Humans logo

The Sin of Saying "I"

The Second-Handers' Revolt

By Heather RichmondPublished 4 years ago 6 min read
1

This is an evil thing to say, for it is a transgression...and we have never spoken of it. But we know. We know when we look into each other's eyes. And when we look thus without words, we both know other things also, strange things for which there are no words, and these things frighten us.

Anthem, Ayn Rand, 1961

But we must say them, Ayn. Even if we think there are no words, we must say these strange things that haunt us in the depths of our souls.

First, to ourselves. Then, when we have understood it as well as we can: to each other.

Because it is what we leave unsaid that needs saying the most. And it won’t be long before our desires turn the words of our heart into the thoughts of our mind.

I’ve seen a man’s eyes stare back at me with a hollowness so deep and unending that I could almost see his rotten heart. But the black heart of an evil man should not be the thing that scares us the most. It’s the golden one of a man who has let himself live gilded.

We should be terrified of the man who is content with a life led second-hand.

One sweltering summer morning, I found myself fleeing from New York City as though trying to beat some natural disaster that was heading my way. I let the door slam behind me like a hollow punctuation and set about feverishly running to catch a car so I could get the fuck out of there, my hasty departure a resolution to one of the most gray narratives I'd ever been a part of. I was running away from a man whose soul was stifled by his own hands. He'd experienced pure joy, but couldn't believe in its permanence. So, he castigated himself for loving me and, equally, punished me for making him feel.

What began as a cool blue meandering walk of self discovery had, over the past months, warmed, reddened, and exploded into a hot race to solve the problem of my own mortality. I'd spent these months either chasing something that could kill me or running away from it. I got high each morning on the knowledge that it might be my last and stumbled in a hazy brown drunkenness to reluctantly sleep and forget, for a few hours, about my own power and the loneliness it implied.

The men. The men were the providers of both the questions and the answers. They all led me, in their own ways, to discovering the parts of myself I'd long forgotten and to the attempts to integrate them into my present reality.

They all also left me.

They served their purpose and so did I. Then, they returned to their lives, leaving me alone in the white hot search for my own. The ranting academics with chips on their shoulders and a yellowed list of deferred dreams, the finance fucks whose weak minds couldn't handle a version of reality that they might create themselves, the tech boys who were more comfortable with the sex of 1's and 0's than they could ever be with my lips around their impotent cocks. They all had different faces, but all their songs sounded the same, whether they'd been born near the cerulean waters of Istanbul, in the depths of a shitty Louisianan swamp. Whether they'd emerged from the mire of a Jakartan slum or the piney backwoods of East Texas: not a single one of them recognized or realized his own power.

These men had all been so raped of their identity, of their autonomy, and of their influence by their mothers, by their sisters, their wives (oh, god, their wives!), their daughters, their teachers, all their women, that they were rendered passionless, castrated cowards who were inevitably damned to spend their days acting out the plots the bitches in their lives had written out for them.

This...this was why these men, the men who I loved, hated me. It was more than my evergreen feminine mystique. This was beyond my sex or the sex. These men came to hate me for the portraits with which I presented them, the chance to know themselves, to own their power, and to exert it in ways that they themselves crafted. They hated me because they saw that I could give them the unfathomable: acceptance of their selves and deference of their power. They hated me, in the end, because they now had the knowledge that these opportunities existed, but they knew they could never seize them. These horrible gifts were simply too much of a burden to bear. They were too unfamiliar, required a reserve of too much fortitude, and would likely lead to infinite loneliness.

Instead, these men were accustomed to a society in which they were expected to cede their power and their potential. So, they acted out in strange ways. They told lies to the women who took care of their children, they became slaves to the thoughts of sex that had been placed warmly in a jar on an unreachably high counter by their mothers, they became obsessed with the pursuit of all that which they'd been denied.

I thought about K, who refused my soul with little more than a chilling dismissal, about L whose cruel nature could no longer be suppressed in my presence, about A, who fought a battle with demons so strong I could almost see them, and about all the other men who had never made a single decision in their lives. They'd let their women do it for them in exchange for the perpetuation of the soothing lie that they, the men, were in control.

K loved nothing more than torturing my breasts with his mouth as he thought of how his mother's denial of love led him to choices would hem in forever; he punished me relentlessly for having the freedom that his wife would never let him have. L preemptively deemed me to be a "dirty cunt" when I challenged him in a one line text message-obvious to me was that this ire came about because of his dead mother who'd left him alone with his alcoholic father and co-dependent sister. Rather than make a move to improve his lot in life, A ran back to the comforting arms of oppression when he realized that I might love all the shadows his mother had created in him and the shame his wife reinforced.

When men are confronted with the idea that they might possess boundless power, that which is not limited by or dependent upon their knowledge, skills, status, or relationship to another person, when they understand that their true power comes from themselves alone rather than a display of brute force over another group, they become terrified. The prospect of having the ability to explore one's mind as far as it will take him and to chart his own course based on his findings is too daunting for all but the steadiest of minds.

Combined with an unfelt heart, it renders a man a coward. It drives a woman insane. It makes a woman flee from New York with a broken heart. It leads a man to feel his shame at having broken it.

But once we all see our power and feel our own hearts, we can heal those pains that have plagued us forever. We can love the Self and, then, each other. We can love without the guilt of the sin of saying "I".

humanity
1

About the Creator

Heather Richmond

Spiritual Teacher and Writer.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.