I’m in This Picture…

This essay was originally written in July of 2023

Content Warning: This essay is about recognizing the problems you see in other people may just be projections of shit you need to sort out wrong with yourself. As such, it talks about depression, codependency, and skims into abuse at some points.

An essayist is not a reliable narrator.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I pick over the detritus of my life and try to figure out how exactly I got myself into the mess of thinking I have my shit together far more than I do only to discover how painfully wrong I’ve been on that front. 

Except I figured this out by looking someone I loved dead in the eyes and going, “Oh buddy, you’re fucked up.” 

And then realizing, over the course of several months, that I was eyeing up the questionable structural integrity of my friend’s spout like the cast iron of my own heart isn’t one overheating away from splitting like overripe fruit.

Pot, meet kettle. Everything that you’re pissed at them over? You can find lining the edges of your own walls, you disastrous scrap heap.

And here’s where I remind you again: an essayist is not a reliable narrator.

I feel supremely confident in my belief that my friend has ducked and dodged a lot of shit they need to deal with in life by amassing a wide array of very impressive, niche skills–because me fucking too.

I have a running list of ideas of what exactly my friend is ducking and dodging, and how it’s showing up in their life anyway despite their best efforts.

But that doesn’t mean I’m seeing my friend correctly. Not every read is of the text in front of you, sometimes it’s a projection of the text inside of you.

And I can’t tell you which text I’m reading anymore. 

Which irks me, because there is still a part of me that is desperate to be someone my friend might still listen to about this shit, because “bro, what are you doing with your life? What are you doing to yourself? What the hell did we do to each other? We’re too smart to be this stupid, but somehow it feels like every attempt to bake together ends up with us making nitroglycerin.” 

But if I can’t even trust that I’m on the mark with a friend whose ear I’ve lost the right to, then a lot of that’s a moot point. 

But not all of it.

Because there’s still the reality that, months later, I’m still chewing cud over this friendship. So there’s got to be something there.

Which means I start positing theories:

Theory 1: I am just this catastrophic over any muppety pretty boy that has some competency with their hands and tongue. 

Likelihood: I mean, okay, this is true. I’m always going to be weak for an artsy fucker threaded through with a melancholy urge to be gentle with the world around them. Please stare off pensively with your big cow eyes after rambling about the ways human connection is found by building a relationship with the earth we live on. Please tell me about how you stole your sibling’s favorite snack from the quikstop because they were sad today. Tell me about how your cross country trip helped you understand the ways your middle school experience fucked you up. 

Give me your brooding mercurial whimsy, I’m just as bad as those fuckers dying for the manic pixie dream girl. It’s been catnip since I was six years old and I get drunk every time on the promise of spinning castles with that kind of spirit. 

But.

But that kind of spell can only hold me a couple of weeks and three bouts of passive aggressive sniping before you’re not so pretty anymore and I remember that every guy is just some guy, not Orpheus given breath and perhaps I can be a bit more discerning and I bit less starstruck every time some soft mouthed former theater kid shows me a wink of interest.

I’m not trying to sell them short, my friend is good with a line and an angle grinder and probably had more people mooning over their profile under firelight than they’ll ever realize. But so are half the butches in my city radius. I live in a profoundly gay southern city with a big poetry scene. I’m not under some illusion that I’ve lost a white whale of love and friendship here.  

So, I don’t think this is the trouble of a torch I can’t blow out. Theory discarded.

Theory 2: I’m a completely petty bitch boiling to have the last bitter word and disguising it as “concern” and that’s what fuels these ruminating loops.

Likelihood:

Someone in a student group I was once in looked me in the face after an event one day and said they were scared of me because they felt like I could read their soul if I felt like it. I, uh, don’t know if I should have felt as pleased by that assessment as I did. When I get mad enough, I am capable of the verbal equivalent of taking your barbie by the legs and twisting her hips right out of their sockets. It’s brutal and pointless and fleetingly, primally satisfying.

I try not to do this to people anymore. I don’t think it’s productive, healthy, or useful.

Even the last time I initiated a breakup, with all my anger and frustration and heartbreak, I stuck to the one thing I felt confident was actually true and wasn’t my spitefulness in a sanctimonious coat: I love you, but I think we have non negotiable differences, and I’m tearing myself apart trying to work through this. I won’t anymore. Good bye, good luck. 

I’ve been turning around my fragmented perspective of my friend on my tongue, feeling the angles I could cut them with, deciding if that would really resolve my lingering brooding or just be an act of cruelty. A way to absolve myself of my own shit actions by coating them in self righteousness. 

And I do have a handful of things that my brain goes, “I was fucking right about this one and you were a douchecanoe” whenever my thoughts trip over them. But I also probably have an equal stack of shit I wince at and go, “Oh, I promised you I was so much better than this and utterly failed the delivery.”  

But a lot of days it feels like a net negative. There we were, two people who by our own testament know how not to be douchebags, who both desperately wanted not to be a dick to each other, but somehow kept ending up with our elbows in one another’s ribs and junk. 

I never wanted to hurt them, but I did, repeatedly, in ways that I’m ashamed of. Lashing out to try and cover my shame won’t actually improve my behavior for the future, or absolve me of my past.

Which brings me to:

Theory 3: Oh god, I’m in this picture and I do not like it.

Likelihood: 

You ever click with someone because some part of them just sings out to a part of you that hasn’t gotten much of a chance to come out and play in a very long ass time?

You ever then fall out with that person and notice all the ways the little spackled over cracks in both your hearts resonate off each other in a sound that’d set dogs howling?

Well, awoooo. Here we are.

The truth is, I can’t tell you what the fuck is wrong with my friend. Or why. 

I can make guesses. I can observe how their shit comes off and what I think they’re doing versus what I think they think they’re doing. But that’s all subjective based on the limited angles they’re willing to show me.

But, oh, I can tell you what the fuck is wrong with me, based on how I reacted to shit my friend did. 

I’m haunted by it, in fact.

I can tell you I got a pair of brass balls around here somewhere I need to go find, because that’s the only explanation for how I think I have the right to accuse someone of going beyond the pale in terms of people pleasing like I don’t twist myself upside down and inside out if some fucked up switch about love gets flipped in my head.

I can tell you that I may have retrained myself that love and fear do not go hand in hand when it comes to family or friends, but I still haven’t learned that “I’m in love with you” is not the passcode to get through all my boundaries. That I don’t have to let someone scare the fuck out of me over and over instead of stepping back until they figure out if I’m worth speaking to kindly.

I can tell you that holy shit I date the worst version of my best parent. I date them over and over. From the high flying creative ambitions to the smoldering silences punctuated by staccatos of “nothing” when I try to ask what’s wrong. And I can tell you I do this because—

Because I’m still looking for a replacement parent in my lovers. All the shit I’ve talked about the emotionally immature twats who want a fuckable mommy, and here I am. Except I’m not looking for you to teach me emotional insight and how to make a doctor’s appointment. I’m looking for you to validate me. Tell me I’m smart! Tell me I’m doing a good job! Tell me I can rest! Hold me, I’m scared. I’m so terrified of the world, can’t you fix it? Can’t you make it better, for just a little while? 

I can tell you I’m really good at seemingly having my shit together, because I’ve hidden all my self-destructive tendencies on the back staircases of my house. Yeah I got a job, I can keep a routine, I practice self care. And I work myself down to the raw bones hoping someone will acknowledge me as the most special boy [gender expansive] and I will earn my rights to rest and pleasure. No you can’t bring this up to me, but yes it will become a problem between us.

I can tell you I’ve got some fucked up ideas about my own sexuality, because finding out I shared my horny thoughts and feelings with someone who wasn’t interested fills me with a deep shame and horror like I’ve revealed some of the most embarrassing parts of me and the most dangerous parts at the same time. 

I can tell you I need to myself some more fucking credit. I don’t trust myself not to abandon all my values for a lover, to the point where I’ll warn away other paramours, but not knowing means to quit means I stay locked in fights far longer than I need to be, not that I cede ground the second someone kicks up a storm against me. So maybe instead of trying to make it work through hell and high water, I need to save that energy instead of throwing myself to the rapids.

I can tell you that oops, turns out I’m shaped by death in ways I didn’t notice. That when I was fourteen years old, Atlas died and I took up the world on bone thin shoulders and maybe I need to watch where I’m pointing fingers about unexamined grief before I think I know something. 

I can tell you that I’m so ungodly bored of myself and trying to escape that agony by making myself interesting to other people. Except that’s a recipe for corroded self esteem and deep existential dread late at night. Because people’s interests wax and wane, and if they’re only spending time with you because they like this cool trick you can do and not because of you? Well that’s gonna leave you feeling lonely and like it’s your fault you’re starving for affection. 

I can tell you that half the time that I think I’m in love with someone, I’m just admiring traits I wish I had for myself. I wish I were more creatively daring, politically vocal, stylistically self expressive, experimental, outgoing. So it’s not a surprise when I end up enamored with people who represent those things. But loving someone else isn’t embodying those traits for myself, and often sets up a space for my insecurities to grow– and either strangle the other person along with myself or be exploited by them. 

I can tell you I have a bunch of new practices for non-monogamy. Because freedom to define our relationships how we want still means we need to agree on the definition, or you will find yourself halfway through a break up conversation mentally going, “Wait, we were dating? When were we dating? I didn’t know I was *in your polycule* until that one stand up joke, what is happening, I just wanted to blow you as a friend, that didn’t work, it's chill, I figured we’d probably try cuddling instead, how are we having a transition conversation right now?” and you will feel too stupid in too serious a situation to say anything about it. And as funny as it is to think about that moment now, I still never want to do that again if I can help it. 

I can tell you that getting stoned isn’t going to help me relax around someone I don’t feel comfortable around, but it will make it harder for me to stay out of trouble and easier to get my feelings hurt. 

I can tell you the only way I need it straight is in communication. I can’t do guess culture. I can’t even do polite “I’ll phrase this as a suggestion and maybe you’ll get the hint” culture. Indirect asks will sail straight over my head. Boundaries that aren’t told to me in a “I need this to happen between us, or I will do this to care for myself” kind of way are going to be misunderstood. Eventually you’re going to blow up at me after getting pissed off that I’m ignoring your feelings and I will be pissed off at you for not just telling me what you damn needed in the first place. We will both come away from this feeling chafed and mildly unhinged. Let us not. 

I can tell you truthfulness and transparency are such a cornerstone in my values that I will straight up vacate a town while on the edge of blacking out in pain rather than let you see me struggle if I feel like you’ve fucked me over on one of those fronts. You can’t be upfront with me about how you feel? Worse, I can’t tell when you’re hiding things or being honest? That scares the shit out of me, like fuck I will let myself look weak and stupid in front of you. You have pissed on me and told me it was raining and I am too proud to cope with falling for that again so soon, ciao ragazzo. 

I can tell you that I’m not made for the big gestures. I don’t know how to plan them and I don’t know how to time them and I will snap in two stretching that far out of my comfort zone. I know how to show up in a rhythm, in the day to day, but I need you to teach me how you like it played. Moreso, I don’t think I like when big gestures are the saving grace attempts towards me, either. I don’t care about what you did to make sure we had one beautiful day if the rest of our relationship is blackout poetry of all the things you can’t say to me, and I will look back on those gestures with unease wondering how much of you I never understood.

I can tell you that denying parts of myself I’ve wanted to be for so long has made me desperate for a kind of love I don’t think I can even reciprocate, because I need someone to love this truncated version of myself or else what am I doing this for? I don’t think I can draw a hard line distinction between the feeling of “I love you” and “I’m in love with you” but I still lost all common sense the second someone I respect said those five words. But minutes after they admitted, “actually, I don’t, not like that, not anymore” I wasn’t heartbroken, I was annoyed, thinking to myself, “Why didn’t you say so? I could have sulked for a week and then we could have got on with things.” So if I’m not afraid of the pain of love unrequited, why this desperate hunger? Why am I pursuing a category of love that I only care about as long as the other person cares?

I can tell you so many things about myself from this friendship turned shitshow. Things I am now sitting with and figuring out how to work on as my life continues to roll on with increasingly absurd demands on my attention.

And the worst thing is, I have to have compassion with myself about it, because I’ve chosen to be compassionate to my friend. Because, potentially in spite of my best judgment, I still like them.

If someone can hurt me in several ways that have left me unable to trust them right now and I still feel the urge to be like, “buddy, buddy, please fix yourself. I think you’re kinda on fire, like a little bit on the inside somewhere. You don’t deserve to go down like this, not smoldering, especially not this slow burn under your own hand.” 

Then I think I need to say that to the one person I actually have any authority to enforce that kind of estimate with, myself.

Because holy fuck, I am hurting myself all the time, in pointless ways. I’ve been burning myself down slowly from the inside out, tricking myself into thinking I had things in hand better than I do because hey, I’m going to therapy, I’m reading all the right books, I have coping skills, you know? Real ones that aren’t just about numbing myself to my problems.

Except. 

Except.

Except you can get really good at analyzing all the shit going wrong in your life and relationships, all the places you’re feeling things that aren’t great, all the snared intergenerational threads that are catching on your weft threads–but that doesn’t mean you’re feeling it. That doesn’t mean you’re dealing with it.

Turning yourself into a pet project to dismantle and reassemble a hundred thousand times is a great way to go through your life without having to acknowledge that you’re a thinking feeling scraggly haired animal just skittering around experiencing life and not some flawed version of a higher being endlessly rolling towards some arbitrary definition of enlightenment that you really can’t decide on. Just, that it must exist and you’ll only reach it the day you stop hurting other people with your mistakes.

Except maybe the first step to never hurting anyone again is to accept that you can’t have that goal. That you have to become someone who is capable of accepting the hurt they cause without taking it as a condemnation of their character. Maybe the first step before that is to acknowledge the person that you’re hurting first, the one you were taught to hurt a long time ago, is the only person you can ever hope to stop being accidentally cruel to, yourself. 

I’m tired of being a version of myself I’m ashamed of. One that doesn’t stand up for myself, but can’t manage to lay down flat enough in the dirt, and who still manages to let down everyone I think I’m giving myself away to. 

I can’t escape them if I keep worrying about some other knucklehead. I don’t get to decide what my friend’s problems are or how they should fix them. Trying won’t make up for the hurt I’ve caused them or heal the hurt they’ve caused me. Disguising my impulses to make myself useful as the drive to care for others won’t guarantee I’m loved or make me altruistic instead of condescending. 

I have no idea what person my friend will be next time we cross paths, and I can’t keep constructing my life trying to be someone they would still call friend and trick myself into thinking I’m just making myself into a more accountable, stronger version of myself. Especially when I think the friendship I loved between us may have died long before either of us noticed “hey, we’re sailing awful close to those rocks.” 

I don’t want to get lost at sea thinking I’m mourning my friendship instead of mourning who I thought that friendship would make me. 

I want to become that person instead. 

So I’m looking at all the mirror images to “what the fuck is wrong with you?” and I’m mapping out all the fires I’ve left burning inside me, because those are my neck of the woods to reckon with, and I’d like to see forty with more to me than cinders.

Questions:

What actions of other people haunt you? What is the potential you’re in love with there? What does that longing actually tell you about yourself? 

Where are you performing for others' approval instead of living for yourself? What does it cost you to keep up this performance? Who, aside from yourself, has asked you to take on these roles? What might happen if you put them down? In what ways can you shift these performances of yourself to feel more true to you? How can you prepare yourself to weather any fallout from this change?

Do my thoughts still occasionally snare white hot on a memory and go, “What the fuck made you think that wouldn’t bite either of us in the ass?” 

Yes, absolutely.

Can I suck my teeth while looking at the details I know about their life, our relationship, and the various circumstances around our relationship and go, “Ohhhh, I still think you were wrong but I get how you got there”? 

Yes, absolutely. 

And I can extend this grace when there’s a lot of shit about them that is essentially a blaze of “??!!!??!” in my head. 

I’m really repeating myself if I think my urge to tell my friend about themselves stems out of pure altruism without any thread of “fixing you fixes me.” My friend can figure out what the fuck their problem is. I can figure out if I still want to talk to whatever version of them I cross paths with next we meet. But that’s for future me to deal with. Right now, I need to figure out who future me is. 

I can tell you that I can’t keep abandoning myself and wondering why other people won’t claim me. If I don’t want lovers who feel like trying to catch a tide, either sliding between my fingers or bowling me over, then 

But we don’t get a second round of parenting. Not from other people. We stumble our way to adulthood however we get there, and from that moment forward, the rest of the raising is our responsibility. I took this so seriously about making sure I wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of my family’s past. I wanted to be independent and responsible and competent at everything I did. But I made myself into a workaholic with a god complex who’s terrified every harm I commit is the testament to my true nature as a terrible person. I’ve made myself into someone who relies on other people for emotional regulation when it comes to my fear, my sadness, my anger, my grief. I’ve honed myself into a double edged sword: on one side, here is the unreasonable expectation I have for you. On the other side, here is how I give away so much of my power to you. This is yours, to either be crushed under or crush me with. 

(Oh, you said I felt like a stranger, and you weren’t wrong, because neither of us noticed the day friend me and lover me swapped places, but I can tell you now it happened with that first time I called you crying because you snapped at me, instead of telling you to get your shit straight and come find me when you were ready to stop being a bitch over some bolts and tell me what your actual problem with me was.) 

Which, probably explains how I debated hitting up an ER in a foreign country rather than calling for help