“You write so much about how men have hurt you,” a friend said recently. “But what about all of the men you’ve hurt?”
Strangely, it is often harder for me to admit to the things I’ve done than it is to admit to the things I’ve felt.
I’ve been a subtle monster. I have hurt many people because I don’t know how to say “No.” Terrified of serving up rejection, I shudder with indecision. Because of this, I’ve learned that people will hear what they want to hear: if you’ve given someone any reason at all to believe there’s a chance, they will blindly pursue that chance until you explicitly put them out of their misery. I am terrible at putting people out of their misery. Shy optimism is one of the qualities I love about humans–that silent, unending belief that tomorrow must be better–but it’s also one that has allowed me to treat them in some horrible ways.
This has been the case with so many of the men who have loved me. I avoid initially hurting them for so long that, in the end, I destroy them. It’s a tug of war: a coquettish bat of the eyelash and then a dismissive remark to even the scale. I am always building walls around myself, insulating my heart from what I dread is the inevitable. It’s my own fault that I never end up with the nice ones.
Too often I am compulsively crippled by my desire to please, to give every part of myself to others until we have joint ownership over my sparking synapses, the wispy ends of my hair. It’s a quality that makes me a loyal intern, and, had I been born in the 1930’s, one that would’ve made me an excellent Betty Draper. But when what someone wants is me–when what a man wants is me–and I can’t conjure the necessary reciprocal feelings, I often feel like I’ve failed. I’ve failed to make myself someone capable of loving back.
A few months ago, someone fell in love with me and I didn’t fall with him. For weeks I waited for the thud, the sound his body would make when he hit the ground after the fall without me there beside him. In the thick of it, I wrote a Miranda July quote on a piece of paper that I slipped into my lingerie drawer: “We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don’t.” The point here is to be honest, and so let me do that, finally: I said and did everything back then not because I couldn’t love him, but because I didn’t. Though I failed to admit it aloud, I think he understood that from the very beginning.
To break someone else’s heart can sometimes feel worse than having your own broken. This time, I was the monster. There was no victimization or sympathy on which to cling: just an unspoken responsibility, the guilt of knowing that I am capable of draining someone as easily as I am of filling them up. I ache to be a source of light, but so often I run around carelessly, hearts jangling in my pockets, snuffing out all the candles.
“You make me a mean person,” I told him at the end. “I want to do horrible things when I talk to you. You make me want to kick things.”
“We have this Yin-Yang thing going,” he responded, “Where the Yin between us is perfect and continually draws us together but the Yang is like two magnets turned against each other.”
We are all monsters sometimes.
well, this is not so much about this post, but rather just to say this: you write beautifully …
@Sarah Thank you!