J'Accuse!

I was originally intending this post to be entitled "The Butterfly Effect" because of the fact that it really does seem as if there is some sort of malevolent force in the universe that just continues to take every good intention you ever have and corrupt it. To force every action that intends to make the world a better place, to instead leave hurt and anguish behind.

Unfortunately, in the midst of lying in bed, wallowing in my sense of my own wrethedness, I started staring upward at the ceiling. And without my glasses, everything looks blurry enough, but given the shadow that played on the ceiling at the time of day, I've decided that I hate those orb-like ceiling spot-lights. I hate them because I started staring at the one spotlight right at the foot of my bed, and realized how much it looks like a single, gigantic, eyeball. And like most giant eyeballs above our heads, it was staring directly at me.

The thing about giant eyeballs is that there's something in us that makes us believe that they see everything about us. Our entire lives, our souls, in one perfect snapshot. And, this eye being a light bulb and not really an eye at all, it was unblinking. Which is always that unnerving thing, too. There is no break in it, no room for a slip or a failure, just always, constantly, "on."

The truth is that I so often feel as if I'm such a fraud. Looking back on my early childhood, most of my memories revolve around being a spoiled, selfish brat of a kid. The kind who tormented and pestered his older brothers, but worked up enough manipulativeness even at such a young age to realize that just turning on the doe-eyes and saying "I love you mommy" would mean that I wouldn't get in trouble for anything I did. That was, at least, until my mother walked down the hall one day and caught me dancing in front of both of my brothers singing "I got away with it, I got away with it." After that day, I never really got away with anything anymore.

But since then, I can't help but wonder if that bratty little kid was my core persona. If perhaps, at my base, I'm just this selfish little rotten person that deserves to get his ass kicked because all he does is stir up trouble and manipulate people. And that this baseline persona is exactly the reason why all of my good intentions turn out wrong.

The fact is, Matt was still trying to let me down easy when he said that I was a healer. When he talked about all of the good that I do, and try to do, for everyone I meet in the world. And I admit that I've really made that desire to make the world a better place than I found it a part of my identity, that I want to leave each person I encounter a little bit better, happier. I want to find suffering and mitigate it to the best of my ability. I find somebody struggling, and I want to help them along their journey.

I did that to him, and he saw exactly what I was trying to do. And he praised me for it, perhaps in the best way it possibly could have been presented to me, too. So maybe this whole self-accusation problem, the eye and the accusation within it, is just my own inability to see the good in myself. That entire self-scouring, trying to find the answer to what there is of value within myself, when all I see is some twisted, malformed monster.

I gave Matt my journal on Saturday, but I honestly did it in anger. At the height of the issue, he was pushing me away just for the sake of pushing me away, and I admit that he was really cruel by telling me that I didn't know him and didn't understand anything about him. So I threw the most secretive pieces of my psyche, some of them from the time in my life that I truly hate who I was, as well. High school was a dark time for me. College was much better, of course, and I had a lot of writing from back then, too, but my writing had always had that sense of being some audience that I could write to, but still be my own private thing. That nobody would ever see it, and so it was a way to get things out without having to actually tell anybody.

But I gave it to him. Perhaps that, too, is part of the sense of the eye. For the first time, there is somebody out there who knows how terrible of a poet I am. Who knows some of the things that I thought about myself and about other people throughout both my worst years, and my best, as the dichotomy between high school and college both were.

Part of me thinks of it as odd that he doesn't see me as a monster, as well. Then again, everybody has their own nightmares to fight through, Matt not the least of them, and I remind myself that he was still trying to let me down easy. Because the fact is that we have inverse curses. He can't for the life of him come to fall in love with somebody else. And I am incapable of actually being loved. I suppose he still feels guilty about everything, and he knows, at least, who I've been trying to be. It really was a great gift. But the eye keeps on staring at me, even now while I have my back turned to it while I sit at my computer typing this. The accusation of true sight.

I keep on coming back to a song that has had all too much meaning for me over the years. Melissa Ferrick's "To Let You See Me," the refrain which states:
"But oh, to let you see me
because I am not that pretty
oh but you will find out, and then,
you will leave me."

That's it right there, the height of my own insecurities, in one well-worded and beautifully vocalized phrase. My fear of abandonment, my sense that I am completely incapable of being loved, my fear that I really have nothing to offer other than a host of good intentions that I constantly fail miserably at coming to the completion of. Because in all of his own good intentions, and his compliments, and his desire to build me up, the fact is that he truly did spend several months trying to love me. And whether it was his incapability or mine, the one thing I still walk away from is that it was one more of a series of people who saw me, and just couldn't bring themselves to love me.

Ok, I'm just realizing now that there are people out there that are actually going to READ this crap. To all of you, I really apologize. This is not the type of shit you read this blog for. Or maybe it is, in which case you are one masochistic son of a bitch. No, really, though, I'm sorry. This is my process, and unfortunately, paper and pen stopped working for me after college. For the most part, at least. Typing is what I do, and I don't have some elastic-bound, private, never-to-be-actually-read volume that is somehow going to make me excise all of this cancer from my being so that I can move on to something a little bit less paralyzed.

Which, I suppose, brings me back to the topic that this blog was supposed to be about. And yeah, I admit that I was reminded of it by watching Heroes. Not that I didn't already have some sense of it, but the last episode had actually rung it home a bit in that way... It's the sense of not knowing what to DO. So what if there actually IS some sort of rule that if you are doomed to cause more pain and suffering every time you try to do something good, or that every time you attempt to mend a wound, that you're destined somehow to cause it to grow, then what do you do? I can't for the life of me imagine even being able to try to stop myself from doing the best I can by the world. I can't help but attempt to step in and take action when I see suffering, or a need that must be fulfilled. And even knowing that my own intervention has the potential to make things that much worse, how can I help myself but still at least try to intervene?

This is why I choose not to believe in God. Because in a universe that is inherently meaningless, finding yourself in a situation where you do the best you can with what you have actually makes itself into a positive lesson. A sort of putting an order to the chaos. Whereas the world being as it is, and knowing that there is a being the likes of which we are nothing in comparison to, who actually made the world this way... I may know that my mission is bigger than myself, but at least in the universe that I conceive, every little bit counts. In a world that was ordered specifically in this way by a divine power, however, I simply refer back to the words of Elphaba in the musical Wicked: "No good deed goes unpunished."

And perhaps it's not just in myself that the rule goes. For all of what it was worth, Matt telling me that I'm a healer would have been the best thing that he possibly could have done. But the eye still mocks me, looking through my floundering to witness my failure, and as it stares at me, all I can think of it saying is "J'accuse!" And in that sense, I'll never know the alternative, but... I wonder if perhaps it may not have been better for him not to have tried to point out the good in me, after all...