Giving No Fucks 2.0: Calling In

Guess who’s back…back again….

So, I would consider “2016:  Year of No Fucks Given” a wild success in the sense that it helped me to get in the habit of understanding that I had a choice to object to adults behaving badly, and in the sense that it started a lot of conversations about how to resist — in ways big and small — instances of inappropriate behavior that affect us as individuals but have an even larger ripple effect on our communities and our cultures. As with any other area in which one aspires to a deeper state of wokeness, though, I’m finding — for me — that giving Literally Zero Fucks, while a laudable goal itself, is but one step in the process of Actually Sometimes Giving Fucks. Well, sort of.

A lot has happened since the symbolic end of the Year of No Fucks Given, celebrated with Christmas in July. For one, I moved to a place and a job where I don’t feel as regularly ambushed with battles for my dignity as a human being. Which is great, hooray! But it also means that those rare instances catch you even more off guard.

In December, I waved to a coworker, Broseph A. Banks, on my daily bike commute into work. I parked my bike, made some coffee, typed some things, went to lunch. On the way back, I passed Broseph in the hall.

“Hello, Broseph!” I proclaimed, in my best post-lunch sunny voice.

“You shouldn’t be wearing that skirt!” Broseph barked back, by way of greeting, I suppose.

Flipping through my mental flash cards of socially appropriate responses (“Ça va?” “Ça va bien.”; “Cómo estás?” “Estoy bien, y tú?”; ” As-Salaam-Alaikum” “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam”; “Ᾱp kaesē heimn?” “Maemn thīk hūmn.”‘ “You shouldn’t be wearing that skirt!”; …?) and coming up empty, I said nothing. I continued along my merry way back to my office, where I promptly shut the door and proceeded to have a mild meltdown.

What was wrong with me? How could I have left the house looking so inappropriate? Isn’t this every adult’s version of that dream where you show up to school naked — only it’s worse, because you did actually remember to dress yourself?

I agonized for a good while. How could this have happened? My skirt reached my knee; that was appropriate, right? Maybe it’s because it was leopard print? Or maybe when I was biking its resting place on my thigh made Broseph swivel his wedding ring uncomfortably as I passed?

Eventually, enough freaking out had been achieved that I remembered all of the skirts I bike in are hand-selected for their ability to not reveal the color of my underwear (admittedly, after a bit of trial and error), and Broseph was more likely than not to be referring to the December cold, which would make my knee-length skirt un-should-able. I texted three friends in effort to get it out of my system, took a deep breath, and decided to move on with my life. Broseph and I went on to collaborate on other projects and work together comfortably. Well, at least I presume he did. I was always a little bit afraid of him after that, but I swallowed it. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Right?

Oh — wait — there’s more to the story?

Ah, yes. I see.

Fast forward to recently, a sunny spring day safe from the temperatures that send dry pallid ankles into hibernation. Mine were still resting, though. In Nashville earlier this year I had finally replace my old cowboy boots, and this April day they were in full bloom.

All set to sally forth and giddyahp my bicycle for a cross-campus meeting, I strode out to greet my steed, her saddle dry and seasoned, her coat gleaming with glory. As I strode and I strode and I strode some more, a dark presence loomed behind me. I turned around.

“Take those cowboy boots off!” Broseph proclaimed as he passed. “This isn’t the South!”

Ohhhh, he did it again. But don’t worry. This time I had a response prepared:

“I’ll tell you where to where my cowboy boots,” I murmured under my breath.

(True story, I actually did. I know people talk all the time about murmuring under their breath, as opposed to over, between, or across from it, but this was a fur realz murmur.)

I went about my day. I went about my meeting. I went about my life. But two meetings later, I realized that I hadn’t actually gone about my day or life or meeting at all, just swallowed the shame and rage I felt from Broseph. Who the hell was he, to have opinions about what I put on my body? Why was he looking? Why did he feel the need to comment? How was this okay? The next time I saw that Brospeh A. Banks, I vowed, I was gonna give him a piece of my mind about the pieces of his mind.

Annnnnd wouldn’t you know it, but I opened the door to leave that meeting and walked right into him.

He was in the middle of a conversation with someone else, so I temporarily relieved myself of my solomn oath. But it didn’t stop there. As I passed I heard just a small snippet of their conversation:

“Yeah,” said Broseph’s colleague. “That’s pretty stupid.”

“But not as stupid as wearing cowboy boots!” Broseph replied.

Oh.
No.
He.
DIDN’T.

(Well, actually, yes he did. Therein lies this post.)

I came back to my office steaming and sputtering. I paced. I texted friends stabby emojis. I whined. I yawned (in all of this madness, I had forgotten my afternoon cup of coffee). Which only made me ANGRIER.

“Not only am I gonna give Broseph a piece of my mind,” I said to myself (this time in my head. I had done enough under-breathing for one day), “but I’m gonna gift wrap it, leave it outside his door, and set it on fire!”

Thankfully, I have a few friends who are more level headed than I am. After giving two people the version of what I wanted to say, and having them reduce my recipe by half, add a pinch of sugar, boil until the water evaporates, and then chill for 18 minutes or until firm, it hit me:

Broseph meant for his comments to build a bridge, not a wall.

It’s a foreign language to me, but as in my head I reviewed Broseph’s tone, posture, and delivery, I realized I had seen it before, in the context of men joking with other men. Broseph wasn’t trying to be sexist. He was trying to be my bro.

His comments — as even my level-headed friends agreed — were still inappropriate, mostly because there were three of them. But effectively communicating somebody who was starting from the place of building a friendly working relationship is different from schooling a total creepazoid on which segment of your body houses your eyes.

Still somewhat in a haze of wrath, I plucked from the corners of my mind a phrase I had heard at a social justice workshop years ago:  “Calling each other in“. The idea is that, we all make mistakes, and either because we want to be kind or we want to be pragmatic, the best way to respond to the stupid shit someone else says is not to “call them out”, but to call them back to the goal they were trying to achieve — in this case, building community.

Personally, I’m very bad at thinking up snappy responses on the spot; anything particularly on-point I say was usually memorized in advance and delivered at the right time. And in the basement of the corners of my mind was a reference guide for specifically how to call someone back in, a cheat sheet for how to deploy what apparent originator of the term Ngọc Loan Trần calls, “A less disposable way of holding each other accountable”. And so I summoned my courage and went to knock on Broseph A. Banks’ door. And what I said was this:

“Hey, I know you were totally joking, but it makes me uncomfortable when you make comments about things that are on my body. You are totally free to make fun of how clumsy I am, the fact that my computer case looks like it’s going to pledge a sorority, or my total inability to form sentences before coffee — any of those are fair game!”

It took Broseph a minute to process my words, likely because I delivered them on fast-forward, like a chimpmunk who has just chewed through an entire packet of chocolate covered espresso beans. But when he realized what I was saying, he was appalled and contrite.

Broseph sputtered an apology or three, invoked a story about how his wife threw out his cowboy boots and he was jealous of mine (read:  invoked his wife; Broseph has a wife and therefore can’t possibly be sexist), and said multiple times, “but it was just about the cowboy boots!”

And, to Broseph, I’m sure it was. Because Broseph has never had the experience of getting catcalled at noon on a Wednesday, of kneeling on a dirty public school floor with a ruler pressed into his knee to see whether his skirt was within dress code after a growth spurt, of a vague sense of shame that your colleagues are paying more attention to your shape than your words. Broseph’s body has never been a battle ground. He doesn’t understand how it feels to have your being constantly policed, constantly exaggerated or silenced to fit the purpose of someone else.

But he doesn’t have to.

All he had to understand is that his comments tore me down instead of building me up, and respond appropriately. And that he did. Because when what is at stake is not whether or not you’re a sexist, a racist, an anti-Semite, or a homophobe, but whether you can hear and empathize with one person’s discomfort, and make a slight adjustment to your actions accordingly, we’re not talking about social justice in the abstract. We’re talking about affirming basic human dignity.

Giving No Fucks 2.0:  Actually Giving Some Fucks When Those Fucks Are About Building A More Humane Society.

Yeah. I’m into that.

Christmas in July

Break out the carols and tacky lawn ornaments, y’all — I’m celebrating the end of 2016 early this year!

You see, as far as I’m concerned, 2016:  Year of No Fucks Given has come to a close. But, don’t cry! It’s a happy ending after all.

When I started this project, I envisioned chronicling my journey of giving Absolutely No Fucks, from January 1 to December 31, charting progress toward the eventual goal of status as Grand Diva of Fucklessness. I had a vision of this blog serving as a guide for those just dipping a toe into the warm, healing springs of giving No Fucks, a vision that — by mapping my journey throughout the year — I’d develop a replicable model, a comprehensive set of “how-to”s for most common scenarios involving Fuck Vampires. I would create a seamless road map towards the state of Utter and Complete Fucklessness that we all seek.

What I’m finding, as this project progresses, are a few things:

• Silent Fucks count, too.
  The deeper I delve into 2016, the more I find that the Fucks I’m not giving…are intensely personal and highly context-dependent. The fresh, verdant Fucks of Spring seemed to come, not from the random asshole at a party I will never see again (lolz, I don’t really go to parties), but from people who, by choice or circumstance, I intend to have in my life for some time.

  Sharing my Crusade of Fucklessness with the world was meant to inspire you, too, to go forth, and give No Fucks, but as I would start to write posts about my conquests, I realized that I was creating the potential for someone to be identified (I didn’t publish any posts where I thought that was an even mild risk). I could just hear it from behind keyboards across the nation; “Oh, that must be Brometheus!” “Wait…Brozo the Clown lives in St. Louis, and the Queen of No Fucks Given was just in St. Louis…” (Sidebar:  Dude, I had the Brocabulary on lockdown, let me tell you).

  I realized that, in telling these stories, I would unwittingly be casting people I cared about as the villains. A sub-realization was that the storytelling style I have adopted often creates a villain/victor dichotomy in general, which is probably the wrong message to be sending. Because this isn’t about Fuck Vampires getting burned at the stake. It’s about rising from the ashes of a society that makes casual sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. so usual that refusing to participate has become a revolutionary act.

• The balance of principle and prudence.
  As much as I wish it were otherwise, it simply isn’t a good idea to give Absolutely No Fucks all the time. At least, it isn’t for me. Namely, I find this to be true in work and family settings, where the consequences of giving No Fucks far outweigh the benefits (see also:  Leprechaun Fucks). But, don’t despair! Realizing that I have a choice about when and where to give No Fucks — instead of believing as I did in 2015 that I was doomed to be a perpetual debtor of Fucks – has helped me to be cognizant of the choices I am making, and has given me more freedom from guilt, doubt, and denial than I anticipated. This is something I find about life in general:  We have a choice about almost everything that happens to us — at the very least, we have a choice about how we’ll react to it — and being aware of my options helps me to feel less trapped.
• The number of situations in which I’m forced to decide whether or not to give away one of my precious little Fucks has apparently decreased.
  I mean, I haven’t like, quantified this scientifically or anything. But where in January I had near daily ideas for posts about things that were happening in real time, it’s much more rare, 6 months in, that I’m rubbing a golden nugget of a Fuck in my palm, debating about whether or not to give it away. Maybe working so hard to give No Fucks cast an aura that deterred some of the Fuck Vampires who wanted to drain me dry. Maybe all that energy I spent to cultivate Fucklessness as a default state means that I’m actively giving No Fucks even when I’m not aware of it, like how sharks don’t stop moving when they’re sleeping and are equally scary AF when they’re awake as when they’re napping. Maybe the Fuck Vampires just don’t like to come out in the sunlight, so they’re only active for a few hours a day in the summer. IDK, but it’s pretty sweet.

As they say, giving No Fucks is a journey, not a destination. I have no doubt that many moments of Fucklessness await my discovery; who knows — mayhaps you will hear from me again. But for now I can safely say that the first six months of 2016 has found me with a fully-stocked toolkit for combating Fuckery everywhere it may occur. The right use of these tools is now up to me.

So, Thus Endeth 2016, Year of No Fucks Given — we hardly knew ye, but we got all we came for out of ye and it’s only July, so…I’m going to call that a win.

Go forth, my friends, and give No Fucks!

You Don’t Have to Wait for it to Get Bigger

I haven’t really had much time for fun in the past three years — working full time and enrolling in a degree program will do that to you — but for about the past year and a half, I’ve been consistently making time for writing for fun. I have a writing group I go to every month, and I absolutely do not let work get in the way of it. You want me for an evening meeting? That’s too bad. One Thursday night a month. I am worth that much.

The first time I went to this writing group, I met a charming chap, Edgar Allan Bro, who wound up stalking me a few days later. I knew old Edgar would return to the group after he stalked me, and I made a decision that I would, too. I was not going to let him intimidate me out of doing the one thing I truly loved. For months, I showed up, knowing I would be sitting across the table from someone who took the time to google my work address, drive his big-ass scary car up the block, and sit outside my office waiting for me to leave. Eventually, Edgar Allan Bro left the group, but you could say I’ve put up with a lot to enjoy this small pleasure.

Last month, our group got a new member, T-Brone. The instant I met T-Brone, I knew I didn’t like him. There was just something about him that creeped me out. Part of it, I think, is because he looks like your worst stereotype of a 40-year-old gamer who lives in his mom’s basement and calls himself a Writer in lieu of having a real job. I felt bad about judging a book by its cover, though, and sometimes the brokenness we hate the most about other people comprises the same parts of ourselves that we wish to hide from the world. So I decided to wait quietly and see what happened.

Via e-mail, T-Brone submitted a piece of horror writing for the group to review. I mean, not “horror writing” because it was so bad — although there was that, too — but horror as in, “why does the brotha always have to die first?”. This, automatically, was a red flag for me, because Edgar Allan Bro also wrote horror. But, I have also met horror writers who are really cool, not at all sketchy people, so I reaffirmed my decision to wait quietly.

I submitted my piece to the group, also via email, and, very shortly later, I had a message from T-Brone:

“Hey, I know we should keep out critiques till we meet on the 21st but I just had to shoot you a line and tell you how much I enjoyed your submission! I LOVE post-apocalyptic and I enjoy your subtlety!”

Now, this looks like a compliment, right? That’s exactly how Edgar Allan Bro lured me in. Almost word-for-word.

Here’s how I read T-Brone’s message, with the benefit of my new realist-colored-glasses:

“Hey, I know I’m not supposed to be contacting you, but I’m contacting you. But only because you’re so good! You’re a good writer.”

Oh, really? Because boundary-crossing is one my favorite types of fuckery to not feed. And the connection to the “I give fucks about your opinion of my writing” line was twelve stops ago on this Train of No Fucks Given. If you wanna cross, you’ve got a long way back in time to go.

It may seem small, it may seem innocuous, but these are the moments I pay attention to now. So many dangerous situations start in these small moments of compromise, where a Knight of the Round Table of Fuckery announces his marching into your territory, and you think, “Oh, but his horse is tired; let me lead it to drink and house it in my stable for the night.” Nope. Nuh-uh. Because you let the horse in, and soon the knight wants to come with him, and one minute the knight’s resting nobly in your stable with his horse and the next he’s scaled the walls to your bedchambers and is watching you sleep, his loud, sweaty breaths fogging up your castle.

So, T-Brone had rightfully earned a place on my watchlist. Or my shitlist. Whichever.

Last week, our writing group met again. I was (as usual) not early, but I wasn’t late, either. When I arrived, T-Brone had positioned himself such that the only two seats available were next to him. He did this on purpose, a small voice in my head urged. He did this to be next to me. Now, that’s pretty conceited, right? But, conceited or not, that’s what I felt. And sometimes you just know things and you don’t need any proof.

I decided not to make eye contact with T-Brone, because sometimes that’s all it takes for a bro to think you’re interested. I also decided to speak as little as possible. We had a few go-round questions, and I was always last. “What about you, Bad Bitch?” T-Brone said a couple of times. I didn’t like him using my name. I didn’t like that he was paying attention to me. If the leader of the group wanted to bring me into the conversation, well, that would be one thing. But this guy? Nah. I’m out.

This was strike three — no, wait:  five, because I decided to add on the horror writing and the general creepy vibe strikes I had suspended from before — and when I left the group that evening I was already thinking about not coming back to the group again. Admittedly, that was partly because the group’s leader has seriously slacked off on facilitating conversation for the past several meetings in a row, but T-Brone wasn’t helping any. But I felt bad. Group Leader’s new, and I’m one of only a few group members who’s been around for a long time. And, after all, I’ve stuck around through a lot. I owed Group Leader. I owed myself. Right?

Yesterday, writing samples started to roll in for next month’s meeting. T-Brone submitted a piece. He included the following note:

“Might as well throw one of my writings out there as well. This isn’t nearly as polished as my last contribution. Its from the middle of my Scifi novel. It deals with ugly concepts like prostitution and rape so you’ve been warned ;)”

WINKY FACE?! REALLY?!

Set aside for the moment that “prostitution” and “rape” are considered to be the same level of “ugly concepts” here. What man in his FUCKING right mind thinks he has permission to use a FUCKING WINKY FACE to punctuate a sentence about rape?

I scanned the writing sample. It was — predictably — terrible. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that T-Brone had done exactly zero research (or even an ounce of critical thought) into the psychological impact of rape upon its victims. The piece was written from the perspective of a character who had been raped in the past, so — while the piece wasn’t a rape scene — it was insensitive and poorly executed at best, and at worst it made me wonder whether T-Brone didn’t enjoy thinking of women as objects to be violated.

I closed the document. I looked back at T-Brone’s note. I stared that winky face right in its winky little eyes. I opened a new message to Group Leader and asked him to remove me from the group’s mailing list. No explanation. No apology. Just…done.

Now, these might all seem like small little things. Chiclet-sized. Don’t even matter until you throw a bunch of them in your mouth together and they’re big enough to blow a bubble with. Or maybe they don’t seem like small things to you, because you’re smarter than I’ve been, but I’m only recently starting to realize something very important about small things.

You know what that important thing is?

You don’t have to wait for small things to turn into big things in order to do something about them.

 

The fact that they’re small things — or even relatively small things — and that they bother you is enough. I don’t have to sit there, month after month, and be uncomfortable. I don’t have to wait for T-Brone to try to get me alone, or for him to make a comment about my body, or to roll up outside my office a la Edgar Allan Bro. Maybe none of those are things that would even happen. Or maybe they would. Doesn’t matter. Point is, I’ve had enough. Boundaries have been crossed. I do not like it. And I don’t owe it to anyone to stay a minute longer.

I have worked long and hard for these Fucks, and I’ll be damned if some two-bit, heavy-breathing gamer/Writer/mom-can-you-make-me-a-another-grilled-cheese-sandwich-because-I-almost-beat-this-level-and-I-spilled-the-last-one-all-over-my-esoteric-nerd-joke-shirt-er is going to cross my Picket Line of No Fucks Given.

Uh-uh.

Nope.

Sometimes small is just the right size.

My Leprechaun Fucks

Hi. Hello there. How are you?

So, here we are again.

So, there comes a time in every Bad Bitch’s life when she is faced with a choice. She can decide to give Fucks. Or, she can decide to give No Fucks. Alternatively, when caught between a Fucking rock and a No Fucking hard place, she can choose to give Leprechaun Fucks. Today, I want to tell you about my Leprechaun Fucks.Specifically, I wanted to give this tutorial to help teach you to distinguish Leprechaun Fucks from Actual Fucks. They have many similar characteristics, and only a true connoisseur can really tell one from the other at first glance. So, let’s get started.

First, you may be wondering to yourself, “Just what exactly is a Leprechaun Fuck? Have I seen one before? What do they look like? Are you sure Leprechaun Fucks are even a real thing?” Well, yes, Virginia, there are Leprechaun Fucks. And thank god there are. Pretty sure I would have been fired by now without them.

A Leprechaun Fuck looks a great deal like an Actual Fuck. Class, do you know what the difference between a Leprechaun Fuck and an Actual Fuck is?

A Leprechaun Fuck looks, smells, sounds, and tastes exactly like an Actual Fuck (gritty, with a helluva burn for an aftertaste). But the true difference between a Leprechaun Fuck and an Actual Fuck is that Leprechaun Fucks mimic Actual Fucks. Leprechaun Fucks have no Actual Fuck power on their own. Leprechaun Fucks — much like Leprechaun gold — disappear as soon as you receive them. They’re illusory. They’re…sort of like pretend Fucks. Monopoly Fucks, as it were. They don’t have any real currency anywhere, except in the moment when I need the illusion of giving them.

I give Leprechaun Fucks when I need to maintain the façade of giving an Actual Fuck, but, in actuality, do not give an Actual Fuck. And, recently, it has come to my attention that it can be difficult to tell whether you’re the recipient of a Leprechaun Fuck or an Actual Fuck. So, for those of you following along at home, I’ve created a handy guide to help you tell the difference:

The truly remarkable thing about Leprechaun Fucks is that they’re much more rapidly renewable than Actual Fucks, making them a more sustainable, eco-friendly alternative to giving Actual Fucks. It’s true:  Leprechaun Fucks, like Actual Fucks, are not created by spontaneous generation and I do not have an endless supply of either. A lot of time and care does go into the production of my Leprechaun Fucks, but, while it may take me months or even years to craft an artisanal Actual Fuck just for you, Leprechaun Fucks can be mass produced in a matter of hours.

Convenient. Safe. Affordable.

Leprechaun Fucks.

 

So, as I like to say:  Go forth, my friend, and give No Fucks.

(But if you have to look like you’re giving Fucks, make sure they’re Leprechaun Fucks).

Now you know.

I Am Difficult, and So Can You

People who know me won’t be surprised to learn that I get called “difficult” a lot. And, people who know me would believe that I am, in fact, difficult. But people who know me well understand that I just have a reeeeeeeeeeeeeaally low threshold for bullshit. So, yes:  If you have come to me peddling bullshit, you will have a very difficult time with me.

This is a fact of which I am immensely proud.

I’ve never heard a man get called “difficult”. I’m sure that it’s happened before in the History of Ever, but what I more often hear is that a man “drives a hard bargain,” or that he’s “relentlessly logical”. These are virtues. Yet, when a woman uses logic to deconstruct a poor argument, she’s difficult. And that makes her Bad.

Do you know the interesting thing about the word “difficult”? About using it to tear me down? It’s an adjective that only makes sense in context, in relation to other situations. What’s difficult for one person may be not at all difficult for somebody else. When you’re saying that I’m difficult, well, that’s an incomplete sentence. The end of that sentence, what you really mean, is that I’m difficult…for you. And that, children, is not my problem.

“Difficult” is the opposite of “easy”. And women are supposed to be easy. Easygoing, at least. Pliable. Subservient. Acquiescing to your desires. I get called “difficult” when I say things that are true and necessary and inconvenient for you. Where you might say of a man, “Wow, he really cut through the emotions to get to the tough decision on that one,” you say to me, “You hurt my feeeeeeeeelings.”  When you tell me that I’m difficult, what I hear is that I’m stressing the edges of what it means to you to be female, and I could not be more glad.

When people tell me that I’m difficult, I think they mean it as an insult. After all, as a woman, I am supposed to care a great deal about your opinion of me. I’m supposed to be likable. But, lately, I’ve started to hear “difficult” as a compliment. “You’re difficult.” “Why, yes, I am, thank you.”

Difficult is what you say when you’ve come to the dead end of your point, and you’re vacillating at the fork between admitting that I’m right and outing yourself as whiney. When you tell me I’m difficult, what you’re really saying is, “You’re not letting me have my way.” No. I am not. Sometimes compromise really isn’t best, particularly if your idea is bad. I mean, honestly. If I could have 100% of a good idea, or meet you halfway and have 50% of a good idea, plus the good graces of someone who would rather I prioritize their emotions over the right thing to do, then why on earth would I choose the latter?

Now, you might be saying, this all sounds rather harsh. But do you know how I know I’m right? How I know for dead sure that I’m not just being mean?

Because if I’ve made a logical argument, and you have to resort to the personal attack of calling me “difficult”, then you’ve come to the very last resort of people who want to get their way. The end of the road. The last stop on the train. Actually, the train is pulling out of the last station, and you’re holding on to your luggage, trying to figure out whether to throw it and jump, or go down with this ship. Train. Whatever. If the only response you have to my logic is to insult my character, then you’re wrong, and you know it. Worse:  So do I.

So, the next time you want to call me difficult, just…don’t. Save your breath, because I already know. If you really think I’m that difficult, then save us both the trouble and GTFO.

I’m doing just fine without you.

 

Difficult.

Yup.

And so happy.

Achievement Unlocked: Fucklessness is my Default State

You know what, I’m not gonna lie:  Giving No Fucks is hard. Truly and utterly being Fuckless requires undoing years of cultural conditioning that says women should be nice, polite, and selfless, regardless of how unacceptable a situation may be. Being Fuckless means breaking a vow to blame ourselves for someone else’s misconduct, a pervasive cultural edict so insidious that I just got used to kneeling on greying middle school linoleum when my long legs forced a skirt a few centimeters above the ratio prescribed by dress code, that I just got used to the cheap scratchy fabric of the chairs in the principal’s office where I waited, missing class after class after class, for my mom to leave work and bring me a pair of jeans, because it was more important for boys to learn than for me to learn. That was normal. Of course it was. In college, so was carrying mace instead of expecting men not to rape. At work, so was waiting for a man to bring up an idea I had derived months ago, and so was nodding my head and pretending he was brilliant for thinking it, just so the damned project would get done.

Sexism — nay, misogyny — isn’t just an idea, it’s a way of life. So, too, then, must giving No Fucks become a way of life. And, as immeasurable as that way may be, I’m proud to report that I achieved a small milestone on that path.

So, I’m grabbing a few brews with Kermit down at ye olde watering hole when a mutual friendquaintance, Raspbrotin, appears with a few other friendquaintances at the table in front of us. Raspbrotin was the only one among them unadorned by his female counterpart, Prasbrovia, so, being the fifth wheel of his own group, Raspbrotin abandoned them to say hello to us. Or, me. Kermit was in the men’s room.

I’m not Raspbrotin’s biggest fan. I don’t especially dislike him; I just don’t especially love him either. He has a penchant for secrecy and whispered conversations in low voices that has always mildly irritated me, and I disagree with a lot of the decisions I see him making. But in other situations I’ve seen him do decent or even good things, and he can be quite funny and kind and welcoming. So I guess you could characterize my feelings towards Raspbrotin as neutral. Raspbrotin and Kermit seem to get along, though, so when Kermit returned from the restroom and I took my leave to do the same, I was happy to leave the two of them to their conversation.

When I returned, Raspbrotin had turned his chair 270° away from his group and was rapt in a conversation with Kermit. I could have moved my chair closer, stroked Raspbrotin’s ego by telling him how good it is to see him, but I didn’t feel like it. The bar was loud, and, while I could have probably could have half-assed participating in their conversation, I didn’t want to. So, I didn’t. I checked my e-mail and lusted over newly available books on my GoodReads list. I drank my beer and had a great time drooling over books.

After about 20 minutes, Raspbrotin decided to stop ignoring the group he had come here with. He waved at me as he rotated his chair back into place. “He’s all yours now,” Raspbrotin waved, indicating Kermit.

“Damn straight,” I replied with a smile.

Kermit and I continued to booze and engage in fairly deep life conversations. At some point, I got that twitchy feeling that I was being watched. I scanned the bar out of the corner of my eye and my gaze settled on Raspbrotin’s face. Or, rather, the edges of his face. The rest of it was hidden behind his iPhone camera, where he was trying and failing to discreetly snap a picture of me without my knowledge.

I stopped talking to Kermit mid-sentence and gave Raspbrotin my best RBF — which is not my natural state and, I think much like being curly-haired and envying women with straight hair, who subsequently envy women with curly hair, I wish in vain that I could just effortlessly RBF in my daily life. Raspbrotin somehow continued lining up the shot, oblivious to my death glare.

“What are you doing?” I asked, staring straight at him through the camera lens.

Raspbrotin lowered his phone at last. “Um…taking a picture?”

I said not a word and continued staring.

“I was gonna send it to Prasbrovia.”

My stare remained as unabated as his blundering.

“Well, um,” Raspbrotin stuttered, “I took one of Kermit, too!”

I just raised my eyebrows and shook my head. I waited for him to lower the camera to the table and turned to resume my conversation with Kermit, without another word to Raspbrotin.

But…I couldn’t. I was still really mad at Raspbrotin. And Kermit — who, for all his good qualities, is sometimes still the first to say, “Well, but, he probably didn’t mean to-” in these situations…didn’t.

“Did Raspbrotin take a picture of you, too?” I asked.

“Yes.” Kermit replied. “While you were in the bathroom, he told me that he had snapped one when I wasn’t looking.” Kermit was visibly uncomfortable.

Okay, in all honesty, I’ve never really fit in here in the Midwest. I tried, but, I think for loud, opinionated, let’s-put-all-our-shit-out-in-the-open-so-we-can-deal-with-it-and-move-on me, it was just never going to happen. See, while I give No Fucks, Midwestern fucks are like fossil fuels. They’re buried deep underground and pressure cooked for hundreds of thousands of years, then siphoned from the depths of the earth with a force greater than the sun. Whether they’re Angry Fucks, or Sexually Repressed Fucks, or Depressed Fucks (because, let’s face it — when does anything good get buried so deep?) — you can bet that they’re a furious power to be reckoned with.

Whether Raspbrotin was feeling lonely in Prasbrovia’s absence, or wished that he was closer friends with Kermit and I, or just did it to pass the time is something that I give exactly Zero Fucks about. I don’t even care that he did it equally to me and to Kermit — as they say, two wrongs don’t make a right. Don’t be a dick to him, and don’t be a dick to me. This is easy. This is simple. And — even in the universe where Kermit would have been okay with a voyeuristic photo shoot — did Raspbrotin really not imagine the possibility that sometimes doing the same thing to a man and a woman sometimes affects them differently? (Spoiler alert:  Of course he didn’t.)

Here’s something I don’t understand:  Why do I have to explain to adult men that taking pictures of women without their knowledge is fucking creepy? The crazy thing is, Raspbrotin isn’t even the first man I’ve had to call out on this exact behavior in 2016. Like, seriously, how is this complicated?

And I think this is one of those moments where Men’s Rights Activists like to get all hot under the collar and whine, “But, I don’t understand. How are we even supposed to talk to women? You people have so many rules.” But again, it’s not complicated. It’s just context dependent. No, these things aren’t black and white. If Raspbrotin was one of my close male friends, I probably would have hammed it up for the camera, raised my glass and grinned or stuck out my tongue and crossed my eyes. But the fact is, Raspbrotin is not a close male friend. He knows that. And he also knew that he was doing something objectionable. So here’s your Pro Tip of the day:  If you’re going to feel stupid when someone points out what you’re doing — and I’m not talking shames you, but merely calls a spade a spade — then…maybe don’t do it?

However, believe it or not, the point of this entry is not that Raspbrotin made a dick move. The point is that, for the first time this year, giving exactly No Fucks about Raspbrotin feels came naturally to me. Tone is subjective and impossible to communicate in print, but I’m pretty confident that my asking “What are you doing?” was neither angry nor a pleasant inquiry, but probably blunt, and pregnant with the reality that I actually did expect him to give me a (good) answer. I’m sure he felt uncomfortable. I intended it. In that moment, making Raspbrotin comfortable was infinitely less important to me than the fact that I felt a personal boundary had been violated. I didn’t care whether calling him out would have impacts for our social circle later. I didn’t even care why he did it. At that not caring was easy and natural, as comfortable as my favorite sweater and my artisan-crafted coffee mug molded perfectly to the shape of my hand. I have not so much as a dusting of discomfort, because I’m starting to believe that my emotional safety is important. That — my own comfort with speaking up, not the asshole thing that someone else did or didn’t do — that is the point. #WorthIt.

I would still categorize my feelings towards Raspbrotin as neutral. At the bar that night, he didn’t permanently emblazon his name on my Shit List, and even though I think that he fucked up, it’s not a big enough fuck up to write him out of my life. Like I said, he’s not a bad dude; he can be a lot of fun, and I would absolutely hang out with him in a group again. But you can be sure that, the next time I see him, I’m not going to apologize for making him feel uncomfortable. And he can be sure that he’s never going to pull that shit with me again.

It’s a small victory in the world of No Fucks Given. But I’ll take it. It’s big enough to clear off a space on my shelf for all those small moments of giving No Fucks, like a tiny “personal best” trophy. By making space for “personal best”, I make space for “third place,” and maybe someday even a great big blue ribbon of No Fucks Given.

And that, my friends, is how you become a Champion of Fucklessness:  One small personal victory at a time.

A PSA from Your Terrorist Friend

Hi. Hello there. Nice to meet you.

Um, can I just say something real quick? It’ll only take a minute.

Okay. Okay. So, I have a confession.

I…am not a terrorist.

I know, I know; my olive skin and my naturally curly hair made it hard for you to tell. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. Sometimes, I wake up in the morning, wash my face, look in the mirror and go, “HOLY SHIT!!! Call 911, there’s a terrorist in my –oh, wait; just me again. Time to brush my teeth.”

Technically, I’m only half terrorist — my dad’s a white guy (because we all know white people can’t be terrorists, right?). So, in terms of racial discrimination, I don’t have it so bad. I even have white passing privilege most of the time. However, here are some of the things I have regularly experienced as a white-passing biracial Arab woman:

• Friends who say, “I mean, but, you’re really white.” (Thanks, guys! So glad you were here to be the expert on my race! xoxo :-* luv ya, biotch!)
• Random strangers who say, “Wow, you’re beautiful — so exotic!” My personal favorite was the time a dude in the personal care aisle of Wal-Mart walked over holding a box of magnum condoms to tell me this.
• “So, when did your family convert?” Although not all Arabs are Muslim (much in the same way that not all Americans are Christian), I most frequently get asked this question by very educated people who should fucking know better. Not to mention the fact that being in the U.S. doesn’t necessarily imply that my family converted to anything, nor that my religion is the same as my family’s.
• “Speak some Arabic for me!” Dude, I took Arabic in college, and the only words are remember are still the food words and the bad words I learned from my grandfather.
• Not having an accurate box to check any time a form asks me for my race/ethnicity. Most forms will group people from the Middle East under the same category as people from Europe. Let me tell you, even though I’m “only” half, the experience of being Arab is not the same as the experience of being European, and it’s mildly grating to see my entire cultural background erased because it’s not considered a Census category.
• “What are you — some kinda Eye-Talian?” (almost invariably spoken a drawl, almost invariably beginning with “what are you” instead of something equally invasive but less objectifying, such as “what is your race”).
• Planning extra time for airport trips on the likelihood that I will be “randomly” selected for extra searches. The only times that seem to be the exception to this are:
  • When I’m traveling with a white man (who, invariably, will get searched instead of me), and
  • When somebody browner than me is next to me in line.
• Being detained in a concrete underground room in an airport for an indefinite period of time with other brown people
• “You should put your race on your resume. There’s a huge push to hire ‘diverse’ candidates nowadays. It’ll help you get your food in the door.” (YEAH NO. Why do you think diverse hiring policies exist, anyway?)

Being “only” half, I don’t know if I count as a “woman of color”. If I am, I’m not a WOC in the same way that a black woman is, or a native woman is, or a latina woman is, or even a darker-skinned Arab woman is. I’ve never been pulled over while driving on account of my race, and I’m more likely to get propositioned than labeled as a threat. But, shit. Just try telling me that my experience is the same as a pale blonde chick’s.

When I started this blog, I imagined that it would be a space to bring visibility solely to the gendered experiences I have. But I had a new life experience recently that threw the intersection of giving No Fucks and race into sharp relief.

 

I was at a coffee shop with a friend; we had finished our first cup and were ready for our second. I went back to the counter and placed the order.

“What size?” said the barista.
Me:  “Uhhh….” Oh shit. I totally forgot to ask my friend what size. BRB LOL.

I dashed back to our table, got the drink size, and rushed back over to the counter. In the ~15 seconds it took me to do this, a customer had appeared in line, and, without even realizing it, I had cut in front of him to complete my order.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” I said to the customer. “I almost ran into you.”
“It’s okay,” he replied. “I thought you were a terrorist.”

Me:   :-O

“And,” he continued, “I was like, ‘and I’m the white guy you want to attack!'”

Me:  :-O

:-O

:-O

Now, as we’re nearly 3 months into the year of No Fucks Given, I generally have a few snappy come-backs prepared for any sort of gendered comment I might receive (whether or not I execute them well is another story, but they’re there!) I…totally had NOTHING prepared for something this explicit.

The White Guy I Apparently Should Have Terrorized (WGIASHT) had appeared at the counter to return his dirty coffee cup and order some food to go. The best I could do was correct him when he slid his stained mug across the counter to the barista.

“Um,” I said, “There’s a bin over there labeled ‘dirty mugs’.” Because of course he couldn’t be bothered to check. It was my small act of resistance. Giving No Fucks about asking this white dude to make clean-up easy for the underpaid baristas!

As he marched out of the coffee shop, wrapped sandwich in tow, I ran through the gamut of possible responses I could have had, vowing to be ready for next time. Then, it hit me.

There is nothing I could have said, no snarky one-liner I could have delivered, that would not make me more suspect. In that moment, and in any others like it I may experience, I was confined to the realm of giving No Fucks that does anything other than address the racial microaggression I had just experienced.

I feel like both WGIASHT’s comments, as well as my reaction to them, are brought to you by a post-#DrumpfForPrez2016 America. Up until this week, any racial insensitivities I experienced were mostly innocuous. They were offensive, and they were hurtful, but I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve feared for my future because of my race. And, maybe that day in the coffee shop there was no reason for me to fear, but in hindsight I realized that it was just as likely that my words could put WGIASHT in his place as they could spark someone else’s fear. Fear of me, an Arab. It wasn’t a chance I was willing to take.

At work, a colleague recently confessed to me that she was backing down from a fight about a truly and utterly ridiculous project that was being foisted upon her. “I just don’t want to be the angry black girl here,” she said. That’s an experience I’ve never had. Oh, sure:  I get passionate, and I fight for what I believe in, and I know that sometimes (read:  frequently) other people see me as a bitch for doing so (which, BTW, #NoFucksGiven). But I’m pretty sure that nobody has ever thought of me as “that angry Arab bitch”. I have never once had to weigh the consequences of what I want to do on the scale of how it will make other people perceive members of my race.

This week, it viscerally occurred to me that giving No Fucks is a function of privilege.

 

It occurred to me a few weeks ago while writing an entry that questioned the cost of giving No Fucks. I mean, how hard is it, really, to put an asshole in his place? What does it cost, at the end of the day? “Well, sometimes, a lot,” I thought to myself as I typed. I do think situations where giving No Fucks costs us our lives or personal safety are rare(r than the ones when we can just tell someone to fuck off and call it a day), but perhaps part of what makes it difficult to give No Fucks is that hair-raising game of Russian Roulette, that uncertainty of knowing whether this time, this guy, this place is the one time that things are Breaking-News-worthy levels of unsafe.

Hearing this WGIASHT call me a terrorist wasn’t a big moment in my life. Actually, it was almost funny to me.I feel like it shouldn’t be, but it was so absurd. Using the word “terrorist” was almost too much. But WGIASHT made me realize that what was absurd for me might be normal for somebody else. If I had darker skin, I might live in fear of someone like WGIASHT calling me a terrorist at school. If I was a hijabi Muslim woman, I might back slowly out the coffee shop door, hoping I wouldn’t be attacked. It doesn’t even have to be about race. I recognize that the gendered comments I feel comfortable confronting might represent a serious threat to trans women, poor white women, and other marginalized people who want to speak up, but can’t.

Giving No Fucks, for me, is about learning to find my voice, to identify situations where I can object to my own objectification, and acting where I can, even and especially if I’m not graceful, because I MATTER. This is not something I have believed for a very long time, but I truly and irrevocably do now. Giving No Fucks is not about putting yourself at risk to make a point, and it is not about me telling you what you should do or feel in any given situation.

With my white-passing, cisgendered, able body, I hope that using my privilege to give No Fucks when and where I can enables you to do the same when and where you can. For people whose safety would disproportionately be compromised for giving No Fucks, I hope, at the very least, that my giving No Fucks to some random fucker makes that fucker think twice before he says some fuckery to you.

And, if he doesn’t? And you feel cornered and afraid, and all you can do is back away?

Please know that, no matter what, you matter to me.

I know it isn’t much. But it’s all I have.

And I will fight harder to give No Fucks so you don’t have to.

(Please note:  I am, actually, in true fact, despite whatever my skin or hair color might lead you to believe, not, actually, a terrorist.)

(And, yes, I really do feel like I have to spell this out, just in case.)

The Pitch: A Giving No Fucks 9 Years in the Making

And, lo, the Angel of Giving No Fucks came upon them, and the glory of the Angel of No Fucks Given shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

So, there was this guy I dated, Bo. And it ended badly between us, due 100% to choices he made. (hmm, maybe I didn’t need a whole other entry to explain this situation). Anyway, things between Bo and I were very over, and I was moving on.

He contacted me about repaying the money he owed me, and we set up a repayment schedule, which he more or less stuck to. Then he started sending me unrelated e-mails. At first, they were simple. Nice, actually. Just two people who cared about each other, nothing implied.

Then, they weren’t so simple. They grew a little bit darker, as slowly as the winter follows Independence Day. He’s troubled, I thought. People who are emotionally healthy don’t gamble to the point that they lose relationships. He needs help. I need to be there for him.

Then he started to weave in subtle criticisms. According to Bo, I could be an angel. And sometimes a banshee. There were so many things I didn’t understand. He wavered on his repayments, implying that I was only still in contact with him because of the money (#accurate) and threatening to pull back in order to keep me in his life.

Before long, the messages became a rapid succession – sometimes 9 or more in a row – sent at all hours of the night and morning, frequently unintelligible, usually mildly frightening.

 

And they continued.

For 9 years.

Sporadically, I would tell him to stop. That I needed a break. That our communication wasn’t healthy for me. But eventually, he would belittle or berate me into communicating with him again. After all, I owed him.

There were other weird things, too. For one thing, it made him angry if I mentioned any details of my life, even in passing – whether I was working, proper names of any of my friends, what state I was in. For another, he always claimed that he could sense things before they happened (he was in the neighborhood of correct maybe 10% of the time). For years, he pressed me to see a therapist with him, which I consistently opposed, but he pressed on and on even when my (amazing) therapist agreed that it was a bad idea. He reached out to my spiritual advisor so he could collaborate with her to “guide” me (she didn’t). I sent him a stupid email forward about how, no matter what happens in life, I’d always be glad to call him my friend, and he erupted with anger that I would think to refer to him as a “friend”.  On the rare occasions he realized that he had done something irredeemably inappropriate, he always had excuses:  his difficult childhood, how stressed he was, how he reacts to stress in general, his tendency to hyperfocus. He would become riotously angry if he suspected that I was in a relationship, whether or not I mentioned being in one, and he many times accused me of being sexually depraved for dating other men.

Anybody to whom I explained this situation thought I was being insane. “Why on earth do you still talk to him?” they would say. Without exception. “You don’t understand,” I’d reply, “We had this connection. He’s having a rough time in life. He needs support. We cared about each other once.”

 

On Christmas Day 2015 – following a little over a year of silence on my end, despite the sporadic provocation from Bo in the form of late night texts – he sent me this:

 

Oh, God, I thought. He’s going to kill himself.

And maybe he was already to that point, and it wasn’t really my job to bring him back from the edge, and maybe he wasn’t there at all and I was overreacting. But I just thought, I’ll be damned if he is on the point of suicide and I do absolutely nothing about it.

“Beautiful skyline!” I wrote back, testing the waters. “Merry Christmas.”

“Thank you,” he replied.

I couldn’t tell much from that, so I contacted an old friend of Bo’s, asking the friend to check in on him.

Bo was fine. I don’t know whether he had intended to trigger that reaction in me or not, but it worked. Bo sent me a few more messages. I thought about answering them, but, knowing that he wasn’t in harm’s way, I decided against it.

This was not okay with Bo.

The late night texts started again. “I am disappointed,” he wrote. “We sure seem to have missed a lot of opportunities.”

In the past, whenever I had told him that I needed a break and requested that he not contact me, I’d say, “This isn’t forever, you know. I just need some time. I’ll come back when I can.” He’d be upset anyway. “I’m never going to just drop off the face of the earth without telling you. If it comes to that, I’ll at least let you know.”

But in 2016:  The Year of No Fucks Given, I finally realize that I don’t even owe him that. Today, I’m finally done with Bo.

Bo has chronically demonstrated for nearly a decade that he doesn’t respect my need for space, that he expects me to prioritize his emotional gratification at a higher level than my emotional safety, and that – even when I was willing to comply – no effort I undertook would ever be good enough.

I need to strengthen my resolve – patterns you form over a third of your life are difficult to change – so  I went back through all of our communications. In 9 years, I exchanged approximately 350 messages (which Gmail quantifies as “many”. Because, even Google doesn’t want to count them all), not including texts or emails to a now-deleted account, with someone who mostly did nothing but insult me. The number of messages made me frustrated.

At myself.

Why didn’t I tell him off sooner? Why did I let it get to the point of 350 messages? How hard would it have been to just say, “Laters, Babe”?

But, the more of the emails I mined through, the more I was forced to have compassion for myself. I did tell him to piss off…to the best of my ability. Which, back then, wasn’t great.  You know what, though? You can only do what you can do. And every small act of resistance, every seed of health that I planted any time I asked for space – even if I went ahead and let Bo run all over me later – was leading up to this moment.

Below, I’ll share with you the themes of Bo’s messages, in his own words, in hopes that, if you or someone you know is in a similarly toxic situation, you’ll be able to recognize these patterns and GET THE FUCK OUT. But, first, two reflections on my messages to him:

1. I remembered our exchanges being a constant war of words. But one thing that surprised me is that, after years of Bo telling me what a terrible, cold person I was, my memory of my words was a lot meaner than the reality. Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not a saint, and sometimes Bo would really grate at me, and my reactions weren’t always the best. But they were pretty damned good most of the time. When I got it wrong, I apologized; I asked for clarification, and I attempted to repent. But, because Bo accused me of being so callous, I falsely remembered that my anger was the rule rather than the rare exception. My most heinous crime, as far as I can tell, was setting and reinforcing healthy boundaries, sometimes in a not-especially-nice tone.
2. I was utterly shocked by how much personal information I willingly and consensually shared with him. I let this man in to so many aspects of my life, to the extent that one of my messages to him contained my current address, where I’ve only lived for the past few years. I told him the names of my boyfriends, and, worse, about troubles I was having with them. I told him about spiritual progress and spiritual setbacks. I told him about moving and starting over and being scared and feeling alone. And, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why. Maybe he told me so many times that he had my best interest at heart, that I actually believed it. It was never true.

Below is a small sample of Bo’s words. I want you to see them and I want you to know them, and if you ever hear them, I want you to run far, far away. I have wasted far too much of my life trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t understand what it means to set healthy boundaries and reinforce them. My first responsibility is to my own health and well-being. Anybody who doesn’t get that is not welcome in my life.

 

And, Bo, if you’re reading this?

STOP. Just stop, right now. I do not ever want to hear another word.

The Wisdom of Bo:

(Spelling errors and emphases his)

• I was always doing something to hurt him…but when pressed, he could never tell me exactly what I was doing that was so painful.
  • “All I know about your world view is that it hurts people.  Sometimes incidously under the guise of really helping or feeling really good.  It led you to injure me in ways you could not possibly comprehend.”
  • “You have no idea how badly you were hurting me when we were trying to date.  You have no idea that you are doing so now, right now, whatever you are doing.  You have no idea that you did so earlier today… “
  • “you had deep, heartfelt, and defined apologies from me.  You have also had the fruit of my own war with my own ego.  I have only since the last time we spoke on the phone recieved an end to the bludgeoning I have sustained from you.”
  • (Me:) ‘Now, can you tell me, what can I do to show support for you, to fully listen to you, to help you?”
    • (Bo:) “I don’t know…like i said, baybe you could be creative”
  • “I have been sick the past to days.  Physically ill due to our interraction.”
  • “I needto know that I am going to be able to support whatever level of survival I am capable of.  Twice, interactions with you have contributed to my inability to do so (and don’t try to blame it all on whatever psychological challenges I may have.).  That must not be permitted.  I need peace, balance, and Love.  For two years I have begged you to help me by calming down and trying to be gentle with me in attitude, to try to assume the best instead of the worst and not jump to conclusions.  You told me not to control you and accused me of countless other forms of ‘wrong’.  I warned you, I told you, I begged you.  You made your choices.” 
  • “But now I see that you once again used me as a metaphysical douche bag, without consideration and withoutANYenergy in return.  HOW FUCKING DARE YOU?!!!”
  • “Besides, I’ve already had to move twice because of you.”
  • “We are here now because six weeks ago, I felt that it would be inapprpiate for me to not reach out. I did not want to reach out. but I could not live with the other.”
  • “I had to tell you what I have had to overcome in order to make th is moment possible It was a very significant investment”
  • “Not sure that you see how you let me down sometimes so I rember here and in the future to not expect you to be consistant with the things you say.”
  • “But I have to say that dealing with you has been all cost for a long time.”

• But, if I didn’t understand something he was saying, that was okay. He would just say it again, with more emphasis:
  • “I have purpled all of the components I believe you did not read.”
  • “In response; I will send the messages again.  They were important and they were the most positive thing I have to offer.  I am hurt that you did not care enough to look or to ask me to clerify.”
  • “You are not hearing me so I will write louder.  I AM NOT CONCERNED NEARLY AS MUCH AS HOW YOU HURT ME IN THE PAST AS MUCH AS YOU ARE HURTING ME RIGHT NOW!”
  • “Also, there are some paragraphs in the exchange that are still in bold from the first time I sent them.  Look for those if you care to.”

• Basically, everything I did was wrong:
  • “Just so you know, any time that you felt that I rejected or questioned your love, it was more a question of your ability to allow it to come through unadulterated.”
  • (Me):  “Sometimes, it just utterly defies me how much adversity there is between us.”
    • (Bo):  “It strikes me oddly that you would make such note of an apparent discordant dynamic between us.  If it exists, you are its co-creator.  I would ask you why you think it is so.  In other words, what purpose would be served by the adversity you have observed?”
  • “I was driven to my wits end literally trying to live up to your expectations I felt you had of me.  They always seemed life and death and they were usually in opposition.” 
  • “It seems most of what you have come to think and believe about me in the negative is not me at all but rather a creation of your own mind.”
  • “You jump at every chance you have to divide us and if there is not one available, you make one up…We could talk if you would only just accept that we are equally at fualt.”
  • “I fear that you are in a ‘group-think’ mentality and will never be able to hear me no matter how much you may want to.”
  • “I have no need to ‘make’ you feel insecure.  You CHOOSE to feel insecure…”
  • “And I am infuriated that you would talk to others about our issues and not with me.  These who have never met me and i am bothered that you listen to them at all, especially that you would rather reinforce whatever non-helpfulness between us through the echo chamber they provide.  Who are these close friends of yours that they could be so judmental and who are you that you disallow my fair time in their minds, more importlantly YOURs?!”
  • “Goddamit that pisses me off.  Who the hell are you to decide UNILATERALLY what would help US and what would not…One of the top 3 things that frustrates me about you is that you do not seem to see value in discussing things and you make up your mind without ever discussing or EVEN letting me know.  If you want to seclude your mind from mine, fine.  But at least through me a bone instead of letting keeping me in the dark so that you can watch me offend you and justify being angry (you need a healthy outlet for that anger or you will turn out like me).”
  • “It’s not crazy for me to try to improve relationships with any one, especially the people I care most about.  It’s only crazy if the other party refuses to participate because they think it is.”
  • “You, for both our sakes avoid communication so as to avoid my becoming upset and avoid your own stress by being exposed to ‘my own stuff’.  I imagine you feel exasperated.  I imagine you feel tired.  Maybe you are right.  Maybe there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.  Maybe crazy Bo is just sadly in his own way far too much to ever be able to relate to [you] in a healthy way.  But it seems to me that there are a lot of possible solutions that have never been tried.”

 

• I didn’t trust him enough, and that was a sign of weakness:
  • “I have never had so much hope and faith.  Do you not see how tremendously blessed we are to finally understand one another?  …But alas, you choose to run away.”
  • “I BEG YOU TO LET GO YOUR FEAR OF ME!!!  You are asking me to do EXACTLY that which I have needed you to do for a long, long time.”
  • “Proof of your fear, fear and subsequent anger.”
  • “In order for communication to be appropriate between us at all, it must not be possible for you to see me as an adversary.  Very recently, you admited that…you heard an adversarial voice of Bo in your head.  That must change; forever.”
  • “I hate when you filter yourself.  It’s so fake and unhelpful.  Better I hear the truth and respond however.”
  • “I know that is what from your point of view it seems that I am doing.  but your false world is upside down and I will not go back to it being able to recognize truth.  I would ask you do get over yourself and just accpt what i am asking and to trust me but i know that you cant do that.  I dont member you ever trusting me actually,”
  • “You can have your walls, or you can have my companionship, you cannot have both. You can entertain and believe your false conclusions, or you can talk to and trust me.  You cannot do both.”
  • “Boundaries can be fine.  Boundaries can be great.  But boundaries ARE NOT walls.  A boundary is a mutually created, accepted, and or respected understanding of what is appropriate and what is not.  Boundaries allow for our growth to take place while sustaining our individual personhood and are in balance with our ignorance synergistically.  They are bi-or muli-lateral.  Not uni-lateral.  Walls on the other hand are unilateral and can be more destructive than constructive.  I invite you to try to replace your walls with boundaries.”
  • “Today I realized that what really offended me was the fact that you defiled my autonomous personhood.  YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO TRY TO CONTROL MY FEELINGS.  You cannot do this by what you do or do not “let me know”  and you cannot do this by “putting up walls”  We both need time.  We are getting SOOO close, closer ever day to the wonder all this work has promised.  DONT FUCK IT UP FOR ME!!!”
  • “why do you think you have such sensitivities, especially where I am concerned?  Do you think your reactions are reasonable?”

• He, on the other hand, was a spiritual teacher:
  • “Who is guiding you?  Are they trustworthy?  As trustworthy as a monk?  Are you strong enough to know a true guide?  Does your guide(s) know how “malleable” you are?  Will they respond within appropriate boundaries?  Are you sure?  Have you even stopped to ask yourself these important questions?”
  • “Yes, I am uniquely able to be of help to you, and in allowing me to do that, you might be of great help to me.  There is nothing I have ever wanted more.  But again, I will not rush it.  I do have what seems like an endless caravan of treasure for you but I will not push the camels unto their death (or mine).”
  • “I beg you to seek to understand more than you seek to be understood.”
  • “WE, YOU AND I are and have been under attack from the demon of separation (if you will) since the day we met.”
  • “Our difficulty in the now is not all a Bo problem.  We must both try to see our own faults before those of the other.  We must both seek to understand rather than be understood.  However, I feel that I have tried to understand you and that you could not give more than a half a shit about understanding me.”
  • “Don’t bother asking me why.  Instead, next time you don’t understand somthing, practice/think on it until you understand something more; something that helps US.”
  • “Again, I tell you that in my own experience, humility is seeing where you yourself are in the wrong without a goddamn thing in defense of yourself and without any accusation or condemnation of the other.”
  • “I have denied myself pleasure over 150 times with women because I can always see what is exploiting them and how it is doing so…I will not exploit women.  I loathe those who do… I have great difficulty watching women play into that dynamic, not usually (not at all is most common) understanding that they are or how they are being exploited… It is excruciating to watch others swoop in and do what I would not.  Terrible it is to watch my sacrifice go un noticed and unappreciated.”
  • “I am not your spiritual advisor…It was a mistake for me to try in the first place.  I meant only to see you through to someone else…I have known that since we met; I could not rest until I had seen you to a safer place than when I found you.  I failed.  I failed in many ways, and I succeeded in many ways.”
  • “And for some one who hates control or manipulation, do you really think that whatever was using me to hurt you was not delighted when you ran straigh into its arms?”
  • “As hard as it was, I left you alone for 6 months when parts of me screamed you needed me the most but I knew that you could not even hear me let alone understand.  And that was important.”
  • “We need to cooperate.  We need to recognize when we feel offended and then ‘straighten our back’ to the point that we grow,especially when we feel like we cannot.  We need to not TAKE offense.  That is humility.  That is saying, ‘grant that I may never seek…'”
  • “But just as I feared, you have come to subltle yet disasterous misunderstandings about [your religion]…and create monoliths out of that misunderstanding.”
  • “Long have I watched you dive headfirst into things.  Wreckless and proud.  Always wanting, needing out of control to be 10-1000 steps ahead of where you were.  It was dangerous for you and for me and for anyone else you came in contact with.  Mostly, I was worried about you.  Easy to see where it came from.  But we are at our most teachable and most balanced and at our wisest when we admit that the only thing we know for sure is that we do not know anything at all.  I began holding back from you years ago when I watched you trying too hard.  Slow down, I said let it come to you, the harder you try to bend it to your will the longer it will take you.  LOL not listening : ) ok so not listening and now your pain is beautiful because you are on the verge of humility.  I will pray for you.”
  • “I Iam amused that you have begun to use [your therapist] to support your side without ever giving me a chance.  You really are a piece of work”.
  • “You are right that I intentionally tried to influence you but everyone does, you just singled me out as the bad guy not even considering the source of real danger…Not sure that is worth the punishment you continually issue.  Anyhow…you still are not in control of yourself but you are making slow progress.”
  • “Anyhow, the reason we would go to tougher terrain is for some excitement of course but also for me as insturctor to bring out the weak points or areas of improvement we needed to focus on in the rest of the lesson and in future lessons.”
  • “It is almost telepathy…It is like giving a genie in a bottle to a child.  ‘With great power comes great responisibility.’  -Spiderman’s Unlce  I have the power without the discipline.  I dont know how it happened exactly becuase usually one must usually do…[spiritual] practice to find it.  Some people find many of these insights with drugs.  I am in niehter of these categories as I have always had great insight even before my first beer and I am far from a beacon of self control.”
  • “Enjoy your enlightened ignorance but know that you and your kind seem very offensive to millions of people all over the world.  And we will NOT be subjects to your patriarchal, hierarchacal bullshit no more than you or I would be ‘subject’ to the Pope. Human beings committed to spiritual growth can be found in any geography in ANY tradition.  You have just glommed onto one that reinforces, not removes your ignorance.”

• Which was a good thing, because I was very morally flawed:
  • “I see that you are just as spiritually proud as you have ever been.” 
  • “I see that your ego is demanding that I come humbly before you.  And I am TELLING you that I have become as humble before you as I can without help and reciprocation from YOU!!”
  • “Freeing one’s self from ego means in part learning to control one’s self and one’s own feelings and reactions.  This was a lesson we both needed to learn.  But I can see that you are not cooperating on this.  If you refuse to be consistant in controling how you feel, then your ego has already won and I will not do battle with it again.  You must join me in a pact to cooperate and help each other control our own egos much like a spotter in the weight room would cheer a person lifting a heavy load.  It does us absolutely no good for you to understand in some way the oneness of things if you will not be consistent in your application of effort given that understanding.  If I am trying as hard as I can to control how I feel but you are not, we will never make it off the dock let alone anywhere dangerous.”
  • “You and your ego wish more to be understood than to understand.”
  • “P.S.  The pride contained within ‘your humblest peace offering’ suggests that you still have no idea what humility is.”
  • “I must not say too much because i know that if I warn you about anything, you will rush in head first to the whatever.”
  • “I was hurt though by your brash selfishness in defense of yourself.  Please, I beg you try to excersise a little more judgment and patience.”
  • “I can’t believe that I am actully saying this to you but I think you are loosing touch with reality up there…. Are you able to offer me anything other than anguish?  Are you able to read this without overreacting?”
  • “Hey, do me a favor please, try not to be so vicious with me.  Even if you feel ‘justified’.  I will retrun the favor, honest.”
  • “You can humble yourself and know if only for a short time that you are ‘wrong’ about everything. “
  • “most of our interaction since the beginning has been overshadowed or manipulated by your (and sometimes my) displacement of anger (most of your own you have been denying and burying for almost two decades)”
  • “Your lack of self control is unbearable for me to watch.”
  • “Also, I fear that the leap of faith in you required on my part is nearly unapproachable as i have allowed myself to be fooled many times by an innocent yet deadly facade of capability on yours.”
  • “Can you put down your infinite selfishness for just one hour and do me a favor?”
  • “I would like to find a way to tell you that your cosmic selfishness hurts me much too deeply, please stop… Please trust.  Please commit.  Please be humble.  Please be accountable.  Please by kind.  Please slow down.  on and on like this….No, I will not give you permission to be selfhish and inconsiderate …Doing whatever you want whenever you want is not freedom actually.”
  • “I finally, FINALLY have discovered why you have been so vicious and in a way I am glad that you were.”
  • “You have fought visciously to to excuse youself from most (not yet all) accountability for the great majority of things.  For years you have been denouncing all forms of judgement.  I gunna look up the definition of morality right now and I will bet you a synanymn of judgment shows up …….conformityto the rules of right conduct; moral or virtuous”
    • “ah there we go.  OOoo looks like im blue now,  FUN!”
    • “RIGHT (as oppsed to WRONG) conduct.  Now lets make friends with the thesaurus…….”
      • [pasted content]:
        • chastity, conduct, decency, ethicality, ethicalness, gentleness, godliness, good habits, goodness, honor, ideals,incorruptibility, incorruption, integrity, justice, manners, moral code, morals, mores, philosophy, principle,principles, probity, purity, rectitude, righteousness, rightness, saintliness, standards, uprightness, virtue,worthiness
        • Notes: morality  is beliefs regarding appropriate behavior, while ethics  is the formal study of morality
    • “I congratulate you on a job well done on distancing youself from most if not all of these qaulities, at least where I am concerned.”
  • “One thing I would ask you though is why you dont seem to believe in morality?  How can [you] not understand the concept of ignorance?…Do you not value personal responsibility at all?  …I find you at your least compassionate and most hurtful when you throw accounability to the wind and just follow whatever whim takes hold of you…[it’s] an ugly selfishness which knows no compassion, only self indugence.”
  • “But you have no humility about it.  You claim an all inclusive morality but what you end up with is none.”
  • “I like how you called me out on my own habitual intentional loss of self control.  I would like it better if you would ask yourself If I am not in control of me, who is?, rather that just lashing out at me.  It’s just sad to see someone so powerful be so easily manipulated, especailly by people who may not really have her best interests in mind.”
  • “I am not responding to you so that you can selfishly satisfy your curiosity.”
  • “How arrogant you must be to present yourself as the only one who is tired of [talking about talking]…Every communication from you since I (alone again) broke our silence has been dripping with a [stop being that way Bo].”

• And I seemed to owe him a lot of stuff:
  • “S.  If you were looking for a gesture of good faith to give me…I think it may about time you bought me a drink.”
  • “I am just afraid that I am going to get cheated out of something great in the process of accepting what I must…  And then of course, Where is my payoff?! lol  I also understand that the only way to get a payoff here is to not want one so that is a little joke.  But not really.”
  • “Recently, I observed a mother who lost her son to a murderer reconcile and meet him face to face to forgive him.  If that can happen, you and I have no excuse not to take on the obstacles in our way.”

 

• Because he was the one doing all the work:
  • “Imagine we had a weight to lift together.  Only by cooperating and using all of our strength TOGETHER in harmony could it be lifted.  Neither one of us can do it alone and we must not get distracted otherwise one or the other or both will be crushed by the weight.”
  • “It is hard for me to trust you so long as I know that you are merely reacting to my outreach.  Where are YOU?!  Where is your assertiveness?  For as animated, engaged, deffensive, offensive, energetic, hard-working, etc. as you can be, I don’t remember observing YOU being your own catalyst.  You have always seemed to wait for things to happen TO or AROUND you and then ask yourself,”‘how should I react?'”
  • “You seem IN THE NOW to expect me to do every-fucking-thing.  I am telling you that I cannot.  I would like exactly what you would like but I need your help.  You seem unwilling to help me.  If you give me any more of your contolling attitude or if..then nonsense or especially your ‘holier-than-thou” rhetoric, we will not be able to communicate.”
  • “PS  It seems to me that you always just respond.  You do not seem to take innitiative with our communication.  This leads me to believe that it is insignificant or that you still defer your own freedom of choice to your circumstances.  Do your circumstances control you?”
  • “The purpose of all of my whining was to express to you all I have to overcome to make our love possible.”
  • “I am dissappointed that you give up on me so easily… You say that you have not given up on me yet you continue to give up on me any ol time you feel like it.”
  • “Only YOU can give yourself the freedom you need.  It has absolutley nothing to do with me or what I say or what I do.  You just think it does.”
  • “For the last 3 yrs i feel that i have been carrying the full wieght and responsibility for any love we might share.”
  • “I have taken careful inventory of the past few years and I really cannot recall the last time I felt good about some effort you put forth…I think there might have been one or two last year and then one or two the year before that.  anyhow, not enough iguess but ill gladly take what I can get.”
  • “you never did have time for me, not ever”
  • “I have always felt and continue to feel that everything between us is up to me…As I mentioned, interracting with you seems like all cost.  It seems like I am the only one putting forth any energy and I simply do not have enough to do it all by myself.  Plus it would not be appropriate for either of us for me to make all the decisions and for me to always be the one to reach out.”
  • “I know you don’t understand.  That is nothing to apologize for.  However, I also know that you do not care enough to understand.”
  • “I am weak.  I feel like I have been carrying you through a desert for a long long time.  I feel that we have come to an Oasis but that I am completely exauhsted.  If you care enough about us, you will have to bring some water out to me.  I cannot go any farther.”
  • “If you cannot garuntee that you will keep ‘us’ a priority or move our focus to something postive, then I am sorry because I cannot go any farther with you.”
  • “Do you really think it is healthy for me to have subjected myself to all of your projections all this time? You know, if I went out and tried to run a 5k right now, it probably would not feel very healthy to me, but it would be a big step toward my health.  I know you are just trying to do what you think is best for yourself and for me [by asking that I not contact you].  And I appreciate that, I really do.  I just am not sure I agree.  I think you are doing what’s easiest.”
  • “I took a big risk to help you when your health was of concern.  I am not going to say that I expect you to return the favor because I don’t.  But when I believed that I could be of service to your health and well being, I was willing to risk my own.  I guess I am just a dumb fool with a taste for masochism.”

• And, perhaps most oddly of all, he was constantly threatening to leave:
  • “Fortunately for us, I have not yet felt completely absolbed of re3sponsibility concerning our best relating.  But I feel as close to that as possible without crossing the line.”
  • “I do not want your energy, just a cooperative attitude.  You want me to give up.  Fine.”
  • “I don’t know if I have the strength to deal if you repeat your behavior.”
  • “I do not expect to hear from you again if ever unless and until you can do so without walls.  To put it another way, you are not welcome in my life so long as I am in competition with fear, anger, pride, and control among others…Basically, you must choose between me, and not me.  You cannot have both.”
  • “There is a point in the not too distant future that either we will be in balance with one another, or beyond wich we will permanently be out of communication…The more you blame me and refuse to meet me where I am, the farther we drift apart.”
  • “So, as they say ‘the ball is in your court’.  But I must warn you again that there may not be a multi-year hiatus between us followed by a reunion.”
  • “Not only this, but I almost WANT to abandon you.  I am tempted to delight in your screams in the dark and to help you cause yourself more affliction like the enabilers you invite in your life have done and continue to do.  I built and destroyed the great wall of China.”
  • “Are you more committed to your fear than you are to anything else?
    • What do you understand this situation to be?
    • Do you relize that this could be the end for real?
    • Is that what you want?
    • Do you know what you want?
    • What is standing in the way of what you truly want?
    • Do you care?
    • Do you want to finally try working together for the first time ever or do you want to give up before we try that?
    • If you do want to work together, what do you think each of us has to do?”
  • “I AM OUT OF RESOURCES FOR US.  That does not mean that WE are out of resources.  That means YOU have to decide what is next.  It is time for YOU ALONE to take a risk and it is time for ME to REACT or not react to whatever you choose.
    In the now; I am reaching out to you for the last time unless you change our dynamic.”
  • “I am giving up now, on what I am not sure.”
  • “Go, live your life.  Just do it without me.  I cannot care about you any more.  Is there still a love?  Maybe, but I cannot care about it.  I have said all that I can.”
  • “Please be advised that any message you send me will be auto deleted.  I should have done this a long time ago. If you need, and I mean NEED to get in touch, try to contact my mother.  Goodbye.”
  • “I am sorry that I hurt you.  I forgive all the instances I felt hurt by you.  We are so much more than our selfishness.”
  • “Until you stop presuming to know what is appropriate for me, I cannot appropriately have anything to do with you. And that is meant with all the coldness it implies.”
  • “I was wrong about a lot of things.  I was wrong to reach out to you, now or ever.”

 

 

Yes. Yes, you were.

Now, kindly back the fuck off.

This ain’t The Year of No Fucks Given for nothing.

 

ETA:  Bonus! More messages:

• “Seven years. Seven missed chances for you to redress and wish me well on my birthday day. You musts be aware that people run out of birthdays.
  Therefore,
• I must assume that you have no intention of ever doing so. That is actually a great gift and I think you.”

LOL thnx I doubt it. Now let’s see if I can block you from my phone…

 

The Wind-Up: A Giving No Fucks 9 Years in the Making

Every year around Valentine’s Day, I think of my ex, Bo. Not in an, “Aww, gosh, that boy was really swell; I can’t believe I let him get away” way, or even in an “Glad to be rid of that jerk!” way. I just think of him because he forever cemented Valentine’s Day as a holiday that I will always share…with my aunt.

I was 18 when I met Bo, and he was 29. It was summer. We started dating almost instantly, and things got serious very quick. By the time February rolled around, I was excited for the direction our relationship was going. Also, this marked the first time I’d had a boyfriend at Valentine’s Day, ever.

On Valentine’s night, I met him at his place for a dinner that seemed romantic at the time, but in hindsight I think came out of a pantry full of boxes appropriate for the kitchen of a broke college student, and possibly some flowers. And then there was a gift exchange. I don’t remember what I got him, but I remember Bo opening his first and then excitedly handing me a little velvet box. It was red with a bow, and it nestled comfortably into the curve of my palm like a burrowing rabbit. Jewelry! I thought, nodding to myself. Score. I smiled, looking up at him in anticipation. I opened the box.

Inside were two condoms.

I tried to listen as Bo waxed on about how serious our relationship was, about how he was ready to take things to the “next level” with me…I tried not to feel so selfish and materialistic, but, honestly, I was hurt. I buried the feeling — because, that’s what you do, right? Having tucked away my emotions into a handy pocket-size parcel for Bo’s convenience, we had a decent evening. And no, of course the condoms didn’t get used.

 

The next morning, my aunt – who is basically my sister – called me up.

Aunt:  “Hey, how’d your Valentine’s go?”
Me:  “Um….”
Aunt:  “Ohmigod. I’ll be right over.”

About 15 minutes later, my aunt’s car was in my driveway. In the car was a gigantic, pillow-case sized bag of condoms. I looked from her to the bag in horror. She drove me to Bo’s house. We dumped the bag all over the lawn, rang the doorbell, and ran away.

 

It wasn’t mature – and, to this day, I’m not even sure it makes sense. I’ve never done anything like that before, or since. But I knew Bo got the message when he called as my aunt’s car was pulling out of the driveway. “Touché,” he said with a wry smile I could hear.

That’s my favorite memory of Bo – the one that marked a relationship growing stronger (albeit with someone else).

The rest of my memories of Bo are…less humorous.

 

You know how I met him when I was so young? Yeah, he was my boss. Which maybe should have been my first clue that he was willing to cross boundaries. But hey, not all office romances are bad, right? He was my first serious relationship, and, unfortunately, one of the first men I was interested in who treated me like a person. This made it very, very easy to get attached to him very, very quickly. Really, much of our relationship was fine; decent, even. At some point, though, he developed this idea that he was a spiritual teacher – nay, my spiritual teacher – which I found annoying, but it was mostly background noise.

There were a few other things. Early on in our relationship, we were going on a date, and he was late. And I don’t mean, like 5 minutes late. I mean, like, an hour late. And he had a cell phone. And he didn’t use it. And when he finally arrived, sans apology, I implied that I might not be interested in dating him after all. Later, during and long after we had stopped dating, he continued to bring this incident up again and again, not out of remorse, but with ire, as though my reaction marked some moral failure of mine.

Sometimes, I would start to bond with a woman, and Bo would become very, very angry. A queer woman I was hanging out with way before I knew him must be interested in me because she and I were getting to be closer friends. Once, when hanging out with Bo and a close friend of his, the friend’s girlfriend came along, and I liked her — but as soon as she left, Bo told me all about how evil she was (literally, he used the world “evil”), and how she was trying to corrupt his friend. According to Bo, a friendly polyamorous lady didn’t actually like me as a person; she was just trying to get me into bed. Once, he did the same thing with a man who was plainly interested in me, but he was far more jealous of the women in my life. He would tell me all about what terrible people these women were. He had to. After all, Bo had my best interests at heart.

Another thing that bugged me was that I could never figure out how Bo – who was more than 10 years my senior, and who I met when he was holding a stable job – always seemed to have trouble with money. Heck, I had my finances figured out better at 12 than he did at 30. He lived in a collegey section of town, technically owned a car but it was always broken, and owned a supply of Ramen bricks fit for a castle siege.

Bo would tell me about his troubles with money – this part on the car that had crapped out again, his utility bills went up this month because of his roommate, he didn’t make as much commission as he had expected. One day, after hearing about how his car was so busted that it couldn’t even get him to work, I offered to give him a loan of a few hundred dollars to fix the part. He was incredulous – maybe even angry. He couldn’t; he couldn’t possibly.

“What – it’s not even that much money,” I assured him. “Anyway, you’ll pay it back, right? Besides, how are you going to get to work to earn more money if your car’s broken?”

Now, let me stop you there. It’s certainly not the case that lending money is a bad idea all of the time. As you might suspect, though, it definitely was in this case, because all of the signs that Bo couldn’t be responsible with money — or, like, human beings —  were right in front of me. But…he hadn’t even asked me for the money, right? How could it be a bad idea? Isn’t this what people who are in love just do for each other?

Bo fixed the part on his car and was on the path to paying me back. But then, his cat got into something and racked up a ginormous vet bill. And he had to make an emergency trip to see his mother in another state. And he was starting a business on the side that he needed some help getting off the ground. By the second time I lent him money, he didn’t wait for me to offer, but came straight to me. By the last time, I had lent him a total of $1,000.

 

I remember one night in early spring. It was still chilly. It was Easter. Bo had been out of town with some friends, but had promised me that he’d call as soon as he got back that afternoon, and we’d be able to spend the evening together. I hadn’t eaten, because I was planning on dining with Bo. He didn’t call. It was getting later. He didn’t call. I was hungry. He didn’t call. I was cold. But the thing I felt more as the night waned on was alone.

I tried calling him a couple of times toward the end of the night out of concern, but somehow I knew it was futile. I shoved some bread into my aching belly and went to bed.

 

I called him the next morning, just to check to see whether his phone was on, because I was pretty sure his car had overturned in a ditch somewhere and I was mostly biting my nails waiting 24 hours to file a missing persons report. To my surprise, he answered.

Bo:  “Hello.”
Me:  “Hey – are you alright? Where have you been?”
Bo:  “I was…out.”
Me:  “Well, yeah, I knew that…but I thought we were supposed to spend the evening together.”
Bo:  “Oh.”
Me:  “So….” (pretty sure by this point he’s about to tell me that he’s cheating), “…do ya…wanna tell me what happened?”
Bo:  “I was out.”
Me:  “Out…where?”
Bo:  “Out…gambling.”

Bo had lost all of the money that I let him, and then some. And then a lot. And then some more after that. He had made it back in town – a little bit later than he’d planned, on account of all the extra turns at the roulette table – and had been too ashamed to call me. At the time, I think that’s what I was more upset about than anything:  that he had left me alone, to worry and wait. I told him I needed a few days to think about it.

But I knew.

I took a few days to try to see a way around it. But there wasn’t one.

On Friday, I called him. I had been thinking about it all week, and I had to wait until I was with a group of friends, or I knew I’d lose my nerve.

“I thought about it. It’s over. Goodbye, Bo.”

It was his 30^th birthday. I felt like the world’s biggest jerk. In hindsight, I can see that mine was a response to a situation that Bo himself created, and whether I broke up with him on his 30^th birthday, or his 23rd or his 57th, or any random day of the year wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. Because he was the one that forced me to choose. The night that Bo went gambling with the money I had lent him, he put me in a position to choose my own emotional and financial health, or his, and I chose me.

It wasn’t easy. In fact, it was very, very hard. But I thought it was over with. I’d had my first serious relationship, and now it was time to have my first serious break up. And to seriously get over it. And to seriously move on. And to seriously find somebody else. And I seriously did.

But Bo didn’t.

And that’s where the second half of this entry comes into play.

That’s why, 9 years after we started dating, Bo is still eligible to be included in 2016:  The Year of No Fucks Given.

Because I truly do NOT anymore. And, in one more (very long) entry, I’ll tell you why.

Really Nice Guys Who Fuck Up

Gosh. Grown-ass adults say the darndest things, don’t they?

Recently, I arrived early to a party. Okay, I arrived so early I was the very first guest. (To anybody who’s ever had to put up with my pathological lateness:  No, I’m not sure how this happened, and Yes, this was the only time, and you missed it). The second guest, Brosephus, arrived to drop off a dish before he had to be somewhere else; he planned to return later that night. He chatted with the hosts briefly and was on the point of leaving when the Hostess introduced us:

Hostess:  “Brosephus, I’d like you to meet my friend, BadBitch.”
Brosephus:  “Oh, hello, BadBitch.” *shakes my hand* “…Are you, um, with anybody?”

Oh, buddy. It’s on. What is this, an AOL chat room in 1997?

I could think of two reasons Brosephus asked this question:

1. Hello! I’m hot, and he wants a piece of this.
   1. That fact notwithstanding, Brosephus was wearing a wedding ring, and he didn’t strike me as that socially awkward. Door number 2:
2. Here I am, a woman all alone…surely there must be a man around to dominate/protect/complete me?

I didn’t especiallly like either of those two options. Not from someone I had just met (just kidding, I wouldn’t like them in anyone). Although, for the record, Brosephus does not win first place for the Most Ridiculous Thing Anyone Has Ever Said to Me upon First Meeting. That prize goes to a friend of a friend who famously said, upon being introduced to me for the very first time:

“Oh, so you’re the bitch who stole my job!” Upon realizing that we had both applied for the same job that I, um, got. Due to my qualifications in the field. Or, you know, thievery. Whatever.

Ladies and gentlemen, the adults among us.

Anyway, back to Brosephus. So, I had generated a few options to explain what he might mean, but I just figured, hey, let’s go straight to the source and fact-check this shit.

Me:  “Who am I with? *indicates hosts* I’m with them.”
Brosephus: “No, I mean — ”
Me (in my head):  Oh, honey, I know what you mean. Be a good boy and spell it out for me, will you?
Hostess:  “Brosephus, BadBitch is dating Kermit. Kermit wasn’t able to make it tonight. We’ll see you later, then?”

Brosephus left, and we went about the party. Later, I caught Hostess:

Me:  “Hey, WTF is up with your friend Brosephus? Like, where does he get off?”
Hostess:  “I know, right? That was weird. See, though, the thing about Brosephus is, he’s a really nice guy.”
Me:  “But…that thing…that he said…that was really weird!”
Hostess:  “Yeah!”
Me:  “And I was trying to find out what he meant.”
Hostess:  “Yeah…I know, but I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. He’s such a nice guy.”
Me:  “Well, if Brosephus doesn’t bring his wife when he comes back over here, I’m going to give him shit about it. ‘Oh, are you with anybody? You walked in on your own, and I just wanted to check.’ You think he would have said that shit to me if I was a dude?”
Hostess:  *nervous giggle*

Not too much later, we arrive at the moment of truth. Brosephus strides back in — you guessed it — unaccompanied. I’m firing up my engines and I sneak a quick glance at Hostess…who is clearly silently uncomfortable with the situation.

I back down.

And I spend the rest of the night regretting it.

I wind up on the periphery of Brosephus’ conversation, far enough away that I’m actually in it, but close enough that it’s awkward that I’m not. He’s mostly talking about his kids, the school system, his inlaws…things that I, as a childless (and, God forbid, husband-less) stranger am not really in a position to discuss anyway. But every once and again, Brosephus makes a conscious effort to include me, and I just…can’t.

What’s wrong with me? I think. Why can’t I just be nice? Would it kill me to make an effort with this guy?

But eventually I realize that it’s not even the principle of the thing. It’s that I actually, literally, can’t. Not in even the sarcastic sense. I sort of can’t even hear what’s going on around me. The party is happening in a blur. I try to form words, but they just don’t come. Nothing feels real. I’m dissociating.

Wait — dissociating? That seems like a strong word to use in light of what is, essentially, one very small comment spoken hours ago (technically, he said something else that was questionable later, too, but it was so small it isn’t even worth mentioning). I tried getting angry with myself, but, surprisingly, that didn’t fix anything. So mostly I just sat there, for what could have been hours or minutes or days, until Brosephus left toward the end of the night.

“Wow,” Hostess said when Brosephus had gone. “You really didn’t like Brosephus, did you?”

Once she opened up the conversation, I realized what was wrong. It wasn’t the one little thing Brosephus had said.

It was Hostess’ effective ban on my addressing it.

To me, the Year of No Fucks Given is partially about being okay with taking the chance that I’ll read a situation wrong. It’s about not second-guessing myself, it’s about seeing the devil’s advocate’s point and raising him one. I didn’t realize, until Hostess opened the floodgates for me at the end of the night, just how much it hurt when she blocked my attempts to do so.

You see, Brosephus was the one who said what he said. In asking him to explain himself, I can do no more or less than call attention to his intentions. In asking him to explain himself, I don’t become the bad guy if he said something objectionable, and I force him to look it in the pale, ugly eyes. In asking him to explain himself, if he’s said nothing wrong, then the conversation is over, quick and painless, and we all get to move on.

In not asking him — nay, in being explicitly discouraged from asking him by Hostess — I did feel like I was the bad guy. That the onus was on me to create a nice, pleasant atmosphere — even if Brosephus was saying, “I’m married with kids, but I feel entitled to your female body.”

Hostess suggested, at the end of the night, that, since I was the first one there, maybe Brosephus was looking around the room for my partner Kermit, thinking that Brosephus should introduce himself to Kermit, too. To which I say, “maybe”. And, “if that’s what he was thinking, he would have been able to say that, and we both could have moved on.” In posing the question — had I gotten the chance — Brosephus could have proven the “really nice guy” status that was attributed to him no less than 4 times that evening. Maybe he is a total woke bae and I’m the one who’s misinterpreting his words. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to take someone else’s word — even somebody who I love dearly — over my gut instinct when the latter’s telling me that there’s a problem here. (BTW, if you need help trusting your gut when other voices are telling you to ignore what you’re feeling in the interest of being “nice”, then you need to read “The Gift of Fear” ASAP). Nobody, not even my closest friends, has the permission to tell me to ignore what I’m feeling because my emotions make them uncomfortable.

Because, really, isn’t that what it was about? It wasn’t about what Brosephus meant or didn’t mean. It was about my friend Hostess who wanted to have a nice, pleasant evening with her guests. She didn’t want me to start a fight, or maybe she wanted to protect Brosephus from my rabid feminist ire. Good intentions, maybe. But what was the result? Instead of a 30-second exchange in which this guy had to explain his own words, which might have left him marginally uncomfortable — again, only in the event that he was actually saying something objectionable, I was the one who felt uncomfortable and cowed the whole night. In that moment, Hostess unconsciously and unknowingly chose to prioritize Brosephus’ emotions over mine, and it fucking hurt.

“Badbitch,” you’re asking yourself, “Does any of this actually matter?” And I have three answers for you:  No, Yes, and Yes.

• No. I do not pretend for one minute that this awkward social encounter is at all equivalent to other, more insidious or violent brands of sexism. It’s just not.
• Yes. I do believe that the small things matter. Because how can we expect anyone to stand up for herself in life-threatening situations if she isn’t brave enough to do it in the everyday ones?
• Yes. It’s absolutely important because I respect my own inner wisdom. When it speaks, I listen. It doesn’t matter how big or small the issue. Period.

Hostess isn’t the villain here. I think we’ve all done it — minimized or shut down a loved one’s feeling when they’re inconvenient for us. I know I have, at least. But, fortunately for me, Hostess was willing to have an open, honest dialogue with me by the end of the night in which she understood the impact of her actions and took responsibility for them. Isn’t that the best any of us can do, at the end of the day? By my own logic, I’m very likely this year to get it wrong, at least one of these times that I respond from my gut instead of running my visceral response through a filter of “nice”. I hope that, the next time that’s me, I have the grace that Hostess did to meet the other person where they are and be willing, in that moment, to set aside my need to be right in favor of supporting someone who feels hurt. No matter how big or small the scale of the perceived infraction, isn’t that just sort of…the practice of becoming a better human being?

This bundle of Fucks got dropped and broken, the pieces didn’t glue back together right. They’re all wonky, like melted crayons on the sidewalk that will never hold their original shape again. They don’t look the way I want them to anymore. But they are still my Fucks, and I chose not to dole them out. These Fucks are perfect in their imperfections, and glorious to behold.

And they are all mine. You want some, go get your own. The Gift Shop of No Fucks Given is right around the corner. The Honey Bunches of Fucks are on special this week. Try them; they’re delicious.