edited for total anonymity!!
Nobody wants to believe they’re the problem in any given situation, and a lot of the conflicts we experience in life can be attributed to a lack of ownership in that regard. It’s difficult to come to terms with the fact that you or your actions might be the reason something’s gone wrong, so you’ll get defensive, shift blame, or even twist your perspective to justify your actions. We all do this. We’re only human. (I love saying that. Nothing else comes close to being so accurate, yet so incredibly vague.)
Negativity has been a giant recurring theme in my life, whether that be the effect it’s had on me from my peers, friends, and family, or how my own negativity has affected them as I proverbially barrel through their life. Much like other aspects of our personalities, such as prejudices and mannerisms, a negative (or any) demeanor is fostered throughout your life via your relationships with others. I can mostly address my own shortcomings and negative influence to a certain degree, but I can only speculate when it comes to the influence I receive from others. This is your formal warning: What comes next is going to be as honest as I can muster, and that means -changing names and pictures just so I can post this damn article-. You’ll get the idea, it’s fine.
Role Models
I know. “Role Model” isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think negative. But role models are just what they sound like: someone that behaves in such a way, they inspire and influence the same behavior in others.
Remember the questionnaires you’d take in school, or the questions you’d be asked during a job interview? “Who are some of your role models? Why do you look up to them?” I think about these socially accepted definitions a lot. The implied positive nature of a role model is laughable. Yeah, positive role models obviously exist. Sometimes they’re the “pure of heart” type, but sometimes they’re really not. Sometimes they kinda suck. Truer still, sometimes they’re both. My first and most significant role model was my grandfather.
Papaw
My grandpa, Papaw as I prefer to call him, was an extraordinary man in every way. When I think back on my childhood, Papaw was there teaching me how to fish (super cliche), making sure I had money for lunch, sitting in the garage watching thunderstorms and telling stories about how he’d been in the War of 1812, and having me fetch a wad of cash from his desk so he could pay for whatever shady deal he’d just negotiated. An extraordinary man, indeed.
My grandfather was not a nice man. He was extremely loving, but terribly manipulative and deeply motivated by grudges and an incessant need to control. I didn’t always know this, despite having heard stories from my mom and uncles about how he was when they were kids. I never believed them because there was no way Papaw could do anything wrong. Not the man that effectively made it so I didn’t notice I grew up without a father, who went out of his way to take me to and from school after I’d been jumped on my walk home, or made sure I had everything I ever needed, often reminding me that he promised me as a baby that I would “want for nothing”. I spent a lot of time around my grandparents growing up. I’d spend weekends and summer vacations with them, and would move in with them right after I started high school due to conflict with my mom and her boyfriend. It was around this time I started noticing some of the unsavory aspects of Papaw’s personality.
He was the go-to guy if you ever needed help, and was always such a sweetheart while he was doing it. Need a tow? He’s got you covered. Need some extra cash? He’ll have some paid side job he doesn’t even need done, just for you. The first wreck I got into was on a one-way street — Papaw drove up the one-way, on the sidewalk, to get to me. I remember him going up to the other driver and asking, verbatim, “How much to make this go away?”
This all sounds incredibly kind (if not mildly shady), until you realize that a lot of these things ended with you owing Papaw a favor, usually without knowing and often with him saying you don’t owe him anything. There are so many examples it almost sounds like exaggeration. If you didn’t repay that favor, oh boy. You were disowned (until you weren’t), because my grandfather held a grudge like no other (save for maybe yours truly). He’d turn your phone off if he paid for the line, take the car back he helped you get (going as far as to use his spare key to literally take it back), and even attempt to interfere with you buying a house from a mutual friend. I believe his favorite complaint when things didn’t work out was something along the lines of “I’m sick and tired of people using and abusing me.”
None of these examples are exaggerations. Even the house bit, that was my mom, his daughter, he tried to stop from buying the house she wanted. I’ve had two vehicles taken from me, my phone turned off, and was kicked out of the house after graduation for talking back one too many times. And I had it easy. An argument could be made that I had it better than anyone. But you don’t grow up around that sort of environment without it rubbing off a little bit. Imagine a setting where you receive equal doses of genuine love and love with a cost, manipulation, anger, and the animosity you receive from others when you’re treated better than they are (more on that soon) by the patriarch of the family.
There are interesting takeaways from that environment, such as how I’ve learned to manipulate or how long I’ll wait for revenge, or on the flip side, how far I’ll go to help someone or the severe loyalty I’ve developed towards certain family and friends despite all we might have been through.
Uncle “Steve?”
I played baseball for several years when I was younger and so did my cousins, usually with their dad, my Uncle Steve, coaching a team. I don’t remember being on my cousins’ team very often, maybe once or twice over the years, but I would often practice with them and my Uncle (he had 5 kids, so there was plenty of baseball equipment to go around). I remember Uncle Steve back then in that way a kid thinks of a superhero: Sort of silhouetted by sunlight, perpetually above your eyeline. That sounds ridiculous, but Uncle Steve liked everything I liked: baseball (he never missed a catch, ever), movies, dragons (he had so many dragon statues), and video games. He even did tattoos. I’m not savvy when it comes to level of talent for tattoo artists, but I’ve never seen a tattoo done by my Uncle that I didn’t love. Uncle Steve was fucking cool.
Imagine the heartache I felt when I came to realize Uncle Steve didn’t particularly like me. I learned this over time, and often refused to believe it, but when you’re met with evidence consistently over the years, it’s hard to ignore.
It turns out I reminded my uncle of his brother, Bobby(sure?), which is maybe the second worst person I could remind Uncle Steve of (the first being my grandpa, his dad). See, Bobby was the star child. Of a family of United States Marines, Bobby was the success story — I admittedly don’t know much about his career, but I do know his position had him close to then-President Bush, and I know he had money. Even before the Marines, Bobby was a star wrestler in high school, and I’ve heard stories about his charisma, general success, and most importantly — how he got away with everything. Uncle Steve being the oldest, he naturally developed a bit of a grudge.
At some point during their upbringing, my mom and Uncle Steve left home, leaving Bobby, which allowed my grandparents to focus more attention on just the one kid at home. This resulted in a bit of a cliche where my grandpa, notoriously absent from certain activities, made it to Bobby’s wrestling matches and etc. Fast forward to after my cousins and I were born, and remember that I had essentially been the unspoken “favorite” of the kids for my grandpa, and it’s not hard to understand my uncle’s grudge extending from his brother to me.
This didn’t stop me from wanting to be around him because, like I said, he was a cool guy. Extremely creatively talented but severely self-defeating, Uncle Steve decided to blame everything on Papaw whenever things went wrong. The strange truth to that is it often times was partially Papaw’s fault (remember how my grandpa liked to give and take?). Couple this insane father-son relationship with me basically getting more attention from Mamaw and Papaw than any of Uncle Steve’s kids and you have a very volatile family. I can’t count the times I’ve been banned from seeing my cousins. I’ll sometimes work up ways to say hi, such as asking him to help me change my brakes (I know how to do this) or by sending him movie recommendations. More recently, I’ve confronted him about the general disdain and false niceties he presents when I’m around (or when he thinks I can’t hear him) and was told very bluntly “I didn’t always like you, but you’ve changed over the years into someone more respectable.”
I often wanted to be as talented as Uncle Steve, which would transform into not wanting to handle situations like Uncle Steve. He’s unwaveringly stubborn to the point where he will stall his own progress if he disagrees with the path it might take him down. He is very much his father’s son in terms of personality — Of all my family, Uncle Steve reminds me the most of Papaw (minus the impossibly shady backstory) Nowadays, I certainly contribute to my uncle’s distaste for me, where previously I had no control over the reasons he felt the way he did. I don’t like how he treats his kids or my mom when he doesn’t get his way, and I don’t appreciate the entitlement he feels towards my late-grandpa’s possessions. I’m not quiet about it, and I’m sure he doesn’t care. I love my uncle, but when you hear your favorite uncle tell your mom her son’s an asshole during a family get-together, that sort of thing sticks with you.
Alex Sr.
I mentioned earlier that my grandpa made it so I didn’t notice I’d grown up without a dad, and that’s true. I may not have noticed, but I was always aware, if that makes sense. There’s an interesting phenomenon that I feel plagues those with absent parents (I may be completely wrong about this) where they try to do better. They try to prove themselves to someone that’s not there, if only to say “Look what I did, and without your help.” I do this. Less now, but absolutely when I was younger.
You don’t get to pick your name. My grandpa used to joke (I think to make me feel like I belonged) that my name was Alejandro “Roberto” Porras Hall Jr. He never got my middle name right and as much as I wish it were different, I’m not a Hall.
I met my dad when I was 7, and wouldn’t see him again until 13, 17, and 21. I used to try to call him every so often, but he wouldn’t talk long, or only talked long enough to lecture me about something happening here in Ohio. He liked to think he was my dad, which sounds weird considering he totally is, but only on paper. It was very frustrating, but I tried to pretend I was okay. Each time I visited Alex, he was dating someone new and always living up to the stories my mom told me: He dedicated his life to work, he gets distracted easily outside of work, makes false promises, and never really grows up. Between the times I visited, I would do what I could to maintain contact, which generally consisted of subscribing to whatever MMORPG he was playing that month and joining his guild. I’d call and ask what games he had his eye on, ask when I could visit again, and if that birthday present he’d told me about was still lost in the mail. Then wonder why it was so hard for him to give me a straight answer, yet so easy to lecture me on whatever my grandpa/mom had told him had happened.
As I got older, it became easier to talk to my dad. Me sitting quietly, waiting for a lecture on how to take care of my mental health (this happened frequently) turned into me saying “You’re doing it again.” He didn’t like that, but I didn’t have the capacity to care. When I visited at 21, we were sitting in the car in the middle of Queens, eating street food, when he said “I’m sorry I wasn’t around.” This is the first time he’d ever addressed it. The cliche would be to have a heartfelt bonding moment where we shake hands or hug it out, leaving with a mutual understanding that it’ll be better. Instead, I opted for “I never noticed.” I took a healthy amount of pleasure out of his quiet “Wow.”
A few months after this, I had to travel back to New York for my job. We were trying to impress a potential client, but were short-staffed. I knew my dad to be an excellent employee and a quick study (my mom used to comment on how that was all he was ever good at), so I set the board up to have him hired on. I became his de facto boss. Admittedly, we made a fantastic team, and professionally, we never had any problems. This is the most consistent period I’ve seen my dad in my entire life. At work, we’d get comments about how similar we were, how insane the resemblance was, and how proud he must be for how much I’d accomplished at a young age. I quit less than 6 months later due to stress.
While there were other factors leading up to my resignation, it was the sudden realization that this guy was my most reliable team member. I could trust him with any size job, and he’d get it done. He was responsible. Just not when it came to his son.
It can be overwhelming when you’re hit with feelings you didn’t know you had. For me, there was a seemingly never-ending wave of anger and hate that I couldn’t do anything about, couldn’t direct at anything. I wasn’t prepared for it and I nearly caved. If not for my friends and my mom, I might have.
The people we surround ourselves with, our role models, aren’t always going to help us be our best selves, but I think they can be important lessons.
With Papaw, I picked up bad habits and later harbored an animosity towards a man that, despite his many flaws, was always there to pick me up.
With Uncle Steve, I developed a deep disdain for being blamed for someone else’s problems, which encourages my behavior even now.
With my dad, I had to come to terms with what the word “family” means to me.
Social Circles
Family can certainly have an impact on your behavior later in life, but at some point you have to cut the cord. This allows you to spend more time with friends, meet new people, and discover what it means to be you (hopefully.) I’ve written about some of my experiences with friends before and how they’ve left their mark (you can find that here), but to seriously delve into how much your social environment can influence your life and outlook, I’ll need to be a bit more specific.
Allen Biketrail
Yeah, starting off with one of my longest-standing (ex)best friends.
Allen Biketrail is the Negative Best Friend in the paper I wrote for my 24th birthday, and partially what inspired this piece. I spent a lot of time around Allen, as we were off-on best friends for almost 8 years, so it’s only natural that we influenced each other as we grew older. When I first met him, we didn’t go to the same school together, but we found out we lived within a 5 minute walk from each other. I remember him being excited about it because he realized I lived across the street from this girl Allen used to “help out” (his words) with sexual favors. He had a lot of stories about girls he used to “help out”.
Allen was the first “popular kid” I remember paying anything more than a passing attention to me. I don’t know if he was popular in school prior to both of us attending the same vocational school, but he was in a band and was friends with this guy, who we’ll call Coco Puffs. I’d played baseball with Coco a few years before high school, and I always thought he was a cool guy. Plus he looked like Michael Wincott, an actor from one of my favorite movies, The Crow. I figured Allen, by association, must be pretty cool, too. I was right for a while.
I don’t remember immediately hitting it off with him, but I know he added me on MySpace soon after we met. We’d chat here and there, but what really cemented the budding friendship was how Allen had tried to date a mutual friend, “Sam”, from my A Few Experiences paper, which you can read here) I think they dated for a few days before Sam went back to her on/off boyfriend at the time. This really pissed Allen off, and he knew I was friends with Sam, so he messaged me on Myspace asking if I would stop being friends with her “with him” because of how awful she was for going back to a guy we both thought was a huge shithead. This would be my first experience with Allens weird level of justification. This kind of attitude where Allen felt things shouldn’t work out if he disagreed with them was a staple of our friendship. It would take charge in conversations where I’d talk to him about going back to school or moving out on my own — “I just think you should work right now, because school is expensive” or “Why would you move out and pay more if your mom isn’t charging you rent?” Such subtle gestures, but important ones.
Over the course of our long friendship, we’d have several falling outs, and often for ridiculous reasons. The first was soon after we’d become friends, where I ended up dating a girl he’d asked me to help hook him up with. While this was partially my fault, as I knew his feelings towards her, the girl had been pretty open to both of us about not being interested in Allen, so I didn’t take this too harshly. I distinctly remember holding hands with the girl on my grandparent’s couch while Allen sat across the room, silently crying (there were tears). I felt bad about this for a long time, and Allen never really got over it in the sense that, whenever he’d be dating someone, he would “jokingly” comment on how I need to stay away. I would’ve believed they were jokes he if hadn’t gotten so worked up any time his then-girlfriend would text or hang out with me (we had a close group a friends for the most part, so this wasn’t as suspicious as it sounds). There were other girl-related falling-outs, like when Allen started dating a girl we’ll call Lana, a girl I’d been involved with briefly but had treated poorly (more on that later). He didn’t like what Lana had told him, so he stopped being friends with me. This was the first time I’d hear rumors originating from him about how awful a person I was, and this is where I’d notice a change in our friendship whenever we’d reconnect.
I don’t know how this came about, or who encouraged who, but at some point, my friendship with Allen had become this massive ball of negativity lashing out at anything that didn’t sit well with us. At one point, in part because of how often people spread rumors where we lived, Lana, Allen, and I even made a social media account meant to gather everyone’s rumors and insults in one place for everyone to submit to and see. It worked for a while, and it was funny. It was funny because it was all we talked about in our group messages and whenever we’d hang out, and we were finally sharing that publicly. A never-ending cycle of hatred. When Allen realized there were rumors submitted about him (like all the nude photos of girls he kept in his email, or how many girls he’d taken to the bike trail), he refused to admit he’d ever been a part of it.
My last falling-out with Allen was November 2015, and was the last time we spoke. It was over how I hadn’t purchased toilet paper but had the balls to ask him to contribute more money to the shared internet bill. It was either that, or that he thought I stole his Thor movie and metal pizza pan. I did borrow his Thor movie, but I lived with him, so I figured it’d be fine if I didn’t put it back right away. I don’t know what happened to the pizza pan, but I know he kept his new one in his room until he moved out.
Personally, I think there was a lot left unsaid between me and Allen, left over from the years of arguments with no resolutions, and the growing bitterness at small issues finally spilling over. I tried to talk to Allen about it, going as far as to bust through the door to his room because he kept texting me despite being in the other room. He wasn’t having it. I’ve known Allen for years, and I’ve never once seen him confront anyone about how he’s feeling, and this time was no different. He shoved me out of his room, and I shoved back. Allen Biketrail, notorious for avoiding confrontation at all costs, started punching me in the face. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I remember the death grip I had on his shirt because it ripped as our other roommate tore us apart. Poor “Teri”, his girlfriend at the time, had gotten shoved aside once I realized it was her slapping me repeatedly in the face. This is, to-date, the stupidest physical fight I’ve ever been in. Allen moved to a different room in the same apartment to avoid having to walk past my door after this, and moved out shortly after. My tires were suspiciously slashed Thanksgiving morning, and according to our other roommate, so were Allen’s. I texted him asking to talk, but he never responded. Before he blocked me on everything from Twitter to Xbox Live, I saw a few posts saying how good it felt to not live with someone that steals from him and pee on his stuff. 2015 was a very confusing year.
Allen’s entry here is a little weird. I didn’t focus on the things Allen said to me like I did with Papaw, Uncle Steve, or my dad, because he never really said anything worthwhile. I don’t mean that in a rude way. He just never said anything substantial in the way of friendship. We talked about video games, movies, and people in our town, and that was it. Every day, whether it was the Allen/Lana/AJ (AJ is me!) or Allen/Teri/AJ combination, we encouraged each other to bitch and moan about people we knew/knew of and didn’t like. We made fun of Allen’s ex-girlfriends, Lana’s interests (Lana wasn’t really in on this, but she was a good sport for being the butt end of a constant joke), Allen’s old friends/bandmates, our families, the list goes on. No one was safe, and we thought we were better than them. We thought we were clever, talented, and hardworking, and that they were all losers pining for attention.
We were bullies.
LANA!!
I mentioned Lana in the previous entry, and how I treated her poorly. I don’t mean that in a juvenile way, like picking on her in school or something so simple. For a while, and after heavy introspection, I was extremely concerned I might have caused some serious emotional damage. I could be overreacting, but I’m not that optimistic.
I met Lana in high school, and we hit it off unusually well. Our sporadic personalities and similar dealings with mental illness (not in a romantic way, more a relatable “I’ve been there”) helped us establish a quick, strong friendship-turned-relationship. The relationship only lasted a month or two. All the important stuff took place later.
I won’t pretend to know what Lana felt for me, but I can make a couple guesses that it was pretty strong affection well after we were no longer together. Our relationship was fairly basic, and by high school standards, relatively tame. Upon finding out Lana was a virgin (I was not), I felt this ridiculous pressure to not mess anything up. I’d always wanted my first time to be important, and while I wasn’t a “wait until marriage” type, I had it in my head that sex meant something -because of this unnecessary hesitation, I found it hard to be intimate with Lana early on. So we didn’t sleep together, at least not until months after the relationship ended. Hindsight makes me worry this was because she felt it would fix things, that’s how attached she seemed. It was that attachment, how she openly clung to the possibility of us getting back together, that ultimately influenced my distaste for her company.
That does sound dramatic, and it was. Remember, we’re 16/17. Having someone so openly infatuated with me was intimidating, scary even. Regardless, we’d continue sleeping together for a little while on, and for some reason, she put up with my poor treatment of her for a very long time. I wouldn’t talk directly to her in public in our last year in high school and I genuinely have no idea why, there was a sort of guilt surrounding our conversations, like I had lied to her about something. Her understandable frustration with this, combined with our strained, sometimes sexual relationship outside of school, would often boil over into a fight where Lana would bring up legitimate arguments regarding how necessary communication was and I’d fight back with whatever angry bullshit I could muster. I usually won, but only because Lana was so goddamn anxious to make sure we stayed friends that she’d drop it or concede.
Similar to how often Allen and I would stop talking, Lana and I had our fair share of friendship-ending arguments (and in some cases, no argument at all, I’d simply stop replying until she left me alone). One of the first and easily the most hateful falling outs we had was shortly after Lana and Allen had started dating. We’d been sleeping together, post-relationship, and I found out she’d also been sleeping with Allen. I was angry, mainly because it was in the midst of Allen and I not being on speaking terms, and I started doing everything I could to get Lana to hate me. Nothing worked, at least not to my knowledge. She was so passive, never truly angry with me, yet always genuinely hurt when I hit a nerve. I took this too far, at one point writing a lengthy post on Tumblr (where I knew she’d see it immediately) literally describing any of her shortcomings I could think of, complete with hateful comments on the way she walked. At 17, this was the most hateful thing I’d ever done to someone. I don’t know if I’ve done worse, but I’m guessing this is still top 5. I don’t know how she took this at the time, but years later we’d talk about it and she basically responded with “Yeah, that was real fucked up of you, but I’m glad we’re past it.”
“I’m glad we’re past it.” — I’ve heard this more times from Lana than I have anyone else in my life, easily. Which is truly something, as it speaks to how often I’ve gotten into a fight with her, where my own insecurities would build up until I took it out on her since she was always there, somehow. She’d often joke about how I treated her like an emotional punching bag, though I don’t think she was truly joking. It’s superhuman how much she’s weathered during the time she spent trying to secure our friendship, and while we’re not friends now, I find it terribly difficult to say anything negative other than “she’s pretty loud”. My friend Mike told a story about me and Lana recently to some new friends where he described me as a pet owner loudly swearing at his pet (Lana, in this instance) to get her to stop yapping. He described one scenario where we had all been hanging out at a bar, Lana grew excited (as she does), people started to stare, and I basically growled “Lana, calm the fuck down.” and then she would. I laughed at his story, because it was true. I felt sad by the time the topic changed, because it was true.
While I’m sure Lana’s done some terrible things in her own right (as we all have), I can’t honestly say she’s ever been a negative influence on me. I never let her be a truly positive influence, either.
The times I spent being friends with Lana helped me feel comfortable being an asshole towards people that cared about me, and that’s on me. This comfortability fed my growing ego at a radically changing point in my life, where I’d begun to transition from constantly being bullied with no way to escape to proactively taking measures to prevent ever feeling helpless again. In an unfortunate way, Lana (and others) was practice. While I didn’t mean for this to happen, I’m going to have to accept that I was, and could still be, a shitty friend and all-around hateful individual.
Thankfully, the reason we’re not friends now is only because I’m uncomfortable around recreational drug use, and I campaigned for her to land a job interview under the request that she stop with the recreational drug use. As negative as that sounds, and as fed up with me as I’m sure she is after all these years, I’m glad it’s not the same hateful cycle we grew used to, and I hope she’s doing alright.
Introspection
There are plenty of quotes surrounding hindsight and how helpful it can be, and I’m not interested in reinventing the wheel. I spend so much time revisiting conversations and events in my life, trying to find new perspectives (and retroactively make witty comebacks), that it can be difficult to determine whether I do this to learn or because I want to justify my actions. I’m a firm believer in raw introspection; I think it’s incredibly useful, though it can also be a dangerous means of dismissive justification.
Me, AJ
I’ve used a lot of examples here that focus on how these people and events in my life have influenced my approach, and they’re as true as I can muster, but that doesn’t mean the influence they’ve had on me clears me of all wrongdoings. I can’t even argue with a straight face that I’m only partially to blame for how I can be. This isn’t a movie where you’re a genius inventor because your father was a genius inventor, life doesn’t work that way. That isn’t to say we don’t take after our role models or social circles, because we certainly do. We’re all capable of self-awareness, and it’s our responsibility to recognize the red flags.
It’s me!
A big problem I’ve only recently come to terms with is how often self-awareness is used as a sort of shield in today’s world of accusations, viral rumors, and internet personalities. This was a particularly unsettling discovery, as it shed some light on how I’ve been approaching my shortcomings. We’ll often boast self-awareness in a variety of ways, publicly, as if knowing what we’re doing wrong somehow alleviates how wrong it is. On a general level, we see people brag about how much of a bitch they can be, or how savage they are with exes or estranged friends, and it’s a nice laugh — we continue scrolling, on to the next screenshot showcase.
While I might be aware of how my grandpa, uncle, and dad could be, as well as how Allen and Lana encouraged/enabled a negative environment, I didn’t try to fix them. In some cases, it took me time and serious introspection to come to terms with these experiences, like Papaw being manipulative or how much my relationship with my father affected me mentally. These weren’t easy tasks, and I’m still learning from them, as well as learning how to move on from the influence they’ve left behind.
I mentioned earlier how Papaw’s influence taught me patient revenge and manipulation, that wasn’t an exaggeration. Throughout my life, friends and loved ones have often confided private and sensitive information in me, and depending on how that relationship panned out, I’ve actively used that information against them as a weapon designed to hurt them emotionally as effectively as possible. After I split up with Ashley, arguably my only serious relationship (which I discuss in both 24 and A Few Experiences at length), she went through a pretty difficult time with her home life and romantic endeavors after me. Because of our off and on, strained friendship, she’d confess some of the details of those difficult experiences, which I’d turn into verbal venom if we ended up fighting again, blindsiding her with twisted versions of the pain she’d already experienced. I’ve done this with other friends, and often accept their emotional turmoil as a sort of achieved vengeance against any negative experience I’ve had with them. My grandpa may have taught me to hold a grudge, but I’m the one that was alright with that.
Being active on social media means you see a lot excuses, and one I see most often is how mental illness is the reason for certain behavior, and “we should all be conscious of that and do what we can to help our loved ones through it.” — While I think this is partially true, I’m hard-pressed to accept a bipolar disorder as an excuse for someone being a dick. Having been diagnosed with a healthy serving of my own mental disorders, my biggest internal struggle is trying to figure it out whether my behavior is stemming from something out of my control or harbored negativity of my own design. While I’m sure I’ve acted out due to how my brain’s wired, I’m also positive I’ve willfully encouraged negativity in the lives of my friends and loved ones.
Before I moved out on my own, I lived with my mom from maybe 18 to 21. My mom’s easily the strongest person I know, and has dealt with some serious bullshit. You might have noticed I didn’t include her in the Role Models section, but remember that this is entitled “Raising Negativity”. My mother has never been a negative influence in my life, but I have been in hers. I went through quite a bit after high school, and as with Lana, I took it out on the people that were always there for me. Sadly, my mom was no different. She is the strongest person I know, but there was a time my faith in that wasn’t 100% (she’d been going through a separation, and I was finally old enough to see how it affected her). Depending on the day, I somehow got it in my head that I had the right to lecture her on her decisions, and it hurts me even now to remember how often I’ve made my mom cry. This is one of those “you’re more like your father than you know” instances where I actively channeled both Papaw and Alex Sr. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have someone you unconditionally love like a mother does a son belittle you, and I’ve never felt I’ve made up for that. We have a fantastic, comfortable relationship now, and I’m immeasurably lucky to have her in my corner as a rock star mom and friend, but without introspection and self-awareness, I don’t think we’d have made it back to a healthy relationship.
Because I know she’ll read this — Thank you, Mom. I love you.
Finale
It’s incredibly fascinating how easily we’re influenced by those we surround ourselves with, and I think that’s worth exploring at every opportunity. The fact that, in the past two years, I’ve noticed a genuine change in my outlook and demeanor is a testament to how much your environment affects your behavior. I recently moved away from Springfield, where I grew up and where my family is, because I felt I needed something fresh, something without the familiarity and comfortable negativity. I’ve refrained from family gatherings, due to our negative history, and I rarely make the trip to see old friends, either because we’re not friends or because I’m weary of those negative conversations I’ve mentioned. That said, it’s very important to confront these influences in whatever way you’re able.
I’m never going to change my uncle’s mind about me, my grandpa was set in his ways, stubborn until until the very end (and I loved him for it), and I’ll never have a healthy relationship with my dad. I’m mostly fine with all of that, and I’m going to carry everything they’ve given me, positive or negative, indirectly or otherwise, forever.
When it comes to friends, it has to be mutual. I can’t make Allen talk things out with me, and frankly I don’t need or want that to happen. Because of our long history, there’s only so much I’m willing to do. With Lana, I’ll likely never be able to make up for the way I treated her, but she’s a different person now and I like to think I am as well, so I hope one day she’ll be able to forgive me and in the meantime, I’ll work on forgiving myself.
I think experience is one of the best teachers there is, and my experience with these various negative environments has helped me navigate up until this point. I’m sometimes cynical and weary of repeating past mistakes, but mostly I’ve grown more understanding with why someone might behave the way they do or stay in the environment they’re in.
That said, I hope me sharing these personal experiences helps others to evaluate their own lives, helps them take a beat and consider whether they’re surrounded and influenced by negativity or are cultivating that negative environment for someone else. Thanks for reading.
- AJ
