Fuck Them

(1)

Whenever I do something wrong and chastise myself in my head, there’s a part of me that thinks “Hey. Leave her alone. She’s been through a lot.”

I usually resist saying anything against my younger self because I have so much affection for her. I know how much she strove to do the right thing. I know how destroyed she was by the thought that she might do the wrong thing.

I know how hard she was trying all the time, how much she wanted people to like her, and how much she wanted to impress everyone. But this striving was rooted in an over-focus on herself, which caused her to do so many things badly, above all, relate to other people.

She saw herself alone, against the world, and thought no one would truly ever understand her, but they would be dazzled by her incredible talent—still trying to figure out what that would have been.

She would show them all. And if they weren’t impressed, well fuck them.

I know people (as we all do) who tell themselves, and usually their friends, a story about who and how they are and the things that have happened to them. I could be this person. I’ve only lived about thirty years—there’s still plenty of time for me to overestimate my own talent and get angry when I find out how many people are more talented, more deserving, more hardworking.

If I live another thirty years, maybe I’ll have my own story about why I’ve turned out the way I have, and why it’s actually everyone else’s fault, and if only somebody had recognized that I was special, then I wouldn’t have turned out like this, and doesn’t it suck that the world screwed me like this?

I’ll sink deeper and deeper into my self-constructed pit of spite, because I’ve talked too long about how I’m going to show them, whatever talent or drive I had has long since atrophied, and all I have is memories and wishes and stories I am desperate for other people to hear.

I don’t have to elaborate too much, because you have known or been this person.

I can be overwhelmed by the resentment and shame that make up my past failures. I am constantly on the verge of being sucked in by that black hole of fuck them, that former gigantic burning mass that can morph into an almost-impossible-to-resist pull toward the abyss of hopelessness and helplessness and despair.

You likely have a spilling point as well, an instant when things seem close to the edge, closer to falling into whatever gaping chasm threatens to swallow you up. This is the dread that I feel when an ugly part of me is threatening to spill over, when I’m on the verge of I’ll show them all, or fuck them.

If someone rejects me, or treats me unfairly, or sees me in some limited way, fuck them is not necessarily a bad way to go. But if this is how I choose to see the whole of my existence, if I repaint every failure in my life as fuck them, then I collapse into a dying star of ego with enough gravity of resentment to suck anything close into my own stagnant, bitter universe.

The author John Green, in a commencement address to Kenyon College, addressed this problem to a group of graduates, getting ready to join the workforce:

“Some people will probably treat you as less than fully human, imagining you to be not the complex and multitudinous person you are but instead as an easily replaceable cog in the clockworks of their organization. All of that will be easier if you can see yourself not as the protagonist of your own heroic journey but instead as a collaborator in a massive, sprawling human epic.” (2)

This is what was missing in my younger self - not a lack of trying, not a lack of practice, but an over-focus on what it meant to live among other people. If I was the protagonist, the journey was about my life and my struggles. But no one’s life is that clean, containing a hero, a villain, a love-interest, a funny best friend, and a series of supporting characters.

Everyone is the hero. Everyone is the villain. Everyone is a supporting character.

I was the protagonist in an epic of a million protagonists.

You can die believing the clean story if you aren’t careful. You can die angry at them.

Who is them?

1. "Conan O'Brien." WTF with Marc Maron, theflyby YouTube Channel, January 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z86CWZAC3D0&t=3961s

2. "Kenyon College: John Green Commencement Address." Kenyon College Youtube Channel, May 21, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AriZhzeHbA

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