This is as about as low as I ever manage to feel. It's the final scene of the movie of my relationships. It's part of a cycle. It's painful and traumatizing each time.
I struggle with “niceness” or “help.” I'm eager to please and get taken advantage of. I see someone help or feel the impact of their help, I never want to consider us square until their wildest dreams are being attended to. Allie helped me at an extremely stressful point in my life. I was making appeals to smug and rich relatives. I was sleeping in my car. She loaned me $2000 to pay off my house. I drove straight to her when she confirmed it was a real offer.
I thought we had the right amount of different but similar characteristics. She played with fire, I play with fire. She is thoughtfully critical of the world around her, I say “fuck that thing” about a lot of things. When she gets an opportunity to work at something she cares about, she does it.
We moved in kind of accidentally, which is a repeated pattern from Kristen who specifically denoted moving in as a poor choice for her back in the day. When me and Allie did it, the pandemic was locking everything down, and we were both under the impression she was going to be living out of her trailer. Well, we ended up functionally on top of each other in the shed.
Country life, let alone bachelor-shed-life comes with a host of negotiations in order to stretch those pithy paychecks. I go into “attempt to attend to needs” mode. I buy an expensive tiller. I look to explore ways to cultivate the space so she feels like she's not completely alienated.
I have no less than 30 projects I'm considering doing at any one time. There's 30 on the board right now. There were at least 30 on the board back then. They all took time, money, overcoming the learning curve, and often some shared concept of what either of us where going to contribute. We eventually decide to pick our particular projects and generally go about them alone.
We never really got to communicating well. Before there were any work tasks or dreams together, it was just going to classical concerts, dinner, and sex. It was the getting-to-know each other dragged out over the distance to Kentucky. We had a really fun time at her cousin's wedding, which shortly after is when I asked if she'd be my girlfriend instead of my “Kentucky girl,” as though I had girls all up and down the Midwest.
Eventually, every few days, then every two weeks or so we'd have some version of the same argument. We tried writing out discrepancies on the white board. She was not a fan of that method. I eventually demanded we parse through things and email each other, as recording our fights and maintaining civility were not seemingly possible. We cut each other off. We reacted and doubted verses listened and questioned. The emails didn't seem to resonate with her either.
The fights? The classics, “I want you to hang out with me!” “I do want to hang out with you.” “If you wanted to you would X, Y, or Z!.”
“I do more chores than you!” “I'm not sure that's true, let's count them and redistribute them.” “You never just believe me and support what I feel!.”
She zeroed in on aspects of my personality that she does not like or thinks I have little reason to express, like arrogance. She spoke to the relatively big game I've talked and compared it to the amount of TV she's witness to.
For my part, after many months of feeling hopeless, I started losing my patience. I punched a hole in my white board and have punched my door. Today I threw the full-enough recycling bins, certainly not attempting to hit her, but definitely close enough for it to not be worth splitting hairs. I emotionally leveraged and antagonized her until she ripped off a piece of the small porch pillar and busted through my front door demanding her cat, then grabbing the piece of broken wood as though prepared to stab me. When I asked her about this, she said I made her afraid, and it was self-defense.
Situations like these are why I have so little faith in myself, intentions, or long-term “fixes” to anything. We'd been talking across purposes for so long, I consciously decided to turn on what I understand about emotional leverage. I was desperate for an honest exchange, risking everything for it. I've felt ignored, caricatured, taken advantage of. I felt like I've spent hundreds of hours and thousands of words attempting to grasp where she was coming from. Only after I induce her to rage-quit my door frame does she capitulate and start speaking honestly?
For greater context, for reasons unbeknownst to me, we'd frequently be in some disagreement right before work, where there's no hope to take the time to try and find a resolution and it can devolve over text on the drive in. Or it would happen while I'm in the middle of talking to people about how there is hope for some resolution if they stick to the plan and remain responsibly accountable to what we've all agreed upon. I talk about irony so often it's lost all meaning.
I know I'm not normal or an okay person. I know whatever aptitude I have for approaching people to bring them ease or hash out their issues is because I'm so deeply enmeshed in my own. I will never be able to outrun, or out think, my feelings, or the cycles they provoke in me. There's something deeply life-affirming and meaningful when you are connected to people and able to invest in them or see them grow. I don't have any guilt or shame for that desire, but I really want to live in a certain kind of fantasy too.
I want to believe people with shared goals, personalities, or the general inclination to get along and work together can do so somewhat “easily.” I want to believe things can be talked out. My experience is shaped by dozens of “friends” I'm no longer connected to in any real way, having a psychopath best friend who's statistically more disagreeable than me, and now three relationships that have ended all with similar narratives about how I'm just not quite capable or willing or worth engaging in all this blogging nonsense that has apparently made me so set in my ways I'm just unable to “people.”
The worst thing about me is when I get the desire to burn something down. It speaks to my sensitivity to condescension. I hated nothing more than feeling erased and ignored. The story of my life was so often dictated to me in spite of all reason or contradicting information. I could move seamlessly between daily tension and drama into chill and video games and food in different divorced parent environments. I know which I preferred, and today I know my brain formed patterns around both environments independent of my preferences. I've seen enough instances of going crazy for “no” reason. I am someone who can do the same.
At the peak of the emotionality, and the wave of whatever washes over you as you're coming down, I felt I was finally able to have an honest exchange with her. I asked questions, she answered them, and not with another question or statement about me. In my writing, I've recognized that when I'm at my peak of some emotion, and in the feverish exploration, I find the most flow, insight, and useful actionable material. Today she told me, if I really knew her, I'd know she was “weak.” She understands weakness as not being able to trust.
Functionally, we have a recipe where anything I say, by default, isn't trusted. I'm feeling constantly on the defensive trying to unpack statements like “don't tell yourself you're doing me any favors” or “you only consider this one thing.” I use the word “dishonest” a lot when it comes to trying to understand where people are coming from. If they can't articulate it, which is often perfectly reasonable or understandable why they wouldn't be able to, then I ask to formulate something that can be observed by both parties. You think you do more chores? Let's define chores, count them, and explore. If you refuse to do that, confidence in my charge of dishonesty grows. You're either lying that it's about chores, afraid to be caught learning you don't do more, or unconsciously or otherwise presenting the situation because you already know how I'm going to respond, and are betting on me to fail you.
It's not about the chores, and basically never is. It's about whether or not you're going to change the subroutine that responds to their perspective. It reminds me of when I was supposed to just skip along with being accused of rape. Like, no, I have many questions, and while I'm perfectly willing to entertain or accept the depth of your feeling, we're gonna need to sit down and explore. I'm a “take accusations seriously” significantly more than “believe all women” type, and think we should all carry ourselves the same way.
I like the idea of being helpful and meaningfully contributing. I like the idea of questioning and searching until you break through into new behaviors or insights. I like the myth that I have an infinite amount of time and patience, at any point in the day, to parse through something after it feels like bad faith, distracted character jabs or lazy assumptions. I want you to bite the bullet and tell me you don't like me, don't trust me, and think you fucked up trying to do big things with me.
If you ever, for a second, delude yourself into thinking I'm a “good” person or think particularly highly of myself, you're not paying attention. I'm good at this. I can talk to myself in a way that quells the faint desire to just sleep and not come back. I can simultaneously crack the joke, and cry somewhere deep in my chest as I've practically forgotten how to sustain any real tears. I'm violent. I'm angry. And in one of the hardest ways to cope with, alone. I don't handle what feels like preventable disappointments and disagreements well. I don't like going into relationships waiting for them to fail in spite of everything I do or say. Or is it because of those things?
This is the only way I know how to approach what I consider “responsibility” and “owning my feelings.” I felt and carried out the worst of me today. I demonstrated, sober, in the pure light of day, why I insist on this forum, honest answers, and an inquisitive posture before the moves to mind-read, caricature, or demean. You think you can talk shit? You think you can scream? You think you're annoyed or afraid or alone or full of conflicting and complicated feelings no one understands? Watch this.
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