Category Archives: personal

Authenticity

My niece, when she was a toddler, began using the toilet to urinate.  She was hesitant to do the rest of her business there and her mother asked her why.   “It’s very dangerous!” my little niece apparently said, with great conviction.   The seriousness with which she delivered her answer made it a great laugh line in the family for many years, though we never learned what the actual danger was.   

The last Mother’s Day of my mother’s life, a week or so before she was taken to the hospice to die, was one of the saddest days I can remember.   Her daughter, my sister, had long been operating under the principle that our mother was “kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.”   The phrase harkens back to an ad for sugary cereal that ran for a while when we were kids.   The mascot, a very excitable cartoon bird, apparently a kookaburra (famous for its hysterically laughing call), went wild for the delicious cereal, bouncing off the walls and squawking “kookoo for Cocoa Puffs!” over and over as it freaked out.   Saying our mother was kookoo for Cocoa Puffs was a cute way of saying she was batshit crazy.   When my mother “lost” her wedding ring, her mother’s solid gold bracelet, the one with the little photos of our family lovingly cut out and pasted into sections of a little gold orb that opened and  expanded like an accordian, it was because she was kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.   When my mother was pissy that her daughter and grandchildren never thanked her for anything she bought them, same verdict.

During that last meal with the family, gathered around our dying mother’s kitchen table, many meaningful looks were shot behind the old woman’s back.  She’d say something and eyes would quickly roll, facial expressions would flash all around, silently and constantly, “phew, nuts, eh?”  My sister, her husband and her children were convinced of the old lady’s lost grip on reality.  She was nuts, and they humored her, if barely.In the end my mother started to cry, which they felt proved their point. 

I never found my mother to be the least bit nuts, except when she was in a situation where everyone was pretending.  That shit drove her crazy.  A week or two before she died, a new hospice nurse met her with a small group of hospice workers.  I heard them all laughing from my mother’s bedroom.  When the nurse came out, she said to me, with a big smile,  “whatever else you want to say about her, your mother is sharp as a tack.”

Meanwhile, before an early dinner on that final Mother’s Day, there had been a tense negotiation, for the hours leading up to that carefree meal, with numerous phone calls back and forth, due to a serious, ongoing suicide threat.  A door had been slammed and locked, wailing tears from within, nobody could reason with the inconsolable teenager who’d been humiliated on line, as teenagers are when their friends turn mean.   It had apparently been touch and go for a while, until finally the younger brother quietly talked his way into the room and was able to calm his sister down.   They arrived a few hours later, big smiles on all their faces, with Chinese take-out and the firm conviction that grandma was insane.   It was an excruciating experience.  A few days later a van from the hospice came and took my mother to her deathbed.

I have that same tic my mother had when faced with dishonesty, selectively poor memory, a failure to acknowledge when my feelings are hurt, an insistence that I’m crazy and the people insisting on my insanity are beyond criticism, no matter what they have to do.  After my mother’s funeral I mentioned a historical fact, someone’s prior marriage, that sent my sister into a frenzy.  She desperately made the slashing “ixnay!!! ixnay!!!” gesture across her throat to get me to stop talking.  The prior marriage was, for some reason, a humiliating secret that left my sister no choice but to lie to her daughter about it.   It upset me to be called a liar, and in my confusion I held my tongue.   The next day, when we spoke alone, my sister promised to clear things up afterwards, but put so many conditions on when and how, that it took over a year and then, she explained, the conditions were still never right.   After a year she was hurt and very angry that I still had an issue with being called a fucking liar.  A year!   My fucking insane brother only knows one thing — how to hold a fucking grudge.

My mother’s funeral was more than twelve years ago.  Now, in my sister’s mind — twelve fucking years later my brother is still upset that I inadvertently called him a fucking liar and that there was a slight delay in telling my children the demanding, judgmental asshole hadn’t lied.  Is there no statute of limitations on his insane, prosecutorial bullshit?  What about love?  What about fucking love?  My brother wouldn’t know love if it came up and lied to his face!

Call me kookoo for Cocoa Puffs, but to me love does not include a need to lie whenever necessary, a pass for all hurtful behavior, a license to do whatever you feel you need to do to someone else, whenever you feel hurt or upset, with a lifetime entitlement to unlimited, unconditional understanding, kndness and graciousness.  That’s something, we can all agree, but I’m not sure we can call it love.   

For one thing, it is a one way expectation, since the party insisting on it does not extend the same privileges of unlimited forgiveness to the other.  For another thing, without authenticity, what is there between two people?

Being authentic means being honest.  In an intimate relationship it means being honest while taking care with other people’s pain when they feel they’re not getting what they need from you.  To some people it hurts too fucking much to consider making themselves vulnerable that way.  They tend to believe that we all have our own perspective, our own reality, that nothing anyone you love says is necessarily true or false.  This essential solipsism is untouchably real to someone to whom the pain of rejection is much more terrifying than accepting that we are, on the most basic level, eternally unknowable to each other.   The price of maintaining this kind of solipsistic relationship is very high if you are so kookoo for Cocoa Puffs that you insist on difficult abstractions like honesty, apology when someone is aware they’ve hurt you and so on.   If you can’t love and forgive without conditions, they insist, you are not worth loving.

And, of course, they are completely right.  You certainly will never be able to convince them that they are not, since it is humiliating to them to ever admit being wrong or acting hurtfully.   You know them well enough to know what will make them tense up, set their faces, become cold, whenever they feel you are criticizing them.  You are prying open an unbearably painful primal wound, proceed in the face of resistance only if you want to end things.

Sometimes, even with your best efforts, relationships you love, that have long been a source of comfort and security, will end.  It can be very, very hard to move on, but sometimes it is necessary for everybody.   Sad, and true, as death itself.

Friendship?

Worth thinking about, obvious as it also is:

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   

You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain. 

You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that. 

We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

Double Standard redux

If I get mad at you, it’s because you’ve hurt me badly, have never tried to make amends and I have a good goddamned reason to be hurt and angry after months of your denial and defensiveness.  

If you get angry at me, no matter when, it’s because you are being fucking unfair and vicious, for your own sick, irrational reasons.  

What is hard to understand about any of that?  Could it be clearer?

Now, all you have to do is convince the eye witness who loves you that what they saw, what you experienced, actually happened.  Since everyone has their own perspective, aren’t we really all arguing that we’re better than the person who claims we treated them badly, that our point of view is more valid than theirs?  Isn’t everybody just equally right in their feelings?

No.  There are objective things that actually happen prior to and in the aftermath of somebody getting angry.  Focus on those, compare how each party acted.  Things that actually took place won’t lie to you, no matter how emotionally compelling a spin is placed on them.

Trauma

When someone you love acts in a way that activates trauma in you, it’s not just having your feelings hurt.  Trauma is more like being electrocuted.  Chemicals flood your body, fight, duck, flight, run, scream, crawl, what the fucking fuck?!! Help! Help!!!  But, just like when you were helpless earlier in your life, there is no help.  You are back in the exact terrifying moment, facing the  implacable violence that seared the trauma into you when you were too little to protect yourself.   Flung in a disorienting instant back to a time when you were helpless against a brutal force much more powerful than you.   The essence of trauma is that it is terrifying and you must somehow face it alone.  You can’t save yourself from it, and nobody else will either.  Trauma is in a class by itself in terms of psychic pain.

If I accidentally traumatize you by losing control of myself, and find you shaken in your soul, my apology is a first step, at best.  The apology is the beginning of the healing story, not the end. To reassure you I will have to demonstrate better self-control going forward or you will be perfectly right to find my apology worse than meaningless, my threat ongoing. 

You won’t believe my apology, you’ll recall similar angry things I’ve done to you before, particularly if I continue to tell you that any pain you claim I cause you is your own fault, every time, that I only react that way because you make me do it.  The old wife beater’s/bully’s defense, “I wish you hadn’t made me do that to you, why do you keep making me hurt you?”

We are all weak, flawed, imperfect, limited, even disabled in various ways.  Those of us who are not narcissists (who see themselves as either perfect gods or unbearably worthless pieces of shit)  or are otherwise crazy, do our best to be kind, to not do things to others that we hate done to us.  We don’t always succeed, but our goal is to be kind, to listen and reassure people we care about when they are suffering. 

If we’re damaged enough as children we face a mountain of hard work to climb out of the traumas of our past, to avoid replicating them, inflicting them on others, but many spend their lives climbing.

Some traumatized people sincerely believe that change is impossible.  In the cases I’m familiar with it is the immenseness of their pain that convinced them of the impossibility of change. 

None of us are good at sitting with painful feelings.  Without sitting with pain, looking at it carefully, we have no hope of learning how to proceed, outside of keeping busy all the time, running, hopping, jumping, doing anything to avoid being alone with our feelings.  Many people in pain, who have the money, seek a good therapist to help them through the difficult challenge of developing the insight to change harmful behaviors.  A good therapist is a great comfort.

Others just want peace, and calm, and people to accept them exactly as they are, unfixable flaws and all.  And it is also true, if you can’t accept somebody’s weakness, you really can’t be friends with them. Those same people who need unconditional acceptance of their flaws are often very judgmental, have unshakable, harsh opinions of others and are experts at denying or justifying even the most cruel things they may do.  When confronted they will say whatever they need to say in the moment to defend themselves, telling lies they may contradict a moment later in their desperation to avoid feeling blame for acts they may be ashamed of.   They may tell you they were mistaken, that they can’t help it, both understandable human frailties, and that you are being cruel to them, that they simply need to be loved without conditions.

Anger is probably a human’s hardest emotion, up there with grief and fear.  It leads to insensitivity, nastiness, beatings, lynching, mass murder.  Anger is also inevitable when, however patient you try to remain, there is no mercy shown, no understanding given, no acknowledgement of your right to feel hurt by thoughtless treatment.  “You hurt me, too, asshole, what makes that OK?,” is not a recipe for reconciliation.  That kind of response may cause you to raise your voice, say something mean, get ready to fight, no matter how much you may cling to trying to remain mild.  When we are hurt, we need reassurance. If we get stern insistence that we are wrong to be hurt, to need to talk about it, it is the opposite of reassuring.

But some people can’t help themselves.  They may feel bad, on some level, but they are truly unable to resist redoubling the old beating when somebody appeals for their mercy by making themselves vulnerable.  Vulnerability is their worst nightmare.  No mercy for weak, vulnerable, fragile bitches!   Nothing scares someone who is terrified of being vulnerable more than somebody laying their heart bare to them. 

Here is therapist Bessel van der Kolk, with a succinct, insightful description of trauma.

Narcissism is fueled by humiliation

To understand how delicate bragging, strutting narcissists are as they advertise their unique greatness, you have to consider that their stilted worldview is an attempt to escape the unbearable pain of a crushing sense of their worthlessness.

If you have a burning sense of inferiority you must construct the facade of a superman, just to survive. Pick at this facade at your own risk, losers!

Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t

If you find yourself locked in a titanic battle of wills, remember one fact:  there is no way to resolve that kind of impasse with logical discussion, no matter how calmly you get yourself to proceed.  Will, once inflamed, is not amenable to compromise, facts, persuasion, the observable law of cause and effect, the consensus of most calm, disinterested people in the world. This kind of showdown is famously phrased as “my way or the highway.”  The best you can do, when confronted with another person’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge they’ve hurt you, is hit the road.

If we are not in a do-or-die war of wills, and we find ourselves suddenly and confusingly at odds, we can talk.   A conversation can reveal that there may have been a misunderstanding, something taken out of context, a disorienting echo of past trauma that made us act badly, something we can later understand clearly was wrong of us to do, hurtful, causing damage.  After a good talk, we can make amends, agree to be aware of what caused our conflict and try not to hurt each other as we have. 

In a war of wills, all that is beside the point.  The need to win justifies victory by any means necessary.  This kind of fight is a desperate struggle to the death.  Remember that willful people are deeply damaged, so badly hurt that they’re incapable of acknowledging they could ever hurt anybody else.  They are always the victim.

We see it in our politics, of course, and it trickles down to almost all of us in this litigious, zero-sum culture where for every “winner” there are ten million losers.  If you are terrified of being a “loser” (an absurd and deadly construct, we should note ), there is no limit to what you will do to try to win.  If you don’t win, you will scream bloody murder (in my grandmother’s great phrase).   The game was rigged, you were cheated, everybody else is a fucking liar, weak, traitorous, stupid, a puppet, sick, dangerous, a monster!   This enraged outburst is the reaction of a “Terrible Two” year-old, a child just discovering that they won’t always get their way and fucking inconsolable about it.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as the saying goes.  If you want something badly enough, you can often find a way to get it.  Where there’s a will, there’s a won’t — in every battle of wills.  You say it was this way, I say no it wasn’t.  You say you were hurt, I say no you weren’t.  You say you have a recording of me saying what I now deny saying — I say you wore a wire on me, you fucking fuck!   If facts, actual events, cause and effect, how most people not involved in your conflict would feel, are all dismissed as the Devil quoting scripture to win an argument, my best advice to you, friend, after every good faith attempt to make peace shows you only the implacable face of war: hit the road, Jack.

Think, write, feel better

A friend once called me at 2:45 a.m. to tell me he’d received a note from me in the mail that made him very upset. I was upset to be called at that hour by an upset friend who couldn’t wait until the next day to cry to me about how upset he was. 

You have a right to wonder what kind of sick friendships I keep, but this guy and I have been very close friends for forty years or more, helped each other many times over the years.  He’s going through some hard times recently, has trouble facing his anger and how trapped he probably feels.   

So I didn’t tell him to fucking fuck off with his upset, I tried to help him out at 3 a.m.  I didn’t respond with anger, I responded with Reason.  When he complained that, unlike him, I have plenty of time to think, and write, and rewrite, I didn’t say anything mean about a life where even having time to think is impossibly hard.  I asked a question.

“Was there anything unfair, inaccurate or even unkind in what I wrote to you?”   The subject of my note was the crucial things I am suddenly not allowed to talk about without him getting mad.   He was too upset to answer.   

I was able to remain patient.  When we got off the phone I found my body poised to fight, I was wide awake, hyper awake.  Finding myself unable to sleep, my temper eventually exploded that this inconsiderate call — expressing hurt that I am not allowed to express under the sick new rules of our old friendship — had left me holding a bag of flaming dog shit, destroying a night’s sleep on the eve of a trip when I needed to be up early every day.  I vowed never a-fucking-gain.  I texted him “do not call after midnight unless previously arranged” and he quickly agreed.

Here’s what I want to point out, though.   No matter how insane somebody’s demands are, if you care about the person, you can put aside the insanity of the demand, respond as calmly as you can, and continue to think things through.  Thinking will not fix anything, though it will lead you to understand your situation as clearly as possible.  Then, as I always do, you sit down to write.  

This is the best practice I know for working through extremely difficult emotions.  Put them clearly in order on a page.  Read them over.  Clarify anything that is unclear.  This process leads you to removing excess anger, provocative comments, snideness, not having to assemble all the proof of your case.  You don’t need all the proof of your case.  You need just enough to make your point in a way that has a chance to sink into someone stubbornly insisting they are right and you’re wrong.  When you read the final product, you will feel a little better.

While writing I can put aside the righteous notion that I’d be completely within my rights to tell an old friend who is suddenly behaving like an impulsive, angry, solipcistic child to fuck off.  There is also something deeper at stake.   Part of it is affirming the value of patience, compassion and the truth in resolving conflict with people you care about.

If you encounter a year of sustained denial, reframing, anger, blame, threats, silence, doubling down on an irrational zero-sum war created by anger and fear, justifications, excuses, gaslighting, selective amnesia, etc. most people would not blame you if you just went silent.  Silence is the instant cure for all of that shit, unless you care.  If you care, silence will continue to bother you, because the impossibly unfair situation you’ve been placed in by someone else’s weakness will keep gnawing at you.

You can always walk away from people who behave like self-pitying, angry children with no ability to empathize with anyone else.  If walking away is difficult, you can also think, write, clarify.

In the end you come to a baseline of true things you will not fight about, will not compromise over.  Setting out this baseline is important, and writing it down, I’ve found, is very helpful.  If you can agree that you unfairly blamed me for things that were not strictly my fault, that my reactions were not unreasonable, unfair or mean, we have the first step on a long road back.

My upset old friend sent me an email about hiring a professional to help us (me, his wife, Sekhnet) resolve our estrangement.  His email was efficient, vague and hopeful.  Mine requested clarification about what he hoped a mediator could do for us, since I was not seeing an issue a mediator could broker a compromise to fix.  His reply was vague but hopeful.  He thought the mediator might help us answer questions like “how can we talk to each other without making each other angry?”  I brought up, in three or four paragraphs, the compelling reasons I am just about out of hope for fixing things, unless he (and his wife) are prepared to admit that they are having a hard time with their anger.   

I understand anger as well as I understand anything.  It is a difficult emotion, it makes us feel righteous doing godawful things to each other.  Anger can become humiliating afterwards if not immediately justified, the justification desperately clung to. I was raised in a home of sudden, implacable anger, rage was common, it was a fight to the death every night.  I know few things as well as I know anger.  

I know the first thing to learn about anger is how to control it in yourself when it begins to spark into a bonfire. The second is how to make amends after you hurt someone with anger.   I also know that in situations where the other party takes no responsibility for angry interactions, often the only thing to do is get out of that situation.

Not everyone is capable of introspection, sadly.  Self-criticism is very hard to practice.  I get this.  At the same time, if you have a problem and need to blame me for your inability to do better, you know, I can say this as politely as possible, but fucking fuck off.   Or do some work, on your own troubled life and stop blaming people who are already exhibiting tremendous patience under great pressure that you have created, as you keep denying that anything is fundamentally broken, that the entire problem is the fault of the one exerting himself to not tell you to fuck off.

You know what I’m saying?

Complying with unreasonable demands

Sometimes you will be confronted with unreasonable demands from others.  People at times set conditions for relationships that are grimly unfair:  whenever I’m upset with you, I get to confront you immediately; you have to patiently respect my right not to deal with your hurt until some time far in the future.   I cannot be patient when I’m in great pain, you must always be patient and calm with me when you think I hurt you.   Shit like that.

You can say these kinds of conditions are endgame scenarios, they are imposed when everything is so fucked up betwen people that all they have left is their reflex to defend themselves at all costs.   I wouldn’t argue.  In a mutually empathetic relationship you will not encounter these kinds of unreasonable asymmetries.   They arise from long held grievance, which accrues until the weight of it becomes unbearable to one party, who then feels compelled to inflict it on the other party.

These childish conditions are imposed in an unthinking attempt to make things right, somehow.  Everything harmful that I do is purely unintended, a mistake, forgivable human weakness, for godsake, and everything bad that you do flows from your disrespect, malice and sadism.

“You are a reflexive sadist, I realize you can’t help being a sadist, probably, but that is your default setting for treating others, or at least for treating me.  You’re aggressive, threatening and mean as a goddamned snake.”  If you have a productive response for that, one that will change the view of the speaker, you’re more inventive than I am.  When someone frames things to me that way, in stunning black and white, it’s time to move to the next car.

I have a friend who listens patiently to my horror stories.  He is sympathetic, offers whatever insight he might have, tells me a related story from his own life.  That is truly all a friend can do when we are up against it, listen, relate, offer his best ideas.  Our need to vent sometimes has us persist, once a friend has done all these things.  At that point my friend would nip that shit instantly with a simple “wee, wee, wee!”, said in a mocking, singsong cadence reminiscent of a crying cartoon baby, or piglet.

“Wee wee wee!” is a great, shorthand evocation of this kind of childish need to insist, beyond the limits of all reasonable conversation.  It makes me laugh, snaps me out of it, as I realize I’m now behaving like a fucking giant baby — and that I don’t have to.

Death during life

The finality of death is a crushing thing.  A cherished conversation ended, forever.   The chance to fix a once-precious, broken thing, irretrievably gone.  Traces of the little quirks that endear us to each other remain, remembered fleetingly, painfully at first.  Death reduces the dead person to the memories of those who loved her.  That we all must go there is little consolation, it’s the opposite of consolation, really.

Death during life?  That is the death we decree on others who have crossed a painful line too many times to endure.  “You’re fucking dead to me” is the cry of pain we direct at those who prove over and over that they will not yield, for any reason.  Once they are dead to you, of course, the painful dilemma — trying to unilaterally resolve things you cannot resolve to save a relationship that is already dead — is over.  The gangrenous foot is surgically removed, a prosthetic foot is attached and, after a short period of rehab, you walk better than you have in a long time.

I think most people have experienced this addition by subtraction, the relief it produces to finally not force yourself to bang your head against an immovable object,  a locked door, an adamant refusal to acknowledge hurt a loved one cannot personally feel. Your hurt reduced to peevish triviality when weighed against their own pain and anger.

I recall the wonderful feeling of lightness, waking with a great weight removed from my shoulders, neck and head, after an unusually good night’s sleep, when I have finally told someone turned monstrous to get out of my fucking face.

Whenever I’ve found myself being bullied by an old friend, given an ultimatum, held responsible for their pain and inability to behave reasonably, urged that only denial will solve what is bedevilling my sleep, the only relief, in the end, is removing myself from the situation.   You win, I lose.  I take myself off the chess board.  You are absolutely right, have a nice day and a very nice life.  It can be done politely, if you want, but the finality of it, when that moment comes, is also unmistakably clear.

I am dead to them while still alive.  Their pride will prevent them from reaching out, no matter how painful my death during life may be for them.  I have rejected their version of love, after all, an unforgivable thing for a dear friend to do.  In a case where I reached out after several years of estrangement, my old friend, although delighted and relieved to hear from me, was unable to reach back, being too neurotic to resume the friendship he claimed to value above all others. I don’t take it personally, it’s not about me, intimacy is not in his skill set.

Though it’s a very painful thing, there are worse tragedies than death during life.  Few relationships live forever.  People change, come to value different things.  People grow apart in their beliefs and their needs from others.  Understanding is not the universal coin of human affairs and love is not a magical balm that can heal things we can never touch or understand.  We are “wise apes” and we do the best we can in a violent and largely irrational world.  Sometimes we resort to cannibalism.  What else can you do when the place you used to live is now under the sea and you and your twenty million neighbors are on the move with nothing but the dead to eat?

The cost of lying

A lie can cover shame, sure.  It’s done all the time.   We can tell lies we can argue aren’t actually lies, they are just ways of sparing some pain, to ourselves or others.   There are gradations in lying, too.   We can lie in a way that is, arguably, basically truthful.  We can leave out just one key detail, more or less accidentally, and satisfy ourselves that this small omission was completely justified.  Without that troubling detail, the rest of the story makes more or less complete sense, so what is the harm of the “lie”?

Because we now live in a culture where a lie, unless told under oath and punishment for perjury is actually pursued, is no longer a big deal.  So, I lied, so what?  I wasn’t under oath, only loser chumps take an oath not to lie.  Everybody lies, and you’re lying if you don’t think you’re a fucking liar too.  And if you don’t lie, you take the fucking Fifth, like a man.

The analysis is fine, as far as it goes, which is not far at all.   When you accept a lie you choose your poison.  

Why is the United States poised for an era of stochastic terrorism, angry, unbalanced men, rabid lone wolves, poised to do deadly violence to themselves and others, always ready to be triggered by an angry suggestion that this person or that is deserving of death? [1]  

Because the widely accepted lie that one party is run by demented, murderous, child-raping Communist blood-drinkers is as accepted (among a solid 30% of Americans)  as the one that Blacks are irrationally angry about nothing, that Jews are about to replace all “white” “legacy” Americans with brown dupes, that elections lost by your candidate are rigged by these all-powerful Commie traitors, etc.  If you are angry, and alone, and everyone else in your social media silo also faithfully believes these demonstrable lies are true, and you have lost faith in everything else, and an assault weapon is legal and readily available in your state, why on earth wouldn’t you take out some of these demonic scum in your heroic last act on earth?

What is the cost of accepting a lie, being faithful to defending a lie to the death?   It costs you your integrity, your authenticity, your credibility. It also costs the ability to ever solve a problem or conflict based on what actually caused the problem or conflict.

As in politics, so in our personal lives.   If saying something that is true enrages or humiliates someone you know, you tactfully avoid the topic.  Some topics are easier to avoid than others.  If it is a shameful single event, unrelated to anything else, that you both acknowledge is mutually painful and worth avoiding, it’s reasonable to agree to not bring it up anymore.  If the topic is honesty itself, that’s a tough bridge to cross with your relationship intact. 

“Uh, OK, we can’t talk about why it’s better to be honest than dishonest, OK, let me try to remember never to say anything that might bring up that flaming bag of shit.  Honesty is overrated, LOL!”

To me, the cost of my integrity, authenticity and credibility is too high a price to pay, in most situations.  Then again, I have a lifelong issue in that regard.  Life itself, making a living, often requires limiting the scope of one’s integrity, authenticity and even credibility, in the name of going along to get along.  Too much insistence on a right to be whole, and treated by others with the same care you give to them, can make you as welcome as an agitated scorpion at a baby shower.

On the other hand, if you are honest, you will understand that the price of lying is almost always unacceptable.

If we don’t trust each other, what kind of love do we have between us? What kind of savage world do we live in?

[1]  Walking neo-Nazi pustule Steve Bannon called for the death of Anthony Fauci, and his family, on his podcast the other day. Free Speech, bitches.  First Amendment, you fucking blood-drinking Fauciist cucks!