Category Archives: personal

Ten minute drill (pre- surgery)

Got to stick to the timer, which I will set now, because Sekhnet is very stressed about leaving on time to be more than three hours early for my knee replacement surgery today.   I woke up with the poor, stripped joint yowling top volume, the limp to the bathroom was harder than usual.  So, off to have the knee replaced.  

For some reason, I need a few moments to compose myself before showering with the special antibacterial soap they gave me and packing my overnight bag for the hospital.  This I should not be doing, with only 29 minutes remaining to the time I promised to leave (compromise– we’ll only arrive 20 minutes before they asked me to be at the hospital two and a half hours prior to surgery), but, God help me, I can’t help myself.

Years ago, before a trip to London, I agreed to leave whenever Sekhnet wanted.  I have a history of arriving at airports at the last minute and even once missed a flight because of it.   So, to avoid stress, we arrived four hours before the international flight.  When we got there she turned to me with a big smile and said “isn’t this nice?”.   I gave her a grim version of a smile and nodded, wondering if I’d manage not to kill myself in all that time in a terminal before a long flight.   I hate getting up early as much as I hate an unneccesarily long wait.  Sekhet put her head down on our luggage and feel into a deep, happy sleep.

On the airport PA, as I paced, they kept paging Mohammed Atta, asking him to call the desk.  “Mohammed Atta,” a woman’s voice said every two or three minutes, “please use a courtesy phone to call the main desk.”   A coincidence, I know, since the only Mohammed Atta I ever heard of blew himself up on one of the planes the maniacs crashed into the World Trade Center.  Sekhnet had been at the catastrophe as it unfolded, filming the horrors for the news station she worked for, and still suffers PTSD and other health troubles from being in the toxic cloud when the first tower fell.  I looked over at her and watched her happily sleeping.

“Good for you,” I thought.  She certainly didn’t need to hear them paging Mohammed Atta over and over.

Time.

The calm after the temper tantrum

Something familiar from childhood that I had forgotten, the soothing reassurances by my parents after a particularly savage parental attack.  Once you were upset by their angry reaction to your needs they could comfort you, prove to you how crazily wrong you were to feel unloved.  

I completely forgot about this practice, a disorienting mindfuck I’d experienced so many times as a child, until I heard the recorded soothing tones of two old friends determined to do everything possible, except listen or compromise, to resolve the raging conflict between us.  They sounded so sympathetic and loving, until I told them they still were not letting me say what I needed them to hear.

I had what became a fatal falling out with old friends, who after a few increasingly stressful days in a rented house, were very upset that I’d said the f-word in anger.   My apology had to be considered, after all, what I had done was so brutal, so upsetting, so much worse than the distance, coldness and passive aggression I’d seen between my old friends, who it turns out are experts at covert warfare. They let me know that I was on notice, after I’d hurled a curse at the love of my life, that I’d be on trial and would now have to pass an ongoing test to see if I still deserved the friendship we’d always shared.

After months of silence, when one of my friends smilingly made a cutting remark (“homo”) to her husband (who winced), I told them I had a few things I needed to put on the table.  Fair is fair, it seemed obvious enough to me.  They’d both immediately had the audiences with me they’d demanded when they needed to speak.  In the first case I had to hear an apology that was later explained to me, more than once, as no admission of wrongdoing, but said only to calm me because, although I’d completely provoked the justified reaction, I was clearly so upset.  The other meeting began with a direct threat — “I have walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.”   

I recognize now that both of these things are characteristic of people who can’t be wrong and who can’t, therefore, honestly accept their role in, or help to resolve, a conflict.  It matters not how otherwise easily the conflict might be resolved, the point is: if there is a conflict, we cannot be in any part responsible for that.

They left hastily, as though in shock (“I was shocked,” my friend later explained), after I mentioned there were things I needed to talk about, after a few months of silence.  I followed up with an email, explaining my purpose, and had the response that they’d be happy to hear what I had to say, once there was less stress in their lives, once the Omicron variant of Covid was under control, once there were no more family emergencies to deal with.  

Three months later I wrote a short peacemaking letter I never heard back about.  After a holiday visit where my old friend avoided eye contact with me (I did get one last laugh out of her, eventually) I told my friend that I used to think of him as a person of integrity, but that I no longer did, and that I now understood that when I speak to him I’m not talking to the boss.

This worked as well as his wife stinging him with a tossed off “homo”.  Within a few days he had dragged his reluctant wife downtown and we were sitting down so that I could say what I needed to say, and they could listen, and we could all finally move on.  It did not go well.  

Whatever I had to say, no matter how mildly I tried to phrase it,  had an instantly inflaming effect.  My old friend did an uncanny impression of a furious, eye rolling, tooth sucking, arm crossing, hissing, head shaking, back turning, cell phone pounding teenager’s tantrum.  I somehow held myself back from responding in kind, though her fucking tantrum, not letting me finish a sentence, was very upsetting.

All this time my phone, with their acknowledgment, was recording, so that I could listen to it back and make sure I’d said everything I needed to say in the clearest possible way.  In hindsight I understand that needing to document the talk shows that I already no longer trusted them to be fair or honest when it came to any role they might have played in our difficult conflict.   

Eventually she told me to turn off the recorder, it was clearly making her feel very defensive.  I tapped it off, put it in my pocket and the conversation eventually took on a calmer, more mutual tone, though nothing I said could actually be acknowledged.  Hours later, when I went to use the phone, I saw that there was an eight hour recording in progress still going on.  The file was 500 MB.

When I realized this I tried to edit the sound file, get rid of the five hours of pocket noise at the end of our conversation.  It proved impossible to do, I’m not sure why.  The few seconds I did hear, my angry friend cutting me off, instantly raised my blood pressure.  The part I wanted to save was two things she said after she finally calmed down.  

Both friends had angrily denied over and over that there had been any pressure or tension in that vacation house until I, for no reason except my irrational orneriness, exploded in anger.   When she was calm after her tantrum my old friend said “there was a lot of tension” and she explained one factor, admitting that she’d been micromanaging everything in an effort to make things perfect for her husband, the sixty-five year-old birthday boy.

As for any tension between them that I might have found alarming, she said, I hadn’t seen anything to write home about.  She then described how when they are really angry at each other they sometimes go days without talking to each other.  I remember her mentioning five days, sometimes a week, though nobody else recalls that number.  I’d like to hear her statement again, just to clarify that I’d heard what I recall hearing.

All this is academic, however.  A friendship, once attacked a few times with an ax, cannot be resumed as though no deadly force had ever come into play.  I have written about this, at every stage of my long agonizing try to save the biting zombie of a once beautiful friendship that I was carrying on my back, in unbearable detail, and it is not my intention to delve any further into the decomposing rot of it all here.  

Trying to free up space on my stuffed, doddering phone the other day, I saw the large sound file and tried again to upload it to my computer so I could delete it from the phone.  This operation proved impossible to do and after several attempts I knew it was a job for Sekhnet, a technological problem solver with infinite patience.  At one point, trying blindly to find the two quotes I mentioned above, I tapped in at around the two hour mark.

“What is it that you think we’re not hearing?”  I heard my once close friend ask me with the soothing tone of a kindergarten teacher speaking to an upset child in the schoolyard.  “I think we know exactly why you were upset, what do you feel we are not hearing?”

My other friend, done with her temper tantrum, came in with the same slow, calm, sympathetic, perfectly reasonable cadence.

For a moment I found myself wondering how I’d missed this conciliatory, loving part of an otherwise frustrating talk.  Had I been so upset I couldn’t hear them?  Sekhnet, at the time, had said as much to me.

This thought lasted only as long as it took for me to reply on the recording, and for them to shut me down again.   The feeling I was left with was long forgotten, but as instantly, elementally familiar as the memory of that time, at eight, that I stepped on a board with a rusty nail sticking up out of it and it went deep into the sole of my foot.

Classic definition of insanity

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

It gets crazier still when you add in the repetition compulsion, a neurotic reflex to serially relive the identical emotional experience in hopes of getting a different outcome.

If you are a long time, trusted friend who suddenly begins snarling at me, I will try to make peace. I will restrain my impulse to say, after threats, after the second or third show of hostility, “what is your fucking problem, asshole?” I will remain patient, try to listen, try to make myself heard. None of these things are effective once someone has turned implacably hostile, nonetheless, strategies I developed as a child for surviving monster attacks will automatically come into play (he said, the passive voice employed) during such conflicts.

Until I finally learn to recognize what I am up against. Once you see it, and confirm it, and confirm it again, it is crazy to think that with enough kindness, understanding, benefit of the doubt, you can win back the friendship of someone who is determined to “win” a conflict. There is no winner in a conflict that results in the death, real or psychological, of one or both of the parties, but that doesn’t matter to someone who cannot bear to “lose”.

The conflict itself, we learn, can be over virtually nothing. The dispute can be elementally simple to resolve, but that’s not the point. All that someone who cannot be wrong and must prevail at all costs needs is something that can be converted into a war cry. Then, you will find yourself at total war with someone whose greatest terror is the thought of “losing”.

They rightly perceive that they are in a war to the death. You may naively believe that good faith can fix what’s broken, but what war ever ended in people of good faith resolving the issues that led to war and setting up a way to avoid future wars? Good luck with that peace plan, idealist schmuck!

While you are searching for peace, the warring party is searching for war allies, convincing people that you are a sick, belligerent, dishonest, sadistic monster. If you find yourself talking to one of the folks who have already taken the warring party’s side: watch out. They will urge you to do whatever you need to do to end the war that you stand accused of starting and stubbornly prolonging. You will hear the unfair charges repeated as truth, and if you protest, your defensiveness proves the truth of the charges.

You remain calm, you refute each point, but at the same time, you begin to wonder why you are bothering to remain calm, logically refuting each point. This isn’t a conversation, it’s a prosecution, at the hands of someone you never exchanged a cross word with. Why am I being prosecuted? Because someone has made me an enemy and recruited mutual friends against me. Why have I been made an enemy?

The common fact, in every case of death during life final falling out, is that by exressing hurt I have made someone feel bad about themselves, feel as if they might have been wrong, thoughtless, perhaps even irredeemably enraged.

The fear of being made to feel shame, even though your entire life is a hard won buttress against feeling worthless, is more than motivation enough to attack and keep attacking anyone who might hold you responsible for things that are intolerable to you, as a perfect person. Perfect people are very dangerous when the obvious is pointed out to them, that there is no such thing as a perfect person.

It can take decades to recognize something you don’t want to see – that few friendships last forever and that friendships with people who cannot be wrong are doomed to end in an ugly way.

Much better to learn than stay in the loop of senseless, repetitive war.

You have a right to your feelings

Our feelings, it should go without saying, are always what we really feel, and, while we are feeling them, they are beyond right or wrong. We have to be gentle with our feelings as we consider how to move forward. They send us important messages our monkey minds can’t always perceive through cleverness alone. What we feel is what we feel, and acknowledging that is much healthier than pushing emotions down and pretending we feel some other way.

When you tell someone, particularly a friend or family member, how you feel, you are hoping for understanding. We are sympathetic to people we care about who are aggravated, worried, afraid, in pain, otherwise in need of comfort.

Compare and contrast:

“I’m exhausted…”

That’s not hard to understand, you’ve been working your ass off, and working on short sleep, plus you’re worried, and that takes a toll on your energy too. Hopefully you’ll have a long, restful sleep in a few hours.

“I’m exhausted…”

How come?

“I’m exhausted…”

You shouldn’t be, it’s your own fault, why do you go to sleep so late and wake up so early? You don’t take care of yourself, I don’t know why you do this to yourself. A healthy person knows how important a good night’s sleep is. I always get at least eight hours of sleep, no matter what.

The first two replies are expressions of empathy. The third is not.

So what the fuck is that third response? An inability to empathize? A need to feel superior? A need to have the last, authoritative word? Obliviousness? Moral idiocy? Fuck if I know.

The only thing I can tell you is that when you get this response from somebody a few times, listen to what your roiled guts are telling you – this is fucked up. No matter how nice we pretend to be, it is not right to be treated this way. It is intolerable.

If you dispute somebody’s right to feel the way they feel, you dispute their right to be an autonomous person with as much right to express themselves as you claim for yourself. You can call it love or friendship, but those things both feel much different than whatever the fuck this is.

Dr. House’s Rule 12

My friend’s therapist, John House, has a great set of 18 rules of life that make a whole lot of sense.   Rule 12 is maybe my favorite, since we see it played out over and over and over and wonder why these nasty, painful cycles continue. 

Many people are impervious to the evidence that what they are doing is causing them identical problems over and over.  It is always easier to blame others than to search your own life for your own damage’s role in ongoing bad scenes. House’s lessons apply to anyone who is trying to learn to have less pain in their life by changing reflexive habits that cause them pain over and over.  

Rule 12:   A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

At my sixtieth birthday Sekhnet threw me a party at the home of old friends.  I held forth in front of a room full of loving friends, several of whom I’m no longer in contact with.  Most of the people there I’d known since I was a teenager.  Most of the people I met back then, and kept as lifelong friends, fulfilled a psychological need for me, to be close friends with people who had many of the traits of my perplexing father.  My father had all the tools to be a great friend, he was hampered by a black and white worldview that made it impossible for him to be wrong in any conflict.   As long as I avoided conflicts with these old friends who were often similar to the old man, everything was fine, for many years.   The pattern of fatal conflict emerged over many years and I could never see it coming or understand it once it arrived.

Tensions would develop, it could be over anything, often over something dear to me, or upsetting to me.  I’d be upset because my health insurance had been illegally cancelled (this happened to me three times, including during the first full month of the pandemic).  Suddenly a friend would tell me I was overreacting, that my anger was not proportional to merely losing health coverage.  According to my friend’s argument, it was an indication of something fundamentally wrong with me, that I was so irrationally upset.  Now we had an actual conflict:  your feelings are out of line, asshole, and what about my fucking feelings?

This was a mirror of the eternal conflict with my defensive, prosecutorial father — denial of my right to feel the way I did, reframing of my feelings to make them a magnifying glass for my problems and shifting the conversation to his moral superiority in not whining about his, much worse, problems.  I’d react to these friends with patience, with a hard-won ability not to explode in anger, extending the constant benefit of the doubt that strikes me as the heart of friendship.  

For some reason, I was unable to see, until this shitshow had been repeated several times over the decades, that In a conflict with a narcissist, none of these things will help in any way, except to prolong a maddeningly insoluble impasse.  If one person in a conflict is incapable of empathy or compromise, on pain of feeling utterly humiliated, that’s all she wrote, boys and girls.

I was sixty-five when I had my first conflict with my two oldest remaining friends.  The conflict itself was supremely easy to resolve, if both parties had been able to remain open, listening, granting the other person their imperfections.  I agonized for a solid year, waking every day with the pain of this impasse boiling in my head.   It caused tremendous agony to Sekhnet as well, that I was in such pain and couldn’t see my way out of it.   I kept thinking of House’s Rule 12, since this conflict had major echoes of several others over the years.  What am I not fucking seeing here?  I kept wondering.

One day, bingo!  When someone shows you they are implacable, will not listen, no matter what, will not grant you the benefit of the doubt that you are extending to them, take notice.  When they show you that face it may be a warning of worse to come.  The second and third time makes waiting for the tenth or eleventh time an exercise in masochism.  How many times can you reassure an angry friend of your good intentions before you realize they don’t have the capacity to care about your good intentions?  Three or four unrequited attempts to make peace should suffice.

Lesson 12, in my case, when someone shows you over and over that they must win the conflict, at any cost, including the murder of your friendship, the best roll of the dice is to throw them away.  No need to agonize for a year, and extend endless chances for compromise with people who would rather kill you, and murder your good name, than admit they had ever behaved badly.

Lesson 12, when someone shows you that they are a childish asshole, believe them.  House’s rule 13 will only be of marginal use at that point:

13. People always do the best they can. If they are doing poorly, it is because they have not learned the lessons that will enable them to do better.

Some people are angrily oblivious to the lessons of their lives. And those who must win at any cost are the world’s greatest fucking losers.

The death of a 1000 cuts

The funny thing about the death of a thousand cuts is that sometimes you can be cut 980 times before you realize you’re being subjected to the death of a thousand cuts. In the end you’ll be cut to shreds, in fact, you already are, even as you’re deluded by protestations of love from the folks with the knives.

It’s like walking around with a wounded friendship, carrying it on your back with no idea that it’s already dead. And worse than dead, really, the corpse you’re hauling on your shoulders is actually a biting zombie intent on having a nice snack.

The uninterestings

The smartest woman in the room, a Harvard graduate with a successful literary agent practice who has read countless books, loved The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer.   It is the epic fifty year story of friends from summer camp, who met the summer after my closest friends and I met at summer camp, and stayed close thereafter, their lives intertwining over the decades, as, amazingly, ours had.  My two closest friends were so excited by the book that they bought me a hardcover copy, in large print, no less, a kindness to my old eyes I always appreciate.  

I began reading the book, which starts from the point of view of an insecure, working class teenager Julie, a girl who is flattered to be taken in by a group of the coolest kids at camp, who rename her Jules.  This little group, The Interestings, forms the dramatis personae for the rest of the book.  I confess, I had a hard time making progress with the book, it struck me, from the start, as profoundly uninteresting, though context may have played a large role, as I will describe.  I got the audio version from the library and listened to it, determined to hear the whole thing.

Toward the end of the book the depressive husband of Jules tells his wife that her lifelong fixation with these Interestings has always been a mystery to him.  Aside from sharing an intense bond as teenagers, what was actually so interesting about any of these interestings?  He certainly spoke for me, and I suspect, many readers.

The pretty rich girl who was the queen of this little group wound up rich and successful, and married to a billionaire.  Her brother, a charming kid much loved by the females, wound up an expatriate in France, when it became clear he might be indicted for rape.  The eccentric, creative kid who couldn’t stop drawing and making little animations, became a billionaire, which is what happens to real geniuses, I suppose.  The musician became an engineer, I.  forget what became of the rape victim, though I think she remained friends with the others.  Jules became a social worker, I think. 

We didn’t wind up talking about the book my friends of fifty years had loved so much they bought me a copy of it.  Now that I think about it, we’d rarely discussed any books we’d read in common, beyond a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  It was not terribly long after I read The Interestings before a fifty year friendship with my two closest friends was over.  That’s fairly interesting, I think.

My friend flew into a rage at me over a conflict that, were she not so angry, could have been easily resolved.  Her righteous husband forced her to apologize to me the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, traumatized that my closest female friend had glared at me with a contempt I’ve only seen from my long dead father.  This famously willful woman’s loss of control, the show of rage, and the forced apology, I now understand, were mortifying to both of my old friends. 

Although I immediately accepted her crabbed apology, which, while blaming me for the entire incident seemed nonetheless sincere and the best she could do, they couldn’t accept my apology the following day for using the fucking “f-word” in a moment of anger.  Her husband rallied to his wife’s side, telling me I had no right to expect him to understand my feelings, because he was too upset by what I’d done (the f-word!) to hear about them.  In the space of two days, it was grimly clear these lifelong friends were no longer my friends.  It took me over a year to stop agonizing and see the obvious because it all made no sense to me.

My old friend called after the hellish five days in a beautiful rented house that ended our friendship and began “wasn’t that a great vacation?”  It went quickly downhill from there.  Next stop, a month or so of silent treatment from a friend I always communicated with a couple of times a week.  Then a demand to meet, and at that meeting, his wife beside him, he began “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.”  Instead of verbally punching him in the mouth, which, in hindsight would not have been unreasonable, I reassured him of my friendship and he accepted my assurance, handed me a great book they’d bought for me.

Reading this book, some part of me must have understood the superficial aspect of the whole thing, the intimate friendship beyond question, the need to tell the same cover story, stick to the dramatic script, swallow hurt because your hurt is humiliating to someone who claims they love you like family.  And, like family, you simply have to unconditionally accept the faults of your parents, your siblings, your flawed uncles and cousins. 

The rap goes like this: being family means that nobody ever has to hear or understand why what they’ve done hurt the other family member.  Family is a sacred bond that cannot be broken, except by vicious, unforgiving, treacherously angry people falsely claiming to be hurt and who can’t let go of their childish grievances.  You understand that if I hurt you, I love you more than you are hurt, so it’s a wash and stop trying to talk about whatever you claim I did to you.  It is your problem, not mine, not the family’s, dummy up, be quiet, swallow our version of what you think happened quiescently or you’re going to be fucking sorry.  You don’t threaten the family, you fucking filthy mouthed fuck!

Interesting, maybe.  On their influencer daughter’s Substack page recently there was a long post with advice about how to endure difficult people, presumably those who intrude with strong opinions and feel they can never be wrong.  These people, she suggests, must be placed on an UNSAFE list and only dealt with when you have all of your personal matters for the day taken care of.  Funny to find myself on that list, but, yo, that’s family for yuh!  You’d have to be a reckless idiot to risk a million dollar inheritance to indulge the need for someone your family deems unsafe to have a word in your ear.

Impossible letter #2 — background

The impossible letter, I understand now, is any letter written to influence somebody who has unquestioning, unreasoning belief.  The greatest letter you can conceive will not change deeply held beliefs, unless the heart of the recipient is already inclined toward what you have to say.  It’s natural to suspect a nefarious motive when you receive an attempt to persuade you of something you’re not inclined to accept, coming from someone you’ve been warned against.   A charming, personal letter from Hitler, no matter how beautifully written, would have little chance of changing my mind about anything.

Impossible letter number two was written to my only two living blood relatives, my niece and nephew.   I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to have no response from either of them.   The back story is long and complicated, though also simple and straightforward.

The roots of this insoluble impasse to-the-death, like most things of a deadly emotional nature, are in long-ago childhood.  I have avoided writing directly about this particular tangled emotional web but at this point my need to set things out is greater than my need to be senselessly discreet.   When you’re forbidden to talk about things, and they continue to bother you, the most obvious option, for those who sit down every day to write, is to write them out.   To me clarity is a much better option than blind emotional commitment to a strong, unreasoning feeling.   If you’re like me, the impossible letter eventually begins to take shape in your head, you imagine the clear telling that will set everything straight, in a perfect world.

In the home my sister and I grew up in, our father dominated our mother.   Dad “won”, mom “lost” — she always compromised, he almost never did.  Our mother was smart, quick on her feet, funny, competent, sociable, a better driver than our father, adroit at solving mysteries, but she always deferred to her strong-willed husband during the hollering matches we had with our dinner almost every night.   She bent to whatever he needed, always took his side, out of love, loyalty, sympathy, knowing how badly he needed to be right, fear, weakness, conditioning, lack of confidence, variable self-esteem, a housewife’s expected fealty to her husband in the 1960s, some combination of all of the above.  Our father was upset almost every evening, exhausted by working two jobs and the monstrous ingratitude of his two spoiled, mean-spirited children.  He flew into a rage easily and in his rage was never without righteousness on his side.  He was rightfully known as the DU, The Dreaded Unit, my sister’s perfect name for him.

My sister paid me a great compliment once, when we were young adults.  We were sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts in south Florida.  She asked me why I wasn’t like either one of our parents.  I told her that if those were the only two options in life, to become one of our deeply damaged parents, I’d have long ago snuffed myself.  I asked her why she thought those were the only two choices.  I had no understanding then of how inexorably our childhood had marked my sister’s life, limiting her choices to modeling herself after a winner or a loser, righteous dominance or humiliating submission.

“I’m the DU,” she told me somberly, shortly after her second child was born.   She fixed me with a terribly poignant look that shook me as much as her statement.

“No, wait, that can’t be, you can’t… you have to do something about that.  You need to talk to somebody, you need to do some work, you can’t replicate what was done to us.  You don’t want to inflict that kind of damage on your children.  You can’t do that to them, come on, they’re totally innocent.   What are you going to do?  You’ve got to nip this shit in the bud.”

“Being the DU means you can’t do anything about it,” she said. 

Decades later I understand that if you are damaged enough to see the world as black and white, win or lose, pride or crushing shame, with nothing in between (compromise is weakness) you believe, in your core, that there is nothing you can do about it but get up every day and fight anyone who makes you feel bad about yourself.  My father always argued that people cannot change on any fundamental level.  

I understand now, only very recently, that it was a true statement for him.  Being the DU means you feel utterly powerless against your dreaded nature.  If you acknowledge that others can work and change some of the worst things about themselves, how humiliating that would be.   It’s almost like you’re choosing to be too weak to face whatever makes you live in a black and white world.

(part 2 to follow)

Image for a dead friendship

In hindsight, it’s often easy to see the moment when a friendship ends. The time of death can be placed pretty precisely in retrospect.

The image I had for the year I was hoping a cherished friendship was not dead was me carrying the corpse of a relationship I was desperately believing was not actually dead.

I realized just the other day that a more accurate image, in light of how relentlessly this heavy cadaver fought me to the death every time I tried to make peace, is that I was carrying a zombie who kept trying to bite me. Lovingly toting around a biting zombie. Try getting your brain around that.

Bad enough to be naive enough to carry the dead body of a beloved in hopes that maybe they’re not dead. But how much worse to carry a zombie that is actively trying to bite you the entire time?

I understand, but sorry

It’s sad, but also freeing, to understand that while somebody you care about can’t help their anger, feels they must behave as they do, their misery is also no excuse for things they do that become intolerable to you. What you can’t tolerate, you can’t tolerate.

“But if I can’t help it, it can’t be my fault!” the person might cry.

OK, but if you can’t help doing it over and over, and won’t talk about it, and I can’t stand it, I can’t help you either.

It’s as tragic as untimely death itself, but the math of it is pretty straightforward.