Know Your Carrot
“To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one.” CJ Hauser
Disassociation Airlines allows you to traverse the open skies of your mind, which offer not just space but also time travel. I did not even realize how frequently I was zipping away here to then until my moods became unable to sustain two realities at once. The present and the parallel. Anniversaries always get me all choked up.
I have to remind myself constantly of the human brain’s inability to tell the difference between real and imagined scenarios. It reacts the same either way. Looping scripts of catastrophic thinking, imagined scenarios, and ego narratives are continuously punking my gullible brain into juicing whatever neurotransmitters and hormones are the appropriate response for social slights, vengeful ideations, and waves of existential dread. The chemical theater in my bloodstream is just about at Michael Bay levels of whoosh.
This ax-grinding show, however, is more of an experimental performance—mostly to show that you that I have an ax and it’s very shiny and sharp, so just fucking try it, why don’t you? You can’t really take it on the road though. People start to look at you a bit funny because jeez what’s with the ax? Defense mechanisms are flashy maneuvers, but an entire show they are not. To practice them in solitude doesn’t perfect them so much as it does ingrain them into your vocabulary of gestures. They’re the movements your flinches fantasize about.
Most of the time, the things we deserve aren’t the same as our goals or even the things we desire. They’re an amuse-bouche, something to keep you going. I’ve been doing so well, I deserve this. The things we deserve aren’t really much more than a limitation of self-worth—more the stick and the string than the dangling carrot itself. You must be careful not to think too much about what someone else deserves because you just might do something about it. And revenge, perverse fairy tale it is, rarely delivers what it promises. (You can’t trust a narcissist, even the conceptual ones!) Revenge requires so much devotion just to reach a point where you can overlook doubt. Which I guess is kind of what makes it so appealing in the first place. A doubtless mind doesn’t even need an ax.
Vengeance is exhausting, though, and likes to run wild with the cash as it assumes we are all working on the same moral abacus of debt and consequence. That anyone who decides the debt of another’s actions would be the same person to collect it—you can see a major conflict of interest there, I’m sure. The currency of revenge is satisfaction, and satisfaction is not justice, no matter how righteous it may feel.
Count your carrots, instead. Focus on the bite marks, and only chase the ones where you can see the other end of who’s holding the stick. They can easily appear as far away as stars. Because that’s the thing about deserving, isn’t it? It’s always right within reach and also ages away.