Spiders

I don't like sharing my personal space with bugs. I'd like to be all zen and shit about them, let them live as long as they don't threaten me. With some of the more innocuous seeming bugs, I can convince myself to adopt this attitude providing the bug keeps its distance.

For very threatening bugs like bees and cockroaches, I will take swift action regardless of their placement or behavior. I will kill, usually overly much. Typically, they get swatted, ground, and smeared. I want to be absolutely sure they are dead. If a relatively harmless bug persists in being in my space in a way that is unhealthy or worrisome, like living in my flour, I will also become less zen about them. I do not intend to share my resources with something which is hurtful, unhealthy, or parasitic.

My ex, T., doesn't like to kill them, although he's rather panicky around bees and such. Today he told me that a wasp flew into his office at school. He dodged it but it kept coming for him, so he closed all the windows and left. He is hoping that it will be dead when he returns to his office on Monday.

He also told me today, interestingly enough, that he broke up with me. I asked him if he meant that he acted like such an asshole that I had to break up with him, thereby passively causing the breakup. He said no. We then had a discussion about each others' narrative of the relationship, or specifically, about the breakup.

T. was probably thankful to be done with these sorts of conversations and I think it came as a shock to find himself engaged in one with me. Over the last few years, his discomfort with them became like a fucking presence in the room. This was part of a more general detachment. T seemed to lose the ability to engage in deep conversations that demanded he operate with some understanding of assumptions relevant to the discourse at hand. He used to be very engaged and socially aware in interactions not only with me but with friends. Over the year, he lost so much connection that friends frequently commented that he had more and more "inside jokes", meaning stuff that he would expect us to find funny without explaining the sometimes unlikely connections he had made in his head.

What was happening? I think T was becoming what I consider a zombie. I was one once when I was married. The zombification results from the belief you are trapped or powerless to deal with the sometimes quite difficult challenges in life, especially the growing up challenges that come up in your late 20s. And a zombie is someone who is scared or threatened enough that he will even kill his own spirit to stop feeling scared.

It's a very fortunate biological fact that when they are in pain or discomfort, animals will try to escape. Shit, even slime molds will be provoked into acting like an entirely non-fungus-y organism if you consider lack of food an unpleasant stimuli (which you should unless you're some kind of freakish diet addict). We humans are higher organisms and shit, so you'd expect us to be able to seek remedy in efficient and enlightened ways.

Hardly. Unfortunately, even humans’ "remedies" for unpleasant stimuli are often predatory, parasitic, and/or destructive. Further, it seems we humans are unique in being sanctimonious about our destructive remedies. We can covertly move from a rewarding communal or couple relationship to one that is parasitic or predatory, telling ourselves that this is right, just, warranted, “the way things are done”, or whatever. I can't think of another creature that goes out of its way to convince the organism it is about to eat, hitch onto, or somehow harm in its efforts to ensure it feels safe and secure that the organism should actively and eagerly participate in its being used.

Back to T. T was used. He served as a remedy for some monstrous deficiency of his father’s. As a result, T lost some crucial basis for adult self confidence, self efficacy, and the ability to embrace mutuality. Throughout his childhood (and at family dinners even now) all of T's judgments and choices were subject to cross examination through daddy's ridicule or tantrum. A significant manifestation of the damage this has done is that T does not really have decision making skills. He can make choices if a committee agrees that they are the right ones. Or if his family agrees. And he immediately forgets the text of what little clear deliberation he did engage in. I believe it is because the process makes him anxious, so he's eager to be done with it asap.

The need to recruit others to deal with the decisions in his life has left T the options of being either parasitically attached to his partner or a gear in the suffocating machine that he calls his family. That’s a bad spot. No winning on either side. So he chose the only route that offered no pain. He became numb.

When I was a kid, I had nightmares about zombies. I might have written about this before, so I apologize if I’m being redundant.

My nightmares were marked by a recurring theme of a zombie like illnesses that spread through the community and into my inner circle. In these nightmares, I was always holed up somewhere with people I was close to, avoiding a war, storm, or some other disaster. Zombies would start out as a premise - a "they're out there" sort of thing. The next thing I knew, I would realize the people I thought were safe, healthy, and helpful were becoming predatory zombies too. This was the most horrifying thing for me.

Eventually it would become clear that our hideout/shelter was not holding and needed to be abandoned. It seemed if we banded together, we'd have a fighting chance of making it out. And if we died in the attempt, at least we wouldn’t become zombies. The one thing that was always abundantly clear was that I could NOT stay there and just let this happen. But no matter what the circumstances were, I could never convince anyone to leave with me. My companions would peek out from under a bed or inside a hole in the wall to tell me they were too scared to run, to fight, or to do anything but stay there even if it meant a fate possibly worse than death.

I always woke up screaming, not in fear or horror from the threat around me, but in something like the most outraged frustrated disbelieving anger. There is no word for the feeling.

I've felt like this with T. I felt it when I was speaking to him today on the phone. I know I was cruel sometimes. I wasn’t when we first broke up, but then when we first broke up, the only threat was the one of hurt. But it was hurt for a good or at least right reason. God it did hurt, but the other routes seemed like they would be worse. Using one another, coming to hate ourselves and/or each other, losing our identities....

I broke up with T because I knew it would be bad to become what he thought he needed, and I didn't want to continue to be angry and frustrated with him for failing to find the courage to live on his own terms. I wanted to find an enlightened remedy to the pain and the threat of more pain. It was not easy, but I thought I could do it. It was so hard to accept that what had once been such a wonderful and joyful, honest relationship had turned into such a horrible and increasingly sullen, selfish mess. Because I wanted to be honest and genuine about the love I still felt, and kind about the love he still claimed to feel, I accepted the term "separated" and I tried to maintain a friendship while keeping the necessary boundaries in place. But he repeatedly tested and crossed them.

This was becoming threatening and unhealthy, but I didn't stomp it out right away. The last two times I saw him, I had mentioned to him that I wanted to plan some time to talk. His calling me when he was driving by and asking if he could stop in, inviting himself out to dinner with me and my friends, taking me aside to hug and kiss me - but not calling, not planning, not showing respect for my time - it was crushing me, and making me angry. I didn't want to feel thsi way, so I said "hey we need to talk" and he agreed. Last time he was here, I said "call me next time you're going to be in town and we can set something up". And he said "Well you could always call me". And I thought, yeah, he's right. Plus I'm the one who requested a sit down talk. So I called the next day. Then I waited. He replied days later with a distant e-mail saying he had been very very busy. He also happened to mention he had found the time to go on a field trip to Boston during that very busy time. This was too painful. What the fuck was I doing?

I decided to fail to put an end to this means I agree to play along so T doesn’t have to deal with the realities of the break up. He gets to put me on a shelf when he doesn’t want or need to deal with someone who holds him to an exceptionally high standard. And I get to have a zombie relationship. It's not dead, it's not alive. He didn't want to try to fight it out with me, he wanted to hide under his bed. So now he’s a zombie looking for what passes for intimacy for zombies, i.e., predation and consumption. Apparently I can’t be his lover, but I can still be a consumable resource. It hurts to have to swat, grind, and crush this out of existence, but the alternative T offers is unacceptabe. While his remedy is not one where I am the predator or user, it is self destructive and I simply won't do it.