i want to be good but i am bad - help?

a reader asks 'at what point are we no longer able to change our brains?'

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Want advice? Your question/conundrum/pickle can be SS (super serious) or DAAD (dumb as a doorknob) or anywhere in between. I’ll answer them all.

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Q: At what point are we no longer able to change our brains?

Alex, I've always been a quiet, reserved, melancholy person. One of my main aspirations in life is to raise a family. But I come from a family dynamic riddled with mental illness, abuse, and generational dysfunction, which I've personally been addressing in therapy for about 7 years now (I'm 30). 

Still, I have a string of failed romantic relationships, unhealthy patterns and can't seem to keep up with neurotypical expectations. I try so hard to do better and change; to be the person I want to be -- loving, nurturing, fun, friendly, trusting, stable. But I always fall back into being a depressive, irritable, woman-who-can't-manage-her-own-shit adult child. My current partner is at their last straw, ready to leave, and I don't know what else to do with myself. 

Is there a point at which a human just can't improve their behaviors anymore? Am I stuck like this forever? What else should I do? 

- Lou (Portland, OR)

A:

People used to think humans were made of four humors: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. This is, of course, ridiculous. 

With science, we now know that we are, in fact, made up of a mixture of each and every animal from Winnie the Pooh. 

There is Winnie the cute addict, Piglet the anxious wreck, Tigger the ADHD manic depressive, Owl the alcoholic intellectual with dyslexia, Rabbit the narcissist with OCD, and last but certainly also least, by his own approximation, Eeyore the depressive donkey.

We humans are large. We contain multitudes. My personal peccadillos often find me in a Rabbit x Eeyore depressive rage revelry, also known in the not-yet-released DSM-VI as ‘a hole.’

A hole is where I find myself when things are dark and dreadful. In the hole, I can only see the worst in people because I only see the worst in myself. I become defensive, cagey, and obsessed with doing whatever it takes to dig my way out of the hole and back to the land of good people and happy times.

Just yesterday, in fact, I found myself in the spiciest hole I’d been in for some time (my holes, like salsa, come in mild, medium, and spicy variants).

Waiting for the babysitter to arrive, I could feel it. That blinds-on, bummer, burn it all down bonfire in my broken brain inside of which I am on trial for being a piece of shit; I’m also the prosecution and I’m making such a good case against myself that the defense rests. He’s right!! I scream, He’s right!!

Because here in this hole are all of the criticisms of anything and everyone that I’ve ever read online or heard in person or imagined, all stored away nice and sound in the hate hole, ready to be used as proof - PROOF, your honor, that this fella right here is a crumb of a man so useless even the pigeons don’t know what to do with him.

Your honor, take a look at THIS, I say, laying out so many Exhibits we have to go into double letters – this man is a shitty dad and husband and just an all around blob of a person, like one of those sticky hand toys you got at the arcade and now it’s all gross and squishy and covered in hair and no one knows what to do with it but it’s just…around and no one wants to throw it out because everyone thinks that maybe someone else might still be using it?

Leaving the house, everything is annoyingly fine — Wilder doesn’t cry, we’re not late, things are just…good. Which sucks. Because a guy in a hole needs needs to find something to glom onto, sticky hand style, in order to justify the feeling he’s already feeling. 

Yes, I feel awful, but can’t you see it’s because I was just denied the opportunity to even interview for a job at Chewy.com?

Driving down the 2 freeway, I feel miserable. I’m defensive and sensitive, so when Lauren asks where I want to get some coffee, I hear it as “You piece of shit why can’t you figure out the plans for us beforehand why are you so dirtbag?” 

And so I respond defensIvely, “I don’t know I thought we’d just figure it out I don’t even know,” and then I do one of those exasperated heaves of a sigh to signal that all this (her asking a basic question) is way too much.

Lauren, a witness and first responder to holes of this nature, stays calm and tries to help get me out.

“Hey — I’m not upset. I’m happy.” which helps for the moment but doesn’t erase the obsessive feeling I have that she’s mad at me. That she’s just placating because she feels bad for me. She must be, I mean look at me – I’m a dingleberry on the decline, a dried-up grape that’s not yet a raisin but that weird thing in the middle that’s squishy and just like wtf.

The space between

As Louis Sachar once wrote, a man in a hole becomes himself an ahole. Case in point: And so I have, and so I am. It’s been this way for a while, but in the last few years, something big has changed.

Now, I see the holes like Neo in a sad no budget mumblecore version of The Matrix. I have created space between me and my ahole self. Which is huge. A crowning achievement for which I hope to one day earn a Guinness (beer or record, doesn't matter). But it certainly does not mean that I’m all healed and good, my hole forever filled with confetti cake or something. 

Now, I dip in and out of the hole like I’m listening to two radio stations that are nearby one another on the number dials — 89.9 KCRW morning becomes eclectic and 90.1 DONKEY SHRIEKS. One, into the other, and back again.

Los Angeles, city of holes

We park and walk down Glendale Ave, a strip I used to love. It was hip and alive and now it is full of rich kids who suck almost as much as I do. Look at this mustache bucket hat idiot what’s he grinning about? And this happy couple with the poof dog laughing about the chair that’s still there at the store. Don’t they know we’re all gonna die? 

I apologize to Lauren, explaining that I’m in a deep hole and that I feel like I’m ruining this night for us. 

She responds with, “It’s ok. I get in holes too. I get it.”

Which is true of course and I do my best to support her through them because I understand them and of course everyone has holes and I love her even at her deepest hole but my holes? Those are illegal. 

I can tell she really means the “it’s ok” part which helps while also making it worse. Why is such a good human being spending her life with this splinter of a man.

We’re sitting at this bar of this spot Bon Vivant, which is like a Mediterranean hookah coffee pastry food bar restaurant without the hookah. As we wait for our “delicately fried” calamari, it’s quiet and my head is full. 

“Want to know what I’m thinking right now?” I ask. 

“Yes.”

“I’m sitting here thinking about how if I was a really talented comedian or artist here in this moment, I would be making you laugh and being awesome and everyone would see us and go ‘yea wow look at that funny famous guy he’s having such a good time,’ but I’m not that guy which is why I’m just a blah guy who is ruining this night with you.”

She laughs in that pained way someone does when they’re shocked but also not surprised. 

“I wish I could stop your brain from doing that,” she says, “because it's just not true. We’re allowed to be boring. I didn’t marry a comedian, I married you.”

So…you’re agreeing that there’s a difference? I think but do not say. Because something else starts to shift and I look down at the dirt in the hole and it’s rising like a volcano exploding but just with dirt it’s a classic dirtquake and I’m rising up and out of the hole because I explained the hole and she didn’t judge me or tell me I was dumb or insane for thinking it. She acknowledged it as true, as real, as painful. And that was enough. 

And now I’m back on solid ground having zero idea who that guy down there even was.

Over calamari that, I must say, is deeply fucking fried, Lauren and I talk openly about how hard these last few weeks and months have been. How we’re terrified about what happens next with baby #2 on the way and us both not having work. I explain how I feel responsible for us, for figuring shit out, and hating that I can’t. 

I start crying a little and immediately start obsessing over whether she can see me crying. I would really love it if she noticed but she hasn’t so I rub my eye a little to clear the tears even though there really aren’t that many it’s a half assed cry at best but hey the emotions under it were real and so am I no wait that’s just the ahole talking!

Describing what it was like in the hole, it turned out, ended up freeing me from it. There was nothing magical or shocking about what we said. Simply being able to say it at all was enough. It had lightened things. 

Lou, your question asks if we can change. If we can become the people we want to be. 

No.

Because we are already the people we want to be. You’re already the loving, nurturing, fun, friendly, trusting, stable person who can also be, as we all can, a depressive, irritable, woman-who-can't-manage-her-own-shit adult child.

You are BOTH and BOTH ARE TRUE. 

I am both too, even if I can’t always see it. Which doesn’t mean I get a free pass to Tigger my way through life with a sticky hand wreaking havoc on those I love most because “this is just who I am, sowwy.” It is who I am, and I am responsible for making sure I do my best to make sure other people aren’t hurt because of it. 

That means becoming, as the therapists say, skillful. And I have and it sounds like you are too. The part I’m working on and will probably work on forever is accepting those messy parts of me that don’t fit into the idealized version of ourselves I’ve made up — 6 feet tall, good at money stuff.

But that ain’t me. I’m Tigger and Winnie, Piglet, and Eeyore too. So are you. We’re all the characters in that twisted little show. Except one.

There was a theory going around a while about how all of the characters in Winnie the Pooh were just mental health issues in Christopher Robin’s head. I disagree.

I think that theory’s got it backwards. I don’t think Christopher Robin is real. I think he is the idealized illusion of self that all the other characters aspire toward but can never achieve. They spend countless episodes going on grand adventures to find him only to find themselves in the process. Then, and only then, after they have fun and forget about themselves for a minute, ceasing to hate themselves so much, does he appear (I’m basing this all on like two episodes I watched recently but surely its true!?).

Because when they are lost in the wiggle waggle of the world, they remember the good is already in them. It’s always been there, just as it is in you.

It makes me mad to read that you don’t think that’s true and so I’m gonna just say it again – it is. You’re a good person. 

We used to be made up of blood, phlegm, and TWO types of bile. Even then, we were good. We still are. We’re bad too.

There is no such thing as lightly fried calamari.

We are in holes and aholes and yet, through it all, we are whole.

Want advice? Your question/conundrum/pickle can be SS (super serious) or DAAD (dumb as a doorknob) or anywhere in between. I’ll answer them all.

Submit your questions to botharetrue@substack.com.

Comments!

1. what advice do you have for our dearest Lou?

2. do you have a version of ‘getting into holes?’ how do you handle them?

4. plz stack rank the four humors (blood, yellow bile, pghlegm, black bile) from best to worst

5. what helped you change in ways that were truly lasting and meaningful?

8. last question are you eeyore, tigger, winnie, owl, or rabbit? you can only pick one jk you can pick two and you have to give an explanation!