The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

Her sister is a sommelier, so Hats doesn’t fuck around with wine, but my sister’s a narcissist so I absolutely do.

Oliver can’t look the fullness of how bad they were square in the eye, at least not yet. And that’s fine—well, it’s not really fine, it’s incredibly invalidating of his life experience, but I understand that acknowledging the fullness of something then requires you to feel the consequences of it with a fullness too, and I don’t think he has the bandwidth.

People who have a narcissistic personality disorder are intensely skilled at impression management.

Fucking up and owning it is like catnip for me. The self-acceptance it takes to admit your flaws out loud to someone else is impressive, and I’d say downright admirable.

“People don’t develop substance dependencies by dealing with their problems; they develop them to numb them.”

It’s like Maryanne knows how and when to preload people with tokens, and she does it with such foresight that when it’s time for them to regurgitate the loyalty or the yielding she so requires, they just do it. My sister can pull strings in people they don’t even know they have.

“It’s why everyone’s always banging on about vibes,” I go on. “That’s not some hippy-dippy new whatever we’ve just discovered—it’s people picking up on the tiny inexplicable things that they see without knowing they see it.”

but our subconscious is the real boss. Our conscious actions might be the ship we’re sailing, but our subconscious is the rudder that steers it.

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?

People who aren’t self-aware, people who haven’t lived their lives in the pursuit of truth, find that the truth is confronting if you don’t want to hear it. I think I represent to her a myriad of uncomfortable truths she just can’t afford to lean into, because her whole life depends so heavily on a false reality. People don’t tend to want those ruptured.