good girl, bad girl

i give myself the ick sometimes

For someone who claims to know anything about womanhood or society — at least enough to put out cultural commentary on it — I sure have taken more missteps than I care to confess. To write is to know something, according to Susan Sontag, and I’m just not sure it applies to me. I guess that’s the beauty of being back home, where you’re inevitably subjugated to the staleness of once-upon-a-time air, curled up on the same bed in the same room that was once your teenage sanctuary, one that’s softly inviting you to metabolize your past all over again. Digging into everything that’s ever happened is a painful process, reminiscent of skin picking. You just wanted some relief, and now look at you: you’ve got a clown face and a promise of permanent scarring. This unprompted self-reflection, dawning on me when I couldn’t be bothered to welcome it, led me to a bitter realization I wasn’t ready for.

The realization is that I do not see myself as a good person. Ew. Wait, maybe that’s an extreme statement. What I’m trying to say is that I can pinpoint exact moments where my actions were far from good, behavior that would’ve been deemed unforgivable had it been inflicted on me by somebody else. Leading people on, talking shit behind their backs, resorting to silent treatment when I feel like it, not fulfilling my promises, lying — you name it, I’ve done it. Not pretty or cute, rather grim. It’s all rarely intentional or conscious until a little too late: all the tossing and turning, rumination is due. it’s just that my desire to prove something to myself outweighs my ability to be true, virtuous, and honest. I’m moved by self-protection rather than integrity, and this extreme preoccupation with self, even in good faith, can lead to some really ugly decisions. I’ve done objectively bad things to people in the name of distrust and armor, some of which I still can’t find an excuse or an explanation for.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I put my thoughts in a bucket to use when it’s dark and cut imaginary corners. What others do for peace I do for profit, and there isn’t enough self-help content in the world to convince me I’m just doing my best and deserve a narcissistic pat on the back. I like to be associated with the right names only and I like the heat from the spotlight on my forehead. I don’t like tough love, seeking out agreeable companionship so that I never have to face myself. I’ve wished people well when I didn’t mean it in the slightest. In a conversation, I pay more attention to what I’m saying than what I’m hearing. I want to be a trending name more than I want to be helpful, or useful, or good. More often than not, I dislike going out of my way for others. I gossip, hard. I hypocritically screenshot things that annoy me as I’m preaching empathy. Is it bad to admit I want to fuel my body with attention, caffeine, and cheap thrills? Never really saw it as a temple, or maybe never liked myself enough to treat it like one, more of a vessel for experiences and a shoulder to cry on — but only when it benefits me. I like being vulnerable, but I don’t care to be candid. I’m dismissive and vacant, selfishly watching from the other side because courage is not a friend to me. I want to celebrate you, him, and her, but not at the cost of my ego. My restless mind has taken me places I wouldn’t even go with a gun.

Playing catch-up with my mistakes in the comfort of my old bedroom, I decided to reach out to a friend with an apology after I’d cut her off abruptly for virtually no reason. I don’t know what happened there — it was ages ago and please don’t ask — I didn’t have an excuse, so even my diligently rehearsed speech came off genuinely stupid. Nothing new: I punish people with silence and burn bridges because conflict is terrifying and projection is hot. The block button is a long-time lover of mine: I’ve used and abused it in every possible way, erasing entire threads of what once was a cherished connection. While there’s hardly anything wrong with blocking a stranger who left a mean comment under one of your posts, it’s a little different when you resort to the see-you-never emergency button aimed at someone close to you just because you didn’t get your way. I have to remind myself that the emotions others evoke in me are almost always about me, and I don’t have to engage with the worst-case scenarios in my head any more than I should be engaging with the person in front of me. I also have to remind myself something that feels good and freeing in the moment doesn’t imply good or freeing consequences. In the end, my friend was a sweetheart about it, and even then I knew I didn’t deserve all that graceful redemption. Somehow I got it anyway.

Knowing others have suffered at the hands of my behavior is a heavy burden to reason with. Knowing that there aren’t enough days in a decade to go back and apologize for every single incident is just as unpleasant. Competing for the Asshole of The Year award, I’m well aware that it all starts with self-forgiveness: I’m just not sure I qualify when I’m filled with regret and confusion, all while trying to play Miss Righteous in this newsletter and in real life.

Why is it important for me to be a good person? If being “good” isn’t second nature to me and requires some serious effort, am I faking it? Pretending to be good may effectively be worse than simply being bad if all I’m doing is keeping my true intentions on a leash. Is it all just a big sad attempt to like myself a little more — and in that case, is my goodness superficial and selfish? Morality is a subjective grey area: one could argue that Bezos is a good and inspiring guy, while others would be just as right to see him as evil personified. What determines morality is an ancient question, meditated on and explored by everyone and anyone from Camus to Bradshaw, Sartre to Caroline Calloway, Dostoevsky to the Red Scare podcast, and even Aristotle; so don’t expect to find an answer in this post. All we know is there are certain guidelines of good behavior we’re bound by, and our capacity to stay within those guidelines is conditional upon what’s at stake. Yet even those guidelines are volatile, like a house of cards in the wind, always subject to our free will. Simone de Beauvoir writes: Man is free, but he finds his law in his very freedom. It seems that my law is arbitrary, sort of vibes-of-the-day predetermined. If they’re good, I’m good. If they’re off, my moral compass goes awry. Goodness can very much be an August heatwave – you crave it in the middle of January when it’s dark and cold, but once you’re living in it, you’re just waiting for the whole thing to be over. 

And yet, I understand that my obsession with self-assessment is just another means of distraction from the real world. In actuality, it doesn’t matter if I’m good or bad — like, please, grow up, own up to your shit, and move on. Stop thinking and start living your life for a change. I think I would have a much better time simply being a person than trying to be a good person. Maybe it would all feel effortless then, intuitive, high spirits. Maybe my missteps would be met with empathy, not scolding — I could open up to learning from my mistakes than drowning in them and repeating them over and over again.

In the end, I think we would do ourselves a favor if we acknowledged our actions will always have a level of crude unpredictability, and there’s no use labeling them a good thing or a bad thing. In a perfect world, just recognizing that whatever haunts me in the middle of the night is sometimes my fault could show me how to be a better person in the future. We’re not in a perfect world, though, so I can’t promise it to always be true — god knows I’ve tried and failed and tried and failed and lost count. But if there’s one thing I’ll never get tired of, it’s trying to be just a little better than I was yesterday. For selfish reasons, obviously, but the intent doesn’t matter here as much as the outcome. And if that includes reaching out to a friend I mistreated ages ago, without implied audacity to be absolved of my sins by calling myself out, then so be it. Every good journey starts with curiosity, and I’m curious what it’d be like to let my morality run free, knowing it’s faulty and will point me in all the wrong directions now and then. I want to embody kindness, not perform it — and if I’m constantly preoccupied with being good, where do I find the time or space to do good? I’m done making it all about me. In the words of Jemima Kirke, I think we might all be thinking about ourselves too much.