Every Enemy Wears Your Face

How many people are you angry at right now? An ex, a boss, the friend who stopped texting, the country you don't recognize anymore? And the harder question: how many of them are actually you?

When you identify an enemy, you're usually angry at yourself. Every person you can't stand could be a mirror you haven't recognized yet. You take the thing you hate about your behavior, cowardice or a need, and you find someone to hang it on. They get to be the devil. You get to stay clean.

Because the alternative is unbearable: if you don't find the devil, you have to turn inward. And turning inward is the one move nobody volunteers for. Easier to keep a nemesis on staff.

It runs both ways. You are the villain in someone else's story right now, in something you don't know is being told and will never get to answer.

Each one of us will be the enemy in someone's story at some point. Most of us earned the part by being a convenient mirror, not by doing anything at all.

Real harm exists, to be clear. Hitler was not a projection. Some people will hurt you on purpose and mean it, and the right response is to get away from them. But you rarely meet that person. Mostly you meet yourself, wearing someone else's face, and you call it betrayal.

Again, the same trick runs in reverse, and we like that version even better. Instead of pinning the badness on someone else, you set your misery down somewhere safe. "The situation did this to me! The job! The city! The asshole who won't text back!"

You can't be the victim of a club you keep paying dues to. If you wanted out, you'd be out. So why are you still here? Because you're not trapped, you're enrolled. The renewal goes through every month because some part of you keeps signing the form.

It shows up in smaller places too, dressed better. Watch how people give advice. Most of it has nothing to do with you. It's the giver acting out a fear about a choice they'd never make themselves—and calling the performance concern. Someone once told me not to get a tattoo I planned. What he meant was that he was too scared to ever get one, and watching me go through with it made his own fear loud. That's his fear, projected onto me.

There's a kind of advice that does the opposite. It holds a mirror up and asks for nothing back. It doesn't need you to pick what the advisor would have picked. It shows you yourself and then steps out of the way. That is about as close to love as advice gets. I've handed out the bad kind more times than I'd like. When advice is bad, it's rarely malice. Usually it's lack of self-awareness. The person hasn't learned yet how to want nothing from your decision.

The cruelest version is the one we run on people who can't help themselves. Some limitations don't show. A person can be missing emotional tools the way someone else is missing the use of their legs. Because you can't see the lack, you read it as a choice. You decide they're hurting you on purpose. They're not. It's a disability that happens to be emotional—a different ability, if you want to be generous about it. It steers their behavior the same way a physical one would.

The catch is that an invisible limit is invisible to its owner too. The emotionally disabled person is in a wheelchair but can't see the wheelchair. So even when you wish to help, you can only help if they want it and can see it. Otherwise you reach for the handles of a chair they swear isn't there, and they yell, "Don't touch the fucking wheelchair!" There should be an emotional disability granted by the state—reserved parking spot and all.

Here's the part you won't like: you have one too. You've been in a wheelchair this whole time, you can't see it, and the moment someone reaches for your handles, you do the same thing they did, only quieter. What wheelchair.

Strip it all back. The enemies, the victims, the frightened advice, the invisible wheelchairs. Underneath are people, other minds you'll never fully reach, that you keep coating in your fear and anger and want because that's easier than seeing them straight.

Relationships are the canvas we play our traumas out on. It's how we heal, and it's the point of being alive. We're painting our face onto everyone in the room.

The work, if there is any, is learning to wipe it off and look at who has been standing there the whole time.

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