Nastiness

I always am at war with the nasty part of myself. Marya Hornbacher says in Wasted, “It surprised me… how naturally nastiness came to me.” I highlighted that line because it surprises me too. I am also surprised at how easy nastiness comes to me.

I volunteered at hospice, I made lunches for kids who couldn’t afford lunch, I intern with low-income teens in legal trouble. I’m still nasty at my core. I hold a dying person’s hand and ask him to recall his favorite memories as he lays there, motionless, not looking at me. I accidentally burn another dying person’s tongue with oatmeal and spend the next 15 minutes apologizing to her while I try to figure out a way to cool the oatmeal. Is it disgusting if I blow on it? Will she be disgusted if I touch each spoonful to my finger to see if it’s still hot?

Part of me thinks all this is an elaborate façade at kindness and genuineness.

In Los Angeles 2017, I buy a plastic lunch box with compartments of food at Starbucks, to give to the homeless man sitting in the trash can across the street. I secretly worry if he’s allergic to the peanut butter in the tiny plastic cup next to the sliced apples. I hope he’s not. He’s not on the trash can when I come back out in the blazing heat. I see his bag leaning against the garbage can, so I leave the food there. I’m disappointed he’s not here to witness my kind deed and I’m disappointed in myself that I want him to. That I want somebody to notice I’m good. I leave the food by his backpack and leave, worrying it will rot in the sun.

Once in fifth grade gym class I begged a girl to switch with me in line so I wouldn’t have to hold the hand of a mentally disabled boy. I didn’t know if he understood what I was saying. He sucked on his fingers a lot, and I was— and still am— irrationally terrified of spit and mouths and stickiness. This is an excuse. I hold his sticky hand, feeling disgusted with him and later, with myself. I’m still disgusted with myself.

My mother told me about another time in eighth grade when she was worried about getting a test done to see if she had breast cancer. I don’t remember this. I remember her coming home one day wrapped in an ace bandage because the doctor sliced a part of her chest away. Apparently, I said if she has cancer or not it doesn’t matter. I hope I don’t remember this because it didn’t happen, that she dreamed it and that I’m actually not the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about their mother’s health.

In my senior year of high school, a girl I had a strange, biting relationship with brought her ukulele to school. We would fight in classes for no good reason besides us both being there to pick on. Once she drew a swastika on my hand and called me stupid, but was surprisingly receptive when I said she was upsetting me. Sometimes we’d laugh at the same jokes. We were lab partners in chemistry, and she handled all the fire experiments because I was scared of burning myself.

In AP psychology, she strummed her ukulele and said, “It’s Panic at the Disco.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, just for the sake of being cruel, “it sounds nothing like them.” She put her ukulele away and slumped in her seat.

I take a strange, unexplainable pleasure in being cruel. In college, a girl rose her glasses over her forehead in class to show our sociology professor her self-described ‘stunning blue eyes,’ and I immediately rose my glasses too. A mimic to make the cool kids beside me laugh. I could say I’m mean because I want to fit in, to make people laugh, to be one with the cool kids— as I have never been considered a cool kid. It can’t be wholly true because there are uncounted instances in which I’ve been privately cruel.

I don’t have a good reason. I could sit here and say I’m acting out, I had a hard life give-me-a-break, I'm angry, I'm this-or-that. I’m not. Generally, I’m a pleasant person who holds their hands politely behind their back and dips their head down like a Catholic saint. I’m no damn saint.

I’m very bitter in my middle. I remember the time I cried angry tears in the upstairs bathroom of my university because my women’s lit professor embarrassed me. Or another time, I ruined a perfect little lunch with my mother to call her a transphobe. I cling to my anger so hard my fists turn pale. I make half-moons in my palms, irritated at the slightest thing that ignites a memory of being wronged. I feel as though I’m wronged frequently. I lash out- ha-ha. That’s another excuse.

It’s a cycle of unnecessary cruelty, then guilt, then pinky-promising myself I won’t do that again. I'll be kinder to the next stranger. Next time, I won’t be mean to my mother or my father or lash out at my sister or get into a politically charged screaming match with my uncle. Next time. I swear.

In my research methods class, my group consisted of me, one girl— with a blunt bob haircut and a nose ring and designer clothes. Which is to say very cool and chic. I wanted to be on her level and sometimes, rarely, she decided I could be—, and one boy with autism and a tendency to ramble. Sometimes he’d talk my ear off while I scribbled the necessary equations to run our SPSS program properly. I'll admit, it was more of a solo project than a group project.

“Uh-huh… oh… mhm,” I muttered, barely masking my annoyance with being spoken to while I typed away. I didn’t pay attention to most things he said. I felt like a bitch and an asshole at the end of every class, and I’d swear to myself to do better. Sometimes I would. Sometimes I’d hold a conversation like a normal person, appropriately chuckling and smiling. Usually, I wouldn’t. I’d revert back to annoyed muttered responses.

I don’t know how I ended up like this. It’s an odd pattern of being kind to strangers and mean to everyone else. As in acquaintances, family members, friends, anyone I’ve known for longer than 5 months. I am a bitch a lot of the time. I’m not a proud bitch either. I hate to be reminded of anything I’ve done that’s even slightly unkind.

Kindness is a trait I value above all others, it’s one I’m constantly reaching for and only rarely achieving. I have no idea why I act the way I do. I want to say “it’s not me it’s my mental illness,” but that would be a lie. It’s definitely me.

I want so badly to be kind. I also want people to know I’m kind. I hold my tongue very still so I don’t blurt out all the kind things I’ve done this week. I don’t want to be a person who brags, I want to be modest. Maybe this writing is modest. Maybe it’s just to prove to myself or to anyone who reads this that I’m modest. I want to write more about how I make food for my family, unprompted. I want to write about how good I am.

“Look at me! I’m a good person! I’m soooo goooood! I'm so genuine! I’m so full of love!” I shout, full to the brim with sadness and anger. I’m angry and irritable a lot. Sometimes I want to scream at the world to just shut up for one second. I’m not a very good person. Can a person be both good and also utterly despicable at the same time? That’s where I lie. On the line that intersects between good and unnecessarily cruel.