Last night, I woke up at one o’ clock in the morning. The room was dark, the bed was warm. The man I love was beside me.
And I laid there quietly, alone with myself. And I cried.
I can’t explain it, but sometimes all I’ve lost over the past couple of years catches up with me. It sneaks up on me in the shadows, in the dark, at night. Flickering shades of a life that dematerialized so rapidly that it stole my breath stir behind my eyes. But even more painful and haunting to me now – more painful than the shattering of my understanding of my own life and future – was losing my faith in people. At some point, I lost my capacity to trust completely and with abandon in the way I once did. I saw sides of people I loved and trusted that I wished I’d never seen. It changed me. Faced with the reality of what others are capable of, I internally withdrew. Some of who I was then is just gone now.
*
I am sadder now than I was before, and happier at the same time, oddly. I think I understand things about human nature I didn’t before – things I would’ve denied and been unable to accept, I now understand as simple fact, truth. That the people you love and trust have the capacity to hurt you in ways you’d never expect. That there’s no real way of knowing what anyone is capable of, at least not completely. This is the truth I now know. And there’s sadness in knowing that. But also, a strange kind of freedom, a weird sort of liberation. Knowing the truth of what all people are, I’ll never be blindsided again. I’ll enter into every situation, into every friendship, with the understanding that there is always real risk involved, accepting that. I’ll never again be the blindly trusting, naive person I was. Experience has fortified me, made me stronger. But also, warier.
And I still mourn the me of before, the version of me who believed. I mourn the person I was when I thought I knew people so well that I knew they’d never hurt me. It was easier, living in that vacuum of illusion. Everyone in my life who I cared about was, to my mind, “Good,” and “Trustworthy,” and that was that. And the confusing reality is that they were those things, and they are now, still. But even truly good and honestly trustworthy people have their dark aspects. Everyone does. And anyone who would deny that – deny that they themselves have darkness in them, that they themselves are capable of deceiving and hurting others – yes, even people they would claim to love – is selling snake oil. Those that deny the existence of their own darkness are the most dangerous, I think. That lack of self-awareness – of who and what they are, of their own humanity – is dangerous. Those are the people who, after years of denial and repression, explode into violence, self-harm, or addiction. Those are the people who, after having kept a tight death-grip on themselves for the sake of appearances for so long, inevitably fall apart, let go, and go mad. The darkness that was always there in them and always denied ends up consuming them.
Because no one is simply good. Or simply bad. And to try to be wholly either is a kind of madness. Everyone is, well, everything. Depending on the circumstances, every one of us is capable of betrayal, cruelty, hurtful acts, viciousness, heartlessness, negation. This is the reality of what people are. This is humanity, take it or leave it.
The converse of course is that we’re also, each of us, capable of stunning loyalty, caring, self-sacrifice, sensitivity, and amazing feats of love and devotion. But both sides are unpredictable. People are not static things – they are moving, shifting, bubbling, changing, expanding and receding. People are becoming. Always. To try to be one, not two, is to split yourself in half, to dislocate your self and your identity, and to be diminished.
*
There’s nothing wrong with vulnerability, as long as you understand that you are, in fact, vulnerable. My problem always was that on some fundamental level I believed I was safe. I believed that my life and everyone in it was solid, impenetrable, immovable. I believed this because that was how it seemed, and how people appeared to be, how they presented themselves. I didn’t allow myself to see the darkness, or peer into the shadows. I saw only the bright patches, the spots each person highlighted with the self-directed spotlight they carried around, claiming those dappled bits to be the whole of themselves. But no one is that. And by the time I reached my 30s, I should’ve known better, quite honestly. I’d had enough experience and accumulated enough evidence to know better by then.
Two sides. Dark and light, sunlight and shadow. Within and without. There’s no denying it, avoiding it, or making it otherwise. And so we must accept things as they are, people as they are. Forgive each other, and ourselves.
And go on living together, as we must.
. . . . .
Thank you to Laurie, for making me think.
