I have spent the past week talking to people about ghosting. As I try to navigate my own experience of it, I have found some solace in knowing the ordeal is shared, though any comfort I could draw from it was short-lived and soon replaced with an overwhelming sense of nausea; what we do to each other and how often, so shamelessly too, makes me fucking sick to my stomach.
It wasn’t until this morning, however, that I was able to pinpoint exactly what hurts the most in my case. For the past two months, I have watched him climb on stage, night after night, and be applauded by a room full of eager, parasocially-attached strangers looking up at him like he’s the second coming of whatever and not like the spineless coward that I now know him to be.
I’m at home most nights. I don’t have the money to go out. I barely have money to pay rent. If I did, trust me; I’d be on a beach right now. I’d be doing anything other than rotting away. I’d be living or trying to live. I’d be buying distractions, just like him, filling my time with people, places, and things.
Two days after he disappeared back in October, I began grinding my teeth, something I’d never done before. I’m still doing it as I type this. I do it in my sleep, too. I’ve lost a lot of weight. I honestly look awful, a shell of who I used to be. Most days I feel crippled by depression. I feel insecure about my writing, and I’ve stopped working on my book. I’m embarassed by my fixation with my own pain and as I said before, not exactly comforted by the fact that it is shared by so many.
The bourgeois doesn’t need to sit with himself. He is not required to acknowledge the parts of himself he rejects. The mirror can be turned away if what he sees displeases him. What is real to him must also be convenient, palatable and well-behaved. He can and does keep himself so busy he has no time to feel anything at all. He can hop on a plane, go on tour, and surround himself with like-minded people (or fans). His ego continuously coddled by people who have no idea who he truly is. The light step of a man who refuses to burden himself with anything, who has always had someone else carry the load for him, who has always had someone else drive the car.
I wrote a little about this attrition of empathy and decency that comes from fame in #20, focusing on musicians and other performers who tour for a living. Again, the form it takes barely matters here, just that with enough money and fame to escape yourself, you will inevitably become cruel and lose the ability to register it at all. You turn yourself into a fucking menace — un vrai danger public.
The “cleansing” effect that stepping on stage has, the cacophony of applause and cheering that so effectively drown out any dissonance. This becomes the only form of “love” that the bourgeois can accept. Robbed of any capacity to experience true intimacy and straddled with an entitlement to constant praise — a violent intolerance for any sort of opposition or challenge forms and, the circle gets smaller; the only people allowed to stay look and sound like cheerleaders.
I wonder, sometimes about the in-betweens and the times when someone or something can’t be wedged between him and what he’s done. Before bed, for example, in his pink sheets. And then I remember how quickly medication ushers us into unconsciousness, how the bourgeois depends on it to prevent any dissonance from entering his mind for however long, and I realize he couldn’t possibly be grinding his teeth the way I am, tossing and turning. After a long day of avoiding the world and inhabiting his bubble, he crawls into bed the very same enfant terrible he’s always been and continues to choose inaction and himself, no matter the cost.
After all, what does cost matter when you can afford to live the unexamined life, the unexamined self just taking whatever it wants, bolstered by the knowledge that you have the freedom to run, dropping whatever is weighing you down as you flee, never having to look back.
It is easier for him to walk away. And as much as I’d love to blame it on him, on his lack of integrity, on his cowardice, I know so much of that is the direct result of class and status, of fame. It would be reckless to ignore them, the consequences of wealth; the brain rot, the heart rot, the ability to turn a blind eye to what you’ve done, the determination to just bury it, deny it. It would be doing ourselves a disservice to keep individualizing this problem, pretending it isn’t everywhere.
The rich man does not apologize; he just destroys the evidence.
Of course, with time, this will pass. I am not a permenant victim of anything, especially not the cowardice of some man. Still, this pain is real, it manifests in all ways and at times I feel myself being strangled by it, the way everyone I spoke to described feeling. Gutted, devastated and disoriented. And I think I am rightfully concerned about how commonplace this has all become.
I have definitely been an asshole. I have been wrong. But I have never, ever been a coward and I have never, could never ghost anyone. For that I am endlessly proud. J’ai pas le luxe d’etre un pussy.
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“The rich man does not apologize; he just destroys the evidence.” Absolutely, utterly, yes.
“The rich man does not apologize; he just destroys the evidence” !!!