Catalytic Agency
God, every so often bodily autonomy strikes me again and I am just as amazed as the last time. This is so wild. Being in possession of—well more like having a functioning relationship with—myself. Not owing anyone my body, any piece of my being. Any explanation.
How? How is this allowed?
In hindsight all my past partners have been insecure about their gender or sexuality in various ways and to different effects. And the way it always started was, they saw me as playing into whatever personal issue they were unwilling to examine. Which later they took out on me.
Some were uncertain or conflicted. Some were super defensive. There are a lot of ways for insecurity to play out, right. And I was their object, for all of this unexamined garbage. First as an outlet. Then I was responsible for all their feelings and doubts and shame.
Which itself can play out in all these ways, right. My failure to give them what they want, my threat of betraying to others or giving the wrong impression of what they really want. The threat that comes from showing them themselves through their behavior toward me. How dare I make them act the way they acted toward me, and make them feel the way they did as a result of acting that way? It was obviously my fault because no one else had this kind of an effect on them. It was some perverse manipulation on my part, to make them look bad.
It’s like that thing where somehow bullies always know. The neurodivergent kids, the queer kids, even before they understood it themselves. They can always single them out for torture, and know they will get away with it. Except, to be frank, adult predation. Coercion.
It’s all violence in hindsight, all taking shit out on people who can help ease your insecurity. Whether that looks like open malice or desire, acquisitiveness, it’s just different angles on the same shit. Using the other to avoid confronting the self. Finding external reason.
None of it had anything to do with me, beyond my standing out as a desirable target. Yes, that’s the one. She will give me the satisfaction I need. One way or another.
Hell, immediately before they slid into my life, my ex-spouse had sat across from a friend at a Moroccan restaurant and drawn out a list of exactly what they wanted. This was their goal at that moment, to pursue someone who fit my description (as they misapprehended it). And they had this whole plan, this set of expectations that they had preordained, with deadlines and everything, that I had to fit or else there would be problems. I was never a person. I was an external function to facilitate their desires—desires carefully, deniably balanced between precise social indicators of status and identity, and then whatever unresolved issues they had inside, that they saw in me. And later came to accuse.
Though that’s what they were there for, right. That’s why they picked me. Just so long as I hid them from themself, never let them be reflected. So long as I showed them what they knew they should want, what was correct and unshameful, that could never raise questions in others’ minds about who they really were. When I could not do that, I became the biggest existential threat in their life. The target of all their disgust—not, I don’t think, for me, because it was never about me, was it. I wasn’t real. I had to be punished, until I learned how to hide. Not to hide me; how to hide them. They were so empty and they expected me to give them themselves—but not their real selves. The selves they wanted to see. The selves they hoped to show the world. But that’s not how a mirror works.
All this crap I have been carrying around all these years, it really has absolutely nothing to do with me at all, does it. It literally is just other people’s problems, that became mine when they decided I was responsible for them. Mine to own, because they didn’t want them.
I can’t speak to exactly what their anxieties may have been, and it’s none of my business, either to worry about or to relate. Definitionally, those are their problems. Not mine. I have the broad shapes as they pertain to me, and that is more than enough.
It’s actually kind of sad. Not that I need to take on any special pity either, considering what I suffered. Continue to suffer. Will continue to. Possibly forever. But to be that broken and to lack that much ability to self-repair. To be such a void of a person. It’s nothing even to be scared or angry about, really, is it. Just pathetic people who have no way to cope except to tear the world down to avoid their own pain. And, I happened to exist.
And here I still am.
More so than ever.