An embarrassing overreaction, a moment of painful vulnerability. Because even if you’re a bit crazy, even if you just end up acting out your issues, you’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt.
I don’t like to think about things like that, I don’t like feeling like I’m not in control, exposing people to my drama. I don’t like to think that people in my life have to pay the price of tolerating me overreacting or turning something that wasn’t really their fault into a big issue.
But it’s true, isn’t it? Whatever we want, the people who have us in their lives have us in their lives. Whoever we are, and whatever shit we carry in with us.
It doesn’t really affect me, in the day to day. The problems I have are overwhelmingly with other people. Frequently when I start to lose it I just bail and reassert to myself that I’m fine all alone, I deal with the fear of losing everyone by cutting and running and showing myself I’m fine. Which, I don’t know, I guess I am.
For a long time I haven’t seen this as really a problem, or at least not one that I have a responsibility to deal with. Maybe not even as something I can deal with.
Not that I really know how at the moment, but hey. At least the cards are on the table.
There was a friend when I was very young. First grade? We were best friends, then he left me on the playground to play with some other kids. He was all I had, but I guess he had other friends, and it hurt.
There was another friend, a bit older this time. Lived across the street from each other, hung out a lot because often there wasn’t anything else to do or anyone else to hang out with. He wanted to be popular, and I was a weird kid with very different priorities. So we’d hang out when there was no one else, and he’d treat me like shit around anyone else. There were lots of times when he was my only friend, but I tried not to rely on him because no one wants to feel disposable like that.
More friends, while I lived there. We’d meet up, hang out, be ‘best friends,’ then they’d disappear to a different school or we’d stop hanging out or something. All of them.
Eventually we moved. No friends anymore, then met some new people. Best friends with one of them - played computer games together and hung out all the time. When high school rolled around, he went somewhere else. He got new friends, we lost touch.
After that, well. I just didn’t expect anyone to stick around anymore. I stayed aloof and while I still had friends, I’d treat them like I didn’t need them. Sometimes I’d be callous about it, sometimes I’d just stop talking to them at some point because I’d decided I didn’t want to be their friend anymore. I still had attachments to some of them, who I really did like, but I was distant enough that when they made it clear I wasn’t really a priority for them that it didn’t hurt as much.
Then there was a girl, and it was different because she was my girlfriend and I was her boyfriend and we were supposed to come first for each other. Then she cheated on me. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.
I have trust issues. I care deeply about people, and they leave. I try not to let it hurt too much, try not to let myself think that there’s something wrong with myself and that just because everyone’s always leaving doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with me, that I don’t have value. That way lies the abyss, and whatever else I might be I’m not the shell of a person that kind of thinking turns you into. I matter to me, and that’s enough.
But fuck, it hurts.
And, yes, I automatically assume that no matter how much I might think someone is my friend, that they don’t really like me that much. That they’re not going to stick around for my sake.
I mean, it’s often true, and I know why. The only way I know how to interact comfortably with people is through animosity. It was the only way I knew period for a long time, and only recently have I even figured out how to temper that at all. And while that’s been great, a big deal for me personally…
Something I admitted to myself recently is that it still feels like a mask, an act. Something I admitted to myself recently is that what I’d really, really like is someone who I could actually comfortably be the angry mad-at-the-world-and-everyone-in-it kid I was back in high school.
It’s so much harder dealing with people now. It’s not about what I intend, not about what how I actually feel about them, but the appearance of my intentions, the words themselves and how they can be misconstrued. How people can be hurt by a casual gesture that feels natural, innocuous to me.
It’s better for them. I feel like a better person for it, I like that I’m not hurting people just by being around them anymore.
But I’m not really all of me. I’m just the parts of me that people might not run away from. And that means, too, I’m not really all of a person. I can hide pieces, and be less, but I can’t fake being whole.
It’s what was wrong with her, back when we were together, and more recently. Really, the whole facade behind which I hide my less pleasant features came from my relationship with her. She was always hurting, and everything was going wrong, and I couldn’t be all anger and casual cruelty with her. I had to be gentle, and delicate, and every word I spoke could do all kinds of damage. It was so much worse, because although she knew me less than my friends, had less idea of my real intentions, she was so much closer and more vulnerable. I couldn’t bring myself to be that person to her.
I remember she came to visit once, and listened as I repeatedly called my roommate an asshole. He was, you understand - he was an entitled little shit who would spend half and hour complaining to his parents on the phone about his independence and how they had to treat him like an adult, hang up, and call back not ten minutes later to ask for money. I liked him better when I knew him less well, and being roommates was not really working out for us.
She knew about that side of me before, but she’d forgotten. Back before we’d dated, before she really knew me, she’d make excuses about me, justified it in her head on way or the other.
Is there anything worse than having to have someone you’re close to make excuses for you hurting people? Not just to other people, but to theirself.
It’d have been one thing if she understood. It’s terrible to have someone you care about see the bad parts. But she made excuses. Couldn’t look it in the eye.
I was hiding that whole relationship, and I made the excuses for her so she didn’t have to. I felt sorry because I had to be sorry, because I was sure somewhere deep I couldn’t acknowledge that she’d never be able to accept that I hurt people and didn’t give a shit because I felt they deserved to be hurt.
Some things, I did eventually feel remorse for of my own accord. Mostly, it was the times when I hurt people without realizing it. But even then… if they’d just understood, if they’d just talked to me or saw me, saw what I was actually saying and meant and who I was, it wouldn’t have hurt them. I still don’t want to hurt people unintentionally, it’s still my responsibility. But I wish they understood. I wish they knew me.
I never really gave her the chance to see that side of me, to see if she’d understand. Well. There were moments, I suppose. And every time her reaction was terrifying, spelled the end.
I don’t think I ever really saw that until just now. I don’t think I ever really stopped running, stopped trying to pretend I wasn’t that person. I tried to be someone else, tried to imitate my old self now and then, and the lines got blurry… I don’t know. This is hard.
For all that I knew I was rough and unpleasant, for all that I knew that it made me hard to be friends with, I liked who I was. I liked being able to tell hard truths, I liked that I lived with the demands of an unforgiving and cruel reality and that I expected others to live up to them as well. I liked that I fought against compromise, that I was honest even when honesty was hard and painful. That even when I was cruel in the service of that honesty, I never enjoyed it. That I accepted that people always thought I was the bad guy even if the only difference between me and the good guy is that he said what I’d say to your face behind your back.
I liked that I didn’t act like someone else to get people to like me. That even if I was an unpleasant bastard it was what I believed in and that mattered more than what people saw or thought of me.
I liked all of that, and I gave it up because the person I thought was supposed to care about me and take care of me was going to leave because of it, because even though I convinced myself she was different… even if she was different… she still didn’t understand, and she was still going to leave as her excuses slowly failed and she was left with just me.
I don’t know. It was complicated. I didn’t know what I was doing, I still don’t know what I’m doing, not really. I’m trying. I was trying to do the right thing, then. I was just wrong. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want her to leave.
Loading comments...