Borderline assholes…Kurt Cobain…boundaries and hurt
I’m behind, with a few of these to get caught up on. An intense few days.
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Trigger warning: suicide (not me! but I talk about Kurt Cobain) & assholes/abuse.–I’m not joking around with this warning. SERIOUSLY consider not reading this. Message me if you read this and feel yucky. I am not a mental health care professional. I’m going to talk about this stuff anyway. Please take care of yourself FIRST, regardless of how you feel about yourself.
This one makes me feel icky to write, but I know where that feeling comes from, so I’m going to write it anyway.
I’m going to talk about assholes a lot; to me, an asshole is someone without a sense of consciousness. They don’t have a sense that other people matter, but that’s almost beside the point. They don’t have a sense that their past actions have future consequences. They don’t even seem to have a sense that their past or future selves are THEM.
I believe assholes hurt people because they don’t believe that people, as ongoing consciousnesses with persistent thoughts and feelings, exist. I believe they hurt themselves first and worst, without really knowing it. To the extent that I believe in hell, they are in it, always, but will never know it.
If you’ve heard me talk about borderline assholes, I’m not talking about anyone with borderline personality disorder. I don’t really understand what that is. I’m talking about people who sometimes are assholes, and who sometimes are not. If I talk about “bringing someone across the line,” it’s because borderline assholes are people who recognize that they have issues and WANT to be better, but need extra love and care in order to stay on the non-asshole side of the line, to stay conscious of themselves and others. When shit gets bad for them, they lose awareness.
I believe some people are assholes by choice, birth, and/or unfortunate circumstances and will never be self-aware enough to see, let alone change, their behavior, no matter how much love and care they get. I believe assholes deserve love and compassion, but I also know I don’t have the strength to handle assholes except at arm’s length. I am too vulnerable to getting dragged into darkness and numbness.
I believe many people are borderline assholes, constantly in battle over which side they’re gonna fall on, and compassion (with boundaries) is an excellent way to handle them. I tend to like this type of person, often quite a bit. But I like them *much* better on the non-asshole side of the line.
People who have seen the darkness within (often darkness that comes from trauma), know how hard it is to be fully human, who have chosen to be kind and gentle in spite of everything (but can pull on that darkness when they need it): you all are my jam. I think you’re amazing. “I’m at least partly an asshole, and every day that I don’t lose to that part of me is a good day.”
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I like and love a lot of people with flaws. Not “everyone has flaws” flaws. Not “everyone has mental health issues in a sick society” flaws. Not “some people can see the good in anyone” flaws. Even though I’m essentially a good person, I grew up with some extremely dark elements in my personality, and those same elements came out far more strongly in many members of the extended family around me on both sides. Some of the people I loved best as a kid turned out to be fundamentally bad people, both in that their actions were unquestionably evil and that they were bad at being human. Even the transcendentally good members of both families could be downright fucked in the head, casually cruel, and obliviously bigoted. I learned to tolerate bad shit from a young age. I know other people who have had it worse, too; I resonate with their battles.
So.
On the one hand there are certain things I do because I feel like I need to constantly work my ass off to get my soul back from the ways my extended family sold it to various shitty idols, like racism and praying for the end of the world and the eternal suffering of all unbelievers.
On the other hand, I have a hard time getting to know “nice” people and feel safer around obviously flawed people, because I feel like I know what flaws I’m getting into. I always feel like “nice” people are hiding something from me. I have learned to love “nice” people; they do hide things, but usually it’s “I didn’t want to burden you with the ugly parts of me.” Which I think is silly but adorable. I, too, have been a “nice” person, though, and have kept myself bottled up for a long time, so it’s kind of hypocritical of me to feel that way.
C’est la guerre.
Making friends with flawed people is awesome. Flawed people are more interesting; they are unique, slow-cooked flavors in a fast-food society; they are Non-Compliant. (Bitch Planet!) They have interesting experiences. They didn’t follow the path they were supposed to. They don’t say or do things I can predict, which delights me.
It’s also dangerous to make friends with flawed people; I’ve been stalked almost my entire life, with one fairly major incident per year at a minimum. I have mostly learned how to see these coming and extricate myself before the other person hits a tipping point. Or maybe I’ve learned to extricate myself just after the other person hits a tipping point, but before they’ve invested too many spoons and can’t back down. I’m not sure.
But because I’m both attracted to and regularly harmed or endangered by flawed people, and because I’m a creative type, I’m come to identify that the main question I have to address in my life, and a lot of what I have to provide as an artist (rather than as a craftsperson in the arts) is about assholes.
How do you identify an asshole? At what point does a person with flaws become an asshole? How do you know if YOU are the asshole? What should you do about assholes, if you aren’t one? Or if you are? What’s the point, if there will always be assholes? And so on.
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Here’s an example of how I think about these things. Let me apologize in advance; this is REALLY going to piss some people off. It’s arrogant; it makes assumptions and may be completely unwarranted, given that I don’t know all the facts. And it might REALLY fuck you up if you have depression.
Please skip down to the next set of … if you want to skip the example.
I’m listening to Nirvana’s “You Know You’re Right” on loop. I love this song. But it’s an asshole song and an asshole wrote it. I firmly believe Kurt Cobain killed himself because his various asshole tendencies finally got away from him, not despite the fact that he was successful and had a wife and kid, but because of those things. I believe he died because he wanted to hurt his family, wanted to hurt everyone around him, wanted to hurt his bandmates and his fans, blamed his problems on others because he couldn’t stand to face them within himself. I believe he felt trapped in a persona that he could no longer maintain.
Those of us who have loved assholes know this trick and we know it well:
If you don’t do what I want, I’ll kill myself.
Not:
I hurt so bad that I can’t cope, and I have suicidal ideation, and it hurts worse to live. (This is a cry for help, or at least a cry of pain.)
But:
I want to hurt you and I don’t care if I have to hurt myself to do it. This is your fault, because you hurt me first–you didn’t do what I wanted you to do or you said no, and that’s offensive to me.
Usually, *usually,* these “If you don’t do what I want I’ll kill myself” things are more or less bullshit. They’re a test to see if you’ll tolerate abuse. The energy you put into “saving” someone who was never at risk is a marker of how much energy you’ll put into trying to create a narrative where the person hurting you is *just* a flawed, troubled soul who deserves compassion. I’ve had multiple people pull this one on me; none of them are dead.
But then there’s someone like Kurt Cobain.
Interesting guy. Super talented. Charming. Loved by many. Lots of mental health issues. Deserving of kindness, love, and compassion. And dead, in my opinion, because he was an asshole and backed himself into a corner where he would have rather been dead than admit he was was wrong or needed to change. I believed he lived in a hell that got worse the more successful and “known” he became.
Another trick those of us who have loved assholes know: the sarcastic apology, flung out as a guilt trip, as a way to hurt the other person. The entire song is an example of this.
Great song. Mean, though.
Many people are flawed, troubled souls who deserve compassion but aren’t full-blown assholes; however, those of us who get glimpses of our own dark sides often see ourselves as assholes. We crave compassion and understanding. We feel like we won’t get that compassion unless we first are able to offer it to other people. That’s bullshit, but that’s also a ramble for another day.
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A couple of months ago, I decided I was no longer going to take certain actions to keep people in my life:
–I wasn’t going to do all the work of maintaining the relationship.
–I wasn’t going to tolerate other people lashing out at me because they were in bad moods or under stress. (I’d return later, but I wouldn’t stay and take it, even though I’m strong enough.)
–I wasn’t going to pretend that people couldn’t hurt me, or that they hadn’t hurt me in the past.
–I wasn’t going to continue a conversation where my thoughts and opinions didn’t matter, except in cases where I understood the other person to be in pain and I had volunteered my services to keep them company.
–I wasn’t going to continue a relationship where I set a boundary and the other person or people reacted as if I had deeply offended them by doing so. Mistakes are okay. Not apologizing is okay, if it goes with changed behavior. Figuring out mutual boundaries is okay, negotiating “if this then that” is okay. But taking offense at the boundary is not.
–I wasn’t going to tolerate racism or sexism or other bigotry as I could identify it, but I also wasn’t going to try to “fix” the other person. I would speak my truth and let them respond however they wanted.
–I will no longer bend over backwards to bring borderline assholes across the line, that is, I will not violate my boundaries willy-nilly in order to “save” someone. This one gets tricky, but usually where it gets tricky is when I think I “should” do something instead of following my gut instinct. I’m only just now learning how to be aware of gut instincts, though, so that’s probably not surprising.
I decided I wanted to do those things so I could take more risks around people, instead of just assuming that people didn’t care, didn’t want me to be around, found my company to be a burden, or that I was just fundamentally bad at being a friend.–I am not those things, but I’d heard them so often from assholes that I assumed them to be true. I was so flawed that only they could “understand” or “love” me. Also not true.
I knew I would lose people I cared about by setting boundaries. I *knew* it. I *knew* I would feel shitty about it.
I lost someone I love yesterday. I feel shitty. I feel like I failed them. But I will not bend over backward to bring them back over the line. They are used to me doing so; they are used to me using infinite care and compassion in handling them, no matter what they say to me or how poisonous it is or even how it attacks me specifically as a writer. They are also used to me ghosting them when I can’t take it anymore.
This time, I didn’t ghost them. I drew the boundary, drew it and stuck to it. I am now a terrible person who can’t accept them for who they truly are, unquestioningly and unconditionally. Because I have empathy, I feel that. I see and feel their hurt before I see and feel mine. I want to crawl to them and beg forgiveness for telling them no.
But, to them, my thoughts and feelings don’t matter. They find my boundaries offensive. They spoke a subtle kind of bigotry and I spoke my truth about it. They distorted what I said in order to fit their narrative. When called on it, they took things to private messages so nobody could see what they said. I reiterated that the person had hurt me repeatedly in the past and that neither those times, nor this one, were okay.
I did not provide the care and comfort they wanted. They were not willing to respect my boundaries or to be aware of their own behavior. They could not meet me halfway. They lashed out at me and pushed away.
And I will let them go.
I don’t love them any less. And if they ever get their shit together, I’ll still be here. I think they’re in hell and I hate it. I can’t fix it. I tried. I’ve tried off and on for decades now. Because of my own issues, I don’t even have the strength to support them in that hell. I grieve. Even just thinking that I did right by myself by not giving them my oxygen mask when they have their own dangling in front of their face makes me feel ill, guilty, stupid, arrogant, ugly.
I don’t need be told I’m a good person. I don’t need to be told that I don’t need them. I don’t need to be told that I did the right thing. I don’t need to be told that I have to take care of myself first. You can tell me these things, but I don’t need to be told which side of the line I’m on. The fact that I’m terrified that I’ve fucked up and become a horrible person because I drew a reasonable boundary tells me those things already, even if I don’t want to hear them. Gods help me, even as I’m grieving I feel profoundly relieved, too.
I will lose more people. I love deeply flawed people. I myself am deeply flawed.
This will always suck, and be complicated, and make me feel like shit. I will feel guilty for saying no. I will fear that not throwing everything I have into a bottomless pit means I myself am a bottomless pit. I will feel horrified at myself for feeling relieved that it’s over, at least for now. I will feel ashamed that I don’t have the strength that I see in other people, who can give care and support when I can’t.
But I have things that I want more than I want to be able to fix other people whether they want to be fixed or not. I can’t save everyone, if I want to be present for the things I’m good at, the people I care about, and the truths I know.
I tried and I failed, that’s all I can see right now. I’m sad. I’m sorry. I’m not going to take it back. I suck and I’m flawed and if someone treated my daughter the way I was treated yesterday, I’d be tempted to punch them in the mouth. I feel bad for wanting to defend myself the same way I’d want to defend my daughter.
But I won’t bend over backwards to make things better.
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Hey, Buddha. Lend me one of your dangling earlobes a minute.–From a local temple that I can only ever figure out where it is sometimes, which makes me think it’s a magical traveling temple, sometimes there and sometimes elsewhere or elsewhen.
Playing with MJ with a friend, after throwing various raccoon-based prompts back and forth. I like to think of these three as a gang of racoon thieves at a school for cute talking animals.