What I Won't Tell You

[Sydney Jessica Blake]

Ernest Hemingway said “The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.” I fully recognize the world’s tendency to destroy what is best about it. The world, like a child overfond of a particular blanket, is utterly incapable of allowing to rest quietly the things which it most loves. It drags them around by a corner, shows them to everybody and brags, and rubs its teary face into them. Therefore I have decided that the best way to be valued is quietly, belatedly, comprehension rising only long after the person valued has passed onto other things or other lives. I recognize beauty, but I do not need it; I have the courage to take risks, but am sharp enough not to bemoan them; I am capable of sacrifice and have already lost much, but I refuse to give any more of myself to the world. I value myself too highly for that. The world has had enough of me—it can suffer along on its own now.

Yes, I understand that I am being selfish. But human beings are selfish creatures and even I am not above being human. Even those who wholly believe that they volunteer their useful time away to others are being selfish because they take such raw pleasure from seeing what their work has accomplished; they are prideful. I do not mind their actions—avid workers requiring no pay is very efficient—but to call themselves selfless and to allow others to laud them as so only adds to their swelled self-esteem. They do not truly understand themselves.

I understand myself very well. I am forthright, sharply intelligent, capable of comprehending great quantities of difficult things in short spans of time, vindictive, selfish as the world understands it, and petty. I am not offended to hear myself called such things, and often am called worse by those who have roused my irritation or disdain, but I will vehemently argue semantics with you. I am forthwith, not cruel, because cruelty is the knowing causation of pain and the enjoyment of doing so, whereas I simply speak the truths that most people would prefer not to hear but ought to. I am vindictive because no man has the right to do to me what he would not allow me to do to him, and I will always force him to understand that. I am selfish because I spent sixteen years of my life giving it to other people and now believe that my life belongs solely to me and treat it as such. I am petty because I understand that in many ways I am weak, not strong enough to strike back at people the way I would rather, and that the world is not as clear-cut as I would like it to be. I am petty because I will use the world’s own base means of righting wrongs and do not see why I should elevate myself to a higher-minded playing field when everybody else is content to scramble in the mud like animals. I may fight on the same low playing field, but I am still better than those who actually enjoy the mud-slinging.

But you will not understand that, will you? No, to you the actions are all that matters, not the motive behind them. You see all of the good deeds I have done and expect me to love myself for them. You do not understand that I value myself for the genuine value of my better qualities—intelligence and cunning—and not for the deeds which I have done at the demands of others. Whether or not you comprehend this should not bother me—it never has before—but suddenly now I want you to see what other people refuse to: that everything I do has a motive, that I undertake no useless actions, that I do not while away my best attributes on meaningless pursuits, and that whether or not you do understand, I will not change. Your comprehension or lack thereof does not constitute a change on my part on your behalf. I am an individual, and you do not have the right to attempt to change me.

[Sydney Jessica Blake]

The world is such a horrible place. It elevates the criminal and mistreats the worthy, we are encouraged to create ladders out of our brethren and thrones out of our enemies. There is no sense to any of it--to who is made gold and who is beaten by a fist glittering with it. I understand that my parents are not ordinary. I understand that I am not ordinary. I understand that it is normal for me still to feel vestiges of the hate I hold for them and to take it out on undeserving people, that my parents may have with their rough hands crafted much if who I am but that I choose to be rough with the world around me now. I understand that I am entitled to be angry. What I do not understand is why my anger cannot serve a purpose; why others take my treatment so personally when I treat everybody the same; why so many people feel they must hold me down and shake fingers and morals and weaponry in my face in an effort to prove to me that I am wrong, I am cruel, and I am still, after all of my learning and knowledge and intelligence, weaker than they are. I only bring down those who attempt to first do so to me or who allow me to abuse them. I do not do it to prove my superiority. I do it to prove a point.

But what point can a man be proving when he destroys what free will and freedom a cripple has left just to show that he can? Where is the sense in a bear tormenting a bird that can neither fight back nor flee?

Where is the sense in a world that does nothing to prevent such things and not only considers them inconsequential, but common, acceptable simply because no one will make a stand against it?

I have been told that I look upon others as if I just want to watch the world burn. That is not true. I want to watch it drown. I want those who have been burned and trampled before to overrun their assailants so the bigger men lie broken at the bottom of an ocean that was once their castle and wonder why the world must be so unkind. When really, it is not that the world is unkind, it just doesn't care about any of us. We are alone and we each act and react like we've never seen sentient life before. The biggest men do not see what they crush beneath their feet while the broken ones make art out of their bloodstains because there is nothing more left to them.

.... I will find the way, someday, to show people why we learn to love our bloodstains and why we try so hard to keep them from spreading. Those who are whole will never understand that we protect our pieces so much not only because they are all we have but because even though we often wish for others to understand, conversely, we never want you to need to. We know how it feels to envy our bruises just because they prove we are alive.