Role Playing

     In junior high, a substitute teacher, who was also a friend of my mother’s, told me I was a “catalyst for trouble.” Thanks for that. That’s pretty much what every seventh grade girl needs to hear. In high school, a math teacher confronted me in a first floor common area and accused me of cheating by giving my graded math test to another student who had not yet taken the test. Yeah, because I was the keeper of everyone’s attendance and if someone asked to check how her test was graded against mine, of course I would already know she hadn’t been there on test day. Sure, you go ahead and believe that about me. Another high school teacher asked me which of my siblings I “was,” meaning, which I most acted like. Because, yeah, I couldn’t just be me, not when there were four others ahead of me.

     When I think back to middle school, and the substitute calling me a catalyst, I wonder where she got that idea. To that point, I had been in the principal’s office once in my life, for writing on the bathroom wall in second grade, five years earlier. Was middle school tough? It was the late seventies. What schools now acknowledge and attempt to fight as bullying was dismissed as kids just being kids. We’d build coping skills from dealing with it. Was I trouble maker? One time in the principal’s office? Nope. Not up to then.

     The problem was I believed that substitute. She was an adult; I was a kid. She was wise; I was dumb. I was a catalyst. I wasn’t sure what the word meant. I went to the library during lunch to look it up. I learned that as a catalyst, I was the cause, the agent, the facilitator of trouble. I was the reason, if someone called me “nigger lips” (true story), that someone did. If someone called me fat, or ugly, or bossy, it was my fault, because I was the catalyst. It was my role. When I wasn’t the smartest girl in the room, well, what did you expect?

     We like things to fit where we are comfortable with them. We strive to make our worlds fit into patterns and routines from which there are no deviations. We ascribe roles to people, and we work hard to make people fit into those roles, whether the role is accurate or not. Shrugging off a role is difficult because, for one, other people are reluctant to let us change our roles; and two, we’ve played the role for so long, we’re not sure what else to be.

     I’ve never laid a claim to perfection. I’m more inclined to inferiority than superiority. I’m not good at forgiving myself either. I have a catalog, replete with color illustrations, of the ways I am not good enough, and the mistakes that I’ve made. I’m an easy target to make feel badly. Like cooked pasta, if you throw something at me, it’ll stick. I may appear tough, but I am actually a very vulnerable person. And I am cursed with an indelible memory.

     Many people could not write the things I write. They do not understand the Hemingway quote, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” I understand that. In fact, it’s not difficult for me open a vein and bleed on paper, because what the hell do I have to lose? What the hell do I have to protect? My reputation? I’m a catalyst for trouble, remember? What kind of reputation is that? I’m “thank God you’re the last” on the first day of class. I’m the one who needs to build coping skills by experiencing bullying. I’m the one not good enough to be here even when my scores are high. I’m the bitch with “nigger lips.”

     Maybe I’m over-sensitive. Maybe others are under-sensitive. Maybe I need to let it go; maybe others need to think before they speak. Whose responsibility is it when we hurt? The person who did the hurting or the person who hurts? I’ve heard the responsibility placed on both sides. One thing I know, when I taught seventh grade girls, I never called any one of them a catalyst. No one deserves to be cast in that role.

     As far as my role, I’m tired of it. Like it or not, I’m letting it go. If you want me to be your catalyst, you will be sadly disappointed, because I won’t do it anymore. I won’t take that on. Yes, that requires isolating myself from most people, but I’m okay with that. Because I don’t want to live down to expectations any longer. It will be a relief to have nothing left to bleed about.

A Moment of Grateful Clarity

     The major renovations on the house are wrapping up, and listing day is approaching. Tiling the kitchen floor is the last major project, and after that, all the remains is packing, cleaning, and various little touch ups. I’ll plant some flowers today. The long winter delayed the garden from budding, but I have some annuals waiting to go into the ground. Annuals are inexpensive and make the garden look nice. We are moving forward.

     There isn’t much discussion between us anymore. For a while, I had doubts about my decision to leave. I wondered if I were being selfish, if I were taking away opportunities from my son. I wondered if there were a chance…

     There is not. The fight I waged for respect and agency before is laughable compared to what it would take now. Ideas I propose are dismissed before I complete a sentence. He is more anxious to get out than I am. If it were within my means to help him leave, I would. I would give him the freedom he wants so badly.

     I cannot understand, on an empathetic level, the anger. I cannot imagine my decision was a surprise; he asked if I were leaving for months. When you pose the same question multiple times, isn’t it because you already know the answer? Things were not going well, obviously. I often wondered if he was conducting a test to see how far he could push, how much I would take before I would finally break, and say, “That’s it; I’m done.”

     Okay, well, I said it. So if he actually looked back on his behavior up to that point, if he reflected, how does he justify this anger, this resentment?

     You cannot come to me, a week after I say I can’t do this anymore, and tell me you don’t want me to leave, when for almost two decades, you acted as if you wanted me to leave, as if I ruined your life, as if I were a horrible, ugly, fat, and unattractive person. The time to tell me you wanted me in your life, the time to say you love me is when I'm there, when the risk of me leaving is low. You cannot make me the locus of blame and then turn around and say, “But I don’t want to lose you.” Then you should not have treated me as if I didn't matter to you.

     Or, maybe you can, because if I leave, who do you have left to treat that way? What happens to the prince when the whipping boy dies? What an awful, misguided concept – the whipping boy. To have a stand-in for physical punishment, someone who takes a beating for you when you do something wrong. What a horrible thing. But I digress…or not.

     Achieving personal responsibility is a difficult balancing act. When children are raised in an unbalanced situation, where good is dismissively expected, and mistakes are punished – when there is an absence of praise and an abundance of criticism and punishment, children develop a self-protective, defensive instinct. If the only hope of not being yelled at, grounded, spanked, or worse, is not to be at fault, kids learn to deny that anything was ever their fault. Of course, that’s impossible. Mistakes are made. Sometimes, shit happens. When we create environments where mistakes are intolerable, where all shit must have an owner, we create environments where personal responsibility becomes something to fear.

     We have to find a whipping boy, or girl, or spouse. Someone on whom we pin the blame for things, be they mistakes, or serendipitous shit. “You ruined my life.” That person.

     Did I? Did I ruin his life by saying I couldn’t take it anymore? I could argue that, but here’s what I realized. There is no point in the arguing. If he’s the person who believes that I’ve ruined his life, if he’s the person who needs the whipping spouse, he won’t hear the arguments against that position. Not from me. Whatever I say, he will contradict from his arsenal of my defects. He will not confront his culpability in this. He will say that he knows he’s done wrong, but it will be because I somehow caused him to do wrong.

     Hear me out…I am not saying he is entirely to blame. I bear the weight of at least fifty percent of what has happened. I was, in many ways, on many days, wrong. I was wrong and I’m sorry.

     The difference is I want to let go of this, now. I don’t want to punish anyone for this. I don’t want to watch someone hurt. I want to live at peace and know that at the end of the day, the time is coming when we can go pursue the lives we really want. I won’t ask him for what he can’t give, and then resent not getting it. I won’t begrudge him what he wants to do, because I won’t make demands on him. And I’m willing to do that now. I have no investment in making him do anything, anymore.

I wonder if he knows that. Because if he does, and the person he is showing me now, if this is the person he chooses to be, then my choice to leave is more justifiable than ever. This is a moment of clarity. I am grateful for it. 

The not so Tenuous Connection Between Happiness and a Laundry Basket

There was very little sleep for me last night. Writing while tired is dangerous because I tend to go to the dark and twisty place where I dwell on things that are neither hopeful nor productive. I considered putting off writing this post until tomorrow, certain I would be exhausted tonight, sleep well, and able to compose an optimistic piece about how much I look forward to the future – on Tuesday. However, there is no guarantee that I will sleep well tonight, and I’m trying to stay on a disciplined path with my writing. Mondays are blog post days. Grit it out and get the gold star. Control what I can control and ultimately feel better myself. Today, I can write a blog post as determined by the schedule I created.

                Control is a strange concept. We have so little control of others, and yet, somehow, others exercise such incredible control over us. I can’t make you take up your laundry basket of clean clothes that I have washed and folded for you, yet, the longer you leave it in the family room, the angrier and more resentful I become. Have I given over control? Am I justified in my resentment? Why the hell won’t you just take up your laundry basket anyway?

                There is a phenomena I call “emotional over-lording.” Emotional over-lording is the effect that the person with the most volatile, negative attitude has on the environment. The angry person controls the room. The one we fear is the one who dominates. Bullies win through emotional intimidation. Why is that? Why are happy people the ones who are trampled? Moreover, why is that angry people want to dominate the happy, making everyone like them, rather than spreading the optimism? Are we programmed toward the negative?

                In my not-a-licensed-psychologist way, I have developed a theory that in fact; we are programmed to gravitate toward letting anger and negativity dominate our thinking, as a holdover from our earliest evolution when fight or flight was more important to survival than it is now. We simply haven’t evolved much and we’re still filtering our environment for threats. Negativity and volatility are threats. A happy person isn’t going to attack you or beat you up. A raving, furious person just might. Beatings lead to injury, potentially fatal injuries. You have to watch out for that. You have to protect yourself. Thanks for the warning, lizard brain.

                There are two ways to protect yourself: stay away from angry people, or pacify the anger by letting it dominate the environment. Anger loves control. Anger dictates, orders, and commands. Anger exhausts happiness into submission with volume and intensity. You simply cannot be happy in the face of someone yelling about how awful a person you are. Not possible; you’re too busy ducking and covering, at least emotionally. In order to preserve some sense of peace, you pacify the anger. You become what it is that anger wants – you become unhappy.  

                I wish it were possible to happy-yell. To be so loud and overbearing in happiness that anger is frightened into submission. Actually, I believe what I want we’ve labeled as insanity, and we medicate that. Isn’t that too bad? Seems to me the balance of accepted crazy is tilted excessively in favor of anger, not happiness. We need to start medicating the angry into submission. Ever see a happy person go on a shooting spree? Not me. Pretty sure anger is a common denominator in violence. Only Lennie pat the puppy to death in his overwhelming love for the dog. Now that I am reminded of Of Mice and Men, it does capture the dominance of anger over happiness, and how we, as a society have diminished happiness to the arena of mental defect. Huh, I never thought of it from that angle before. New found respect.

                Before I digress too far, I want to bring this back to the point: happiness needs to make a comeback. In my own life, at the very least, if not on a universal basis, the pendulum needs to swing back toward happiness. We need a culture shift away from anger. If our 2016 primary election cycle doesn’t underscore this, we may be hopelessly lost. I for one am going for happy in the future. I don’t think I can do otherwise and survive because my nature is that of a happy person. I know this not because of my past, but because of my present. Unhappiness feels so wrong for me. Unhappiness is an ill-fitting emotional suit that I cannot wear.

                Thus, I will choose happiness, even if that means I will be happily alone, and it means that for time being, I’ll bring that damn laundry basket up.