When I'm working this hard to avoid
writing, I guess I have to start. I think I kind of want to talk
stupid. I also think I want to make that stupid talk analogize to
movies and songs. (Neither of which I ended up doing?...)
I've been thinking a lot about relationships. I glance at my blogger page and see the tag “relationships” is 8th from the top of 427 tags I managed to pull out as mild coherence reference points in my usual blog soup. They mean a lot to me, but apparently not as much as Jordan Peterson, though they're tied with Obama.
For the longest time, every single conception I had of a relationship was about what I could get out of it. Maybe I wanted to be friends with dickhead kids because I wanted their power. I could play the ethical know-it-all in school because of the attention and accolades. I would garner a certain type of crowd to create a certain kind of fun or that could be controlled in specific ways. Basically, I didn't simply “not understand” relationships, I didn't have any.
That isn't to say people didn't try to relate to me. My general nonplussed demeanor or mild excitement at mostly-playful delinquency many depressed and “finding themselves” people are consistently drawn to. It's easy not to judge someone you're not invested in. And people, whether they're comfortable admitting it or not, like when the confident person filled with praises and gifts for them shits on everyone besides them.
That was a big part of my dialogue in my romance language regarding friends. They were “different” because of some ill-defined disposition that could tolerate me for longer periods than most. To be sure, I still think this speaks volumes, but I think I was willing to give out too much credit, and I was doing it at an unfair expense to my own self-conception. I wanted actual relationships. As such, I allowed other people's stuff into and onto mine.
Other people, for as much as I don't generally like them, can be something of a huge motivation. There's people who self-sacrifice in extremely unhealthy ways, and people who do for others out of loads of guilt or fear of themselves. I genuinely want to reward people I consider persistently better than me in some aspect of their life I'm not doing terribly well at improving. Perhaps even better said, there are people with qualities I find as equally valid and important as and I hold, but I want nothing to do with behaving like them. Arguably, given how actively I've sought to cultivate my crowds, words, and direction in life, that's basically everyone.
Here is where I think the word “unconditional” comes up. This is around the space people start to throw out the stupid love word. Unconditional, of course, doesn't really mean unconditional as much as it signifies a kind of persistence and determination through what are hopefully healthy and manageable levels of shit. It's the divine standard by which to set your own inadequacy watch. It's the kind of irrational place a parent may occupy in service to their serial murderer son or wife's devotion thrice beaten a day year after year.
That kind of place seems to pair well with irrational pride. The more you are unduly boastful about something you don't understand or don't deserve, the likelier it seems you'll go down with it. To simply call it “ignorant” betrays the very real motivated energy it conjures in you. The “deeply personal” feeling is everyone's scream for things to matter in a way that transcends the ups and downs of their emotions or tumultuous lives.
In that sense, it's not “irrational” for your stomach to drop when you look at a picture of someone you care about who's gone. They were more real to you than you have the words for. Their impact could have made you feel in ways you'll never experience on your own. Sure, those feelings are playing on survival instincts and deep-rooted fears about the tribe abandoning you, but we're also intelligent enough to extract a greater ethos and example who's death we're allowed to mourn as well.
That's the “heartbreak.” It's not any one person and what you did or didn't say or the details of some regrettable fight. It's the timeless example you thought meant something “special” proving otherwise. Or the proud presumption you have the capacity and wisdom to know what example that relationship was really setting. Or the selfish resentment you have for the work it takes to remain vulnerable and honest. Or the pain of knowing you were working hard, unsure of towards what, to death, conscripted into a cultural fairy-tale.
I miss my relationships that went bad to the extent I allow myself to forget what got them started to begin with. I long for days of old when I pretend I made the mistake of pulling a trigger I never intended. Relationships need people willing to discuss and respect each others' decisions. This is as true between you and every insane-but-savable Trump voter as it is you and those difficult friendships or relationships that blew up for, probably, wholly ridiculous and nonsensical reasons. Check the record, I've never said, “I'm done talking about this.”
My best relationships aren't just time spent, but people who seem to respect that the time we have is limited, and the person in front of you is all you're going to get of them. My deepest sense of connection is when I allow that sentiment to embed itself into my moment. When people talk about things like “no expectations,” the wrong and lazy way to understand that is as the shirking of responsibility. No expectations needs to be making a plan, while knowing you can't control the weather. It needs to be something akin to that AA mantra about having the wisdom to tell the difference between things you can and cannot change, and then drilling down on how or if you really want to. It's me knowing I could blow thousands of dollars getting nowhere trying to create and be independently wealthy, and can only expect from myself to act as well as I can to the extent of my knowledge and ability.
That's the kind of leeway it gets easier to grant when you're older. I'm still a top-notch shit-talker, but if my first impulse was to roast everyone at the office, dear god. As life has felt both more and less in my control, I'm not so quick to throw people's baggage into their face. I still think I prefer to relate in that kind of “mean because I like you” space, but I understand I live in the wrong place for too much of that. I want room to “fail as a person” as much as anyone else. I'm significantly less apologetic or insecure than what's normal, statistically, but I don't want to believe in lost causes, thinking we'll cobble together some misshapen gluey Popsicle stick existence together.
I'm not sad people who want to leave, leave. My first drunk instinct isn't to blow up ex's phones. I don't think I'll create the same (it'll only get better) magic of parties. It bugs me to think that I didn't matter to them as much as they did to me. That my kind of “fucked up” is “too,” but what I accepted as them presumably only someone better than me could really understand or they could bother with in perpetuity. The things I like about them seem to lose out to the things I hate. It's parts of them I think they hate as well, but only they're allowed to suffer them on their own. Their depression wins. Their insecurity reigns. Their conspiratorial gossipy child runs amok. I don't end friendships in screaming and pissing matches inventing a dozen explicitly untrue things to say about you before never talking again.
The things people use to lament me are the things I take pride in. I like having worked for my views and methodical needling down on things. I like being sexual and fighting jealous impulses. I like cussing, and being blunt, and “rough” messy friendships where everything is at once a crisis and immediate celebration that it will all still be over soon enough, so relax. I like knowing what part of the imperfect whole I'm getting more comfortable accepting, and discussing what needs to change. There's a gigantic hole at the center of how we conceive of each other as “right” or “the one” or “best.” This isn't to dismiss people who's styles and experiences mesh more than others, but it's to allude to a lost spirit of entanglement. The kind that happens when “what if you can't get divorced” or “this child is yours forever” enters the picture.
I'm still celebrating. Every forgotten name from my parties frequently lives on in the spirit they conjured in me. Every lost friend or girlfriend occupies at least words on the page, even if the swirl of their influence will never fit neatly into a waffle cone. And I'm still working to create even better and refined circumstances to build the fleetingly small amount of relationships with impacts worth considering and preserving indefinitely. That's the kind of friend I want to be, and misfired regrets over people less willing than me serve no one and never recognized me to begin with. And I'm just the smallest part of everything else we're missing.
I've been thinking a lot about relationships. I glance at my blogger page and see the tag “relationships” is 8th from the top of 427 tags I managed to pull out as mild coherence reference points in my usual blog soup. They mean a lot to me, but apparently not as much as Jordan Peterson, though they're tied with Obama.
For the longest time, every single conception I had of a relationship was about what I could get out of it. Maybe I wanted to be friends with dickhead kids because I wanted their power. I could play the ethical know-it-all in school because of the attention and accolades. I would garner a certain type of crowd to create a certain kind of fun or that could be controlled in specific ways. Basically, I didn't simply “not understand” relationships, I didn't have any.
That isn't to say people didn't try to relate to me. My general nonplussed demeanor or mild excitement at mostly-playful delinquency many depressed and “finding themselves” people are consistently drawn to. It's easy not to judge someone you're not invested in. And people, whether they're comfortable admitting it or not, like when the confident person filled with praises and gifts for them shits on everyone besides them.
That was a big part of my dialogue in my romance language regarding friends. They were “different” because of some ill-defined disposition that could tolerate me for longer periods than most. To be sure, I still think this speaks volumes, but I think I was willing to give out too much credit, and I was doing it at an unfair expense to my own self-conception. I wanted actual relationships. As such, I allowed other people's stuff into and onto mine.
Other people, for as much as I don't generally like them, can be something of a huge motivation. There's people who self-sacrifice in extremely unhealthy ways, and people who do for others out of loads of guilt or fear of themselves. I genuinely want to reward people I consider persistently better than me in some aspect of their life I'm not doing terribly well at improving. Perhaps even better said, there are people with qualities I find as equally valid and important as and I hold, but I want nothing to do with behaving like them. Arguably, given how actively I've sought to cultivate my crowds, words, and direction in life, that's basically everyone.
Here is where I think the word “unconditional” comes up. This is around the space people start to throw out the stupid love word. Unconditional, of course, doesn't really mean unconditional as much as it signifies a kind of persistence and determination through what are hopefully healthy and manageable levels of shit. It's the divine standard by which to set your own inadequacy watch. It's the kind of irrational place a parent may occupy in service to their serial murderer son or wife's devotion thrice beaten a day year after year.
That kind of place seems to pair well with irrational pride. The more you are unduly boastful about something you don't understand or don't deserve, the likelier it seems you'll go down with it. To simply call it “ignorant” betrays the very real motivated energy it conjures in you. The “deeply personal” feeling is everyone's scream for things to matter in a way that transcends the ups and downs of their emotions or tumultuous lives.
In that sense, it's not “irrational” for your stomach to drop when you look at a picture of someone you care about who's gone. They were more real to you than you have the words for. Their impact could have made you feel in ways you'll never experience on your own. Sure, those feelings are playing on survival instincts and deep-rooted fears about the tribe abandoning you, but we're also intelligent enough to extract a greater ethos and example who's death we're allowed to mourn as well.
That's the “heartbreak.” It's not any one person and what you did or didn't say or the details of some regrettable fight. It's the timeless example you thought meant something “special” proving otherwise. Or the proud presumption you have the capacity and wisdom to know what example that relationship was really setting. Or the selfish resentment you have for the work it takes to remain vulnerable and honest. Or the pain of knowing you were working hard, unsure of towards what, to death, conscripted into a cultural fairy-tale.
I miss my relationships that went bad to the extent I allow myself to forget what got them started to begin with. I long for days of old when I pretend I made the mistake of pulling a trigger I never intended. Relationships need people willing to discuss and respect each others' decisions. This is as true between you and every insane-but-savable Trump voter as it is you and those difficult friendships or relationships that blew up for, probably, wholly ridiculous and nonsensical reasons. Check the record, I've never said, “I'm done talking about this.”
My best relationships aren't just time spent, but people who seem to respect that the time we have is limited, and the person in front of you is all you're going to get of them. My deepest sense of connection is when I allow that sentiment to embed itself into my moment. When people talk about things like “no expectations,” the wrong and lazy way to understand that is as the shirking of responsibility. No expectations needs to be making a plan, while knowing you can't control the weather. It needs to be something akin to that AA mantra about having the wisdom to tell the difference between things you can and cannot change, and then drilling down on how or if you really want to. It's me knowing I could blow thousands of dollars getting nowhere trying to create and be independently wealthy, and can only expect from myself to act as well as I can to the extent of my knowledge and ability.
That's the kind of leeway it gets easier to grant when you're older. I'm still a top-notch shit-talker, but if my first impulse was to roast everyone at the office, dear god. As life has felt both more and less in my control, I'm not so quick to throw people's baggage into their face. I still think I prefer to relate in that kind of “mean because I like you” space, but I understand I live in the wrong place for too much of that. I want room to “fail as a person” as much as anyone else. I'm significantly less apologetic or insecure than what's normal, statistically, but I don't want to believe in lost causes, thinking we'll cobble together some misshapen gluey Popsicle stick existence together.
I'm not sad people who want to leave, leave. My first drunk instinct isn't to blow up ex's phones. I don't think I'll create the same (it'll only get better) magic of parties. It bugs me to think that I didn't matter to them as much as they did to me. That my kind of “fucked up” is “too,” but what I accepted as them presumably only someone better than me could really understand or they could bother with in perpetuity. The things I like about them seem to lose out to the things I hate. It's parts of them I think they hate as well, but only they're allowed to suffer them on their own. Their depression wins. Their insecurity reigns. Their conspiratorial gossipy child runs amok. I don't end friendships in screaming and pissing matches inventing a dozen explicitly untrue things to say about you before never talking again.
The things people use to lament me are the things I take pride in. I like having worked for my views and methodical needling down on things. I like being sexual and fighting jealous impulses. I like cussing, and being blunt, and “rough” messy friendships where everything is at once a crisis and immediate celebration that it will all still be over soon enough, so relax. I like knowing what part of the imperfect whole I'm getting more comfortable accepting, and discussing what needs to change. There's a gigantic hole at the center of how we conceive of each other as “right” or “the one” or “best.” This isn't to dismiss people who's styles and experiences mesh more than others, but it's to allude to a lost spirit of entanglement. The kind that happens when “what if you can't get divorced” or “this child is yours forever” enters the picture.
I'm still celebrating. Every forgotten name from my parties frequently lives on in the spirit they conjured in me. Every lost friend or girlfriend occupies at least words on the page, even if the swirl of their influence will never fit neatly into a waffle cone. And I'm still working to create even better and refined circumstances to build the fleetingly small amount of relationships with impacts worth considering and preserving indefinitely. That's the kind of friend I want to be, and misfired regrets over people less willing than me serve no one and never recognized me to begin with. And I'm just the smallest part of everything else we're missing.
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