Unquiet
Things

Once, in another lifetime, I was having a phone conversation. I don’t remember with whom, or what it was about, but I uttered the phrase “…unbeknownst to me.” Just in passing, really, without even thinking about it. Because it was the right word for whatever I was trying to say.  It’s just a word that lives in my head, the way certain words do, the kind you’d use whether anyone was listening or not.

Someone was listening, as it turned out. And he wanted to know why I had to “talk like that.”

Like I was showing off. Like “unbeknownst” was something I’d hauled out to perform intelligence at people. I didn’t understand the accusation at the time, it took me years to fully parse what was actually being said, which was not you “think you’re better than everyone” so much as “why can’t you think and talk and act like me.” It wasn’t, I think, insecurity exactly. It felt more like a profound intolerance for anyone operating outside his frequency. I was supposed to be a mirror. Smaller. Simpler. Legible to him.

I was with this person for ten years. I was twenty-four when we met; he was thirty-five. By the time we moved in together I was pushing thirty and he was inching toward forty, which I mention only because the disparity in our ages felt, at the time, like evidence that he knew things I didn’t. That his read on the world — and on me — carried some authority mine didn’t yet. He was paranoid and controlling and could construct an accusation out of thin air and a vocabulary word. He also knew, on some level, exactly what he was. He told me once, with the particular self-satisfaction of a man confessing to something he expects to be forgiven for, that he was leftover meatloaf. His words. He already had a wife, a life, a family, and what I got was whatever was left on the plate at the end of the night. He said this like it was charming. Like self-awareness was the same thing as not doing harm.

What he could not do was meet me where I lived. And rather than acknowledge that gap, he spent years convincing me the gap didn’t exist — or that if it did, I had dug it myself, on purpose, to make him feel small. More than that: he convinced me I was fine with a small life. That I wanted it, actually. That the ceiling he’d put on our world was appropriate to someone like me, because no one would ever love me or understand me the way he did. I was too much and also not enough, and he was the only one willing to take on the specific burden of my particular whateverness. I believed him. For a long time, I genuinely believed him.

Here’s what I think I know now, that I didn’t know at twenty-four: people who are threatened by how you think are perhaps not going to grow into people who aren’t. When someone hears unbeknownst and reads it as a failure to be more like them, the problem is…probably not your word choice.

What it looks like when someone is actually on your level, or what it looks like for me, anyway: you say the weirdest thing that comes into your head, and they catch it. They throw something weirder back. Ývan knows I think I’m better than everyone (I’m not going to pretend otherwise!) and rather than flinching or sulking or demanding to know why I have to talk like that, he makes me even better. This happens multiple times a day, every day, without either of us keeping score or making it mean something about the other person’s worth. There’s no single example I can point to because it’s not a single example; it’s the texture of everything, the whole fabric of how we move through the world together. Either someone delights in how your mind works, or they don’t. I’m not sure there’s much of an in-between that holds.

And this isn’t only a story about a romantic relationship. The same principle applies now to everyone I let close,  friends, collaborators, people I gave my time and attention, and best words to. The meatloaf guy was the most extreme version, but he wasn’t the only one operating outside my frequency who I kept making excuses for.

I actually think about that post-telephone call exchange every day. But it was seeing one of those “what advice would you give your younger self?” social media posts that made me try to organize and articulate all of my thoughts about it. So here it is.

Younger me: If They’re Not On Your Level, Don’t Fuck With Them. Your weird heights are the view from which you were always meant to see the world; don’t you dare lower yourself. You are not too much. Do not swallow your words. Do not dim your vocabulary, your curiosity, your particular brand of expansive weird intelligence. Do not accept a half-life with a half-person and call it love. Do not accept leftover meatloaf and do not say thank you for it. Do not make yourself legible to someone who isn’t worth the translation.

At this point in my life I have, I’m glad to say, surrounded myself with people who operate at my frequency, who catch what I throw and throw something stranger back, who make me more myself rather than less. It took longer than it should have. But here we are.

And unbeknownst to that younger, credulous, catastrophically undersold version of myself: she was not, in point of fact, consigned by fate or deficiency to subsist upon the desiccated leavings of someone else’s life. She was owed, and has since received, the whole magnificent, unabridged feast.

Also: I’ll talk however I like, motherfucker. Go die in a fire.

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