Category Archives: musing

context for Impossible Letter # 1, The Genius

My two dear friends had a daughter with remarkable talents.  The first she displayed was an amazing ability to provoke her father to rage.  She angered her mother too, but her father was so worried about inflicting harm on his provocative little daughter that he went to therapy to learn how not to become the destructively angry, violent parent his mother had been to him.  

His mother’s readiness to fly into a rage and her angry slaps stung him decades later, sting him to this day.  He was determined not to do that to his daughter.  He made good progress in therapy and left once he felt he’d learned to keep his temper under control.

As a young girl she revealed a remarkable gift for playing the piano by ear.  Her grandmother’s upright piano was soon moved to her house where she quickly developed an amazing independence of hands, her left hand and right hand moved as if they belonged to two different musicians playing in perfect time.  She could play entire classical pieces by ear, a remarkable thing, particularly in a child so young.  She was a prodigy. 

I recall her, at perhaps six, demonstrating her discovery that you can play different classical melodies over the same left hand accompaniment.  Her left hand never stopped playing, a steady heartbeat, even as she looked over her shoulder to talk to me as she went excitedly from one melody to the next.  

She also loved to sing, and once a teacher of her’s praised her for it, she began singing everywhere.  I had a message on my answering machine once, from her, at maybe seven, telling me excitedly that she was going to be on the radio at a certain time.  I tuned in and heard a remarkable a cappella vocal and then an interview with a supremely poised kid, who turned out to be her.

Her parents feared that becoming a child star would turn their already difficult daughter into a monster and mark her for the troubled life so many child stars seem to experience when they grow up.  They decided that instead of letting her perform (outside of school plays) that she would study music.   This, they reasoned, would have the collateral benefit of using her love of music to instill a sense of discipline in her.  They hired a series of classical piano teachers to instruct her, teach her to read music, hone her talent the traditional way. 

They did this with the best of intentions, neither understood that many great musicians and composers can’t read music. The long list includes Paul McCartney (and the rest of the Beatles), Bob Dylan, Billie Holliday, Stevie Wonder (obviously…), Django Reinhardt, Taylor Swift, Aretha Franklin and many others.  They also didn’t get that pure love of making music, the joy of invention, is what made these folks such great musicians.

The piano lessons were a constant source of stress and the succession of teachers was a testament both to the girl’s resistance and her parents’ insistence.   She didn’t need to practice, quickly mastered reading music and every new assignment, reversed hands as she played, without missing a beat, (out of boredom and contempt) and drove each teacher to distraction.  She did well in school and taught herself to play the flute, in her spare time. 

The fights with her mother continued, and as she got older, she got the better of every argument, with her excellent memory and ability to marshal the facts, and logic, to support her case.  Her overmatched mother was very frustrated with her opinionated, challenging little bitch of a daughter.

I watched her musical abilities change over the course of the classical piano lesson years. Eventually she could not play along to anything without counting in, knowing where each beat was supposed to go.  The regimentation of classical piano lessons had taken much of the joy and spontaneity out of music for her and she spent years afterwards recovering some of her unselfconscious excitement and native creativity.  Meanwhile, she turned to alcohol and a succession of mind-altering drugs.

Unsurprisingly, she turned out to be an excellent writer.  She got a job writing a column for an on-line magazine.  Her column was remarkable.  It explored her inner world in a compelling way.  After a few excellent posts she was somehow let go.  Her final piece was powerfully emotional and shocking, filled with harsh self-recrimination.  She wrote that she had been an asshole as a girl and adolescent and caused her parents and her brothers a great deal of pain.  She gave a public account of her drug addiction that included the excruciating detail of waking up on a bus from another city, groggy from ketamine, without her panties or any recollection of how she got there.

Knowing her since she was a fetus, and being one of her parents’ closest friends, I had watched the entire course of her life up until that point.  I had a perspective her parents couldn’t give her, and one it might take her decades, if ever, to come to on her own.  A friend of my parents, with a relatively simple observation about them, had accelerated my understanding of my life by many years when I was around her age.  I intended to pay this gift forward by providing the tormented young woman with some very good reasons to let herself off the hook. I made the offer several times over the years, and she was always initially enthusiastic, but she seemed to grow wary and the conversation never happened.

This wariness is a characteristic of people who have experienced childhood trauma.  I don’t know why I am not wary this way, since I experienced prolonged childhood trauma (perhaps it was my mother’s unerring sympathy for my point of view, in the end), but I recognize that many traumatized people are filled with distrust, even of people they love.  Anyone, we learn as young children, can inflict terrible pain, even without meaning to, and pain inflicted by those we love and trust hurts worst of all. 

I thought I’d put all this in a letter to her, but she never texted me her new address, as she’d cheerfully promised to do the last time I saw her.   Making the letter even more impossible than it was a few years ago, it will no longer be coming from a dear, cherished old family friend.  After an unforeseeable, brutal falling out with her folks,  the letter will now be coming from a vicious, angry, unforgiving, aggressive, sadistic, threatening, stubborn, lawyerly, satanically smart, twisted, unloving betrayer of love, which is how my old friends now see and portray me.   

Try that one on for size, impossible letter writer!

(impossible letter to follow)

Impossible letters

Certain personal matters eat at our souls and rob us of rest.  Misunderstandings so brutal and unfair that we need to explain ourselves, injustices that burn and demand redress, mean things, done by reflex, that chafe us until we cry out.   What do we do, in a world that largely doesn’t give a rat’s buttock about any one of us?   Sometimes we sit down and write an impossible letter, to set the record straight, even as we know there is no record and straight is the most relative of terms in the emotionally fraught world of homo sapiens.

We work on the letter imagining that our words will open a heart that’s closed to us, restore communication where it has been shut down, allow a whiff of mercy, insight or sanity into a room that’s been sealed off from those things.  In our mind the simple facts, and a bit of history, expressed as clearly and non-judgmentally as we can, will work their magic, allowing the other person to shake off the fog they’ve been living in and step back into the light of Reason.   An impossible letter.

The person you are writing to is not the ultimate recipient of the letter, perhaps.  Writing this kind of letter allows you to put very difficult things into perspective.  It helps you chart an intelligible path through the sometimes disorienting terra incognita that is our emotional world.   It’s fair to say that we write these letters primarily to ourselves and to anyone else already sympathetic to what we have to say.

It seems impossible that people we love, who have loved us for many years, will metaphorically kill us for some transgression they feel we’ve committed.  There is no forgiveness, no matter how consistent our efforts to make amends, only anger, and it extends indefinitely into the future, while everyone involved is still alive.  How the fuck is that possible?  Was this person always insane enough to kill the people they love the most just to “win” an eternal argument? Was our intimate friendship just the wishful dream of a foolish heart?

I will provide the set-up, a short version of the context that makes each letter seem necessary, and impossible.   Then I will write the impossible letter, as I have done a few times in recent years.  These letters get no response, because they can’t, since what they require is impossible.  Impossible as the idea that one day the lights go out for every one of us and that’s that.   

The idea of reconciliation is beautiful, a vision of heavenly justice, and the rareness of it makes it even more splendid. We don’t pursue the impossible out of perversion alone, we do it out of faith, love and an unquenchable, though often unrealizable, human drive for justice and reconciliation.

Context to follow for impossible letter number one: the genius.

The Five Stages of Grief, revisited

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of grief in her terminally ill patients: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.   There has been some controversy over this progression since she introduced it in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, although Kübler-Ross clarified that these stages do not necessarily occur in any order and that some will experience only a few, or none, of them.

I found myself thinking about this yesterday in the context of my recent loss of two of my oldest friends, their adult children, and likely some common friends of ours, forced to take sides in a senseless conflict that will only end with death.   I was suddenly filled with anger at being defamed and hacked up this way while still alive, the irrationality and injustice of it, and wondering where the unexpected flood of anger came from.

This death during life is a hard business, and it is natural, I suppose, to deny that you are carrying a dead friendship around with you, once you enter the danger zone where every comment can lead to new accusations, threats and angry indignation.  So denial was certainly at play in the year or more that I fought to keep the dead friendship alive. 

Try facing folks incapable of solving conflict, compelled to fight any suggestion that they are less than perfect. They fight each other this way, the mutual silent treatment goes on for days on end.  They are both of a particularly rigid, competitive type, with perfect social faces and terror and rage at being seen as less than perfect.  I kept denying this could be true in two people I loved, laughed and cried with for so many years.

There was bargaining, every step of the way: if you calm down, and stop threatening me, I will prove to you that I have your best interests at heart, that I am the same as I always was, that we are friends for life, as we’ve been for decades, that I will always forgive you.   It was futile to bargain, since I was unwilling to yield the most essential point: that I was completely to blame for all the bad feelings between us.  It was the same kind of bargaining Kübler-Ross observed in her dying patients trying to bargain with Death.

I tried my best not to succumb to anger during the long, frustrating, life-draining cold war that followed a relatively straightforward and easy to sort out conflict (for anyone with minimal conflict resolution skills). I did my best, and refrained from venting, though my restraint and the look on my face as I restrained myself was apparently infuriating, and the fury directed at me was constant.

Depression certainly was a feature of the long struggle to not see the unsettling horror that was suddenly thrust in my face.  It was an agitated depression, sleep robbing and sharp-edged, filled with self-recrimination because I was somehow unable to reanimate the rapidly decomposing corpse of a beloved friendship.  Expecting the impossible from yourself, and berating yourself for your inability to do the impossible, are features of depression.

With luck you learn, in the end, to accept what you cannot change, no matter how hard you work, no matter how unacceptable the thing you must accept is.  Sometimes you get help, in the form of confirmation that you are not crazy, that the interpersonal conflict is not yours alone to solve, that you are not the one driving the bus that is heading over the guardrails and into the gorge.  

So you accept in the end that all of your goodwill, patience, your bargaining, your attempt to refrain from judgment, and anger, your attempts at reconciliation, making amends, extending understanding and the benefit of the doubt, self-reflection, are of no use in the situation you are up against.  Implacable anger that arises from a deep sense of shame does not yield to these things and, after enough pain, you hopefully understand and accept your powerlessness against this.

After accepting all that, and sleeping better, I was surprised to find myself feeling so fucking angry yesterday.  I don’t blame myself for the now eternal falling out (neither do these two blame themselves, of course) but I find myself in the position, with our mutual friends, of dancing around the supremely ticklish question of how I lost the love of these two saintly pillars of their community.  I find myself avoiding old friends out of discomfort I never felt with them. They believe a certain amount of the lies that have been deliberately told about me, or so it would appear. One has chided me more than once for being unforgiving. Without a short, frank discussion, I’ll never know how things actually stand, and possibly even with that discussion I may not know.

I find myself composing talking points like this, should I speak openly about the uncomfortable subject of being suddenly deemed unworthy of my old friends’ love (and how can it not come up, except through strenuously applied denial and avoidance — who do you talk to about such things if not old, trusted friends? [1]):

A terrible challenge is how the unthinkable end of this long friendship has impacted my relations with other old friends.  If I mention anything about our falling out with your friends, until recently my very close friends, it’s not to start a painful discussion or put you in the uncomfortable position of having to take sides.  I make mention of any aspect of it only in the context of talking about something I learned, and I hope that can be separate from sounding judgmental or influencing you one way or another in your feelings.

Trying getting your mind around delivering that talking point about the sinister shadow now hanging over your friendship with just the right fucking nuance.   Why must you master this delicate bit of high wire walking when your old friends have already spattered the walls with your blood in defending their perfectly moral actions?   Because your old friends are angry, judgmental, unforgiving, childish adults who have justified themselves by lying about the falling out between you, putting the entire blame on you, placing it squarely where you stubbornly, unforgivingly, refuse to accept it.  Fair is fair.

Chew on that one, if you love the taste of bile.  

[1] The answer to that, of course, is a skillful therapist.

Performative empathy and terminal distraction

What I am about to write may mark me, to some, as uncharitable and harsh in my judgments, but see if you’ve had a similar experience.  This might ring a bell and give you a different way of viewing a vexation from your own life.

When someone you know tells you they are sick, badly injured or facing a scary diagnosis, it is customary to say things like “please let me know how it turns out” and “let me know if there’s anything I can do.”  As kids we learn to say these kinds of things from the empathetic adults around us.   If we are involved in the health-challenged person’s life, able to do things for them, and have shown ourselves willing to exert ourselves to follow through, the phrases land as a show of sincere concern and friendship.   If we say these things in a show of concern and never actually follow up, it is performative empathy.  Don’t look at the intention and the history too closely and everybody feels a little better.

Sometimes the performance of empathy is unintentionally feckless.  It is not that they don’t want to help out, it’s just that they are terminally distracted.  They intend to do the compassionate thing, but, goddamn it, there is so much to do, it’s relentless, and, plus, the person they extended the invitation to didn’t seem too grateful, seemed to doubt them, so isn’t there an element of judgment there?   I said the right thing and they judged me as being insincere.  I was sincere, but their silence in response to my offer of help really hurt, made me feel like a bad person.  It was like they didn’t expect me to follow up, as if I said it just to make myself feel like a good person!

Some people always follow up on their offers of support.  Some people rarely, if ever, follow up.  It is better to speak less and do more, given the choice.   For some, speaking in a generous manner is the best they can do.  They are honestly overwhelmed by the million details of their day to day activities, trapped in the rushing cascade of their own highly programmed lives.  When they speak generously they don’t intend not to follow up, it’s just that they are so busy, all the time, that they will not always remember the sincere gasp of concern they emitted when you raised the spectre of a cancer diagnosis.  And it’s not as if you would be there for them.

Along it all rolls, until, for one or the other of us, it stops rolling and all consideration is in the past tense, for everybody else.

Gnawing question?

I had a close friend, for decades, who always said that maintaining healthy friendship takes work.  He was always ready to jump in any time someone needed him, his expertise, his services, his sympathy, his honest counsel.   Then, a few years ago, he started putting up a fence around certain subjects he’d always been candid about, they were no longer up for conversation.  

Something was clearly tormenting him, he was looking increasingly grim and reporting awful moods, agitation and sleeplessness, but he was no longer willing to discuss it.  His walling himself off was a mysterious process.  The unexplained closing down of certain topics was subtle at first, then it began eating at our friendship.  After a relatively simple conflict arose between us, this shutdown of our ability to freely discuss problems devoured what was left of our long, close friendship.  

“No matter what you say, you will never convince me that you have a legitimate point of view,” was his stance on the question of whether I had a right to feel hurt by things he and his wife had done.  That they had both vented at length, while demanding I not mention anything ever again, was my own fault.   “We made MISTAKES, and you want to crucify us, for mistakes, while you…” a knowing look, “what you did was no mistake, which is what makes it so hard to forgive.”   

He’d get indignant if I pressed, or asked “what the fuck?” or looked at him the wrong way.  I had no real idea of what was suddenly making my old friend act with so little friendship.   We were now locked in a zero-sum conflict, familiar as a kick in the nuts from a childhood that had featured a long-running, zero-sum, no-holds-barred conflict with my brilliant, implacable, tragically damaged old man.

At a party a few months back I met a charming, mischievous looking man who told Sekhnet and me a heartwarming story.   Two minutes in I was greeted by someone I hadn’t seen in 35 years, who burst into the little circle to hug me, smile and reminisce, and so I missed the remainder of the man’s anecdote.   Over the course of the next few days it emerged that the charming, mischievous looking man had fairly advanced early onset dementia.  He would stand and sit over and over, uncontrollably.  He would get agitated and cry out.  He was unable to speak.  He was always attended by a kind, attentive young man who steadied him, calmed him, gently got him to stop calling out, directed him back to breathing, helped him reel himself back in.

I think now of my friend’s unwillingness to discuss certain things, the downright silly defenses he made several times over the year of our unsuccessful peace talks, the stubborn irrationality of points he insisted on, and wonder if I missed a similar decline in faculties.  Maybe his change in behavior was not unwillingness to be himself but inability with an organic cause. The charming guy we met at the party was able to put on a front, at first, maybe I was unable to see that my friend’s torment is related to the terror of losing his ability to maintain his personality in the face of a disquieting change in his capacities.  Unable to face what is happening to him, he lashed out at someone who had always reciprocated his care, concern and friendship.  Ironic and terrible, that.

Even if the theory is true, it leaves me with no real option at the moment.  After all, I am the trusted old friend who deliberately, and with depraved indifference, sadistically stuck a dagger into the hearts of these two beloved old friends, for absolutely no reason.  I pressed on when I saw they were upset, and their defensiveness and anger were entirely natural, and 100% caused by me.  I am the kind who does not make mistakes, my hurtful behavior is knowingly malicious and I operate under ruthless principles, justified by the “abuse” I suffered decades back when I was a helpless, angry child, my distorted point of view supported by demonic skills at argumentation and persuasion.

The thing about a traumatic childhood is that when the trauma is reawakened in adult life, as mine was after a long glare of rage was directed at me by a frustrated old friend going through torments she couldn’t openly discuss, the pain is identical to the original.  As an adult you have tools to resolve the pain that are not available to the child, or so you would think.  Another adult may act childishly in response to your need for mercy but, until you see this clearly, you remain locked in the pain of the reopened childhood trauma.  

“I need to talk about what happened,” you say, seeing that the current situation is intolerable.

“You need to shut up about what you think happened, unless you want some more,” is not a response that will cause your roiled emotions to relax. “You brought this all on yourself with your aggressive, threatening, angry reaction to my attempt to be considerate, you vicious prick.  You want to accuse us of being insensitive bastards who don’t know how to treat people.   How dare you, you unforgiving, unloving monster!”

Demented or not, that’s some fucked up shit, Larry.

When the truth bites you in the ass

Sometimes you can’t avoid a truth you would rather not confront. Without looking squarely at the actual situation, and understanding how it works, no solution will ever be possible. So if you are tormented in a relationship you will need to find a way to grasp the dynamic, and assess the damage being done, before you can end the torment.

A parent’s overwhelming need to feel in control and infallible, constantly undermining your own needs is a brutal thing to look at directly. It is natural to make accommodations, learn to accept blame for things you didn’t actually do, flatter the parent when necessary, learn when to withdraw, swallow a response, put on a false smile. These do not really solve anything, but they keep the ongoing harm to a minimum since you avoid fresh conflict with them.

The next step, the painful but freeing one, is understanding that this parent is not capable of behaving any better. They are stuck in unresolved pain from their own earlier life. They may not know how to resolve conflicts peacefully. You may tell everyone that your mother is a goddess, and she may smile, and bask in your admiration, but if you explain that you were calling your mother a goddess only to avoid her rage, she will make you pay for your unappreciated candor.

There are truths we resist because they undermine things we value greatly. At the same time, there is no healthy alternative when you understand the mistreatment you’ve been forced to tolerate. Someone who forces you to tolerate the intolerable does not love you very well.

“What is hateful to you do not do unto another” is an excellent and practicable formulation of the Golden Rule. We all know what we hate, we probably know it better than almost anything. So if I am doing something to you that I hate done to me, you will, and should, point this out to me. If my answer is “yeah, you hate it, maybe even I hate it, but fuck you, this is all you deserve and all you’ll ever get from me” you should very much take me at my word.

Every day that you don’t take me at my word, and hope that somehow love will prevail, is a day that the unacknowledged truth (that my final word to you is fuck your fucking feelings, asshole) is taking another giant bite out of your ass. In the end you’ll have no ass left, a very bad way to live.

Truth is hard, sometimes

I recently got a note from somebody telling me he wasn’t interested in taking sides, or even forming an opinion, but in learning the truth about a conflict we are mutually interested in.   The comment reminded me of an essential thing about truth.   It looks different depending on our point of view, how much information we have, our tolerance for cognitive discomfort, our level of self-awareness and honesty, while at the same time, things are objectively more or less true when viewed in light of the facts, and in the context of the situation. Truth can get famously foggy during a moral battle.

There is an eternal debate, among eggheads (old term for intellectuals) about the nature of truth and morality, the nature of reality.   These brainy types like the structure and rigor of science, even when talking about matters of the spirit and the soul.   Two prominent schools of thought are moral relativism and moral absolutism, both terms also used as pejoratives.  Most people simply believe in the truth that confirms their view of things and call it a day.  Academics write books, teach courses and defend their school of thought in the debate over the true nature of cherished, elusive truth.  Some views are closer to the truth than others, alternative facts are not the same as actual facts.   The academic stand-off goes something like this:

Moral relativists believe that truth, and its close cousin morality, are not absolute but change according to culture, social condition and historical epoch.  An example of this lack of universal morality/truth would be leaving a new born baby on a hill top to die.   Many, perhaps most, would recoil from this practice, condemn it as immoral.   But what if the baby’s mother, and the entire community, were starving to death during a drought?   People living in this harsh environment would not judge a mother for exposing her child for a quick death rather than struggling to keep the doomed baby alive, using valuable resources that others with a real chance of survival need.  In fact, in that case, she’s doing the right thing. Sadly, this rare example, though hard to refute, muddies the discussion of universal right and wrong.  If all morality is relative, who’s to say who is moral and who is acting immorally — how do any of us know the best way to act? 

Moral absolutists believe there is a universal morality, an immutable set of truths that apply across all cultures, times and places.   Murder, for example, the willful taking of an innocent life in a malicious or depraved manner — universally evil.   If there are universal truths, and it’s hard to imagine that something like refraining from murder is not a universally valued trait (but, see example above) then laws can be made based on these principles, to combat evil impulses.  Sadly, moral absolutists are often religious hardliners with no tolerance for the viewpoints of those who don’t embrace their religious views.  Their moral absolutism allows them to believe  morally problematic things, like the abortion doctor who was killed outside the clinic is burning in Hell, while the one who shot him gets a wink from Jesus Christ.

Truth can be elusive, though only in academia (and politics) are there only two ways to see it.  Truth is compatible with both of the warring views above, it is not always one thing or the other.   

Facts exist — I punched you in the nose, your nose bled, you called the cops, the cops arrived and told us both to sober up and fuck off.  The truth is that we had a conflict that turned violent, you were threatened enough to call the cops.  We will tell different stories about the facts.  

You will insist the punch was completely unprovoked, that I blindsided you, fooled you into relaxing just before bashing you.  That will be your “truth” and those sympathetic to you will accept it.  My story will have a detailed set-up, the context that came before the blow, the reason you needed to be hit right at that moment, and those who relate to my telling will be certain I was well provoked before I busted you in the head.   

The reflex of many people is to believe that the real truth exists somewhere between those two stories.  Somebody standing close by while the conflict escalated will be better situated to evaluate the stories, we’d think, but they have biases too.   Plus they won’t necessarily know the history, the smug look, repetition of the most hated phrases, and how they predictably ratcheted up the tension.   Context is important, though not always easily discernible. 

You have the classic “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”  In the case of the more than a thousand angry people who stormed the Capitol after sending 140 cops to the hospital, we can call them insurrectionists, waving a Confederate flag as their belligerently rebellious forebears would have, after sacking the Capitol.   Others call them “patriots” who were engaged in “legitimate political discourse” and are now being held, totally unfairly, as “political prisoners” and martyrs.   Those who blow themselves up for their beliefs are called martyrs, or insane, murderous assholes, depending.

So too in personal life.  Your deepest needs will dictate the truths you believe.   Truth can’t be divorced from opinion, since what we believe to be true forms the basis of our opinions. An opinion based on truth is more legitimate than one based on spin, color, a persuasive, selective  retelling of events that leaves out important facts.   Events and the sequence of how things unfolded, the cause and effect,  how one thing led to another, are the building blocks of truth.  Not everyone is prepared to deal with a truth that is upsetting and potentially destabilizing, like: the peacemaker on his moral high horse has also deployed irritating gas, which had nothing to do with his mission to make peace, in the name of making peace.

The benefit of sharing vexations with others

You can find yourself in a perplexing emotional cul-de-sac, very, very hard to see any way out. You can ruminate, follow theories, compare your situation to others, but the limitation in your point of view is partly that it is only your point of view, uninformed by the views of others.

As soon as you share a perplexing riddle with somebody you trust, you open the door to an insight that might seem obvious once it is expressed out loud but would never otherwise occur to you.

For example, I had an embattled friend who lived in a war zone, who could not help provoking me whenever we got into a conversation. No matter how angry I became, I always restrained myself from bashing this annoying guy in the face, because he was my childhood friend, because I try to conduct myself peacefully, because I don’t bash people in the face. This aggravating cycle continued for several years, until, unable to get him to even acknowledge that he was provoking the shit out of me regularly, I had to walk away from our long friendship.

Recently, I entered a vexatious revolving door dispute with my closest friend. No matter what progress we seemed to make in our peace talks, he regularly became indignant and angry. Each time I exerted myself to reassure him of my friendship and calmed him down. This happened more times than I can recall. He recalls this pattern too.

Talking to an old friend who also knew this guy very well, and has lost contact with him, I described the maddening dynamic. My friend becoming instantly angry, me calming him down. As I described this my friend emitted a knowing chuckle.

“Every every time he got mad and you reacted not with anger but with compassion, you were giving him exactly what he’s been looking for, and never received, for his entire life. And you wonder why he couldn’t stop doing it?!”

And it is kind of funny, how easy it is to see, when somebody else points it out. In both of the cases described above, these are people locked in war who lack good impulse control and basic conflict resolution skills. They are both required to hold in enormous amounts of frustration. In each case, when they vent their anger, which they are not generally allowed to do without severe consequences, they were met, in my case, with the mildness of friendship and understanding. Why would either one of them stop doing it? They wouldn’t, they can’t. Until they succeed in killing the thing that is sustaining their belief that they are worthy of love.

Being so patient in a one-sided arrangement like this is not a long-term strategy for friendship or life. Without mutuality, what’s the point of a relationship?

You can ask this question of people who care about you, and you may be surprised by the obvious insights they may have for you.

Life’s unfair

Whenever I complained about anything being unfair, my parents’ actions or anything else, my father had a stock answer.  

“President Kennedy said ‘life’s unfair’,” my father would say.

I have no doubt that John Kennedy said that, just as I have no doubt he was shot in the head one morning in Dallas, proving his point.   

Life is unfair, it is also immensely complicated.   Sometimes it’s hard to navigate.   I react badly, unfairly, and I hurt you.  You react with hurt.  I think you are reacting with way too much hurt.  Fuck, I didn’t hurt you that badly!  Now who’s the victim of unfairness?

“Wait, you just admitted you hurt me.  Isn’t it unfair to tell me exactly how much I’m entitled to be hurt?   Do you know what I’m going through at this moment, what makes me more vulnerable than usual to suffering from unfair treatment by someone I trust?  Did I ever treat you that way?”

Now the back goes up, which happens automatically as the body is poised for fight or flight.

“You want fair, asshole?”  and the game is on.

If you are philosophical it may seem possible to arrive at a reasonable  understanding of virtually anything.  Once you have some data and a framework to understand something you have the way to make otherwise incomprehensible things comprehensible to yourself.   Of course, life being unfair, having a coherent framework to talk about something does not always lead to a mutually helpful conversation.

I can try to look at the conflict through the lens of your pain, understanding, for example, why it is so hard for you to compromise or make amends, but that view may cut a little too close to your nerve endings for your comfort.  You’ll feel judged, moreso if the view comes close to a painful truth.  Much easier to continue fighting over who has the right to feel more hurt by the other.  On a bad day you will hear things like “you have to understand that I’m too upset by what you did to listen to why you’re upset.”

Life’s unfair, and part of its unfairness is rooted in its often incoherent nature.  In spite of all the theories, and of science, and the role of the marvelous human mind in fathoming things that are difficult, a good part of life simply defies sense, logic, discussion.  Unfair, if you ask me.