I Hope It Was All Worth It

Why do human beings have this tendency, this overwhelming push, this excruciating desire to misunderstand one another?

Why do we create stories about people and events and then oversimplify them, distill them down to caricatures in black and white, and then refuse to recognize that most things operate somewhere in the gray area, not in the boxes that we draw them into? Is it really so much easier to make up stories about the way that the world is, so that we can make some semblance of sense out of things, in order to feel safer and more comfortable about how things are in order to get through our day? Is it that actually taking a closer look at the complexities of things is so threatening to us and we can’t handle how unsafe that makes us feel, so we lie to ourselves and others about how things are because we need those lies in order to simply feel okay?

I’m feeling so exhausted and burnt out on people anymore. I just don’t have the energy to put up with most people’s filters that they insist on seeing the world through.

I never realized how fortunate I am to be able to empathize with others; to imagine myself in their shoes and be able to picture the way they see the world. I’m sure it’s an imperfect picture, because none of us can ever truly fully understand one another — but at least when I can imagine what it’s like for them, I feel a sense of compassion. I care about them and their humanity, even if I don’t agree with them from my own perspective. And sometimes, imagining what it’s like for other people even changes my mind about things. I learn, I grow, I broaden my worldview. I can still fiercely dislike the monster that I perceive as the conservative party, all the while learning to recognize that the liberal party (which I have long allowed myself to be lumped into by default) is simply another head on the exact same monster.

I find it ironic that my ability to empathize has made me somewhat blind to the fact that many, many people do not, in fact, have this same ability. I make the same mistake that most people do, of assuming that other people are like I am, and I get confused and frustrated when other people insist on seeing me through their distorted filters, instead of being willing to walk a few steps over and feel around in my shoes. I have to open my eyes wider to realize that it’s not so much an unwillingness as a muscle that was never used and so has atrophied in a great many people. Not only do many people not know how to try on other people’s shoes, they see no value in it whatsoever. They’ve learned that keeping their own shoes on, thankyouverymuch, and walling themselves off from the rest of the world is a far superior way to operate.

And it frustrates the fuck out of me. It’s difficult for me to untangle myself from my own perspective that this behavior is lazy, it is narrow-minded, and it is cowardly.

I’m trying stupidly hard to have compassion. And yet, I find myself instead taking it very personally. I recognize this in myself, and I hate it. Because as much as I want to step out and keep my “higher” perspective on things, I am a human being, and very much subject to my own emotions and challenges. My feelings are hurt, because I see the (what I perceive as) narrow-minded perspectives of others as a personal affront to me. The socially anxious part in me that cares so much about others seeing me accurately feels furious at being painted as something that I am not. I revert back to the little girl who was told over and over again all of the horrible things that were wrong with her, when she was doing the best that she knew how to do. The little girl that felt hurt and angry at being mischaracterized and mistreated, and utterly powerless to do anything about it. The little girl that was bullied and abused and excluded and belittled for reasons that she could never understand… that part of her as an adult decades later still struggles to fully understand.

Life repeats itself. Cycles swirl around with maddening momentum until she starts to believe all over again that even after all of this work, this growth, this tremendous (and visible!) change she has forged — she is still powerless to the fact that she is and will always be a problem. Other people recognize that she is a problem. That there is something deeply wrong with her that can never be fixed. In spite of all these fanciful ideas about how she is a sword of truth that cuts through bullshit, a mirror that reflects people back at themselves and helps bring change, the truth is just that she is an infuriating trigger that somehow always seems to find people’s buttons (you know, the buttons hidden underneath the armor that they don’t want anyone else to know exist) and rams into them with the kind of force that only comes from tripping, tumbling, and falling flat on her face, button square in the forehead.

It always leaves a dent… in both parties.

I feel so angry. Because somehow, even as it seems like things have gotten so much better, I still find myself pushing others’ buttons when I’m not intending to. I’ve learned these wonderful, helpful things: becoming able to speak up and verbalize my truth eloquently, and with compassion, and to actually value what I am thinking and feeling; bringing a nuanced perspective to the table; to listen and ask thoughtful questions, and to have respect for what other people are saying and thinking and feeling, and to believe them when they tell me their experience; to care about others and to trust that others can see that I care about them. So it hurts me deeply when other people get angry at me, and see me as someone that is rushing in to try to hurt them (simply because I might not necessarily agree with everything they are saying) and vilify me, and treat me like I am stupid. Even as I have made it abundantly clear in every way that I know how, that just because I don’t agree with them doesn’t mean I am condemning them.

And it bothers me the most when it happens to be someone that I care a lot about, that I have a good friendship with. Probably because I have so few close friends. It takes an obscene amount of effort for me to build close relationships because I have to expend all of my energy forcing myself through the discomfort I feel being around someone as they move from an encounter to an acquaintance to a friend… exposing pieces of myself to them over and over and over again until the discomfort slowly, gradually eases, one step at a time, until I finally start to feel safe with them. I can be myself with them without constantly cycling around in my head, rehashing all of the same morbid fantasies about how they must be judging me.

Yes, that’s probably why it hurts even more when they do in fact judge me, and shove me out the door and lock it closed behind them and tell me to go away. And why it feels like twisting the knife when I discover that their judgement isn’t even something that I feel to be valid (as there are many, I think, legitimate reasons to judge me) but instead that they have created some wildly inaccurate fantasy about who I am. That they’ve contorted reality to fit me into a box that makes them feel better about themselves, so they can partition off pieces of themselves and their experiences in order to keep out the things that make them question their world and feel horribly uncomfortable because they don’t know the answer to them. That they’d rather have the safety and comfort of black and white thinking than extend a hand of friendship into the murk of grey that is where I live so much of my life.

The powerlessness that I feel about how others perceive me makes my head throb. I want to curl up in a corner, wall myself off from the world, and never look back. I have all of these good intentions that seem like fruit that is ripe for the picking, yet I grab each one and find that it has sat too long in the sun, turned to mush, and is filled with maggots feasting on fermenting flesh. I want to nourish people and instead I find myself making them nauseous, making them gag. It’s times like this that I reach a point where I’m ready to throw in my towel on the world. Fuck them all. They are so hell bent on misperceiving me anyway, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So why am I allowing myself to care? I want them to be something that they are not, and I need to stop torturing myself with hope.

If I am forever meant to be a clumsy button-hammer, maybe it’s best if I remove myself from the places where the buttons reside. If the whole world wants to segregate themselves into camps and deliberately superglue filters to cover their field of vision so that they can feel safe in knowing that their story is the correct story, who am I to poke holes in those filters? It’s not right for me to insert myself into their worldview, to ask them to take the filters off every so often and recognize that they aren’t the actual state of the world, to see that in fact we can never really (from our current perspectives) accurately perceive the real state of the world. It’s unfair of me to want that from people that don’t want that for themselves. I’m like the person sitting in the movie theater reminding people that it’s a movie when they are content to lose themselves inside of it. Just because I care about it and believe that it matters, doesn’t mean that they do, too. In fact, let’s be honest: the vast majority of the people on this planet not only don’t want that, they vehemently despise it.

The predominant worldview is that it is important to see things in black and white, to cling tightly to our unbalanced and subjective views of right and wrong, to pick a camp and put up a flag and get a big weapon and dehumanize the other side and refuse to see the possibility that there might be value in what they have to say, and to fight them to the death, flatten them to the ground, pulverize their heart and their mind and their guts — the very things that made them the same species as us.

But you get caught up in the story of it all, and you do it because you are righteous in doing so. You are on the right side of history.

And as all of the dust and ash settles to the ground and nothing is left of the voices that you wanted so fiercely to silence, and all you can hear is the dull echo of yourself, left defensive but with nothing left to defend itself against: I hope you finally find the sense of safety that you’ve been searching for.

I hope it was all worth it.