Toxicity

**** I wrote this in 2012.  It’s been in a drafts folder.  I don’t feel like tweaking it, I’m just going to post it – this was from, I believe, my time with Michael. ****

 

I need to contemplate on this.  For a long time I have… held myself to certain perceptions that if I’m a “good person” then I will behave in certain ways.  Because other people stood by me through rough times, if I didn’t do it for someone else, I’d be a lousy human being…

I skyped K tonight and actually burst into tears.  I hate that!  I never do that!  I was trying to be all “stiff upper lip” and all that bullshit.  Especially because I knew he’d do exactly what he did… they came up here.

I was sobbing out this stupidity, the doubts, all the crap that keeps being dumped on me by people I wish would leave me the fuck alone…  It’s like they see a dying animal and run for the rock salt to get a little extra rubbed in those wounds before the show is over…

I don’t know why people have that need…  Actually, I probably do know because I just explained it (under different circumstances) to another friend the other night…  It’s very human, isn’t it?  Making someone else suffer, shoving them under your boot, making them less than you… it gives you a little boost when you’re usually the one feeling subjugated, doesn’t it?  People who feel good about themselves don’t really seem to need to jump at any chance to kick someone who is down…  It’s people who usually feel that they are the ones being kicked by life who are the first to pile on someone else’s pain…

I know all this.  I learned it years and years ago in sociology.  I don’t know why it surprises me.  I don’t know why it angers me or why I let it hurt me.  I can intellectually look at it and say… “They’re like children who get beaten at home so they go to school and beat on someone smaller than them…”  They are weak, and scared, and pathetic.  So why does it make me so angry?  Why do I even let their words touch me?  Why can’t I just call them what they are… powerless and grabbing some bullying where they can find it…  That’s all it is… that’s all they are…  I know it, but I still let them hurt me.

I’m starting to recognize a pattern in my life.  Maybe that’s my one lesson of the day…  It doesn’t matter how “right” it is to do something, to stand by someone, to put up with someone’s abuses because they just can’t help themselves… it doesn’t matter how “noble” it is… the toxicity will eventually soak into me and turn me into someone I hate.

I keep thinking I owe the world something… I have had so many good people in my life, people who stood by me through all of my own crap, and it was some pretty horrible crap… and somehow they all stood by me…  So I feel like I have some karmic obligation to stand by other people, no matter how horribly they act towards me.  I have so many rules in my head!  “I have to be noble.  I have to repay my karmic debts.  I have to do this.  I have to do that.”  And if I ever fail at any of these infinite rules I have in my head, I think, “I’m a failure, I’m selfish, I’m immature, I’m weak, I’m greedy…” for not wanting to be abused…

That doesn’t make sense.

But I think it.  Round and round, convincing myself to swallow this poison over and over and telling myself I’m being noble…

So I sobbed this all out to K and J tonight…  They understand.  They stood by me and loved me and… put up with me…  through all of my sickness, through all of my acting out, all through my teenage years, well,  K anyway… He  didn’t meet J until I was in college… But J got plenty of it too.  I wasn’t even diagnosed until I was 22, and then they couldn’t get the meds right… not for years.. not ever, really.  I’m as stable, more so, now using diet and exercise and vitamins as I ever was on meds, and that’s when the meds were working well!  They just never worked the way they were supposed to.

So these two men, they have been my friends, they have loved me, they have held me, they have… stood up to me, held me down, smacked my ass on occasion… and sometimes simply sat and refused to respond to my raving with anything more than “I love you…”

I have been a demon.  I have been a beast with gnashing teeth and slashing claws and over and over they waded in and opened their arms and took me to their hearts… teeth and claws and all… they loved me.  The worse I acted the more they loved me.  And I don’t really know why…

So many times in our years I remember sitting on the floor, in any number of apartments I’ve lived in… sitting on the floor and saying “You hate me.  You hate me.  Just leave.  You should leave.  I’m poison.  I’m toxic.  Why won’t you let me just drown and die in my own horribleness?  Why won’t you leave me?  Why won’t you save yourself and fucking leave?”  And K sitting on the floor responding to every curse, every accusation, every question with nothing but, “I love you.”  Again and again…  He never gave up on me.  Never even bothered to discuss it with me.  It was like he was a rock and I was a stormy ocean bashing myself against him, raging but impotent against his placid face, his sad little smile and, “I love you.  I love you.  I love you.”

D is T’s partner.  Was…  T had bipolar, too.  Worse than mine.  And even with the meds, they couldn’t control his symptoms either.  And D… had his own way but… equally grounded, solid, unaffected by the battering when T would rage…  He wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t engage, just stood, just listened, took things away before T could throw them and then listened and stood and listened…until the storm passed.

And always, with K for me, with D for T… the storm would pass and the water would slowly run off, and the ocean would smooth and the rock was still standing, unmarked.  I never understood how that could happen…  How they could be unaffected…  How they could love with such open hearts and not be mortally wounded standing naked against our rage…

But they were.

I felt that… I owe the same to others.  I owe others as much as I have been given…  And I try.  Again and again…  I put myself in situations telling myself, “I’m being a good person…”  And I try.  And I can take it for a while, and I tell myself that my heart is fine, that the waves shed off of me, that I’m not bleeding from every harsh word, and even just the indifferent, stupid ones…  Damaged people can be really insular, they don’t think outside of their own feelings…they can’t…just living inside their own heads is more than they can handle.  To try to see through someone else’s eyes is an impossible expectation.  I tell myself this, and I tell myself that the hurts don’t matter, that I’m mature, that I can take it, but I’m lying to myself, because I don’t want to admit that I’m so selfish that I can’t give back the most precious gifts that have been given to me.

And over and over I will put myself in these positions… and after a few months… maybe six, maybe ten… I think I survived my last caretaker position for almost a year… but eventually I stop being able to smile and say, “It’s okay, s/he doesn’t mean it, s/he isn’t capable of more/better.”  I take it on myself and into my heart like I’m an endless storage chest that can store up wounds forever and never bleed to death.

But eventually I can’t smile anymore.  I start getting angry.  I start getting resentful.  I start getting bitter.  My temper starts riding just under the surface…  And the more it happens the more angry I get with myself for not being “better.”  If I was a “good person” I wouldn’t let this get to me.  If I was a “good person” I could take this forever, if I was a “good person” this would just roll off my back…  So I fight my own anger, I fight my resentment, I hate myself for it which… does nothing to dissolve it, just makes it stronger, adds more heat to it until eventually things start turning bad.  I start turning into a horrible person.  And then I HATE myself…  And other people start giving me the, “You’re too impatient with so and so, you know s/he can’t help it…  You should be more patient/more kind/more tolerant.”  Of course this is from people who don’t have to live in the damn situation every day, I love judgment from those people.

I start getting resentful of the entire situation, and the fact that I went into it willingly… that I chose it… that I cheerfully said, “I can handle this…” nobody forced me or lied to me or misrepresented what I’d be taking on…  I went into it with my eyes open, I can’t start calling it unfair now…  months down the road…  What kind of person does that make me?

So I am angry and resentful, and angry and resentful at myself for being angry and resentful, and my patience, my goodness, my honor, my integrity, anything I consider of value in myself… it all gets pushed back into nooks and crannies and all I am is angry… all of the time…  I start getting irrational…  I get angry about the way someone does their hair.  I get angry that the hair pick is pink, who needs a bloody pink comb?  What a stupid color!  I get angry at the way a person chews their food, wipes their mouth, drinks their water… It becomes madness.  Insanity.  Irrational.  I hate them for the situation I’m in…  Even though I was the one that chose it…  I blame them for being who they are… difficult, impossible, inconsiderate, selfish, stubborn, intolerant…  Even though I knew about those very qualities when I walked in the door…

I cried to K and J tonight… about how I can’t be like them.  I can’t be a rock that weathers the storms and comes up smiling and unaffected… I’m not as strong as them, not as good as them… They both look at me both sad and bemused…

K says, “You DO.  Every day.”

I shake my head and lift my hands, filling my lungs, ready to launch into another tirade against my own moral fiber, but K makes a sharp clicking sound with his tongue and continues.

“What was that boy…” he gestures vaguely at his forehead looking to J to support his memory…  J looks confused for a moment then opens his mouth in a silent “oh” and signs a few words to me… “Remember the one, the boy…” he makes a gesture to his forehead…

I know who they are talking about.  I had never given them the name or enough information to identify him, but they knew a few details…  The one who had been kicked from four schools before coming to ours, the one who chewed through staff members like a buzzsaw through pine…  The one who’d met an immovable wall in me and who threw himself against it for a few days and then transformed, as if by magic spell, into a… halfway… agreeable child.

K is signing other things now… describing other children… other situations…  The list gets longer and longer…

I know what he’s trying to do, but I’m determined to hold onto my point… “That’s different…”

“Why?”  Unplanned, they both sign it simultaneously, looking at me with challenging eyebrow raises. (I think they’ve been together too long…)

“Because those are children, that’s different…”

J doesn’t answer, K signs “Why?” again.

“Because they’re children!”

They both start to sign at once and there is a moment of polite negotiation then K starts again.  He makes his daughter’s name sign and says when she was a teenager, J had to handle the discipline when she got into trouble (often and serious) because K and she butted heads and she pushed his buttons and he couldn’t be calm and rational dealing with her during those several particularly difficult years.

I had known this, but it hadn’t occurred to me to draw the association.  K is saying, “It’s personality, it’s situation… we were” he makes a sign for best-friends “when she was little, she turned thirteen and she became impossible,” he pantomimes grinding his teeth, pulling his hair, his eyes wide and rolling in exaggerated frustration (or maybe not exaggerated, J is only nodding solemnly as he watches the description).  “J could stay calm and cool and manage the situation no matter how she acted.  So,” he mimes handing something from his own lap to J and brushes his hands in three swift movements.  J’s lips twitch, but he nods.  K continues, “Different personalities, she was the same, J didn’t get affected like me.”  He shrugs as if this is just a simple fact of the universe.  And maybe it is.

J begins signing now, smoothly picking up the thread from K.  “You are skilled with children, you work with disabilities and disadvantages every day that many people wouldn’t be able to handle… or they’d do it for a while and eventually they’d burn out because it would get to them, every day, working with these kids.  You…”  He signs a rock being battered by crashing waves… then the water trickling away and the rock unaffected.

I have stopped crying and realize they are making sense and I feel perversely unhappy about it and try to pick up the thread of my anger.  “Great, so I just have to marry a disabled, disadvantaged eight-year-old…”  I roll my eyes and turn my eyes away from them and K thumps his sole hard on the wooden floor, annoyed, I know, by the deliberate break of eye contact (a slightly childish gesture on my part, but I’m for some reason set on self-destruction…)  I pull my gaze back to him, holding onto my scowl, and it strikes me that I feel uncomfortably close to replicating his daughter’s standard teenaged expression.

K looks irritated but J is smiling.  K signs, his hands moving more sharply with his annoyance, “No, you work with the difficult children, you date easy men.”

Easy and promiscuous are synonyms in English, but not in ASL.  K’s English much less fluent than J’s doesn’t catch the double entendre, and glances curiously at J when both he and I smile.