The New Me

by Halle Butler

Recognition is not the first step to change. Not in my experience, anyway.

I note this woman’s shape-shifting performance. How by saying a thing, she becomes it. As she complains about how boring it is to hear her friend complain about her mother, as she goes into detail, masterfully reenacting specific boring conversations (both between her and her friend, and her friend and her friend’s mother), she is essentially becoming them both, becoming the boredom she claims to want to remove from her life and mind, but which have complete control of her, and she doesn’t notice that by saying “I don’t like this” over and over she is just drawing herself closer to it, essentially becoming her friend and subjecting us all to what she claims to hate.

Back then, a sense of something more—like Oh, there must be something more!—was always nagging at me, like I was waiting, like my situation and my relationships were unimportant because of their seeming transience.

Maybe you can change the way you feel by trying out new personalities. I meditate on this.

Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.

I cry for a second, but I’m faking it. Waaaaaaahhhhhh. Poor me, poor me, who cares. This is what I wanted. To sit here and not have someone judging me. I’m fat, I smell, no one likes me, my clothes suck, I’ll never amount to anything, everyone around me is an idiot, self-involved, judgmental, stupid, too dumb to know the harm they’re doing, too dumb to know they’re not happy inside, not like me, I know. Ha-ha-ha.

Sometimes I pretend I’m feeling vengeful for the murder of someone I love. I play through the scenario, trying to make myself weep. I try to imagine what it would be like to be in favor of capital punishment, but I can’t. I’m indifferent to punishment.

Work again, another fucking waking nightmare.

I should read a book, I should make some friends, I should write some emails, I should go to the movies, I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby, I should buy a plant, I should call my exes, all of them, and ask them for advice, I should figure out why no one wants to be around me, I should start going to the same bar every night, become a regular, I should volunteer again, I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.

She’d specifically chosen this movie to watch because she’d seen it before. There was no room for new information in her mind. She loved—on the list of things she loved, this would be near the top—being in sweats, under a blanket, mildly stoned with a snack buffet in front of her.

I go with the same intentions as most—to find a person who might realize, through a sympathy of dialogue, that I am the person they’ve been looking for to fulfill what’s been missing in their emotional and intellectual lives.

I feel bored, and then I feel annoyed, and I wonder why no one ever wants to talk to me, because I’m a great conversationalist, it just takes me a minute to get into it. But once I get into it, I really roll, and things are really great. I remember a lot of times that I’ve been downright charming. I also remember a few times I’ve been abruptly aggressive, sure, but it’s unhealthy to dwell on the past.

Bitter, my whole body, my whole insides, everything about me that my body makes but that isn’t of my body—thoughts feelings personality—bitter for having to live in my shitty body, and my body dittoing the sentiment back to its master.

unwilling to reflect on last night and on the sum of my inadequacies.

I was embarrassed to be me and needed someone to reassure me that I had good qualities, to reassure me that I was just overreacting or having a bad day.

You can’t ask someone to help you without letting them know you’re different than advertised, that you’ve been thinking and feeling strange things this whole time. That you’re uglier, weaker, more annoying, more basic, less interesting than promised. Without letting on that your feelings are easily hurt, and that you are boring, just like everyone else. Once you expose yourself as insecure, it’s easy to feel resentment if you’re not immediately put back at ease. If there’s even a flicker, a tiny recognition of your bad qualities, the resentment kicks in, the deal is broken, and suddenly you’re both angry strangers, spending hours alone in a room together and completely unsure of why.

But who cares anymore anyway, it’s always better to be alone, better this way, better to be able to be yourself with yourself, openly awful. Who cares? Nobody.

I tell myself that change is possible, could be possible right now. Behavior is changeable. I might not be able to change my thoughts and opinions, not at first anyway, but my behavior, that I can do. If I don’t care either way, why not make some changes to my behavior? If I’m dead inside already, why not make a few simple changes? At least my body could feel better.

“I just want to be more in the present,” I say. An image of everything I’ve lost comes to me in a crippling flash: James, my youthful vigor, friendship, flexibility, happiness, an unknotted stomach.

The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there’s little of us left to care.

We’re so much in our minds, waiting for something to happen, acting it out, that the body and the outer world almost might as well not exist, for all it concerns us.

I get into bed with the lights on and squeeze my pillow in my arms, longing for someone to talk to, or longing for no one to ever look at me or talk to me ever again. Either one. I don’t care.

Some days I walk through my creation, surveying it, detached, almost proud. Other days, I lie in bed under the covers unable to move, unable to even cry, feeling a hatred for myself so wide and endless it’s almost funny.

She’d gotten it out of her system, knew what it was about, and no longer needed it—the “it” being vulgar and desperate ways of living justified by the false pretense of nonconformity as a sign of intelligence and authenticity.

I do something I haven’t done in a long time. I reel my arm back and slap myself full force in the face three times. Kind of stupid to do it completely alone here like this, no one to see what the fuck I’m doing, but whatever.

I wonder if she ever cries for me, or if they’re worried about me, and then cry myself to sleep.

I try to assess the things that bring me pleasure, and how those things might bring me a fulfilling career. I think about how I spend my time. Where my interests lie. The questions come naturally, as if supplied by the ether, and the answer sits in my empty skull: nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

I get socked in the chest, thinking about how things never change. How they’re on a slow-rolling slope downward, and you can think up a long list of things you’d rather do, but because of some kind of inertia, or hard facts about who you are and what life is, you always end up back where you started, sitting drunk on a hard, sticky chair with someone you hate.

I think about how every decision I make is a no, how every act is essentially a no, and I feel tears welling in my chest and face, and I think about how even if I let them out it wouldn’t make a fucking difference. The answer is still always no, eternally no.

People took comfort, unknowingly, in the anger that filled them, the anger that took them out of themselves and into another dimension—a hallucination of the perfect future.

She was no longer in the part of life where things changed. Her actions from here on out would carry more permanence, could no longer be easily swapped out for something new. Realizing this, she felt panic, deep and wide and boundless, and then she felt release.

The summer breeze moved the leaves in the most perfect way. Friday. Blissfully free. The vast expanse of hours laid out in front of her. The countless hours between now and the end.