#there's like fifteen different points in this post and that's radically sexy of me

[echthr0s]

every once in a while I think about the sheer wealth of courage (and, let's be real, in-person social support and stability) that it took for Heather Havrilesky to go, "actually, yes, I will write a book about marriage that puts the warts and ugliness of being a messy human who is emotionally and legally attached to another messy human long-term on full display, and also I will let the New York Times publish a particularly warty excerpt of it for all the rabid Twitter hounds to see" like to me that sounds utterly mad of her but I'm so glad she did it

we all talk a good game about existing as wholly ourselves, without apology, but the more we understand about what it means to be wholly ourselves the more daunting the task becomes. the depths are deep indeed, and there be monsters. I've definitely made a practice (born of spite, of course, which I seem to have more of a wellspring of than I'd originally thought) of trotting out those monsters as "fun and sexy of me" but that has to come with the caveat that no one else necessarily agrees. to the reader, I'm probably just a bundle of monsters. but that has to be okay, too. self-acceptance has to be weighed against people-pleasing, every hour of the day, every day of the year, and at some point one is always forced to choose

and if we choose radical self-acceptance, you'd think it'd make sense that we'd choose it for other people as well -- that we'd radically accept their radical self-acceptance. except, that isn't always how it works. we see someone else doing it and immediately think, "no, not like that". because we're people and to be a people is to be contradictory and hypocritical and judgemental -- it's unavoidable. either you suppress it and pretend to a standard of loftiness that just makes you look silly, or you learn to laugh about it and try to keep it on a leash. (or you vacillate between both of those at whim!) but it's so, so easy when someone's a public figure... so easy to pedestalise them without even realising that's what you're doing. so easy to go, "well, they should be better than the rest of us, and if they're not, they should at least learn to pretend to be, especially if they're going to write a book".

because what being radically honest and self-revealing in public (extreme public, in front of potentially millions of people) means is that many, many people will have to face the ways in which they are exactly like you, and if they aren't already practiced in facing that, they will get angry. and they will blame you for their anger. they will assume that you're a bad person in a bad marriage (which was only made bad because of your poisonous existence, of course) and you should probably live alone in a cave forever and never darken the doorstep of any of us perfect, infallible, pristine humans ever again.

but there's something so interesting about being a ~bad person~, an uncompromisingly ugly mess of a human being that is honestly just trying their best. sometimes someone else goes, "yeah, me too. wanna buy a house together?" and you have to spend your whole life figuring out why in the cinnamon toast fuck they'd ever want to do that. that's the wonder of it all. underneath all the mess, underneath the snippy thoughts and the petty arguments and the childlike petulance and all the other day-to-day bullshit is the wonder of it all -- that none of that day-to-day bullshit matters as much as whatever it is you're building together, even if you can't see what it is, even if it feels pointless, even if you sometimes think maybe you should have built something else instead. you're still here, doing this day-to-day bullshit, because... why? that's the wonder. I haven't read Havrilesky's book yet, but I bet that's in there somewhere. the sheer naked wonder of being ugly and messy and weird and loved.

I guess I can radically accept the rabid Twitter hounds (et al) who would not accept me or Havrilesky or anyone else that doesn't fit their woefully misguided idea of personhood. accept, but always keep a rolled-up newspaper at hand