise. I've watched myself, or been too blacked out, as I lash out. I start to act like you. It's why I tend to forgive and forget drunk nights that bring out the sober heart in you. Your sober self can be sad as fuck or irrationally angry, you just might not really find out about it until you decide to drink.
I want people to do better by themselves more than I want to insist they stop calling me negative. I'm not crumbling under the weight of its truth, I'm just aggravated and bored with the people so lazy and disrespectful that they've sacrificed their voice. They're running from their responsibilities and losing opportunities for growth and understanding. They stopped paying attention to who they wanted to be. They stopped seeing what roles we could play in each other's lives. To me, that's death. That's the ultimate negative thing. You can carry on about the moral and intellectual disgraces coming out of the era where a democrat barely beats a pedophile, but you've left it to those people to be the last ones with any capacity to truly believe in something. Wins have to “surprise” you so you perk up for a day and decide to call your Senator. You're always looking outside for the validation and excuse.
Maybe I just hit on something there too. These kids all grew up getting the good grades and praise. There's always been some outside affirmation of what they were doing. Their major was correct by default. Their hobby was interesting or their relationship was cute. Perhaps there's been a massive uncontrolled positive feedback loop that ensures any “negative” introduced into it needs to be washed away. I live in a world where things aren't inevitably getting better. I live in a world of subtlety, contradiction, and nuances. I try to work in my impending and hastening death into my reasoning to do anything daily. You can't meaningfully tag that to an Instagram picture.
I don't really morn the dead. My relationships were good enough for the drunkeness or jokes, but these were never the people who wanted to do the same kind of work, or they'd be here with me. They wouldn't resent me. They'd be able to recognize my efforts and ethics and how long it takes before you can savor any satisfaction from the riff you've been rehearsing for years. I can't decide if they know they're dead. I can't pin point if it happened before I ever met them, sometime in the middle of knowing each other, or crystallized when we came apart. I do know that the fights and “innocent misunderstandings” are inevitable with people like that though. I know there is no proper approach or right way to speak. The valuable commodity is maintaining your identity in spite of it all, and you can't expect them to recognize you when they haven't been paying attention to what they've become.
