https://griefbacon.substack.com/p/independence

Independence is a shitty thing to celebrate, even if America weren’t a giant sinking plague ship. I’ve spent a lot of time, like a lot of people, trying to figure how to do love, how to get it right, whatever it is, living up close with other people, being wanted, being loved, the negotiation of a human condition that asks to somehow square desire and comfort together into the same small boxed equation. Almost uniformly, these conversations come back to independence. To be loved, one must be self-sufficient, whole in oneself, needless. Neediness is something anyone can smell coming off of you like the stink of unwashed clothes; love is guaranteed only by not needing love, maybe by not even wanting it, by turning and walking fast in the other direction. These same ideas are the ones that say that the last thing anyone wants is to be obligated. Obligation is the great looming monster, the death of both desire and love, a way to make people hate you by needing them. Obligation, this line of thinking says, bricks up the windows of love’s house, turning it into a trap, suffocating anything that lives inside. People should be with you because they want to be with you, show up because they want to show up, be kind because they want to be kind; everything should be done because it’s spontaneous and joyful, because no one asked for it, because no one needs it, as though the whole long line-strung story of a relationship from one impulse to another could be the feeling of cutting class and going to the beach on a beautiful day. If we could require nothing from one another, then we could all exist as pure desire. The idea that you should need nothing from anyone, that it’s actually doing people a favor to be as absent as possible from them, that even when in a relationship people should have separate lives, separate needs, separate means of fulfilling those needs, at face value makes sense. No one wants to be one more thing on a list of errands; no one feels romantic about a reminder that you have to take the trash down to the curb. Grabbing onto this line of thinking like the stretched-out rope from a life preserver, I used to believe that if I was cruel to and distant from people, they were most likely to love me. I assumed that the greatest form of self-actualization and self-love was being accountable to no one and asking no one to be accountable to me. There was a time when I truly believed that keeping myself walled off from needing anything was lovable or even possible. It maybe isn’t even necessary to say that this time was probably the neediest and least lovable I have ever been in my life. But I believed it was independence, as shining and grand as a flag in the smoke-flavored air on a holiday.