Game Changer

by Neal Shusterman

That’s what we do, isn’t it? Build ourselves a comfy web of reality like busy little spiders, and cling to it so we can get through the worst of days.

You know how some people see a stereotype, and just become it? The path is there, it’s wide, and it’s well trod. It’s easier to follow that path than to defy it. Some people follow that path all the way into the box that’s waiting for them at the end, where the sermon is rote and the flowers are plastic. And so it is and ever shall be, the quarterback and the cheerleader, in every school, in every town, now and forever, amen.

It’s amazing how a simple shift in one’s point of view can make things better. I

There are people who are so threatened by things they don’t understand that they feel a need to stomp them out. They have to crush them so that each thing killed is one less thing to tax their brain. It’s the force behind war, behind genocide, behind the worst things that human beings are capable of. It’s also the cause of the small injustices we come across every single day.

ignorance is a cockroach you can’t kill no matter how hard you try. It hides in dark, fetid places, then darts out into the open.

“Disappointment isn’t about the things a person is,” my mom said. “It’s about the things they do.”

Hindsight is twenty-twenty. False. There’s no truth in that at all. What you see in the rearview mirror of your life is never what actually happened. You’re just inventing explanations that let you sleep at night. Hindsight, at best, is Coke-bottle glasses, with lenses that distort everything. It’s why they say eyewitness accounts at crime scenes are the least accurate kinds of evidence. What you firmly believe you saw is rarely what you actually saw. In that way, we’re all creating our own realities.

Even if they begin with good intentions, in their heart of hearts abusers believe love is about control. They believe it’s about possession. And why shouldn’t they? It’s the ugly underbelly of every love song ever written. Don’t believe me? How many love songs have the words “you’re mine” in the core of the lyrics? Or “I’ll never let you go,” or “you belong to me.” For guys like Layton, it’s much too easy to take that literally.

We want to portray abusers as having no redeeming qualities. We want to believe a guy who can treat a woman like that is evil through and through. In movies and TV, you always know the abuser, because he’s BAD with a capital B. It’s all clear-cut and simple, and we shake our heads at the poor women who are naïve enough to fall for them. Can’t they see that capital B? What’s wrong with them? It makes the rest of us feel good to know we’re so much smarter. But that’s not real life. Because most abusers aren’t assholes in wifebeaters who smack their bitch around because “she deserves it.” They’re guys wearing a T-shirt of your favorite band. They’re funny and charming, and genuine and respectful, right until the moment they’re not. But by the time those nastier colors bleed through, you’re already snared. Because by then, they know you. They know exactly where your buttons are—not just your buttons but your wounds, too. All those soft vulnerable places filled with self-doubt. They find those places, insert themselves deep, and have their way.

I sat with a spread of Sephora cosmetics in front of the mirror. The vanity mirror, they call it. Every bit of language is layered with subtle slights. As women, we’re expected to paint ourselves to meet some social norm, and yet the very mirror that we use accuses us of being vain.

I also know, like humanity itself, there are parts of my multiple selves that will never be reconciled. Gaps that can’t be sealed but can only be bridged—but as any engineer can tell you, it’s the tension in the cables that makes a bridge strong. Trusting the tension between the things we can’t unite is what protects us from plunging into the canyon between.