Sticky Cassandra & Her Curse

I came out of the womb standing at a slight angle to everyone else. I was seven the first time someone confirmed it for me.

My father was making a sandwich. He asked if I was hungry. I said no. Then I watched him put every condiment away and realized I'd never been hungrier in my life.

"Can I have a sandwich?" I said. Meek. Apologetic. Too late.

He looked at me like he'd never hated anyone more. He started yelling, something about how he knew this would happen, how it was so like me to do something like this. I don't remember disagreeing.

When he finished telling me what a terrible person I was, he threw the sandwich at me.

"Just fucking have it."

I don't know if that's where things went wrong. I came out strange to begin with. But it's as good a place as any to start the story.

Thirty-two years on this earth. Here's what I've done with them: Married before 25. Divorced before 30. Married again. A teenage pregnancy. A father in and out of jail at exactly the age a girl needs one. Wrong man, then another wrong man. A temper I inherited from someone I hated for having it.

But outside of my father's temper (the one part of my lineage I can't deny), I have often wondered if I belong to my own heritage at all. I wear the scars of it just fine, but I've always felt more like the child of Cassandra than the child of my own mother. Not because I don't love my mother. I do. But the angle at which I was brought into this world feels less like something a mother's womb gifted, and more like a burden passed down by an angry god.

Cassandra, I think, passed her curse to me. She turned down Apollo, and in return he cursed her. A tradition men still keep to this day. She'd see the truth before anyone else did, and be disbelieved anyway.

That's not quite my curse, though. Mine is smaller, and somehow worse. I'm always the first to notice. The first to say the thing everyone else is politely tiptoeing around. The elephant nobody invited, and here I am, pulling out its chair before anyone's asked it to sit down.

It is a curse, isn't it? To see things too soon. To know things that don't want knowing. To feel and understand the things always hiding in the shadows, and to find the act of dragging them into the light irresistible.

I can't keep my mouth shut. That's the problem. That's my problem. So I've heard them say.

Please don't picture a victim here. Picture a woman sitting, typing, bemused by her own life, smirking in disbelief that she wasn't found in a ditch somewhere by now. I'm like a cockroach. You can't kill me. I admire that about myself.

But, I haven't always admired myself. Simply because I haven't always been a person I, or the people now lost to my life, could admire. I do now, though. I couldn't exactly explain why. People seem to be more ashamed for me than I am ashamed of myself. But as my curse would have me point out, I don't believe that has anything to do with me.

People don't like admitting their faults. I used to hate it too. But the more I did it, the more I found it freeing. An admission of guilt. The awareness to say that even though I know the words cut deep, I still meant them. That I could have said it better, but I didn't. That I'm not going to now.

I find it silly, honestly. Truth, served plain, gets mistaken for cruelty. Dress the same words up in something flowery and forgiving, and suddenly they're believable. I think that's probably when I learned to lie. I realized, very young, that no one actually wants to hear the truth. Well. They do. They want to hear their own truth, reflected back to them.

I was never very good at school, but I think of myself as a great study. So I studied. People, specifically. I catalogued the wrong answers and the right ones, and soon I learned to play the game. I didn't necessarily want to play it. I just found that people liked me better when I did. And it kept my curse hidden from anyone tempted to look closer.

But it's a curse for a reason, I suppose. Hidden or otherwise, I couldn't seem to rid myself of the problems that followed.

All the things adults said about me as a child, repeated so often they calcified into fact. Friendships lost to mistakes I couldn't seem to stop making. Absurd lies, told because saying what people wanted to hear felt safer than saying what was true. Split-second choices I was certain, at the time, would define me forever.

I was spineless. Moldable. Clay in someone else's hands. Friend to all, friend to none, and especially no friend to myself. I didn't paint my own portrait. I didn't even try. I just kept handing the brush to whoever was in the room and taking their word for it.

A sideways glance. A tone I couldn't quite decipher. Small, to most people. To me, reason enough to change who I was entirely, sometimes twice in one day.

And for so long, I prayed for a manual. Everyone else seemed to have one. A playbook to refer to when life was getting ready to crush you between its fingers. Somewhere between the math class I so often skipped and the first wrong turn in my life, I must have missed the day they handed it out.

I found rock bottom more than once. I turned myself into a rehab for lost causes. And as the bad romantic partners started piling up, I began seeing myself reflected in more than one person. Admittedly, it wasn't a flattering reflection, and I was desperate to change it.

Despite this desperation, my life played like a broken record. One melody stuck on repeat for years: the sound of the door slamming after my chaos became too much for any one person to bear. Friends, lovers, myself.

That's when I found it. A true love. A savior, really. Something that finally washed off the dishonesty I'd been dressing myself up in every day.

Nihilism.

People hear the word and think: life is meaningless, so why try, why care, why love, why change. A shrug dressed up as a worldview. I agree that life has no pre-assigned, inherited meaning. But I've come to believe nihilism is permission to do all of those things anyway.

Meaning, I've found, is usually what stops us.

Humans have spent thousands of years trying to manufacture meaning. Gods. Destinies. Soulmates. Legacies. None of it was ever there. Not built in. Not hiding somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

Somewhere, I've always known this. I think that's why I've always stood at an angle. From the moment I could form a coherent thought, I've thought about how absurd being alive is. How none of it is fixed in place. How it's all made up. We spend our lives in stasis. Living by the rules everyone decided were the least offensive.

Living at this angle doesn't make me special. No. Most days, if anything, I wish I stood on the same plane as everyone else. That the truth, the logic, the secrets, weren't all glaring at me, begging to be acknowledged. People would probably like me better that way.

But nihilism has offered me a freedom that meaning never could. No rulebook means no rule-breaking. I wasn't sentenced to be, forever, the child adults seemed to hate, the girl who did those things, or the woman who might do them again. I could start over any time. Change my mind on a whim. Decide, on any given Tuesday, what counted as meaningful and what didn't.

You might be thinking that sounds like the ideology of someone who isn't accountable. I hope you don't misunderstand me. Deciding what gets to have meaning and what doesn't has made me more accountable, not less.

I made a mistake, I did a wrong thing. Acknowledging that didn't have to mean I was an irredeemable broken mess. (Though I spent much of my life believing I was.) No. It was simply a call to look at my own actions with some compassion for who they affected, and some understanding for why that choice was made.

If my transgressions didn't mean anything permanent about who I was, I had the freedom to actually become someone better. I still dissect things, I've never known how not to. A gift of this curse, I suppose. But I've decided I won't let the dissection take over my life anymore. I won't let it be a strike on my permanent record.

These days I approach things with the curiosity of a toddler who's just found a roly poly. Poking it. Prodding it. Watching, fascinated, whether it curls into a tight little ball or unfurls and scurries off. Either outcome is equally interesting to me. Neither one ruins my day. It's a simple curiosity, without the compulsion to turn it into a verdict about who I am.

I'm not claiming to have this perfected, for what it's worth. Sometimes I let my demons off their chain for fun. Sometimes they slip my grip without an invitation at all. I've made peace with that too.

If I'm cursed to be cursed, shouldn't I embrace it? Gallivanting around pretending to be someone free of it just made me sticky. Not the saccharine kind of sticky, like the sweet taste of honey stuck to your lips after you've licked the spoon clean. The other kind. The kind you can't wait to wash off.

If I'm going to be washed off eventually anyway, I don't want it to be for pretending to be a kind of sticky I'm not.