One of my very good friends, read my “Watching Too Much Oprah” entry and wrote me back to tell me about myself a little bit. Her e-mail prompted me to edit said entry and cut it down a little, for many reasons. My friend’s email read in part:
“Trying to fix is annoying, and usually, totally misses the point, but people do that because they love you. It's hard to know the best way to be a friend to someone. There are many of my friends who are in shitty situations, relationships, mental states etc, who I wonder if I should have been more active, less of an enabler to whatever thing is unhealthy in their lives… Again, the question, what's my point? That it's tough to know the best way to be a friend to someone who's going through some rough shit. And when people show you that, in one way or another, it might help to remember that the suggestion about graduate school or getting fixed up isn't really the root of the impulse; those things are manifestations of being someone who really gives a shit about what happens to you, your life, your happiness, and your child's happiness….”
Ok, checked me. At first, having read her e-mail my instinct was to delete the whole entry in question—you know me, more insecurity, more defensiveness, more, more, more! Separate from that though, I felt badly that I represented my two friends in such a poor light. But then I thought there are rules to the blog! Including a rule about committing to the process of not deleting what I’ve written, and contending with it. And did I want to delete it because it was mean to my friends, or did I want to delete it because I didn’t want some representation in print that I am an asshole?! Hmmm. Anyway, I edited it and that’s that.
Edited or not, part of what the entry says about me is that I walk around carrying a lot of this self-loathing or insecurity—and that I like to control the way it fits into my life. I like to control the way in which I can own up to it, deploy it, insert my moment of honesty about it here and there, so to speak. I can only admit to the imperfections when I’m sole manager of that imperfection. I can say “oh maybe I’m a bit defensive” and say pretty much anything else after that, about how regardless of my being defensive, people are really assholes. Which is a very slick way to do introspection, right?
All my life I have been very good at this but in a more blatant way: you could never beat me to the punch in saying all that is wrong with me. I'd open the conversation with that disclaimer, I'd e-mail you the poem, I'd tell you the sick psych ward joke--always would get there first, get it out of the way. I used to be too deliberate about it though and so I had to stop it (this one time that I really needed therapy sessions to work for me, I had to stop it), and I thought I really completely got over that. But clearly, I didn't. At least not entirely. I just got more nuanced and sophisticated about it, and not in a premeditated way—the human mind is a masterful tool of self-defense... To destroy this structure, it makes up a new one, a better one. More stealth if you will. In some ways, re-reading that entry, I see that it is still never okay for someone else to echo that hey maybe there are things that I am fucking up, or not even fucking up, but that there are things that are not right and could be better. Only I can venture into that domain—and I can invite you in, but I don’t like you to walk right in, make yourself at home and start talking. This is very eye-opening for me, in the most unsettling way. The thing I fear most of all maybe in life is the idea that I sit with my bullshit and make no progress.
Because of course, of course, I’m full of shit for that: people who are part of my life are entitled to their own opinions of it, and they earn the right to express it. It’s either a conversation or it’s not, it can’t be a pretend conversation. My friend who e-mailed me won’t stand for any pretend conversations, for the most part, for better or worse. That’s very much her angle. That's all of my friends' angle, the good ones, the ones that I truly love and keep near. My angle is very much that I draw lines that I expect folks to not cross…(and for legitimate, even defensible reasons too). And I probably won’t be able to change that very easily; I’m guessing it will change when other things change.
Ah, what can we do? Happy people are better at living life, I say this all the time. They’re better at honesty, they’re better at relating, they’re better at taking criticism: it’s like if life is an endurance sport and those who live satisfied lives have the stamina and people like me don’t. Bad analogy. Life is a craft and satisfied people are better at the craft, they have more skill. Resilience is not strength though one is often confused for the other. I think in my life it has always been the case. I am very resilient, but I’m only recently feeling strong. I am very capable of taking shit from life, but I’m just recently trying to get good at living life. I think enduring and being resilient are very passive qualities—they’re not skills, they’re not active or proactive or powerful qualities that move a life. My best case scenario is that to get to the point where I become skilled at living life, I have to get past the point where I can just sit here, and passively take my blows. Which I have done for a long time. So maybe when you wake up from that passive state you are defensive and you are self-protecting and you have a short fuse and you jump always to the worse possible conclusions about things…That could be your first stage of awakeness. Then you can evolve into the person that can be awake without the fear and the defenses up, that can be your final stage… After my friend’s e-mail, clearly a lot went through my mind—some old and some new, some predictable (which I am proud to say I resisted!) and some unpredictable. But I’m okay with it. They don’t call these motherfuckers growing pains for nothing. (Thanks Friend!)
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