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Jun. 4th, 2005 07:23 pm
This has Livejournal written all over it
I love the Popular Girls column Miranda does in Tablet... this latest one seems like it's written for half of the people on Live Journal:
Let’s address this little problem you have, sweetness. We’ll call it an intervention of sorts, minus the stoically weeping parents and the histrionic spouse. Let’s pretend that I’m the fair but compassionate counselor with 14 years sobriety, minus the Midwestern footwear and cigarette breath. Okay, minus the Midwestern footwear.
The trouble is this, and I’m not going to beat around the bush here; I’ll give it to you straight. Well, first some credentials, a curriculum vitae, as it were: I grew up with people like you. I was raised with people like you, sugar, and I know people like you, inside and out. My whole life I’ve been drawn to your type; friends, family, employers and lovers, all of them strangely compelling, oddly magnetic and just plain irresistible to someone like me. My childhood, most of my working life and my entire marriage have been chock full of your adorable ilk; I know and love you like I know and love myself.
Thing is, I was you, for a god awful long time. So when you hear what I’ve got to say and it sounds outrageous, absurd, downright wrong, just know that I’ve been exactly where you are. When you fight the concept, when you reject it outright as concrete evidence that the entire world has been conspiring against you at some giant, fabulous dinner party (with pie!) to which you were never invited, know that I, at my bottomest of bottoms, did the self-same thing. I denied it, like you will. Spat a little with my head turned and an ugly mouth and denied it, flat out. Then, in a quiet moment after I was worn out with being righteously pissed, I let the idea sneak up and whisper in my ear as maybe something that could perhaps potentially be something that had the teeniest little kernel of truth in it.
Hopefully you will too. Because it’s important, and facing it, taking a good hard look at it, might change your life. Of course it might not, but if someone hands you a ticket why not scratch it? Could be nothing but it could also be a thousand bucks a week for life. Or another ticket. May as well, right? Be brave, cookie.
So the thing is this: you’re a martyr. A goddamned mealy-mouthed, passive-aggressive, whinging, whining, self-obsessed, overly-sensitive-yet-bizarrely-insensitive victim-without-a-cause. See now that didn’t hurt too much, did it? Like pulling off a band-aid.
Standard disclaimer: if you were abused as a child, you were a victim. If you were traded to four of your step-daddy’s closest buddies for a bottle of Night Train and a carton of Kools; if you were tossed in a sack with your littermates and thrown in the river at midnight, you were a victim. If you’ve been raped, molested, disappeared, assaulted, tortured, mugged, run down, plowed over, beaten up or pimped out, you were a victim. Whatever it was, you didn’t deserve it and the whole mother-loving world should at the very least give you one gentle pat on the back for being here on the other side of it, bowed but unbroken. No joke.
But it’s over now. And a whole hell of a lot of you (and me) were never once burned with a cigarette for looking stink-eyed at Mom when she was off her medicine. We weren’t maimed, mutilated or murdered repeatedly. We had lives; a little hard and a little soft, sometimes really, really miserable, but nothing happened or happens to us, not one blasted thing, that holds water as genuine, incontrovertible proof that we are justified in our sincere (and breathtakingly vocal) belief that we are the center of the fucking universe, and that the universe thoroughly despises us as evidenced by the terrible, terrible suffering inflicted upon us day in and day out by people, places and things without end.
Your affliction is boring. And when we try to love you, like you, work for or with you, when we try to be a good friend or relation to you, we come away with a bad taste in our mouths. Your obsession with you is interesting to us for as long as we feel sympathy (6.3 minutes at last count, 9.5 if something really compelling has happened).
The longer you deny it the longer you’ll feel crucified. Aren’t you sick, just a little, of blaming every setback, every snag, every stubbed toe and broken heart on him/her/it/them? What if you looked at the choices you’ve made, from the very start—as far back as you can remember to this very moment in time? What if you had something, almost everything, to do with where you are right this second?
Then you could do something about it. And we could get a word in edgewise.
One day at a time.
Let’s address this little problem you have, sweetness. We’ll call it an intervention of sorts, minus the stoically weeping parents and the histrionic spouse. Let’s pretend that I’m the fair but compassionate counselor with 14 years sobriety, minus the Midwestern footwear and cigarette breath. Okay, minus the Midwestern footwear.
The trouble is this, and I’m not going to beat around the bush here; I’ll give it to you straight. Well, first some credentials, a curriculum vitae, as it were: I grew up with people like you. I was raised with people like you, sugar, and I know people like you, inside and out. My whole life I’ve been drawn to your type; friends, family, employers and lovers, all of them strangely compelling, oddly magnetic and just plain irresistible to someone like me. My childhood, most of my working life and my entire marriage have been chock full of your adorable ilk; I know and love you like I know and love myself.
Thing is, I was you, for a god awful long time. So when you hear what I’ve got to say and it sounds outrageous, absurd, downright wrong, just know that I’ve been exactly where you are. When you fight the concept, when you reject it outright as concrete evidence that the entire world has been conspiring against you at some giant, fabulous dinner party (with pie!) to which you were never invited, know that I, at my bottomest of bottoms, did the self-same thing. I denied it, like you will. Spat a little with my head turned and an ugly mouth and denied it, flat out. Then, in a quiet moment after I was worn out with being righteously pissed, I let the idea sneak up and whisper in my ear as maybe something that could perhaps potentially be something that had the teeniest little kernel of truth in it.
Hopefully you will too. Because it’s important, and facing it, taking a good hard look at it, might change your life. Of course it might not, but if someone hands you a ticket why not scratch it? Could be nothing but it could also be a thousand bucks a week for life. Or another ticket. May as well, right? Be brave, cookie.
So the thing is this: you’re a martyr. A goddamned mealy-mouthed, passive-aggressive, whinging, whining, self-obsessed, overly-sensitive-yet-bizarrely-insensitive victim-without-a-cause. See now that didn’t hurt too much, did it? Like pulling off a band-aid.
Standard disclaimer: if you were abused as a child, you were a victim. If you were traded to four of your step-daddy’s closest buddies for a bottle of Night Train and a carton of Kools; if you were tossed in a sack with your littermates and thrown in the river at midnight, you were a victim. If you’ve been raped, molested, disappeared, assaulted, tortured, mugged, run down, plowed over, beaten up or pimped out, you were a victim. Whatever it was, you didn’t deserve it and the whole mother-loving world should at the very least give you one gentle pat on the back for being here on the other side of it, bowed but unbroken. No joke.
But it’s over now. And a whole hell of a lot of you (and me) were never once burned with a cigarette for looking stink-eyed at Mom when she was off her medicine. We weren’t maimed, mutilated or murdered repeatedly. We had lives; a little hard and a little soft, sometimes really, really miserable, but nothing happened or happens to us, not one blasted thing, that holds water as genuine, incontrovertible proof that we are justified in our sincere (and breathtakingly vocal) belief that we are the center of the fucking universe, and that the universe thoroughly despises us as evidenced by the terrible, terrible suffering inflicted upon us day in and day out by people, places and things without end.
Your affliction is boring. And when we try to love you, like you, work for or with you, when we try to be a good friend or relation to you, we come away with a bad taste in our mouths. Your obsession with you is interesting to us for as long as we feel sympathy (6.3 minutes at last count, 9.5 if something really compelling has happened).
The longer you deny it the longer you’ll feel crucified. Aren’t you sick, just a little, of blaming every setback, every snag, every stubbed toe and broken heart on him/her/it/them? What if you looked at the choices you’ve made, from the very start—as far back as you can remember to this very moment in time? What if you had something, almost everything, to do with where you are right this second?
Then you could do something about it. And we could get a word in edgewise.
One day at a time.