Not Personal? Part of It Was About Me

Stuart K. Hayashi

 

Many psychologists and self-help writers like to say that when someone treats you horribly — especially as it harms her own well-being — it’s not personal. They say that even if she very consciously wants you to feel aggrieved by her action, it’s about her own issues and not about you. And in most instances, that applies. But not always.

Years ago, I was very close to someone who turned out to be terribly unwell and refusing the proper psychiatric care. She told me about her long history of threatening suicide, and happily insisted she was all better now. At the time, I believed her. She told me that knowing me was so refreshing because I’m so much about life and embracing life. Then, merely weeks into being back in her country of origin, she mostly ghosted me. The few times she communicated, she switched to an impersonal tone, as if we never met. And when it came to the many hours she told me, unsolicited, about her mental disturbances — she feigned memory loss about that. And then, for the next two years, she uploaded photos of herself that were photoshopped to make her look like a corpse with a chalky white face.

I know that the “correct” interpretation that those psychologists would want me to take from this is that none of this was personal or meant to be personal. No, goes the insistence, it was all about my friend’s issues and not about me. It was indeed more about my friend’s issues than about me. But it’s actually not true that none of this was personally about me.

Previously, my friend gushed to me that she saw me as inspiring her about the need to embrace life. Upon switching to treating me in a dehumanizing fashion, she uploads images conspicuously depicting herself as dead. Yes, that was a very conscious repudiation of me and what she thought I represented.

She had told me for hours about her history of suicide threats. And then, for two years, she uploads depictions of herself as a corpse. While many of the other people on Oahu who encountered her were bewildered by this gesture, she knew that I knew the context behind it. She was aware that, because of my knowledge of the context behind her morbid imagery, that this gesture would compound my worrying for her. Yes, part of it was about contributing to the worrying I already had for her.

After telling me that she thought I was all about life and embracing life — her very conspicuously turning her own image into a symbol of her own demise was, in part, about sticking it to me.

That’s consistent with a point that William Swann makes about self-verification theory. It’s that when you like someone, whereas that person hates herself, that mismatch is something that person will hold against you — and for which that person may easily punish you. Knowing that she had told me about her years of wanting to be dead, part of her decision to upload photos of herself as a corpse was about playing mind games and “testing” me. It was a gesture to convey that it’s the principles that I most cherish that are being repudiated.

I have to face that a lot of my friend’s public morbid gesturing was personally directed toward me, and that a lot of it was about me.