My Therapist Is Teaching Me

My Therapist Is Teaching Me

to stop calling bad people "bad" and to instead call them "unsafe"in order to stop being the type of person who, when someone makesa mistake or is unkind or overall has a snobby attitude or variousunpleasant tics that make them, say, misremember your name,different every time they meet you, or comment thoughtlesslyon the kinds of poetry they dislike (yours) or post pictures at the eventto which she invited everyone you know, just not you—to stop beingthe kind of person who just writes that rude person off whole cloth,believing, as I tend to, that that person knows what she's doing, is choosinga life of deliberate cuntiness                (which, this belief isn't totally unjustified, bulliedas I was, and having heard and then imagined all the mean that's been saidof me, like how the woman at my college reunion, still, as we played the longestgame of flip cup against the class of '88, said, cuntily, as I struggled to getthe cup flipped, it's so hard, isn't it? even after five years, voice just dripping withthat which it dripped in like 2008; or those girls from my middle school who        split in two,their doubleness serving to turn every regular thing they said into a sort of joke—they asked the dorkiest girl in class to go to the mall with them and thengave her a makeover there, the condescension, the meanness of whichwasn't lost to me even at 11, 12, 13, whatever—the meanness always hiddenso that you could never rage at them, but knew knew knew that they weretrying to torture you; or the roommates, who, when I was raped, or pseudo-raped,by one of the couple of boys from Iowa who transferred in late and who weremore attractive for their newness—I mean to say, they weren't as attractiveas we treated them—after he put his dick inside me unbidden and treated me—the words kept repeating in my head as it was happening—like a cum dumpsterwe just kept inviting them over to our apartment to get drunk near, and dating them, and fucking them—and as I totally degenerated emotionallythey, the roommates, just kind of fucked off and decided it wasn't worth it,        culminating ina horrible screaming night after which we stopped talking and I took Nyquilto fall asleep every night and Pepto-Bismol to calm my screaming stomach every        dayand I could hear them laughing together in the living room, but when I walked outto make myself a meal there was stony silence and Danya basically livedwith her boyfriend and So Yeon had, smartly, moved out the semester beforeso I was alone with those animals and totally exposed—                        So, yes, part of mefeels I have a right to believe that some people are bad, bad as things have felt—all the times I've had to joke about how things felt in order to make someone hear        me—case in point being after that rape—or whatever it was—I started trying to talkabout it by joking that I wanted to throw myself down our dorm's stairs ha ha,and ended by screaming at the Iowan in my bedroom, calling himDmitri Karamazov, because this is the only way I know how to communicate.Does that sound like a life without badness? Without bad people? To me, no.)—

to stop being the kind of person who writes others off whole cloth for the thingsthey do without really knowing they're doing them or being the kind of personwho believes she is being written off whole cloth for those same kinds of        infractions,said and done thoughtlessly in the face of her own self-centeredness,for those things she says that just come off wrong, or cunty, like the timeI was thinking of how I'd heard a friend liked bdsm and then keptsaying the word "dominate" and all...