resenting responsibility// looking at it
no, i don't want to matter. NO I DON'T WANT POWER. I'M A BAD GIRL
Tonight, I stalked A and O on LinkedIn being so happy in Los Angeles, feeling salt in old wounds past of being traumatized, and realized — Wow. I have graduated from "I didn't matter to them" to "I mattered, but they dealt with it as poorly as my mother did".
This is important for my memorializing of how things went down. Often, if I’m treated as invisible and irrelevant, someone’s consciousness is still watching me, being affected by me, haunted by me, perhaps. How do I feel about that? Better than I realized.
I’ve stopped assuming that everyone who wronged me has forgotten about me. It’s easier for me when I say people have forgotten. I’ve learned the hot wash of horror of fearing being forgotten belies something else — the absolute freedom to genuinely do what I want, with nothing to stop me, the expanse that rolls beyond being a Nietzschean sort of nightmare. Nothing matters. I say I’m horrified at this, but I’m probably delighted. I’m probably horrified that I delight, and delighted in the horror that in fact, I do have many earthly duties. If I truly didn’t matter to them, they’d be friendly to me like strangers. Strangers have a lot of privileges the loved ones don’t.
I was at dinner with a different friend earlier that evening, thinking about how it would be to be capable of crippling someone for 6+ years, being so memorable as the only person of significance to them that is capable of dealing such a blow, wondering if I’d ever wield that power — and realizing that, I wouldn’t even want to turn my head to look if that were the case.
I don’t want to live in a world in which I matter, even though I speak all the time of wanting to be less invisible, more relevant. I haven’t been able to grasp how hard I’ve been negating and living in denial, in response, to such a phenomenon.
What if I rewrote the narrative, today? As I have been without letting myself read it back? Now, everything in my life that felt “out of my control” was not that way. In fact, predestination is a nesting doll in the bosom of free will, as my Swedish malin tattoo says, and yes, perhaps I had a big part to play in my undoing?
What if I realized I’ve always mattered — I’ve always been being watched — I’ve always been landing in a room with a bang — I’ve always been seen — and my actions matter to and touch others?
I actually already know this. It’s been sublimated into my unconscious for the last 10 years, ever since I left a house where my mom nitpicked my every action as a reflection of if she’d successfully parented me right, a house where I mattered way too much. After that, I said I was going to live life my way. I was going to stay out however late I want, hang out with who I want, make money how I want, say what I want, and no one would ever be able to control me ever again. I’ve been living for MYSELF. In theory. I do everything BECAUSE I WANT TO. I “don’t care what people think” (right?). Everything is a gift from God, and I’m just a leaf in the wind, a little trout riding the stream of life.
I tell myself that I must be a self-centered little yappy narcissist, yet revealed preference is I care a lot about duty. I care about nobility. I throw darts with my eyes closed that still land on the board of the realm of existence among others. I pretend to not notice, and I can tune out people’s voices on the subway, but in abstract, they haunt me. Duty can’t really exist, even if it’s tethered to “principle”, unless it is in service of a concrete aspect of Earth. Duty, to me, can’t exist if I really live for myself.
If I really didn’t care about consequences, I wouldn’t “accidentally have the respect of my community.” I would’ve fucked up several relationships, gotten fired from jobs, told my friends to fuck off when they angered me, kicked a baby if I was angry at it for screaming at the Chili’s table next to mine — on a larger scale, despite how I feel all my feelings, I’ve been largely good at eating my vegetables and keeping drama out of my life. Every intense emotion I have is private and belongs to me, only visible through the words I type on my Substack, but never wielded as a sword. I don’t lash out. It is clear that on a gut level, I understand what it means to be disciplined and righteous.
I’m also the person who will drop everything to help a friend, because I don’t want them to be alone because I was once alone. I’m helping inner child me and them. That said, I’ve never identified as a giver, as a caretaker, because it was never imposed upon me that I had to do it. It was never necessary that if you don’t help them, no one else will. It was almost more like, if I had the freedom to, I’d choose the suffering of obligation over and over. Just as there is freedom in commitment, I forget how often commitment lies in the freedom.
As I get older, I schedule my time better, I clean my room more easily, I power through hard emotions easier. I tell myself I don’t have responsibilities because it’s easier to pretend everything is from sheer desire. I assume my radical self-allowance is why I’m able to do this. But I’m also a loyal, obedient person, bound to a higher power, led to virtually everything by a steadfast deference to powers that are greater than mine. How do I properly “rebel” if I’m as faithful of a servant of a God as I am?
This is all disgusting, to realize the truth. To fear I’m not as cool as I thought.
But what if I’m still a prisoner in ways that aren’t freeing? What if I let in all the guilt — not shame — and leaned into the fact that an immense amount of power was given to me by God, and I absolutely detest it, and this is why I fantasize about being a “normal girl” as if it’s easy for them? What if by denial I mean, I’m still making myself too small in ways that are unbecoming?
It’s tempting to close my eyes and say I don’t care about consequences, let me live outside of them dear God, and then magically get side effects of the benefits of my actions.
Yet my body tells me that, no. We are annoyed about it, but we have a duty to what really matters. I can always get myself to do “what I must”, to be honest. I can also let myself be even angry about it. But I still do it, out of a defiance of any “desire” I’d have to fuck things up just to see if I can. If I fantasize about it for long enough, it works out.
If you smack my ass and call me a bad girl, I laugh. It bounces off me. I’m used to people saying this about me. The sad thing is, they were wrong. If you pat my head and call me a good girl, I cry. Receiving compliments is a skill.
I would only cry if it were true that I want to be a good girl. I forget everyone who says I’m good, and only remember when I was told I was bad. But the thing is, I’m a good girl.
I’m a good girl who isn’t afraid of breaking rules. But the point of breaking rules is so I can continue to be good. It is so I can continue to do good things with maximal range. Good girls by way of society chain themselves in ways that are unbecoming to anyone with ambition to build something vital and beautiful that betters humanity. Bad girls are often selfish and just a flip side of good girl cope. You don’t have the smooth anti-hero woman in literature as much, no female Robin Hood to redeem herself with a complex moral character. I want to be that character though. I want either the worst men to realize they could’ve been swagged out like me, or the best men to realize they can be good and free like me.
I’m good because it is satisfying to be the protagonist, not the anti-hero. You have less of an image to keep up. You don’t need to tell yourself doing bad stuff is edgy or your only option. You can be whoever the fuck you want if faith is involved. I've been called an anti-hero by those with a less sophisticated conception of reality, told I’m “blunt” and “intimidating” by those who lack a spine to understand that it is better to be kind and not nice. Telling them they’re wrong takes on the assumption that my opinion leaves a mark. I’ve decided it’s annoying, but it does.
You say that I’m the best person you know at appreciating others and making them feel cared about and concerned about. You say I’m not a mommy dommy, but a true sweetheart. It’s crazy to be told I am that. It’s crazy to be told that because it means I matter and my goodness impacts those around me, not just as a fantasy in my head.
The truth is, I learned to become highly executively functional because that was a skillset to become respected so I could then fulfill my true desire — which is to see a lot of people regularly, have a lot of deep conversations that make me a more healed and better person, and explore every inch of the cities I’ve learned to call home. When I got too oppressed in the cocoons I got squeezed too tightly in, I figured out a way to make a new home while also taking on new ways of stewarding and tending to all around me.
It’s a way of making responsibility noble and chosen in a roundabout way. by looking at the other options and understanding how you’d much rather be eating the shit sandwich you are now. It’s knowing it’s a choice. It’s even letting yourself be mad about it once in a while in a true, honest way. But getting up in the morning knowing you wouldn’t choose differently anyway.
Or maybe you try on a different set of rules. You play as a “bad person.” Then you realize that’s not you anyway, and you go back to where you started.
You have to look at what’s going on though. You can’t play pretend forever. That’s not what the good girl inside you wants.
I was walking down the street on Grattan two days ago to meet up with my friends, who’d apparently congregated at the coffee shop there. I was excited to see them, headphones in blasting Natasha Bedingfield, wondering how much longer I’d have to walk down this road before I’d hit the shop.
I turned my head a few blocks in, passively noticing three girls walking toward me. For a second, I hadn’t yet recognized them, and they were just three girls in Bushwick, passing me by like ships in the night. Or not, because these were actually my friends, as my vision soon saw as I snapped into focus.
We were calling your name, laughed S. M wanted to know where I was going. To meet you all, I said. At a spot I thought was where it should’ve happened!
But you were there the whole time, right behind me under my nose, if only I’d let myself turn away from marching forward to my destination to take the right look.