Bedeviled
Dears,
A word I’m bringing to the forefront of my 2020 is bedevil (to afflict, assail, beleaguer, beset). I like it because it has the word “devil” in it, and how else could I explain the actual torment that I have felt being unable to ignore the fact that there are chips in my kitchen. How is it that potato chips can bedevil me in a way that peanut M&Ms do not? I like the word “bedevil” because it makes me imagine my tormentors as tiny demons dancing on my head and shoulders. It adds both a sense of Greatness and Triviality to my expression of feeling harmed.
Of course, it’s not the potato chips that are bedeviling me. It is my own mind. That mind often tries to twist me into Gordian knots. It offers up futility and the inevitability of death. It tells me that I am constantly on the precipice of ruin. And it is almost always trying to convince me that the people I love do not actually love me back. All of these nasty tricks of my mind are different grooves of one central story: Are you so sure you are worthy of love?
The little devil likes to tell me that one small thing ruins everything. So if I even bought the chips, they’ve already brought some corrupting element into my home. Even if I weigh out a single portion and eat it, those chips are stripping my worth from the inside.
It’s helpful for me to spell out the dysfunction I feel around food, because it’s a little easier for me to spot than the dysfunction I feel around friendships and conflicts. One pattern I’ve been paying attention to is the collection of evidence. So if I have a conflict with a friend, every single day that we do not speak after the conflict is one more marker of unlovability. I keep tabs. It has been one day, two days, three weeks, seven weeks, however many days in a row of me saying, “I see that I haven’t gotten any texts or emails, thus confirming yesterday’s and the day before and etc.’s prior conclusions that _____ does not care about me.”
The devil.
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When I ruminate on the devils, I try to notice patterns. Again, that’s the thing about your enemy being your mind — how are you to defeat it? Or compromise? Where do you go to hide when the devil is inside you? How are you meant to fight?
And then — if your devil is stomping on one relationship, telling you it’s dead or fake — how do you navigate that? So often, in conflicts, I think, if this person knew how I felt, things would be different. I have an inherent belief that if I can communicate how I am feeling, that in itself delivers change, and it’s a false belief. Sometimes you go to explicit pain to tell someone how you feel, and they shrug. They don’t see it that way. They are sorry you feel bad, maybe, or maybe not. But either way, how you feel is your problem, not theirs.
It feels like this year pushed all my relationships into disarray. I’m a pattern-seeker, so how I used to understand my friendships was through intervals: This is a once-a-week friend, this is a once-a-month friend, a once-a-season friend, a once-a-year friend. People could fit into any of those loose categories and I would try to keep them to whatever schedule made me feel secure in our friendship. If I haven’t seen a once-a-week friend in 3 weeks, maybe something is wrong. Maybe that’s a sign of conflict. Maybe something is going on and I should reach out.
These days, I hardly know who I’m supposed to talk to, when, why, about what. The distance feels introduced as if by teleportation — instantaneous, bewildering. Who is my friend? How are they feeling? Are we on a path of estrangement? Will the distance ever close?
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I haven’t been writing too much lately, but I wrote these two poems about that feeling of loneliness and sadness.
I wrote this one night when I couldn’t fall asleep. I had been in an extended freeze with a friend I used to feel very close to, and every single day, the devil was delivering another packet of evidence that everything I had used to believe was wrong. It was dark and miserable in my mind, and when I reached out to another friend seeking support, that friend challenged me. Maybe my freezeout friend was also collecting evidence of all the ways I was disappointing. This challenge in my perspective was welcome trouble, because it at least helped me to reframe away from “every day is another piece of conclusive evidence that I am not cared for” to something, well, still pretty ugly… The troubling change in perspective didn’t close the distance between me and my other friend. It just made it less conclusively my fault, forever, etc.
The poem, then, is my attempt to write some sort of new beginning. Loss haunts every line, and the rushed fake resolution of the final line also mimics the sort of gambit of the “how have you been?” email that assiduously avoids mentioning any conflict.
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This second poem came out when I was journaling. I was writing about recognizing distance and attempting to let it be. Let it be without trying to resolve it through immediate communication. Let it be without trying to collect evidence. Let it be without assigning so many patterns. Let it be like the way you let the environment be. Don’t try to control the distance — it’s not like you can control the sky or stars, either. So I took a seasonal image and used it:
It’s funny because this poem is, in meaning, so much more hopeful than “Death of / an email,” but the imagery is so much bleaker. It examines the same distance as the prior poem, but without the gloss of a “fresh start.” It is attempting to keep hope alive through a winter that feels like death.
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That’s all I have for today. I hope you if you are feeling bedeviled, that you are at least making those nasty monsters dance to keep up with you.
Love,
Cate