Hate and Love: Two Epiphanies

Being outside of my family's particular bubble of insanity has given me a lot of additional insight, but it's taken so long. For one thing, I can say now without trying too hard to spin it into something softer, that my family really was abusive.

My mother, who I love dearly and miss every day, was a complex and damaged woman, and she passed the damage down to me in her blood and with her behavior.

My father, who once warned me apropos of nothing that he would choose his new girlfriend over a relationship with me and never look back, gave me his schizophrenic logic and paranoia along with his artistic ability. There was no therapy. Therapy was the ultimate stigma, a threat to make you behave.

My siblings have their own damage and we don't get along. My sister steals anything that isn't nailed down and flies into a self-pitying rage if you notice your shit in her house. She is a classic borderline personality, leaving chaos everywhere she goes. You can love her for the beautiful person she is, but best to do it from afar, where the snakes can't reach you to bite.

Before prison, my brother was the kind of kid who would slash you with a box cutter if you walked in front of the television. He might be over his anger issues, but I'll have that scar for the rest of my life. I automatically cringe when somebody stomps around in the room because unpredictable violence is a fact of life that's long since been drilled into me.

Nobody bothered to call and tell me my mother was dying in the hospital. For days she asked for me, but nobody ever made the call. Why didn't they call? I asked, and my sister made excuses and lied about how long Mom was in the hospital. My brother didn't understand it himself, and at least he came right out and said so.

And that's how I found out what hate, real hate, the kind that you don't throw around casually when speaking about your feelings, felt like. I'm not sure what to do with it. It feels kind of like I swallowed a bag of lead shot.

Leaving the war zone doesn't mean shit if the war zone won't leave you. And so that's my current project: getting past the damage without false hope that it can be gotten over.

Then there was a bad relationship. It wasn't bad at first, but both of us were fucked up and there were certain areas where communication was absolutely forbidden. For years I watched the other person change, becoming darker and more angry, deciding to "become an alcoholic" and then buying vodka to make it happen. He wasn't happy and he wouldn't tell me what was wrong. Later he would say this was my fault. He couldn't open up because I haad proved he could never trust me.

It's weird in retrospect how reasonable that sounded at the time. I'd never betrayed him in my life, but I accepted it and took the blame on myself. To my credit, I believed it for exactly three months before I figured out his game, but still. That was three months I was hating on myself like I always do.

This person was and is still the most amazing guy in the world. We were friends for fifteen years. But by the end of it we were at each other's throats. He would hurtme by attacking things I loved, and I'd find myself joining him before too long. At times I hated the world just as much as he did.

I never completely absorbed his bullshit. Some of the things--his pathological hatred of women for being weak, his homophobia, his racism, the way he had of hating anything I liked to goad me into a fight--were guaranteed to cause drama, and I learned not to engage him on certain topics. Of course we still fought about them, but it was always disguised as some other argument. And of course, not talking about anything important will eventually change a good friendship into a bad habit.

But we still had fights over stupid shit. He would use a racial slur and wait for me to be offended so he could pull out his trusty "you're only offended if you're a pussy who cares too much what other people think of them" line of defense. He abused my internet friends by trolling my LJ, and I let him because every fight we had eventually became THE fight, and I was afraid he'd finally snap and leave me like he ditched every other friend he ever had. I've seen him utterly lose his shit and ditch friends over nothing, and I wasn't in any hurry to have it be me.

I knew my time would come someday, but I loved the angry motherfucker, and I was in it for the long haul. Keep in mind I'm disturbed too. Some part of me needed to have a friend who made me feel like a terrible person, a worthless person, a disgusting person.

I've never even been on a date, much less gone through an abusive relationship. I didn't even understand how that stuff works. I can sort of grasp the concepts as an abstract, but the motivations themselves make no sense. Even if I did, I suspect it wouldn't have made any difference. Things look different from inside the bubble. Dysfunction can very easily get ahold of you while you think you're being vigilant; hell, because you think you're being vigilant.

I think being reasonably smart actually works against you when it's the heart. You're convinced you'll beat the odds because you've read all those books and know the signs of an unhealthy relationship. Bullshit. I can tell you from experience that the books do not do justice to the reality. We weren't even romantic (I don't think, anyway) but it was nothing like the movies and books where you have the benefit of objectivity.

So we cycled up and up until both of us were miserable, and then it was over. The tumor that used to be the best frienship in the universe was removed, and for a long time it kept hurting. I'd get all mad and have imaginary fights where I'd try to explain myself to him, over and over again. But around the anniversary of my Mom's death, I realized I was actually a little bit grateful to have it finally be over.

I wished, in fact, that we could have ended it sooner. We could have saved eight years of indignity and self-hate. But we didn't, and I know I paid for it. I'm only just starting to realize just how damaging we were to each other.

I never saw it clearly from the inside, and I was honestly looking. I was scared that the influence of our bad blood would make me nihilistic and hateful instead of just bitter and snarky the way I naturally am. But I honestly thought I was OK.

The destruction and rebuilding of my psyche into one more appropriate for that particular bad relationship was so subtle and insidious that it took place right there in my head without me catching on. I never noticed the way I was changing. I thought I would have to see it if there was something there.

I read back on my old LJ entries and I was just so fucking angry and frustrated and FULL OF CAPS LOCK RAGE. There was a whole universe out there that was just begging to have its ass kicked and I was the guy for the job.

I used to be so optimistic and naive, and somewhere along the line our dysfunction sucked that out of me and made me jaded and angry (but still naive). It's like I couldn't be sensitive anymore and leave that in the open. And then I started finding sensitivity funny and worthy of mockery.

I never realized such nihilism had crept up on me until long after the breakup, when my attitude started to fade and I began to realize how much self-censorship I had been doing. It was suddenly right there in the middle of the picture, full-focus.

In the time since we broke up, I've gone from angry capslock troll to a bit of a sparkle-eyed peacefag, and I honestly find being a total pussy the much more fulfilling attitude. I want to be the kind of person who trusts others. I want to be the kind of person who helps fix the world instead of bitching about how much it sucks. I want to feel optimism again. So this really rocks.

This is who I used to be, before I started censoring myself to keep a dysfunctional frienship going. This is who I want to be now that I'm not living that life anymore. I feel kind of like a kid again, and there's just so much in the world that matters to me. I never quit caring, but I was careful not to care too loudly lest it make me look like a loser.

Well, so be it. I'm a loser with a big fat smile on my big fat face. And so far nothing bad has happened to me, so I guess all the angst was a waste of time anyway.

So to everybody who was there to read while I took out my anger on my keyboard, I apologize. I know it's not exactly abnormal to vent on the internet when shit is truly, truly horrible in the real world, but I still apologize. I won't blame any of the trolling I did on my family or my failed relationship, because everybody I ever trolled was abusing other people to earn my wrath, but I do feel bad about all those capslock rants when I could have been thinking about ways to make things better instead of cheerleading the apocalypse.

It's been a pretty rocky life so far, but I'm starting to get the hang of it.


TO BE CONTINUED.