[783] He Made Me Watch

This is in several pieces I'll separate with lines that I've been writing over the course of a few days. Part of me thinks the common thread is as obvious/opaque as anything, and part of me is just happy that all of it constitutes the kind of “I have to talk” vibe, which has always been the point.

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At the end of the day, there is a baseline “you.” No matter how many times you're polite, there's maybe a shark swimming in the waters of your eyes. No matter how many times you're defeated, there's a boxer pulling themselves up on your heartstrings as the count hits 9. Maybe you spend years mocking yourself up against a kind of manliest archetype or expectation, and then the floweriest fairy springs forth for your kid's college graduation, straight-life be damned.

I don't know that I've ever wanted to believe “the best” of anyone. It's rarely been my experience, and the only people I've found myself tending to do so about have been routinely taken advantage of. This likely kicked of my nice “fetish.” To be of some kind of genuine goodness is the kind of ethereal contradiction I leave it to faith to blind you towards.

I invert the habit. I'd rather be prickly and surprise you with outpourings of goodwill or something that surprises me. It feels more personally honest. I don't want to be here, I barely want to know you, and I'm doing everything in my power to take my mind off the myriad things I reflexively say “I hate” about. There's the wizened edge of people who've seen it all before, and there's the despotic cynic. I feel I work incredibly hard, if not merely psychologically, to not reduce my attitude and prospects to the ferociousness of my feelings.

Lucky, or not, for me, I can usually tell when I'm “too emotional” because it very much feels that way. I talk of wanting to destroy things. My chest swells. I ball my fists. I throw something. By now, this whole process happens in a flash. That means, I can “freak out,” do a bit of useless muttering to myself, and within 6 minutes find myself right back here, picking apart who I don't want to be.

My baseline dreams of being “crazy.” I wish I felt as compelled to act a fool for as long as it's taken me to find the control to do this instead. To try and become aware of your baseline is a gigantic actively working task I do not believe people really do until they're forced. Then, say they figure it out, there's no guarantee they won't revel or suffer in what they discover. I say again, I refuse to be a martyr, even to my own absurdity. How many obnoxious MTV reality personalities flaunt how horrible they are? You can love it, and be rewarded for it.

I have clients who swim in the infinite sea of grey in how humans are going to interact with each other. When they are “nice,” I can't let myself slip and believe they're real. Yes, we do get calls to the normal people's houses, and they answer their phones, and sign all the paperwork really quick, and you're not stepping around cat shit as your hair and coat soak up cigarette smoke and stale milk scent. They have reasonable explanations for why we're there, and they don't get angry or spend 30 minutes trying to talk themselves out of a hole. But there's a fundamentally different kind of person walking alongside us. Whispering zombies perhaps?

Can you dream of having DCS show up at your house growing up 12 or more times throughout the course of your life? Maybe. I called my mom’s bluff one of the times she dared me to call them. Broadly speaking though, do you grasp the difference between why they didn't come to your house, and they show up almost monthly at others? Your baseline family and concept of what's acceptable isn't too far deviated from the norm. Your “crazy” doesn't love it. Your crazy has the capacity for shame, or the ability to pause and reflect on the reasons something may be going wrong in your life, and what may be done to account for it. You don't surprise people with shitty texts the moment they wake up because, like some nascent Pokemon, you hurt yourself in your confusion, and are looking for someone to blame.

It's exceedingly dangerous to fall under your own spell. Don't think you're too smart, too moral, too correct. The exacting nature of your understanding is precisely what tears you and everything down. This is why I write. I have inclinations and “clarity” of mind enough to power through shitty feelings. But with each word, the approximate thing I'm trying to grasp grows more defined and starts to disappear into the sea simultaneously. That's the whole exercise. Take something extremely personally and show how it maps onto experiences at large. Consider a single offense or compelling feeling, and translate it into the language of coping or persistence. Turn bottomless pain and frustration into finite pages to step on until you reach something you can comfortably-enough stand, sit, or pass out and die on.

In reviewing my personality assessment, I decided that I didn't want to be “typical” in my levels of neuroticism anymore. The places I've compelled my perspective have turned into “patience” or “cool” or “confidence” or “comedy” or some measure of things I watch people envy about me every day. My capacity to mirror the tension in the room is something a supervisor recently said is something you can't teach. I'm always feeling guilty. That's the gift of my crazy mom. I have an exacting scientific barometer for anxiety that tells me where you are at all times. When I'm not using it, it's eating me from the inside out. This needs a fix.

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A persistent theme of people always finding the fault in you is that, one way or another, you're taking the responsibility for it. Be it the tension in your jaw, or in their unwillingness to engage or define it. It's yours. What's the response? Dive right back in? Keep sacrificing for their sake? Jesus the shit out of the place? No. You leave. You reduce your interactions. You parse out your thoughts in excruciatingly painful detail, and give them every possible chance to keep reaming you further. Because you've learned your place as the person capable and finally, at their insistence, willing to keep piling it on. You turn it into a process. You draw selfish satisfaction. Where else would you go? Prison bitches survive.

I speak too quickly, which isn't to say that's a good thing nor that it's coherently coupled. If there's a battle back and forth of compelling feelings, I rarely win, because I just feel stupid saying the same things over again or pretending loud equals correct. Another reason to write. Your first and tenth, or 800th draft might not quite get there. Whatever you're talking about is constantly changing, and you can literally track the weird bend conversations take whether they're pretending to be hyper-critical, or just shooting the shit. It doesn't really matter if the underlying mechanism is about breaking whatever's in front of you.

The pattern of my life of having things break down and me finding myself more and more isolated is, superficially, me perpetually failing to grasp the problem of keeping people in my life. But, and stop me if you've heard this before, if you simply refuse to go beyond "I have a problem with you!" I still feel comfortable blaming “you.” “You” have a “problem” with “me” in the exact same manner the same is true for me about you in all of my blogs. Certainly I draw from interactions or memories, but I never know how personal it feels or sounds until many many years later, maybe. Just like you didn't write your favorite love song, but damn if it isn't so true!

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I hate me when I don't try. I hate me when I feel dishonest. I hate me when I think I'm trying to persuade myself of something I don't really believe in in a short-hand ridiculous way in order to appease someone I don't respect. I make enough of these statements over time to have a fairly solid grasp of the things I hate or dislike, and discover not-quite by accident all of the things I like in contrast. If you don't understand why I exist in this moment as the culmination of my failures and spite, I can only guess that your understanding of what you hate is more pallid or obscure. It's easy to like a lot of things you're unable or unwilling to think about. Old news. It's easier to like obviously easy things when you consider how much hatred needs to be overcome in order to find the mildest, but more persistent, sense of satisfaction.