Martyred in the mirror

"Women improve men". I decided when I was a young man, no more than a boy, that I would try to be a good person in my life. This is easy to decide as a kid, because being good is obvious. Of course when you start getting older, good becomes relative and you aren't ever sure if you're right, good, correct or justifiable, and you may decide to stop thinking about it altogether. When I was 17 however I met my current partner, and I refined my idea of how to be good. I am a man, I am straight, and I need to get a partner to help me do 'the correct things' in life. When my partner and I started dating, I first thought, that it would be nice to have someone in my life who liked me, thought I was attractive, and maybe I could have sex with. That perhaps these qualities of another human being would make life nice, while I was making life nice for others.

Having satisfied these "requirements" however, there was trauma to deal with; we had been together long enough that we became able to share our deep and heavy burdens. Because of the size and weight of my partners burdens, and the lightness of my own, I shouldered some of the weight, in what I believed was what a good partner – a good person - would do. Over time, as the pain wasn't dealt with, and neither of us were therapists (neither are we now years later), and neither of us had any training or experience in dealing with stress productively, the best solution we had was to persevere. Unfortunately, this shifted my innocent views of a new relationship, into one of responsibility and challenge.

Rather than cut things off in favour of something easier, I learnt that through these hardships we experienced together that my partner was not a burden to my life or trying to vacuum joy from our time together. In fact, as I looked back at the support I gave and the things I had learnt about trauma, I decided that I had grown through another person’s hardships. This seemed like a good outcome, and on balance I thought that must be what a healthy person must do when their partner or loved one has severe and pervasive trauma that had never gone away (and perhaps never will).

However, I made a crucial mistake; I conflated the growth I had experienced with my partner to mean that I needed their trauma to continue growing. That my own growth was dependent on their ability to help me grow, either by hardship or by triumph. The problem of this is co-dependence - and eventually having placed my own happiness and feelings of self-worth on my partners influence on me, I learnt that I was not being a good person as my aim had been. Rather, I had metamorphosed from the same useless boy I had started as, into an older, plumper, parasite. I leeched from their pain and became superior and heightened in my suffrage of that pain. I would share how tough my partner and I had it, to the sympathetic eyes of those around me. Eventually I found myself martyred in the mirror, and through all my jaded lack of pleasance, and with the vigour of my youth starting to drip away faster than I expected, all I saw remaining was a tired and frustrated blob in the shape of a human man.

So I revisited my thesis; if I attempt to become a good person I can be a "human becoming", and that the act of trying to do good will in turn make me good. In this way – and as I had learnt from some thing I'd read years before - once I decided I was a good person I could just as easily cease to be one. Similarly, if I wished to grow, co-dependence on my partners pain was not the way, as they could persist in their state of pain and trauma for their entire life, never allowing for more growth. Or they could continue to grow past the trauma to heal and be happier, perhaps making our relationship suffer, as our continued partnership was (for me) based on a selfish need to make me better through their strife. After all, if they weren't anguished, I wasn't becoming better. Or they could get worse, the growth replaced with shared anguish, and our relationship could collapse, or become a festering blight on our minds creating new traumas on each other or ourselves.

So, I adapted. I decided my approach was not making me happy, and had stopped being supportive of my partner, and so to make us both happy I would grow solo. I would find my interests, my skills and my learnings in my free time, dedicating myself to career, hobbies and efficient use of time. Of course this solution was not final, not the least of which because the fire I rekindled in myself was set to burn very bright, very briefly. Despite tangible improvements, like graduations or publications, I remained in the feeling that "I" was contained within a shell of lofty expectations. I was supposed to be successful, talented and on top of everything, and instead we remained poor, stressed and without the ability to dig out of a hole. Not realising soon enough that this was not working, my partner had been forced to find themselves without their loving partner beside them to guide or nurture, and the only things we shared for many years were arguments, poor finances, and responsibilities.

So again, I found myself, staring down a husked reflection, trading who I was - a self-serving but supportive leech - with something worse; an aggravator. With my happiness dependent on growth, growth dependent on myself, and myself dependent on things I could not control, what remained was a person who was dying under the weight of expectations and trying to use a cup of water to put out a house fire.

So again, I revisited my thesis; trying to be a good person felt out of reach, and attempting to force a change was self-serving and therefore not what a good or selfless person would do. Instead, if being a good person was a good thing to be, but I could not force such a change, then I should lean into the lack of control in my life - the quickly crumbling economy and limited job market for my skills, my partners consistently worsening physical and mental health, startling social division in all circles. Instead, when people need help, just say yes. If friends want to hang out, just say yes. More work from a colleague or boss? Yes. Partner asks me to stop playing games and make dinner, and watch a movie? Of course, yes. For a time, this felt better, as I was freed from the need to guide my life and could feel satisfied in myself for experimenting with a quasi-altruism - that if the people I cared about where happy, then I was happy. This also did not last, as I continued to fall behind on growing workloads, the pre-existing burnout never having been dealt with. An ever-stacking backlog of tasks, as my guitar strings gathered dust, my Unity projects being slowly forgotten, and my writings left unfinished.

Worse still, simply doing as my partner asked was not the same as proactively seeking their company as I had done before, and we grew not as a stronger partnership, but into an arrangement. Very little partnering would happen, and all too much decision making and living was being done one sided-ly by them. In the end, the only thing I had leant into were extremes; at first, I sought the frenzied river and was eager to navigate the difficult rapids, before I found it too much to bear. I tried to fight the rapids and overcome the river, becoming so exhausted I could drown. And when I tried to let it all go, and be moved by the water instead of my own muscles, I failed to avoid the rocks, and was beaten and bruised.

One last time, I revisited my thesis, and found the writing was not written on the wall, but in the mirror. No longer was there a young man, eager to succeed and prevail. No longer was there a leech, supported by another’s experience. No longer was the leech metamorphosing, to be a human becoming. All that I could see was a shadow of a person, neither helpful nor harmful, neither energetic, nor exhausted, neither introverted nor outgoing. The man known to my partner, my friends, my family and my colleagues, were all different variations to something barely more than an idea. Instead, a feeling prevailed that "I" was only a concept. That "I" was whoever the people around me expected or needed me to be. "I" was trying to be a loving and supportive partner, while "I" must be a good son and brother. "I" was a good and reliable friend, and "I" was a worker who wanted to improve and be better for his colleagues and their mission. But "I" wasn't a happy or fulfilled person. Not an interesting or charming person. Or even a very nice or accepting person once all the pretence and expectation was stripped away. And in the darkest hours of the night, came the most pressing learning – “I” was so far from being a good person, that “I” was barely a person at all. And so for many nights since, while my partner lay sleeping alone in next room, “I” have stared into the person in the mirror to see there is simply nothing there.