When We Suck Too Much to Love

The subject of attention appropriately enough occupies a lot of my attention. I think about what it is people attend to when they try to make a life for themselves. As someone who suffers from ADHD, I have to think about what catches my attention all day in an effort to bring my attention back to center. When I attain that manic state of hyperfocus, I can’t stop paying attention. And as someone who admittedly sucks at relationships, I’ve realized the biggest cause of my relational problems usually comes down to attention asymmetry.

I’m a terrible girlfriend when I’m preoccupied. I get distracted and stop paying attention to my partner. I become so involved in my own anxieties and fears, my partner becomes a piece of talking furniture. It’s terrible. One boyfriend I had, his greatest skill was paying attention. This didn’t necessarily mean he was a good partner for me, just that he was really good at keep his phone off when were together. He didn’t maintain a social media presence. He wasn’t addicted to anything. He was strange!

And ho, I felt terrible around him. Here he was paying me all this undivided attention and all I could do was worry about something else, usually always entirely graduate school work but there were some other weird preoccupations, too, like my long stint where I became inexplicably obsessed with long-term disaster survival. Whatever intimacy we achieved in our courtship evaporated undoubtedly because of my preoccupation with things that were definitely not him.

In another relationship, I had a boyfriend who was completely addicted to whatever social media drug was on the table. He’d spend hours scrolling forums and checking Facebook and watching Netflix. Definitely not paying attention to me, but also not really paying attention to anything else, either. His attention was shattered all day across so many things that he stopped being a whole person.

There was no longer a him to talk to as he became a container stuffed full of tiny self-amusements. There was no space between to ask himself who he wanted to be. Everything he attended to in the day was the deluge of the minute and trivial, most of it having nothing to do with him or us or our lives together. Hearing about any of it second-hand made me numb completely. There was no greater self project he was working on; we plotted nothing together. I was, frankly, really bored of the absence of him.

In each case, one of us stopped being a person. And as I learned the hard way, each time, it’s impossible to love a nonperson. There’s no one to love, just a hole where a person should be.

Americans work themselves into a frenzy over the idea of self identity. It’s our national past-time now, cultivating a self. After all, without a self what do you build a brand around? How did people ever interact with each other without knowing each other’s personal brands? Such a time saver!

But weirdly no one asks, How do you make a self? You’re just expected to be. We don’t think too hard about the glue we use to hold ourselves together.

So is it any surprise that we all seem to come together like a dresser from IKEA? I mean look at you, you’re barely holding on, pal. People are crappy and they don’t go slide in the metal grooves the way they’re supposed to and their corners stick out all crooked when they’re shut. Just look at yourself! How do you even bear weight?

We all hope to one day replace ourselves with something more stable, more functional and better-looking, but not today, fuckers, because today we’re going to suck. We fill our days with suck. Most of us have to just to survive because our world is so thoroughly organized around suck. And so our calendars measure our suck through time. Our birthdays come and we have nothing to celebrate. We never seem to find the time to make ourselves better. We suck so much, we don’t want to look at ourselves and thanks to screens we carry in our pockets, now none of us ever has to ever again!

Phew!

This would all be fine, of course, except we all want someone to love us and spare us from ourselves. But we want them to love us despite ourselves, despite our shitty craftmanship. We want someone special to give us extra credit for a job done ok at best.

When we lose ourselves, though, we become impossible to love.

The self is a terrible thing to waste, but most of us will. It’s getting easier and easier to shit a life away. Modernity has afforded us permission to let our social lives get cut up in so many tiny little pieces. We rarely stand in one position long enough to watch anyone’s grass grow.

Most of us are still too afraid of how ugly we are to take a long enough look at ourselves. We paradoxically hope that we’ll just get better somehow on our own but without having to work at it.

But asking yourself, “What kind of self do I want to be?” is a hard question Society really wants you to stop asking. It’d rather just tell you. The people in charge need you to do shit for them and your independent thinking threatens their legitimacy.

So getting everyone to think they’re cultivating a pretty good self is thus the modern trick of power. It’s why most social media sites are designed to enlist your friends in a flattering circlejerk of likes. There’s a certain democracy to its banality. Everyone likes selfies of people they like! Wow, you cooked a dinner! Way to be married! Good job, you.

At some point before I deactivated my account, Facebook just came to seem to me like an endless social bowel movement. Somehow, no matter what people did with their lives, it all read to me like the same shit. The same Netflix binges. The same hot takes. The same poses by different people all somehow having the same vacation. But oh everyone liked it, I guess.

If you’ve ever quit Facebook, though, and joined me on the other side, you realize how hard it is for your friends to imagine being a friend outside of it. You have to be weird and remind them you exist because in their world, friendship is a passive stream of status updates. Once you’re out of sight, you’ll find yourself soon out of mind. And you’ll start having doubts about yourself, asking if anyone ever actually liked you at all.

Which is a good question to ask yourself because it gets right to the point: who are you? What about you do you want people to like? What kind of person are you trying to be right now?

If you’re going to avoid Society’s sucky default setting for self, you have to ask: How do I cultivate myself? I can’t tell you how to do this. No one can. I only know how to make me. I have no idea what the rest of you have to do. That’s up to you to decide. But you have to decide or else someone else will.

And trust me: there’s nothing the powerful want more than to see you waste a life cut across thousands of tiny, ineffectual pieces with your social relationships mediated and organized by third-party platforms. You’re no threat! You’re not even a person!

And they know better than anyone, nonpersons can’t love each other.

And when we don’t love each other, well, then, they’ve got nothing to fear.