it's me, hi. I'm the problem it's me
Are we the baddies?
“You know”, someone said to me recently, “There’s a universe in which you’re the bad guy in this story”. My first instinct was to be offended and pissed off by this statement. I opened my mouth and shut it again several times without saying anything, like a guilty fish. Then eventually I was like: “I know. I think it’s this one?”
Afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about why it’s so hard to admit this. Because it was hard for me, despite the glibness my response might imply. It was hard because I’d spent a lot of time feeling bad and sad about the situation in question, and crying about it and bitching about it and not eating about it and listening to that new SZA album about it, and what was the point in all that feeling horrible if I could not also be angelic and moral in the centre of my own suffering? Why does it feel so icky to stop and go, oh fuck, yeah, I’m Bad Also?
It doesn’t really matter what story or situation me and this person were talking about. What matters is that all of us will experience this at some point, being a dick kind of not on purpose but not accidentally either, admitting we are fallible Humans Who Suck, and it feels weird to do so, because we’re so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the hero of our own stories. Or more accurately — as in this situation — the wronged, tragic hero of our own stories. It took me a minute to admit that some people out there might think I’m “the bad guy in this story” because it was a story that made me sad. How could I be sad about something and not also be the victim?
I worry about our obsession with embodying unproblematic victimhood, but then I worry that saying so makes me sound like a right-wing pundit taking down ‘millennial wokery’. But still, when we pursue purity in being wronged, above all other things, we miss the nuance and the messiness that comes with real life. Recently I watched a TikTok — apparently you’re supposed to hide the fact you got your writing references from watching TikToks by saying instead “recently I read this in the New York Times”, but look, in the spirit of radical honesty, it was very much a TikTok — in which a girl was telling her audience that we shouldn’t enjoy the Jeff Buckley song “Lover, You Should Have Come Over”, anymore, despite it being a favourite on the platform, because Buckley wrote it as an apology for cheating on his wife. And it’s hard — not to be a boomer — not to find that kind of black-and-white moralism infuriating. And not just because this is one of my favourite songs. Why does it matter that it’s an apology for doing something wrong? The idea that songs can only be sad or beautiful only if the person singing them is the wronged party, the victim, is stupid not least because “Anti-Hero” is Taylor Swift’s biggest banger, even more so than “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”.
As the writer Rayne Fisher-Quann recently posted, there’s something to be said about outlaw music, or as she terms it “I’m the problem music”. She cites Taylor Swift, Johnny Cash and Tom Waits as examples (they’re doing the bad things) and Phoebe Bridgers as the antithesis (people she loves hurt her, and she remains, lyrically speaking at least, totally blameless).
Last week I wrote on here about the trauma writing pipeline, and how the confessional nature of the internet inures us to performing our worst experiences for an anonymous audience. I wonder if that’s played into ideas of victimhood as a foil to perpetration, too. Because there’s a social media precedent for it, and a writing precedent, it’s easier for us to admit that we’re the victim — where even if we’re exposed, sympathy is pretty much guaranteed — and taboo for us to admit that we’ve either been complicit in our own pain, or caused others pain in the process. This past weekend I went to see Annie Ernaux speak to Sally Rooney at Charleston Festival, and I audibly gasped, in a very gauche fangirl way, when she came on stage. I mean I literally gripped the knee of the person next to me. I love Annie Ernaux’s writing because in it she is not afraid to be both hurt and sad and passionate and also do “bad things” in the process of it all. But that’s books. On the internet we’re always the main character, and if we’re all the main character, then there’s nobody left to be the villain, or even the antagonist.
I keep seeing this theory popping up in memes, which means it’s perhaps already too online to hold up as an actual theory. The fact we all go to therapy has become a meme, and then the fact that we all get to be the wronged party in therapy (even if the ultimate goal of therapy is of course to face ourselves, in the end) has become a meme too. There’s one I really like of a little monkey in a nightshirt staring off into the distance, surrounded by text that reads: trying to decide whether I made an honest mistake or if I’m evil incarnate. Maybe the monkey and I can be both!
This week I read:
This week I wrote: The cover for FT Weekend’s food and drink special and a love letter to Tom Wambsgans for i-D.
I also have a new short story in The London Magazine’s upcoming June/July issue, and you can read an extract of it here.
