Reality Bites
Southampton College Writers Conference; July 20-31, 2005
“It’s a fucked up relationship,” Mary said. “I’ve known you for five days and it’s already on par with some of the most fucked up relationships I’ve ever had.”
We’d (she’d) been having her “honest discussion” since we walked through the door to the Tidewater bar almost ten minutes ago. She hadn’t stopped saying she wanted to talk honestly about our relationship, and how it seems one of is pissed off at the other any time we’re fully clothed. She was right, of course, and we both knew our best-case expiration date was Sunday the 31st and the conference’s end.
I had been steadily getting further pissed off, persistently asking what possible good could come of this conversation. I recognized the burn and detest that familiar feeling of knowing I’m on the losing side of a fight to stay composed. It’s disgusting to actually know it’s time to close your mouth and stop talking, yet simultaneously understand that as an absolute impossibility. The conversation had been entirely civil up to this point but the rage that has been periodically exploding inside me for the last five years went off again as she would not stop talking. She refused to stop telling me how unhealthy our relationship was.
I lost it. I glared into her eyes. “Mary, just shut the fuck up. Right now.” I tried to softly seethe the words but inside I was raging again, and doing a bad job of hiding it. Mary has noticed how quickly I can get fleetingly frustrated and has asked what’s wrong with me, and why I’m like that. I’d already decided to not tell her why I have no judgment or patience. Or why tolerance is a social skill I lost along with my short-term memory five years ago.
One thing I have excruciatingly learned, something I now honestly say and intend with zero malice, is that even good human beings have better things to do than try to understand. I have lost enough good friends to recognize that, truly, even the best people don’t care.
People will accept that head injury can change your thoughts and memories, but have difficulty understanding that it also changes your emotions…Since the head injury, this person’s anger is multiplied 2 or 3 times… Anger after a head injury is quite different from "normal" anger… Basically you can be in a good mood until some small thing irritates you and you suddenly get very angry. But this anger doesn’t seem to last. [www.TBIguide.com]
In the first sentence of I’ll Carry the Fork; Recovering a Life After Brain Injury, author Kara Swanson writes, “The curious thing about the auto accident that ended my life was that I lived through it.” On August 22, 2000 my own life ended in an ugly, bloody car wreck in San Diego, California. I was only 21 years old. In years since I have struggled to understand the person born that night. I spent the first two weeks of my two months in the hospital in a coma before waking up to find I’d gone missing.
I don’t know how many doctors and nurses have told me how lucky I am for a patient with a severe traumatic brain injury, a TBI. Doctors expected me to remain hospitalized for 12 months, optimistically telling my parents there was a chance I could return to college on a part-time basis in two or three years. I was back in a local university taking that partial course load less than six months after the wreck. I can now easily walk, I can talk, and I can often even put up the spectacular illusion that I’m not feeling tremendously fucked up.
When I convinced my parents to trust me over the doctors and I moved back to Atlanta and my undergraduate college a year after the wreck, I watched my close friends steadily dwindle. I saw my third, fourth, and fifth useless mental health professionals in less than three years following my accident, the last two mandated by my school if I wished to continue my education there. I got used to consistent threats, some veiled and some not, of expulsion from various members of the university administration. Whiny TBI victims point out that the injury can severely impair their social judgment. I can vouch that we do and say things we quickly regret, losing friends and necessitating numerous apologies, sometimes even meaning them, to sundry angry members of the university administration, in my case. I was very fortunate to be in school and not have bosses to fire me, but deans don’t like it when students curse at their secretaries and like everybody else they don’t care and don’t believe that you can’t help it. Obviously nobody forced me to use the “fuck” word when I didn’t like what university administrative assistants said. I often don’t like putting up with me either, but unlike Mary I don’t have the choice.
I saw the start of the writers conference much as I saw my arrival at Southampton College last August: Another chance to meet new people and prove I’m okay now, something I hadn’t yet been able to do. It wasn’t a disaster in grad school. I did make a few friends and pseudo-friends, certainly more than I made enemies and probably even more than the people who just don’t like me.
But as I’m sure I have earned, there are also students from the College who believe (recognize?) that I’m a jerk. The character on the television show ER I most closely relate to is the obnoxious Dr. Romano, at least when he says that, “Most people don’t like me. That’s okay because I don’t like most people.” And when people don’t like me my usual defense-mechanism has been to simply dislike them back. There are people at Southampton College of whom I truthfully say: I don’t know exactly why we have this mutual loathing, but I’m sure they have a good reason and that’s just fine with me. The hell with them.
Then the conference began, I met Mary the very first day, and my perpetual goal of proving myself a good guy without deal-breaking baggage looked like a genuine possibility with her. It appears I’m not there quite yet, but at least it took her a few days to conclude it was “an unhealthy relationship that is bad for both of us,” reminding me once again that the benefit of the doubt can’t exist without the doubt.