The New Me

by Halle Butler

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.

No one ever wants to do what I want to do, and I’m so permissive, so “Oh, okay!” all the time, so “Tell me about your day” all the time, that time after time I end up doing things I don’t want to do, acting the therapist, toeing my limit with alcohol even though I’m visualizing tea, pretending to be grateful at my workplace even though it hurts to be there, pushing my limits and biting my tongue until the inevitable happens and I snap and say something mean.

People spend so much time dramatizing trivial bullshit that when an actual tragedy happens, I wonder how anyone could possibly act out their grief in a natural way.

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.

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.