I’m Kind of an Asshole

A dialogue

“What if you’re just kind of an asshole?” she interrupts.

I shut my mouth and lean back against the couch. After a few seconds, I start rubbing my thumb across the pillow, flicking the texture one direction, then another. 

“I don’t think people are ever essentially assholes or…whatever the opposite of assholes are. I worry that if I think like, ‘Part of my soul is asshole soul,’ then I’ll sort of let myself off the hook when I do things that my ‘higher self’ knows I shouldn’t do. Like I’m concerned if I think that way then I won’t ever hold myself accountable because I can always appeal to The Asshole Side. 

It reminds me of those obnoxious people who are really just super rude but they always try to excuse it like, ‘Oh, this is just the way that I am. Accept me as I am and get used to it or you’re not my friend or whatever.’” As I say this, I feel a twinge of self-annoyance. Why do I talk about myself as though I think this much about the morality of what I do? All I’ve done this past week is basically sit around.

My therapist crinkles her lips and looks down at the rug. “But what if you’re an asshole sometimes? That’s okay. What’s so bad about that to you?” 

Her voice carried what seemed like annoyance, or maybe a slight desperation. It is not something I can remember hearing from her before. 

“I guess… I mean, shouldn’t I try to be less of an asshole?”

“Well yeah, but that doesn’t mean you won’t still be an asshole. I believe that everyone is an asshole. And that makes it not as bad of a thing.” She catches my eyes slice the clock: 4:58pm. 

“Huh, well if everyone is an asshole, then no one is because the word sort of loses its meaning. It doesn’t separate anyone from anyone else. It’s that, ‘If you’re everywhere, then you’re nowhere’ thing.” I roll my eyes at myself. She looks frustrated. Clearly, I am not addressing what she’s really saying.

“But… I will…think that over.…” I want to understand what she means, but the past hour of introspection has been unusually exhausting. Well, it’s time to go anyways. 

⁂

A few weeks later, I embark in with news. I preemptively cut off her usual So, what are we going to talk about today? 

“Hey, I think maybe I get now what you meant with the whole asshole thing. I didn’t get it at first – well, I mean, I think I get it now, but obviously tell me if this isn’t it – but then something happened, and I think I understand.” 

She smiles and prompts, “Okay.”

“Okay. So, my wife and I were at this get together thing with a friend couple and I was…not totally sober…”  

She laughs in that irony-free, half-rebellious-half-guilty way suburban moms laugh when talking about how much they love wine. I feel lame and also that peculiar security which attends both the self-awareness of lameness and reminders that those around are indeed who you think that they are. 

“Haha I wasn’t too off, but I think it played a role. So, eventually, I asked my wife like, ‘Should we go?’ And I thought I was being discreet and quiet, but pretty much right after we left, she was like, ‘You said that really loudly.’ And oh my god I felt so bad about whether I was rude and I agonized over it for like an entire day. And…”

“Agonized over what?” She did a head tilt.

“Over whether or not I came off really rude! And like I hadn’t had a good time with them! But also, the thing is that it really was time to go. Like the conversation had been really good but then it had sort of fallen off and we had been there for a bit, and it was fun, but I really felt like it was Time to Go. But still, I could have been rude about it. Anyways, it all worked out fine like my wife asked them like, ‘Was Marshall rude?’ And they were like ‘Oh! No. Not at all.’ So, that’s good. 

But the point is that, after all that, I had this thought about how if you are the sort of person who knows when it’s time to go, then you will also likely be abrupt sometimes. Like every good character trait has downsides to it. They may not be as strong as the good parts of it, but still. And I thought about if people were delivering my eulogy at my funeral and they said, ‘Marshall was a guy who knew when it was time to go, but he could be a little abrupt sometimes.’ I would be totally okay with that! Like I think it’s a great thing to be A Person Who Knows When It’s Time to Go. Some people, you know, they just stay forever. And being abrupt, as long as it’s not too often, that’s worth it. So…” I trail off, realizing, as I so often do during these sessions when vomiting inner life, that I had lost myself somewhere along the way. 

Looking off into a void, I finally find the strand. “Ah so…with the asshole thing… Maybe it’s like everyone is an asshole in the sense that their good qualities have like side effects. Is that what you were talking about?”

She raises her chin in a surprised arc and when she brings it back down she says, “Okay, yeah! Hmm... You know, some of the most interesting people I know are the biggest assholes.” 

“Huh. There is a thing about that… Like Steve Jobs? He was such an asshole.”

“Oh yeah, such an asshole. But he was interesting! My issue with not being okay with being an asshole is that, if you aren’t okay with it, then you risk not accepting yourself. And that can be worse than being an asshole.”

A knot of dread forms as my initial objection resurfaces. “Well…” I sigh. “I get what you’re saying, and I think there’s value in that, but don’t you run the risk of excusing your assholery unjustifiably if you think that way about yourself?”

“Yeah, but you run a risk either way. If you always hound yourself about not being better and never say like, ‘I guess I just needed to do that today,’ then you’ll never trust yourself. And people who never trust themselves never overcome their anxieties. Plus, in line with what you said earlier about the side effects of good qualities, people who never trust themselves aren’t as capable of recognizing the tradeoffs of good and bad things as people who do. They obsess over every single little supposedly ‘bad’ thing. They can’t really see the bigger picture.” 

She lets that soak for a few beats before finishing. “So, I don’t think it’s an all or nothing type thing. You kinda have to balance both sides of it. You kinda have to accept that you’re part asshole in order not to be a full asshole.” 

I smirk. “Well then, I guess I’m kind of an asshole.” 

She smirks back. “There you go.”