Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

I was small, and the people who should have taken care of me didn’t. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they were awful people. In some cases, they didn’t take care of me because they had their own shit going on.

I get that. I have spent most of my life with my own shit going on, after all.

One of the things with having your own shit going on is that, first, it blinds you to other people’s problems. It’s hard to have empathy and remember that, as the saying goes, everyone you meet is fighting a great battle when your attention is all taken up by being on fire right now. It’s hard to find the energy to be calm and kind and to consider the divergence of experience of others when you’re exhausted and trying to keep your own head above the waves and you’re swallowing salt water and you have no idea where you are going to find the energy to keep kicking.

Another thing about having your own shit going on is that until you get some perspective on it, that shit feels enormous. Like the center of the universe. And it kind of is, in that nobody who is excavating a pile of trauma like that has the energy for anything else except shoveling. But it becomes so all-consuming that it’s easy to forget that you—and your trauma—are not the only thing on anybody else’s mind, or even the most important one, because they’re all really busy thinking about their own shovels.

They have their own shit, their own trauma and crisesdeadlines-taxeshealthproblemssoreteethfamilydramatoxicneighbors you name it eating up the lion’s share of their own attention. And that’s fine , is the thing. There’s nothing wrong with that . Your problems are your problems, and their problems are their problems, and that’s the way it’s actually supposed to be.

But when you’re dealing with that much trauma, and it’s that raw, boundaries are another thing you wind up sucking at.

Recovery, I guess I’m trying to say, makes narcissists of us all.

So when I’m freaking out now about what people think about me or what they think is going on with me I remind myself… I don’t merit more than a passing consideration in most people I encounter’s day. They just don’t think that hard about me.

Thank God.

People got their own problems.

I certainly got more than enough of mine.

I sawher once more, even though I never planned to go back to Chicago. She came out to see me after her parents let her out of the treatment program they’d had her committed to.

She came to my mother’s house, where I was living. Working temp jobs. Never staying longer than a week because after a week, people start to loop you into the politics and then they expect you to get involved. I was in therapy, because my dying mother made me.

Biggest favor she ever did me, in hindsight.

She stood in the doorway looking at me when I answered, framed in the greens of the yard. She studied my face. We were both a little better-fed than we had been.

And then she said to me, “I don’t think you can fully appreciate how much I hate you.”

I smiled as if she had accepted my offer of tea. “Oh,” I said, feeling the swell of self-loathing in me like a rising magma dome, “I think I can, most likely.”

Before Idigressed, what I was pointing out was that it doesn’t happen fast, the changes. It happens slow. It’s an unpicking. The Gordian knot is more of a problem when you’re in a hurry and you don’t have any tools—assuming you want the string to be useful for something when you’re done unpicking it, which I’ve always thought was the problem with the Alexandrian solution.

Well, I had assembled my tools. With as much haste as possible, and it hadn’t been fast, honestly, despite feeling that amorphous sense of formless dread, the pressure pushing on my awareness constantly without any knowledge of where it was going to happen, or when.

Now I have them. Pens, inks. A selection of flawless new notebooks.

The first line in a pristine notebook is always a little fraught. That paper, so innocent. And here I am, intending to put a mark down that would scar it forever.

Maybe the real reason I burned my notebooks was that I didn’t want the responsibility.

Maybe that’s also why I never had children. Just stories.

Nobody really remembers if you screwed up any given story, five years after the fact.

Erase, erase, erase.

There’s freedom in not being important. In not being seen.

I can’ttouch food for three days. Unfortunately, not being able to touch the food does nothing to keep me from getting hungry.

There’s so much to forgive yourself when it comes down to it. So many little cysts of self-hate and personal despair.

“I need you to keep your promises,” I said. And that was the beginning of the end.

He promised easily. Fluidly.

Meaninglessly.

And I kept on believing him. Forgiving him.

Making excuses.

I was so good at excuses.

Not for myself. I was always culpable. And I always found ways to punish myself. I believed it when he told me I was wrong. My perceptions, my understanding of events. When he told me I must be crazy, because what I remembered hadn’t happened that way at all.

I was unforgiveable. I was sure.

But then I asked him to keep his promises.

And I started writing his promises down. In my notebook. With my pen.

I findthe damaged pen in a box I didn’t know had any pens in it, at the back of a deep cabinet shelf. I rattle it reflexively, not expecting a sound. But there is weight inside it, and something shifts.

I open it and find a narrow, black, beat-up old fountain pen I cannot identify.

I mean, I know what pen it is. It’s one I must have been given by a family member but I can’t remember what the occasion was, or who had given me it. I had used it all through college after I lost my graduation pen. But I don’t know what kind it is.

It’s missing the gold trim band on the cap, and the cap doesn’t close and lock. I remember it having a satisfying click when I shut it. It’s so slender I used to tuck it inside the spiral rings of my notebooks. It lived there. It was a good pen.

It is full of dried ink, because I am a terrible pen custodian.

I check the collector websites and can’t find anything like it.

There wasa time I was a bad friend. I was in love with somebody, and they were in love with somebody else, and I was in love with that person too. Looking back, I don’t think either of them loved me.

I didn’t handle it well.

I remember sitting in a bar in a bad chain restaurant breaking up tortilla chips into crumbs with my fingers because I needed something to do while my friend broke up with me, and I didn’t have the will to eat them.