Damages.

Recent (well, ok, not THAT recent, as it hit me in San Francisco which was almost a month ago now) personal revelation:

I choose unavailable and/or really terrible human beings to date because I have bought into the image of myself as a bad person so thoroughly that I think I'll break a decent man's heart simply by letting him know how terrible I am.

There's a lot going on in that sentence.

First we have the acknowledgment that I make piss-poor romantic decisions. I do. Don't argue with me about it. And admitting you have a problem is the first step to solving it, right? YEAH. So, I make piss-poor romantic decisions. Cf.: HISTORY.

The image of myself as a bad person is related to, but not wholly the same as, your run-of-the-mill low self-esteem issues. I do struggle with self-image for a variety of reasons, but the lingering and terribly hurtful idea that I am, at heart, simply a BAD PERSON is one of the most damaging ideas that has ever been pinned on me. And it has been pinned on me. I have always been a person that was in doubt of my own goodness (that's what a Catholic upbringing will do for you, folks) and that was reinforced in some ways by the absolute hedonism of my teenage years. But really: all teenagers are narcissistic hedonists, and I have largely learned to forgive myself for the mistakes I made and the people I hurt while I was figuring out how the world works.

But then I went and got married at 19 and that was a disaster for a lot of reasons but the thing that I took away most strongly from those three years is that I am a bad person. Some of that is probably deserved. I did marry him; I said marriage vows and promised my life to him and I probably knew somewhere in my heart that I was lying when I did that, and that was wrong. Untruth causes untold pain, and if I'd been honest, we wouldn't have hurt as much as we did. Ripping the band-aid off when it needs to come off often stings, but it's not nearly as bad as leaving whatever's underneath to rot and fester and be eaten away from lack of light and oxygen.

And the other piece of that period of my life is that I ended up taking a lot of flack for things that weren't really problems with me. I ended up taking the blame for a lot of things that were no-blame situations, and also I ended up taking a lot of blame for being an independent human being with thoughts and behaviors of my own that didn't necessarily jive with the expectations that he had for me. And that was incredibly damaging to my self-esteem, and also went a long way towards convicing me that I was a far worse person than I probably deserve to think of myself as.

After that, I fell in love with a manipulative narcissist of a different stripe, and in the end I failed at being his conscience. I was supposed to be. He told me that he felt like I was the only thing that could redeem him, but then he abandoned me (and our kid) and I still feel as if I failed him in some appreciable way, instead of the other way around.

So I have a lot of baggage around the idea that I'm not a good person, and it's all heavy, and I don't know how to put it down.

But being convinced that I'm a bad person means I choose bad people to get in relationships with. A good person doesn't deserve the kind of havoc that I'd wreak on their life, or their morals, or their emotions. I don't want to ruin anyone's life, so I choose people to date who's lives are already in shambles. I can't be accused of breaking any hearts if I never fall in love with people that love me back. Or are even capable of loving me back.

However, my metric for good/bad people is probably not nearly as infallible as I think it is. And it also doesn't give enough credit to good men that may want to be involved in my life. And it gives my moral denigration a little too much sway over the world.

It's pretty narcissistic of me to think that I could ever ruin someone's life simply by allowing them into my head, or my heart. Most people are not so damaged that they fall apart like I do, for one. And further, people are pretty darn resilient. No damage is irreparable. Not even the damage I currently see myself laboring under. And if I can fix myself, and my life, then anyone can.

Which is not to say that I'll be out rushing into relationships with nice guys so that they can fix me. But maybe that I shouldn't be quite so guarded all the time. And also I should really, really stop conflating genuine kindness with romantic intent. Because men and women really CAN just be friends. But that's a different recent revelation that I'll have to get to later.

The Limits of Forgiveness.

Author's note: I'm sure this is moderately inappropriate of me, but sometimes you have to be moderately inappropriate. Without recourse to any other outlet, this is what I have. Sue me.

I'm not a saint. Anyone that saw me last weekend puking onto my friends' second floor porch can attest to this. But in a less concrete, and more spiritual sense, I'm not a saint. I talk a lot about forgiveness, about the need for compassion and empathy and understanding and perspective. And yes, I do try very hard to practice these precepts in my daily life.

This often makes me appear as if I am a doormat.

Let me tell you straight up: I am not a doormat. You may not step on me at will. You may not rub your filth on me. There are limits to my capacity for forgiveness. Because I am not a saint. I am still the 10-year-old girl who smashed the bully's face into the coathooks.

Don't fuck with me. I will fuck you up beyond recognition and leave you broken and bleeding on the floor.

I am not nice because I cannot conceive of any other way to be. I am not forgiving because I am gullible. I am not compassionate because I am stupid. I am all nice and forgiving and compassionate because I choose, every minute of every day, to exercise the better parts of my nature and not the worse. I consciously decide, in every moment, to be the better person that I know I can be. It is hard work. But it is ultimately far more rewarding than any of the small, petty victories that manipulation and narcissism could bring me.

But there are things that I cannot and will not forgive. There are things that you just don't do. I don't care how desperate you are, I don't care how amoral you are. There are things you just don't do.

Falsely accusing someone of rape is one of those things. Just don't do it, kids. Public goddamn service announcement, straight from my fingers to your eyes. Just say no to permanently and irrevocably tarnishing someone's public reputation because you fucked up.

I fuck up, too. All the time. But I don't do things like that, because I do choose every minute of every day to be a better person, even in the wake of fucking up. Even in the moment of knowing that I've lost my battle with my worse nature, I don't give up the war. I take stock of my losses and I look at my weaknesses and I go back into the fray better prepared to guard against those destructive, awful impulses that make one manipulative and narcissistic and a terrible fucking person.

You should choose that, too. And if you don't choose it, I will destroy your life. There are limits to my forgiveness, and if you are so far gone that you need a lesson, I will gladly administer it. I am both smart enough and ruthless enough, and I will destroy your life.

Don't let me hear that shit again. Ever.

Celibacy Sounds Great.

My life is a struggle of opposing forces. That sounds so dramatic. What I mean is that I am constantly living in the tension between conflicting impulses: between optimism and despair, between ecstasy and depression, between heat and cold. I mean that last one literally: it was 95 degrees yesterday and today it is 60.

But you could say that the temperatures apply to my personality just as easily. I'm a hot tamale or an ice princess and rarely anything in between. I promise: it is not as much as fun for me as you think it is. In fact, I know you have to deal with me through it all, but I still guarantee that I like it even less than you do. Serious.

But I do. I live in this world of diametrically opposed forces. This is the only way my brain knows how to construct a reasonable story of the world: by making things absolute. My happiness is the absolute epitomy of happiness, and my sadness sends me spiraling into mild-altering substances faster than most people can blink. I am not dysfunctional in the true meaning of the word; I function quite well in the world. But that doesn't mean that I'm not dysfunctional in the colloquial sense of the word, and really, I'm sure many people will be more than eager to attest to my dysfunctional behaviors if pressed.

For example, I have a habit of falling into bed with men without fully intending to do so. I may even have some sort of vague notion that ending up in bed would probably be detrimental. But it still happens. I can't help it. Or, they can't help it? I'm not sure.

Either way, it would seem that I cannot innocently climb into anyone's bed (even while decently clothed) without ending up an object of lust.

This upsets me, somewhat. Particularly when it causes a previously, dearly held opinion to be infinitesmally altered. There are so few people in general, and in particular so few personally known men, that I really look up to as instances of exemplary human behavior that having one knocked down a peg is a traumatic experience. I have (in my optimistic moments) an intense and unyielding desire to think the best of people, always. I have a yen to believe that human beings are wonderful and can be wonderful to each other, and can learn and behave with sensitivity and empathy when they are shown that they will not be eviscerated for doing so. In philosophical terms, I reject a Hobbesian vision of the world. Life is not "nasty, brutish and short." Life is beautiful, fantastic, long and filled with warmth and love. We can be people such as that.


But in other moments, I am firmly committed to this Hobbesian vision of the world, and I despair that I cannot see my clear of it. When one of my exemplars slips, it becomes ever harder to maintain the optimistic idea that we are all good people at root. Every time my heart is prodded and left to bleed, I lose some small measure of my ability to heal myself, to buck up, to readjust my vision so that I can again see the gloriously light-filled vistas of the human landscape instead of the long, dark shadows.

Every time I encounter indifference where my wildly optimistic soul dearly desired to encounter only love, I shed tears. Tears cannot be unshed; they have dripped now, for ever, from my soul and fell upon the world, and what happens when I can't cry anymore, and I'm all dead and dry inside?

These are things I worry about. How many disappointments can I stand? I face so many, every day, because of my great propensity for believing in the absolute best. Dr. Pangloss has nothing on me, but I fear that I can't maintain his spirit as well as Voltaire could. My Dr. Pangloss requires some small measure of vindication, some small sign that the best is real and possible, and when my best hopes for it are left in a bed that I never consciously desired to make for myself, what do I do?

More awareness would leave me bitter. Less awareness will leave me broken.

I live in the spaces between opposites. I live in the space, the ever-shortening space, between the Immovable Object and the Irresistable Force. I fold myself ever smaller to fit into these ideas of the world that I cannot shake away from my mind.

I still want to believe the best, desperately, but indifference makes it impossible. Still, indifference is not malevolence, and so I cannot believe the worst, either. I cannot believe anything. All I have left are hopes, so little understood, and hurts, so little attended to.