1:49 AM: When I was a child I took great pleasure in deliberately, methodically ruining anything good around me. The more good the thing, the greater the pleasure. The more dramatic I could make the destruction, the deeper the cut I could inflict on those around me, the better I imagined it would feel. And in a way, I guess it did.
I frequently imagined killing myself on holidays. And while I do not recall ever actually killing myself, I did cut myself for attention, break things, and ruin special occasions. I recall sitting through a large part of Oz Fest 98, stubbornly standing alone in North Park cemetery one New Year’s Eve, intentionally making Suzi cry on prom, and generally deriving pleasure from being manipulative and cruel. I remember the first hole I kicked in my bedroom wall when I was around seven years old. Breaking the battle ship game my mother got me. There are far worse things that I remember but do not wish to write. I can recall thinking of the most horrible things I could do and then the way it felt to bring some of them into reality.
There is something to this. Being fucked up in this specific way was precipitated by specific causes and resulted in decades of self-inflicted catastrophes. I still find myself doing it, though to a much lesser degree. I do not think it is unfair to say that I now add to rather than detract from events, at least to the best of my ability; however, if I feel that I am wronged or slighted in some way prior to the event, I am still quick to withdraw my participation out of spite. I sat out this past thanksgiving for that very reason.
A great deal of this behavior is most certainly pouting, but there’s more to it. As a young child, it may be that I derived a sense of control and power in a world that was unfair and nonsensical. As a teenager and young adult, I also wished to share the profound sense of pain I felt with those closest to me. Now, I believe it is mostly reactive stubbornness and a distorted sense of righteous indignation. But there is still that old sense of bringing something horrible into the world, of exerting myself in that specific way, though it is subtle and nearly always squelched into inaction. I have become more adept at maintaining awareness of this tendency in the moment and asking myself which course would really make me happier in a few hours.
