mean streak

A FEW YEARS AGO, I had a Zoom meeting with a prospective psychologist whom I never ended up speaking to again.

It wasn’t her fault. It was entirely my own. Most pressingly, it was a matter of finding the time to comply with her strict once-fortnightly therapy regimen, and one thing or another happened to make that impossible, including a medical emergency I will refer to only as ToothGate 2023. Even so, I still think of her every now and then.

‘I just feel ready,’ I remember telling her during this meeting, ‘to confront some of the darker parts of myself.’ She was a practitioner of the internal family systems approach, wherein it’s taken for granted that a ‘multiplicity of mind’ is nothing out of the ordinary and that our personalities, psyches, or ways we interact with the world are based on a number of sub-parts – which may be in harmony or in conflict with one another.

We spoke about the parts I often feel compelled to suppress, and I suggested that I might lay it all out, like a hand of cards during a poker game, a royal flush of my most shameful thoughts and feelings. For some reason, at the time, doing so seemed necessary, as if these particles of darkness were circulating in my soul, increasingly agitated, needing to be let from a vein like bad blood lest they find a more malignant form of expression.

Mostly, I suspect I needed to feel somehow known or seen, recognised for who I truly was. Truly am.

I GREW UP IN AN environment where goodness and evil ran deep, right into the bedrock of daily life. As a child, I retreated often to my imagination, but this private place was in fact porous, accessible by an all-seeing, all-knowing God who could read – and therefore judge – my thoughts and feelings. Can a thought be bad? I still find myself wondering. Cognitive-behavioural therapists would have us believe so, given that faulty assumptions and other erroneous thought patterns can wind up harming us, in a manner of speaking. Other branches of psychology (and religion) emphasise the rather more inconsequential nature of thoughts, how they merely drift, cloud-like, through the vast expanse of mind or self. In these models, it’s attachment that wreaks havoc, a failure to separate rumination from reality.

Yet, still, I find this separation difficult. As much as I’d prefer to believe that we are what we do – not what we think or even what we say – there are seams of myself, dark creases and recesses, I return to mostly in thought and about which I feel horribly guilty. It’s a strange thing, don’t you think, to suppress what feels so grimy and shameful while simultaneously hankering for its moment in the sun? Perhaps it’s the effort of it all, the sheer willpower involved in biting one’s tongue and stuffing it down.

There’s a cold lake inside me, and I’ve fallen in.

‘YOU’RE SO… HOW CAN I put this… conciliatory,’ one of my academic supervisors told me several years ago. It wasn’t a compliment. She wrinkled her nose, rolled her generously lashed eyes, and gave me a lecture about the difference between being nice and being kind. I’ve never forgotten that conversation, well intentioned as it may have been. I felt unduly chastised for being… what? A young-ish woman in academia trying to find a safe route through formidable terrain. I walked away feeling as though there were something deeply wrong with me, that I was somehow inauthentic, either clumsy and incompetent or worse: obviously noxious despite my cheerful gloss.

Of course, I can think of things I like about myself. Plenty of things. I’m gentle with animals, generous to my students, gracious towards my colleagues. I work hard. I let cars into traffic. I don’t take myself too seriously. I always repay my debts.

But what does someone do with all the rest of it?

When I was little, my mother used to read aloud to us, and I can remember a period of time, when we were still living in Papua New Guinea, that we read The Pilgrim’s Progress over several weeks, my Mum and my two siblings and I. It was a hardcover book, interspersed with pictures, and one I came to dread the sight of, so grim was the story and so didactic in its moralising – all that endless plodding between the City of Destruction and the Celestial City.

If you’re familiar with Bunyan’s allegorical tale, you’ll know that the protagonist, named Christian (duh), is weighed down by a tremendous burden (spoiler alert: it’s sin), a burden so ponderous that he will sink into Hell if he cannot find deliverance. In my mother’s version of the book, unlike some others, Christian’s burden literally clings or fuses to his back – a scratchy, almost animate thing in the illustrator’s stark gestural style.

I don’t remember much else now except the profound distaste I felt for those hollow-eyed, burden-bent characters stumbling through sloughs, baulking at fiery mountainsides, and fending off arrows at Beelzebub’s castle. Verily, I loathed that book. But the metaphor of being burdened is one that persists, if not always in my memory then in my conscience instead.

Lately, the burden leans medical. I don’t mean the stuff that has happened per se: the reel that plays in my head almost constantly, mapping every hospital presentation, every unwanted admission, every hour spent slumped in a waiting room chair, every invasive procedure, all the bills, the never-ending bills. Blood. Endone. Fentanyl. Screaming for nine hours straight while ramped in the hallway of an emergency department. Passing out. Projectile vomiting on my husband after a lumbar puncture. Sobbing helplessly while waiting for a PET, apologising to the hapless wardsman wearing kneesocks who couldn’t find me a box of tissues. Lolling beneath the touch of an ICU nurse who gently sponged my back, told me my skin was beautiful, like ‘an English rose’, emptied the catheter about which I was so embarrassed, gossiped about her horrible ex-husband to help pass the time. I mean the strain of forgetting it, or trying to. Keeping it hidden, squashed down. Once upon a time, I was sceptical about ‘triggers’ – hated the word. Now I stare vacantly at the maple tree in our backyard where a tiny dead foetus lies buried. I cry when I pinch the fat on my belly every fortnight to administer the subcutaneous injection that suppresses my immune system just enough to keep my disease down to a dull roar. And I recoil when people want to talk to me about these sorts of things.

I fear sometimes that the ferocity of these thoughts and feelings has caused me to grow brittle, unyielding, mean. When people expound upon their short-lived travails, what I often want to say is, ‘Oh, is that all?’ I can feel my heart rate increase, my armpits prickle with the sweat of irritation. My immediate response is stop, drop, and roll. I want out. Please don’t prevail on me to care about you when I do not demand this attention of you.

This impulse feels different from the other thoughts and observations I endeavour to keep to myself. I hate Taylor Swift, for example, and I have no patience for people who treat a spoilt billionaire as an adequate starter pack for fourth-wave feminism simply because she’s a savvy businesswoman who publicly disses her exes. There. I said it. What else? Oh, I don’t think podcasts needed to be videos! And those fluffy little wireless microphones that influencers hold to their mouths give me the ick, a massive ick, for some inexplicable reason. (Actually, influencers as a broad phenomenon give me the ick, too, and nobody can convince me that shilling stuff to your guileless audience of sycophants is not morally bankrupt.)

OK, what else? It bothers me when folks who have creative aspirations believe they’re naturally entitled to side-step traditional work. Annnd…? I find it appalling to buy from Amazon: nobody said that making ethical choices about how or where to spend your hard-earned dollars would necessarily be convenient. Bezos is a baddie! Stop it!

Frankly, I could keep going like this for days. I’m so angry about so much. So often.

But I keep my unpopular opinions to myself.

A FEW DAYS AGO, I came across a post on Instagram, one of those artfully formatted quotes that must drift happily into whatever algorithmic rip happens to be dominating the socials at a given point in time: ‘The deepest form of slavery is the hunger for being understood.’ It spoke to me (lol), so I took a screen shot – which, funnily enough, also captured a pic of a so-called ‘racoon dog’ doing something either cute or ridiculous. Peak Insta.

Anyway, the quote is attributed to Dostoevsky. The more I think about it, the truer it seems – though funny as well, in a more disappointing sense, because isn’t this precisely what most writers strive to do? To be?

Understood?

Surely, I tell myself, we each harbour a mean streak, a bitterness wrought in the fires of misunderstanding, of being overlooked, ignored, taken for granted. Maybe we all have a tender spot that bruises easily when prodded too often by the fingers of casual presumption. Perhaps everybody seethes from time to time when someone innocently complains about their weight, their job, their stint of solo parenting, a busy shift, a sleepless night, a horrific medical bill, a difficult parent, one Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day… and it taps into a grief or stress we wrestle with constantly.

We perform our well-rehearsed choreographies of sympathetic tuts and murmurs, tuck our resentment away somewhere private, subterranean, where it’s left to bloom and ferment. Not into anything useful, but into that faint, sour conviction that, through another’s obtuse griping, we haven’t been properly seen – that our particular configuration of burdens remains illegible to world around us.

If I dig down deep into my own hunger for visibility and understanding, though, my shovel hits fear, mostly. I’m out-and-out scared of so many things that result from the parts of my life I don’t talk about: I’m afraid of appearing lazy, absent-minded, bad at my job. Of trailing behind in my career. Of being childless. Socially awkward. Unreliable. Even fat. Nice but not kind. Ah. So burdensome is this fear of being incorrectly perceived that it often overshadows any sense of pride I might otherwise feel. Hey, you kept going anyway.

I want someone to understand the cost. I’m enslaved to it.

TODAY, I’M LOUNGING IN BED, eating cold grapes from the fridge, slowly working my way through an editing job I said I’d do for one of my favourite clients. The weather has cooled slightly, which it typically does around Easter, and the familiar combination of tapentadol and another sleepless night have left me feeling drowsy.

I’m thinking about my mother’s book (which she may still keep in a wooden shelf somewhere) and its allegory of hacking our way through a hostile world while burdened by our own unceasing nonsense.

Earlier, my cousin called and asked me when I was going to update my blog. I said I’d been writing something but that I didn’t want to post it because it was too whiny, too solipsistic. But I was touched that someone would ask or care.

I was reminded of these occasional glimpses of recognition, redemption. A phone call out of the blue. A friend who asks if I’m OK before they vent. A doctor who reads my guarded defences with scepticism, who squeezes my hand, asks what they can do to help. An unexpected conversation that lands, improbably, exactly where it needed to. Kindness and generosity from strangers.

Forgiveness when I buckle, when I’m not my best self.

I’m going to post this anyway.

It’s time to move on.