She Broke Up With Me, And Never Gave Me A Second Chance

When I was nineteen, being both depressive and insecure, I dated a girl called Allie.  Allie was perfect for me at nineteen – she was smart, more well-read than any girl I’d ever met, possessed of a wicked sense of humor, and way into Doctor Who.
This was back when Doctor Who was a hipster nerd phenomenon, with the only way to watch episodes on late-night PBS telethons and hand-recorded videotapes, so even knowing Tom Baker’s name was like a secret handshake.  We’d go to her house and watch episodes, and cuddle up, and never quite kiss.
We never quite kissed because she liked me, but thought I was a risky proposition to get intimate with.  I was prone to dramatic outbursts, fresh off of two spring suicide attempts – that was before I’d noticed my Seasonal Affective Disorder – and I had a bad habit of acting out to get attention when I felt lonely.  She wasn’t sure she could trust me.
Which, of course, I didn’t understand.  We were meant for each other!  We’d both read the complete works of Freud!  We both laughed at the same obscure jokes! I was always a phone call away when she was down!  How could she think I might be bad for her?
We dorked around like that on and off for about a year, and eventually she trusted me.  She kissed me, and I floated on air for a week.  She finally admitted that yes, we were dating, and that she loved me.
Naturally, I fucked it up within weeks.
I was insecure because she went to college in another city, and I got drunk, and back in those days I was of the dumbass opinion that if someone loved you, then they’d be happy to prove it to you at any time.  So my reaction to insecurity was to have a mental breakdown over something she’d done, gibbering about how much hurt she was causing me – expecting that she’d naturally see my pain and demonstrate her affection in all the over-the-top, Lloyd-Dobler-with-the-boom-box ways that I was prone to doing.
So I did that on a visit.
She kicked my ass to the curb.
No explanation.  No reason.  She just told me it was over, and told me to go, and next thing I knew I was taking an early train home to Connecticut, *completely baffled* as to what had happened.
I was cut off.
And it hurt a lot.
Now, the reason I’m digging up all of these painfully stupid incidents from my past is because of this much-maligned piece on “Cutoff Culture”, wherein the guy had a four-month relationship with someone who (it’s implied) is a decade younger than he is, and then was still stalkery heartbroken about it two and a half years later.
The essay is basically a long clumsy cry for help, saying, “How can I possibly heal if you won’t talk to me?  How can partners be *so mean* to cut men off without an explanation?  You owe it to me to talk to me to help me along my psychological journey!”
And let me tell you what Allie’s cut-off finally taught me, my friend:
My pain is not anyone else’s responsibility to fix.
And that is quite possibly the most valuable lesson I ever learned.
I was, thankfully, self-aware enough not to be a stalker back then… partially because I respected boundaries, which I did, but partially because my drama took the form of worshipping Allie, with me as her humble knightly servant, and the Queen had exiled me.  So I took it as a matter of pride to stay as far away from her as possible.
(Thank God.  Oh, thank God I did.  Some days I look at my nineteen-year-old self as some rabid tiger, wandering around loose and dangerous, and I wonder who the fuck ever thought letting that idiot out on the world was a good idea.  I wasn’t a good person back then, but holy shit I could have fucked up even worse.)
But I wondered.  I wondered why the heck she wouldn’t want me, when I did everything she needed.  I did all of these wonderful things for her, been her best friend, been the funniest guy she knew – she told me that! – and with all that, how could she toss that away so casually?
I analyzed Allie.  Was she cruel?  Psychopathic?  Crying out in her own way for help?  Blind to my benefits?
And Jesus fuck, after months of pondering the idea, I finally had shucked away the other options and was left with the simple, staring truth that Maybe you were bad for her, you idiot.
It seems stupidly simple, and it was, but I was so fogged by my misplaced affections that I couldn’t do the equation: If she kicked my ass out, I couldn’t have been as good as I thought.
And that thought led to a hundred other thoughts, each of which contributed to making me an actually useful partner:
“How could she not have told me?”  Well, the forensic analysis on those conversations revealed that she had told me, at least twenty times – I just wasn’t listening.
“How could she be so cruel?”  She could be so cruel because I’d been an overemotional jackass to her on multiple occasions, and though she’d been quietly trying to change my behavior, I stubbornly refused to stop.
“Why was this so sudden?”
It wasn’t.
It had been a slow burn, and I was just too self-obsessed in my own needs to see it coming.
Yet when I checked with my friends, the ones who were honest?  Holy God, they all saw it coming.  To them it was a tsunami of stupid, and they were just waiting for it to hit shore, but I didn’t even feel a drizzle.
And what finally occurred to me was that I was the villain here.
Which is not to say that Allie was without flaw.  I’m not going to make the stupid nineteen-year-old mistake of idolizing Allie, claiming she was perfect and oh God I brought down Heaven itself (which was, sadly, the self-flagellation mode I took for years afterwards).  Allie had her own flaws, and in truth we didn’t actually share the same sense of humor, and we didn’t actually love the same things about the books we’d read, and I was a Peter Davison fan when she loved Tom Baker.
Really, such a relationship could never last.
But what I started to learn with Allie (and ultimately had to finish up with my wife Gini, who thankfully I did get it right with) was that I had a really selfish MO, perhaps taught to me from years of therapists who’d been paid to listen to me: When I was upset, I thought it was someone else’s job to calm my ass down.
And it wasn’t.  I was actually a walking stickybomb, expecting everyone else to tend to my needs, and what Allie taught me – bless her – is that nobody else is responsible for my pain but me.  I can talk to other people to try to fix it, and it’s helpful if they do, but they are by no means obligated to help me in my journey.
More importantly: if I fuck up their lives to an unreasonable extent, they’re perfectly within their rights to eject me.  Nobody should be expected to tolerate someone who’s actively toxic to them.
And viewed in that light, the very least I could do to Allie after heaping psychological trauma upon her is to leave her the fuck alone and not try to get in touch with her.
Yet to this day, on the rare occasions I’ve written about Allie, I get people chirping, “Well, you should get in touch with her!  You never know!  See if she’s forgiven you!”
But hey, this is the age of interconnectivity.  My name’s a Google away.  I’ve seen her name float across my Facebook page a couple of times, which means I’m sure she’s seen mine.  I even used her real name in some early blog entries back in the year 2000, before I realized Google would actually put that data somewhere she could find it (I’ve since erased them).
I’m 100% certain that Allie knows where I am, who I am, and has no interest.  And that’s fine.  As I’ve said in my essay “How I Never Forgive Someone“:

It’s not that I don’t believe in the act of forgiveness, repentance, or growth.  It’s that for me, these people have shown me to be not worth the risk of having them around.  They weren’t perfectly toxic in the first place, or they never would have been my friends; there was something I liked about them, enough to give them multiple chances.  They probably did at least one very good thing for every two bad things they did.
Eventually, I realized that I didn’t like continually wondering what hurtful thing they might do next.  The damage of always cringing in preparation for the next blow is, in some ways, worse than the actual blow.  And as such, letting them back into my life would mean cringing on some level… and I won’t do that.
They’ve burnt their time with me.  I hope they can learn to make other people happy; I hold no malice.  But they’re not allowed back, no matter how many proclamations of change they make, no matter how many people vouch for them.  It’s not that I think they are bad, it’s that I am no longer willing to find out.

That’s who I was for Allie.  And that’s why no, I don’t get in touch with her.  She deserves a life free of cringing in expectation of the next blow.  And honestly?  Even at the age of forty-four, I’m still kinda dippy.
That wound still aches.  It’s an embarrassingly teenaged regret to reveal here, but yes – I’d feel better, on some levels, if we were friends, as it’d be proof that somehow I’d made up for my old tiger-level stupidity.
But I am friends with Allie, even if she is not friends with me.  And since I am a true friend, the best way I can show my friendship is to let her not worry I’m going to hurt her again.
I’m no longer her responsibility.  I’m my own.
It is, actually, better this way.

Book Review: The Girl In The Road, By Monica Byrne

My friend Sarah first introduced me to the concept of the “sacred text” – a book that’s such a headlong rush of philosophies wrapped up in vivid characters that fans of the book run around pushing the book at people like some sort of strange Jehova’s Witness program.  They do this because the book reflected some vital part of their soul, saying the secret things that lurked so deeply within their hearts that they didn’t even realize they felt that way until they found this author speaking for them.
The example given was Cat Valente, who taps into people’s veins deeply with The Orphan’s Tales and Palimpsest.
But with The Girl In The Road, Monica Byrne hits another vein – a close one to Cat’s, but different enough that I think she’s gonna be one of the debut authors of the year.   As does Neil Gaiman, who called this sucker, “Glorious. . . . So sharp, so focused and so human.”
Now, full disclosure: Monica was a Clarion classmate of mine, so of course I love her dearly.  But her book pulls off a mightily difficult trick that few authors manage, and does it with such transparency you might not even realize it’s going on: she writes about a manic-depressive so that you utterly see the world through her eyes.
Truth is, I’m not sure what Meena is, because there’s not an official diagnosis of her troubles.  But Meena is vibrantly and impulsively alive, bisexual, sleeping with who she chooses, running after her dreams with vigor and perhaps not nearly enough forethought.  She wakes at the beginning of the novel to find that a snake has bitten her in an assassination attempt engineered by her enemies, and so must flee India.  She chooses, unwisely, to escape via The Trail – a 500 mile-long series of narrow floating platforms crossing the Arabian Sea, which harvest energy from the wave movements.  So begins her harrowing journey.
But The Girl In The Road isn’t really about plot.  It’s about living in the moment with Meena, whose relentless enthusiasm and certainty makes her one of the most flawed characters I’ve ever seen – and yet all of Meena’s decisions make perfect sense when filtered through Monica’s manic, delightful, and compelling prose.  You watch as Meena decides that this is what she must do, then discards it effortlessly because she’s been wrong all along, this is what she must do.  She sleeps with men and women and then leaves them, she opens up then hides, she goes from sunny to sullen in a heartbeat.
Yet for all of that, you can’t help but admire Meena, because Meena is unashamed of who she is.  She’s the perfect example of an active character, one who makes decisions – and she’s making them in a gloriously multicultural world, rich and detailed, one where the complex overspill of all the cultures in the Indian regions mesh and Meena must navigate all the languages and embedded cultural privileges that make this feel like a genuine, battered-yet-functional future.  There’s a lot of new technology floating around here, but it certainly hasn’t solved all the world’s problems.  If anything, it’s just complicated them.
Intertwined with this is the tale of Mariama, a young girl in Africa who’s forced to flee her home and takes up with a caravan of smugglers.  Meena’s and Marima’s fates are, of course, intertwined.
Thing is, this isn’t a perfect novel.  Then again, the sacred texts rarely are – they’re outpourings from the heart, jumbled and complicated as life, a thousand philosophies spilled onto the page.  And I rocketed through The Girl in the Road because I wanted to follow these characters, who didn’t think at all like I did and made terrible decisions, but hoo boy did I know a lot of people just like them, and I felt as though it explained something to me about them that I didn’t understand at the time.  This isn’t my sacred text, but I think there’s going to be a lot of women who pick this up and feel the pull of Meena and Mariama, who are so thoroughly and perfectly themselves that you have to wonder if they’re broken or yet completely functional in alternative ways that can’t be properly described.
What you get with The Girl In The Road are characters who feel more human than I’ve felt from any mere novel in a long time.  It’s a novel with a pulse.  And since it’s her debut novel, I’d suggest taking a look at it as soon as possible, either by downloading the preview or preordering the book – I think you want to get on-board Monica’s vibe as soon as possible.

Women: What Makes A Man Interesting? You Know, That He Can Fix?

I’m writing a piece that’s the flip side of You Weren’t “Nice,” You Idiot, You Were BORING, wherein I hope to explain to the timid young dudes out there how to acquire a personality. This article is intended to be friendly, sympathetic, and helpful.
And so I ask: As a woman, what makes a guy interesting to you? You know, that he can actually fix?
Because the temptation is to say, “Well, I want a hunky, handsome guy,” but not every guy can be hot. Or make himself hot. The temptation is to say, “I want a guy with a compelling personality,” but unless you can break that down into what a compelling personality is and how to get there, then basically you’ve given some pretty damn useless advice.
What I’m looking for are actionable items that a guy can work on to make himself someone that you would be interested in hanging around with on a regular basis.
(It’s comparatively easy to get a first date, depending on how you approach a woman and her personal level of “Why not, what the hell,” but the types of dudes I’d be looking to help here would be the ones who get one or two dates and then their partners drift away, disinterested.  And they don’t know why they’re just sort of background noise to women at large, all they know is that for whatever reason they’re not memorable.)
What I’ve already got is stuff like:

• Have your own interests, and don’t be ashamed of them. Because a person who only talks about what you want to talk about becomes boring really quickly. Find some hobbies, something to discuss besides “I really like you, you know that?” so that when you take her somewhere, you can take her somewhere cool.
• Be interested in things that you’re not familiar with… Which is to say a lot of nerds have a bad habit of tuning out when people start talking about things they don’t know about, figuring that anything they don’t understand can’t be interesting. But listen. Ask questions. I don’t know much about baseball, or wedding dresses, or the weather, or dentistry, but if you treat it like, “Oh, maybe I can learn from this person!” and ask questions, you’ll find most people are actually happy to educate you. And then you know more things to talk about.
• …but don’t be afraid to express disagreement. A dude who bobs his head for everything isn’t a person, they’re an organic rubber stamp. If your date is saying that “21 Dresses” is the best movie ever made, it’s okay to say, “You know, I didn’t care for that!” as long as you’re not disdainful of her choice. Sometimes it can lead to a more interesting conversation about what you didn’t like, and what you do like in movies. There are a small contingent of people who only want to hear reflections of things what they like, but they tend to be terrible fucking partners anyway; don’t be afraid to respectfully tell someone you didn’t love what they loved.

…and so forth. But I’d like some feedback from women on things guys can do to make themselves more attractive as a long-term partner (or, alternative, things dudes have done to establish themselves quickly that they’re not a long-term partner). I’ve discussed psychological things thus far, but it could also be physical tricks like “Don’t have a messy bachelor’s apartment” or “Learn to dress well” (as long as you explain where to go to learn how to dress well).
And so, again, I ask you:
As a woman, what makes a guy interesting to you? You know, that he can actually fix?

My Annual Seasonal Affective Disorder Got… Weird

So I have Seasonal Affective Disorder every spring.  I endure about three to five weeks of terrible, crushing depression, and in fact as a boy I had two suicide attempts during the June time period and was halfway to a third before finally realizing hey, I feel this way every damn year, maybe it’s the chemicals.
So spring is kinda brutal.  (And yes, most people have SAD in the fall, autumn is not an ironclad rule of depression, there is zero need to mention how other people have depression to me in this circumstance since I have it in the spring.)
And I didn’t have it last year – but, as I noted, I’d just had a triple bypass four months back.  So as I theorized then, it could be the new diet and exercise, it could be the super-supplement of Vitamin D the doctor had put me on as he noted my levels were low, or it could be that I’d had major fucking surgery and my body was sufficiently jangled by the trauma that it just sort of skipped all the normal procedures.
I wondered whether I’d get it this year.  And then it hit me on Friday.  Hard.
I knew it immediately, because I’d started crying out of nowhere, feeling absolutely worthless, despite the fact that I’d just had a very good annual salary review and plans for a fun weekend.  I knew this flavor.  This depression was distinctly chemical.
And I buckled down, ready for the next four weeks, feeling exhausted already, and…
…it vanished.
Just went away on Saturday. I kept checking all weekend, but the SAD literally consumed just a single evening.
That’s when Gini noted that I’d forgotten to take my pills on Thursday.
And there’s a scary thing: it may well be that 10k milligrams of Vitamin D are all that stands between me and crushing depression right now.  It’s always hard to diagnose these things, but my exercise has been low, my body’s back, and one pill and I was back to normal.  It had never occurred to me that it might be Vitamin D, as I drink approximately a cow’s worth of milk a week and take a generic vitamin supplement, but…
…it looks like, until I hear otherwise, that taking a small yellow gelcap once a week is the key to keeping my brainmeats functioning.  And I can’t skip a day, or havoc arises.
That’s a little scary, but it’s better than enduring the depression.

Which Past Stars Would Make It In Today's Environment? A Thought Experiment

So you may not know this, but Dolly Parton’s arms are covered in tattoos – full arm sleeves.  And, it is said, her breasts are also covered in tats.  She merely covers them up in public because, well… I suspect it’s because back when she started her career, no nice young girl had tattoos.
Just another way Dolly Parton was ahead of her time.  Dolly’s one of the smartest recording artists out there – a sharp songwriter, an above-the-curve businesswoman, and the kind of feminist who reconciled her sexuality with her talent in such a casual way that she slipped under the goddamned radar for most people.
And I think about Scalzi’s post on Heinlein yesterday, where he tore apart the yahoos who said that Heinlein would never be nominated for a Hugo today by pointing out that Heinlein was, above all, a commercial writer.  He adapted his style to write for the highest-paying markets, paving the way for “mainstream” sci-fi, and if he were to start today as a young Heinlein with his talent, he’d doubtlessly be cranking out respected bestsellers.
Dolly Parton starting today?  This is the woman who wrote classic songs like “Jolene” and “Greatest Love of All,” and writes a song every day – and at least some of those songs would, with today’s modern folk renaissance, still be great hits.  She’d be openly tattooed, still a sex symbol, and probably more conflicted about her evangelical Christianity, but plop Dolly into this musical environment and I still think she’d make it to the top.
But you know who wouldn’t be a star?
Michael Jackson.
Not that Michael wouldn’t still be magnificently talented, but he got his start in the Jackson Five.  When was the last time you saw a family act hit the top of the pop charts?  Or a kid on vocals?  Hell, we still talk about how fucking weird it is to like MMmmmBop, which just shows how much of an outlier that is. A lot of Michael’s talent was developed while he was doing the touring thing with his family, and I can’t see The Jackson Five making the charts.
No, if you’re a kid these days, you do the Disney school of pop star, and not only is Disney not particularly great at promoting black kids as their marquee idols, I don’t think Michael’s controlling father would have let him go.  So Michael Jackson would vanish, and probably be a lot happier somewhere, and most likely alive.
What about the Beatles?  Proooobably.  The interesting thing about the Beatles is that they were the first teen pop stars of such a magnitude, and unlike the teen idols to come later, nobody shaped them – they just sort of started wearing those crazy haircuts on their own.  Unlike, say, One Direction, nobody said “Let’s put four cute boys in a band and have them perform hits,” the Beatles just sort of organically arose – and that’s what enabled them to make the transition from the Backstreet Boys of the 1960s and into the fucking Beatles we know today.
I think if the Beatles had somehow assembled themselves today, they’d be much more managed – with a cadre of people trying to mold them to be more popular, discouraging them from taking risks, promoting and actually fragmenting the band in different ways.  I think the Beatles would still be popular in that Hanson sort of way, but the likelihood of them being left alone to actually evolve into the magnificence of what they became would be very small.  I think the Beatles’ Hits would be four or five chart-topping singles after a good showing on a few reality shows, and then too many agents trying to steer them in bad directions.
So that’s the theory.  Question is, what great singer from the past do you think would succeed or fail today thanks to various marketplace changes, and why do you think they’d still triumph, or meet an ignominious defeat?  (Bonus points if you can pick someone obscure who would catch fire in today’s record market.)