The Ugly in Me

There’s that part of me - the same part that’s in you, I’m sure - that resides in the mind’s basement, hidden from most, but always there. It’s the part that soils my good intentions like a drop of ink in a glass of water. It swirls and dances for a moment, separate from the water, distinguishable in its intrusion. But gradually the water is muddied with the ink’s hue and soon enough I can’t remember when the two were asunder.

Was the water ever clear?

Were my intentions ever really good?

“Good intentions?” The basement dweller, that shadowy part of me, would scoff. “Everything you’ve ever done was for you.” Drop. “You are not a good person, Gnu, you just want people to think so.” Drop. Drop. “You’re ugly, my dear friend. We all are. You’re just better at disguising it than most of these monsters.” And so his case would often go.

That’s all it takes to obscure the clarity.

No matter what I do, no matter how saintly or selfless, the voice whispers a similar mantra:

I volunteered for Red Cross. “So you can tell others how kind you are.” I fought the wildfires out West. “So you could post photos of you being a hero.” I worked with disabled children. “Well, isn’t that a great line to drop when you’re chatting up those women you discard so quickly. You’re pathetic, Gnu.”

As I’ve aged, I’ve listened more to the basement monster.

As children, we fear the scary thing beneath the house. We pull the covers up high, run without looking back, place our hands over our eyes, anything to remain ignorant from the fact that the monster is right there with us.

But after a while, we grow tired of running and hiding.

At least I did.

And so I stopped.

I listened.

The more I listened, the more I began to consider that maybe that voice isn’t some foreign evil; some drop of ink added to the clear water of my being.

Maybe I had it wrong this whole time.

Maybe the basement voice is the water.

Maybe I am the monster.

The more I dwell on this the more tenable it seems. Society has taught me - as it did you and as it will our children - that such ugliness must be smothered.

Is that what I have done? A house of cards built over a shallow grave of myself? My true self?

Recently, I find myself siding with this summary over and over. I feel the house wobble, clawed hands reaching up out of the grave.

These days, the voice I’ve often thought of as the real me seems to speak with a hand over its mouth, desperation laid on thick with every muffled objection.

I just can’t decide whether they’re my objections or those of a time that came before me. The protests of society.

There’s a part of me - the same part that’s in you - that holds my hand and tells me I’m good. We meet less and less these days, my trust waned, and the warmth this part once brought has been replaced with a store bought warmth that burns as it goes down and leaves me wretched in the morning.

Still, the time that passes between that initial burn and the spinning moment I wake seems to hold the only splinters of happiness I get.

Sober, I’m lost.

Intoxicated...Well, this doesn’t change. But for a moment, I forget. Forget that I might be ugly.

Forget that I might be forged by others.

Forget that the person I’ve come to know might not be who I am at all.

And the more I forget, the more I feel myself slipping between the shadows and the spotlight. Slipping between the cracks. Slipping away.