NAIVE

​

Sometimes she became convinced there was something fundamentally wrong with the way she moved through the world. It would begin quietly. A small mistake. An awkward interaction replayed many times in her mind. A memory surfacing suddenly while she was washing dishes or driving or lying awake at night. And she’d cringe and curl inwards slightly, in humiliation, horror, disgust, shame. Then, almost before she noticed it happening, the entire case against herself would begin assembling in her mind with terrible efficiency. 

Naive. That was always one of the first charges.

Naive in ways that no longer felt forgivable at her age. Still believing people when experience should have taught her otherwise. Still wanting sincerity to exist. Still walking toward things with openness instead of suspicion. She would think about the bad decisions she had made, the people she trusted incorrectly, the situations she entered carrying hope where caution would have served her better, and from there the list expanded rapidly. That her wanting something, anything at times, led her to believe when she really knew it wasn’t sensible. Foolish. Impressionable. Lacking courage. Hapless. Unequipped for the world. More than just plain stupid, she was ridiculous. 

By then she could almost feel the atmosphere of it physically, as though somewhere inside her an actual courtroom had assembled. The prosecution pacing confidently before the jury, laying out evidence piece by piece. Look at this decision. Look at this humiliation. Look how long it took her to understand what everybody else already knew. And her feelings of guilt, digging into and settling like a colony of burrowing ants into her mind and her stomach

And then, from somewhere else inside her, came the interruption. That’s not true.

Not calmly either. Not elegantly. More like the desperate voice of a defendant suddenly standing up mid-trial because she could no longer bear listening to herself being described that way. Because the accusations excluded entire sections of evidence. They ignored the things she had survived and built and carried. They ignored the years she had worked relentlessly, often frightened and exhausted, with very little certainty and almost no safety net beneath her. They ignored the risks she had taken. The endurance required simply to remain open-hearted after disappointment. The fact that she had continued making things, continued loving beauty, continued trying.

Sometimes she could feel the defence gathering strength for a moment. A stupid person could not have done all that. A weak person would not still be here.

And she would almost believe herself. She would remember moments of competence and humour and resilience. But the prosecution inside her was tireless. Then explain this, it would say. Explain why you ignored your instincts there. Explain why you trusted that person. Explain why you still keep hoping after all this evidence. 

And her mind would turn again, more exhausted now. Because hope is not stupidity. Because remaining soft is not failure. Because cynicism is not intelligence. Back and forwards it went until she no longer knew. Knew not just which side was right but almost what the argument was. Sometimes she would lie awake feeling completely disoriented by herself, unable to determine whether she was brave or pathetic, wise or absurd, unusually resilient or simply incapable of learning the lessons the world kept trying to teach her. If perhaps the hope about the hope was hopeless. If the failure was in failing to see she had failed. If she was laughing with herself or about herself. 

Eventually the arguments exhausted themselves. Not because either side had prevailed, but because she was so confused. And in the silence that followed, another thought occasionally appeared, quieter than the others but strangely steady. Maybe there was no final verdict coming. Maybe being human simply meant carrying contradictory evidence forever. And beneath all of it lingered the quieter question. Did it matter? Maybe a human life was not supposed to resolve cleanly. Maybe everyone was simply moving back and forwards between competence and confusion, wisdom and absurdity, constructing coherent identities afterward to disguise how bewildered they really were.

Again and again she found herself returning to the possibility that the very qualities the modern world framed as weakness might in fact be inseparable from being fully alive. Openness. Doubt. Longing. Hope. Imagination. Softness. Even eroticism itself, that desire to reach beyond the contained boundaries of the self toward another person, another experience, another feeling. She could not entirely believe these things were failures simply because they left a person vulnerable. Increasingly it seemed to her that the people most certain of everything were often the least awake somehow, moving through life defended against wonder, contradiction and change. Certainty began to feel less like wisdom and more like performance at times, an armour that could be constructed to avoid the frightening instability of being alive. And perhaps that was why she remained permeable despite everything. Not because she had failed to learn, but because some part of her still suspected that to become completely closed in the name of self-protection was a kind of death before the act of dying. 

And maybe whether she was right in either direction did not actually matter. She admitted she did not know. And in that admission she decided that she better just carry the fuck on, making and doing and thinking and being and loving as hard as she fucking could, because the end of her days was spinning closer and closer towards her. And what did she have to show for it? Nothing and everything and nothing and everything.