“It was not as if I was not myself – oh no, I was myself, I was my other self, the self that wishes to carry on a secret dialogue with all that is evil in human nature. Some men do not struggle with this in themselves. They seem to have a certain grace. They are happy – or rather, they are content. They swing tennis rackets in the sunlight and get the oil checked regularly and laugh when the audience laughs. They accept limits. They are not interested in what might come up from the dark, cold hole of human possibility.” – Colin Harrison
There comes a time in every troubled or unloved boy’s life when he is faced with the choice to become the hero or the villain of his story. It actually happens quite a few times, and such junctures will haunt him throughout his journey into adulthood. They’re not always presented as binary and simple choices, and they rarely result in one final decision that veers him irrevocably into good or evil – instead, they are small and little choices along the path of growing up and then living in the world. If the boy has had a few people who were there at pivotal moments to support him when he needed it most, if he’s known unconditional love and been made to feel like he belonged, he stands a chance at endeavoring upon the hero route.
If there have been moments when he’s found himself alone or without support, if he has made himself different or other to a point where those who were supposed to love him hesitate or pause, or if he has been subject to moments where the bedrock of what should have been unwavering, unconditional love has shifted or cracked or otherwise revealed itself to be possibly transient, he may try out the role of villain. And if that role fits – if he might in fact be skilled at playing any role, perhaps – he may realize that the path of the villain is just the sort of misunderstood and maligned journey he was destined to make.
This fall, after our coquette summer, the theme is fade-to-black, as much a frame of my current state of mind as it is a chic and fashionable option for the cooler season. Tom Ford has just released ‘Black Lacquer’, the Rolling Stones are singing ‘Paint It Black’, and this blog is about to descend into the sort of darkness I’ve protected its readers from in an effort to make things prettier than they ever were. Play our opening theme song below and settle in for how I am setting the scene…
Sometimes, its takes almost half a century before some of us recognize and make sudden sense of the patterns and repeated offenses that have occurred – especially if they have happened within one’s own family. Part of it is because you don’t want to believe it, that your own family would ever do such things, and sometimes you are able to see the patterns, and the traps that everyone has fallen into, and it’s not too late to find ways of forgiveness. Sometimes, you’re just too tired to forgive, too exhausted to care, or you understand that it will be this way forever and there really is no point in fighting it anymore.
This fall, I have no idea what’s going to come up here on this blog. I know I need to share some things that I’ve been holding back for fear it may hurt or upset some people, and if that turns me into a villain, so be it. I’ve felt alone my entire life, and at key moments when I’ve needed people to be there they haven’t been. That might all be in my head, and the only way to make that determination is to put it all out there. Well, here.
That may likely vilify me, and though that has happened countless times in the past, it’s never been something that I have welcomed or wanted, but in the way the universe sometimes works, that which we fight is that which we ultimately become.
“In my experience, men and women who have a kind of brutal fortitude have been made that by a sequence of events, until the person passes beyond a point of no return. They learn that life requires the ability to coldly stand pain of one kind or another… They will do what is necessary to survive; they will conceal and protect their vulnerabilities, except from those who cannot hurt them. Above all, they will press their advantage when it presents itself.” ~ Colin Harrison
Being the villain is actually quite a freeing role. It not only rids one of great, or just basically decent, expectations, it also removes any pesky sense of a morale compass, which far too often only seeks to slow or hinder the difficult decisions we must make on any given day. When you’re the villain, you have nothing left to lose, so the terror of losing nonsense such as being well-liked or loved is automatically removed. There is only one thing that usually scares a villain: loneliness. It’s the one secret they don’t want getting out. A villain does not exist if there isn’t someone more virtuous beside whom to stand. More importantly, a villain is nothing without a victim. And so, the biggest fear of most villains is the loneliness that might leave them without purpose or patrol.
That makes this current state of mind, and everything I’m about to write on this blog for the fall season, doubly diabolical, in that there’s only one thing that has never scared me: loneliness. A villain unafraid to be alone is a villain without redemption. Perhaps it’s been beaten out of him over the years, perhaps they’ve been slowly inflicted in complicated and complex patterns that it takes a lifetime to figure out, or perhaps the simple drudgery of living in a world where the only constant is pain – dull or sharp but always there, never fully eradicated – is finally enough to push him into such a villainous turn.
A warning before we begin: this fall it may appear that I’m throwing one big tantrum on this blog. I’m aware that most people think I throw tantrums all the time, but if you really think about it, that’s not at all true. When a tantrum is the result of years of debilitating family patterns finally coming to light in a way only afforded by time and distance and the repetition of said patterns, it’s not so much a tantrum as a reckoning – and most reckonings happen only when they are absolutely necessary. For my own mental state, for my own emotional well-being, and for the sake of simply telling the truth honestly and openly to free my own guilt and shame, this looks to be a difficult fall.
Yet in such an acknowledgment, and in such freedom as being the villain so wondrously affords, there may be a way out – the only way out – and if we walk through the woods together we may discover that escape.
I’m not promising that. As the world slips and tips ever deeper into madness, maybe being the villain is the safest way to make it through the wilderness. I’ll do what I need to do to protect my heart. If I’ve learned anything in the past few years, it’s that nothing is stable. Nothing is forever. And sometimes letting go is the only way not to lose yourself.
“I thought I recognized in him a certain kind of man, a man who is damaged and yet unflinching. I’ve met a few. Because he has taken pain, such a man knows he can take more. In fact, he expects it; suffering, so far as he sees, is in the order of things, the logic of the universe. Usually such men are hard, even self-punishing workers, capable of long periods of isolation or aloneness, and suffer bouts of crippling melancholy. They refuse to take antidepressants, they refuse to talk too much; instead they wait and wait, with the patience of a cat, for the mood to turn. They drink coffee alone in the morning, they smoke cigarettes on the porch… Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he’d better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him – the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream. Yes, let me say it again. Quiet men with dreams can be dangerous.” ~ Colin Harrison
