So, there’s this woman I know. She’s more acquaintance than friend. I’ll call her Georgie. This is not her real name. Georgie is an…acquired taste. She believes what she believes and believes that it’s the truth. For instance, it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t know if the willow trees alongside the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. were cut down with permission or without. She believes they were cut down because the Orange Fool, as she calls the current President of the United States, doesn’t care if he has permission. So, it makes sense to her that he does whatever he wants, everyone else be damned.
I’ve glimpsed a little of Georgie’s personality, but I was curious to know more. On a recent reconnaissance mission, we meet for an afternoon cocktail at a bar on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. Georgie’s a smoker so we sat outside at a café table after confirming she would be allowed to smoke. The manager on duty brought out an ashtray and gave us both a conspiratorial wink as he placed it in the center of our table. A comrade-in-smoking, I thought to myself. And don’t bombard me in the comments section for the name and location of this rule-breaking restaurant. I’m not going to tell you.
Thankfully, the day we meet up is beautiful. A rare cool summer afternoon. While waiting for our drink—Georgie an Aperol Spritz and me a French 75—Georgie reveals to me, rather freely, that she looks at the world through anger-colored glasses.
“What color is anger?” I ask her. I need her to elaborate.
She thinks for a few seconds then a smile relaxes her face. “It’s a murky greenish-gray. Like…a cloudy eye. But it’s crystal clear.” She’s eerily convincing. I nod, internally debating the conundrum of murky and crystal clear. “And sometimes, if I’m particularly angry, there are toxic-yellow flares—brain cataracts, I call them—that obscure my thinking.” I couldn’t help but appreciate her metaphorical prowess.
She further explained that she knows she’s probably going to get angry when she reads the current headlines on any given day, admitting that sometimes she reads them for the express purpose of doing just that. She said she rarely reads the articles attached to those headlines, choosing instead to stay uninformed.
She then tells me she recently began to feel ignorant. Not from a lack of higher education. Georgie has a college degree, and I personally wouldn’t consider her ignorant and I tell her so. She clarifies that she feels ignorant due to her lack of knowledge regarding current events in the country, the world, which she avoids by not reading those above-mentioned articles. She does not like feeling stupid, her word not mine, but she has chosen willful ignorance. And you know what, I understand that. Sometimes knowing can wreak havoc with my own anxiety.
“I have somehow found comfort in my anger,” she says to me while lighting another Marlboro Light. “I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t angry. When I wasn’t playing some sort of victim role of my own creation.”
I ask Georgie to explain how she how she is playing a victim of her own creation.
“I’ve spent a great deal of my life believing that my perceptions about something are the truth.” She takes a drag from the cigarette. It feels like a moment of deliberate pause instead of a need for nicotine. “I don’t have conversations where I seek to understand why someone believes what he believes.” I notice the change in her body language as her hands become more animated. I hope the ashes don’t hit me as she gestures. The cigarette smoke spirals away as she exhales. “I don’t try to understand the why of the differences. I avoid them. Yet I have no problem recounting the actions of this person or that family member to likeminded friends with a woe-is-me tone in my voice.” She shrugs and looks at me matter-of-factly. “It’s victim-y. I can hear it. I can feel it. But I don’t stop doing it.”
I ask her to connect the dots between the ignorance and the victimhood. But before she can, a man walks by us playing music loudly on his phone, filling the world with his choice of music. Georgie turns to look at him as he passes, staring like she’s trying to burn a hole through the back of his head. As she returns to me, I can barely discern, “I hate people.”
Georgie fascinates, and annoys, me. But I don’t disagree with her. People are awful. Especially those who think the world belongs to only them and their iPhones.
She took a drink then began to connect the dots.
“I live with a lot of fear. Fear of the truth especially. I realize anger is a byproduct of that fear. And now I feel like I’m allowing my willful ignorance to mix with the fear and increase my anger exponentially.” Here she turned her face away from me and sighed deeply. “I don’t even know if I’m making sense.” She ashes the cigarette in the ashtray but doesn’t wait for me to respond. She makes eye contact and holds it. “I have lived with my fear and my anger for so long that I’m comfortable there. It’s safe. I know how to navigate the world.” She takes a final drag and presses the cigarette into the ashtray. It lies bent atop a bed of gray ash next to its stubbed and crooked sibling. Her exhale dissipates in my direction.
A breeze blows past us in that moment, and the ashes begin to disseminate proving to be as fragile and fleeting as I imagine Georgie to be behind her protective wall.
“I think I’m arrogant.”
She seems proud of this statement. She takes a drink so I do too.
“I think my opinion is the correct opinion.” She lets that gem sit between us. I was nodding at her, a sign that I was listening. But I will admit I was surprised. I wanted to say Really? or Why? but kept my mouth shut. Thankfully, she went on. “I believe I’m a good person. I think about right and wrong, yet I don’t take the time listen to another person’s point of view nor do I create opportunities to do so.” She contemplated another cigarette but seemed to decide against it. “I struggle with empathy. I’m a rule follower and I don’t understand why people can’t follow the rules. I don’t like living in the gray area. It makes me feel out of control. Being angry and fearful seems black and white to me.” She absentmindedly took the previously avoided cigarette from her black-lacquered cigarette case. “I struggle,” she said, then lit the cigarette.
The conversation with Georgie tapered off after a bit more bitching and moaning, a little more venting. She seemed to have done what she admitted she does. She played the victim. Before she left our table, she gave me a look that all but asked me to console her. I did.
After I paid the bill, the waitress took away the empty glasses and the ashtray. Anyone passing by at that moment would have thought I had been there alone. All traces of Georgie were gone.
I strolled along the sidewalk, contemplating what had been shared, and my thoughts about what I’d heard. My ear locked on the sound of singing. I saw three street performers ahead of me. One with a guitar. There’s a hat on the sidewalk at their feet. The closer I got the clearer the harmonies became. I recognized the lyrics: “I went sky diving / I went Rocky Mountain climbing.” I knew the song—“Live Like You Were Dying” by Tim McGraw. Isn’t it funny how the Universe works? Giving you something you didn’t even know you needed? I hadn’t heard that song in years. And I didn’t stop to listen to it then. But I could still hear the singers belting the chorus as I turned the corner to walk in another direction.
I share some of Georgie’s traits. I can be sullen. Why am I saying, “can be?” I am. And my expectations run high. The political divide also makes me angry. And there are things from my past that I know I should let go of. And my own fears make me crazy. I don’t want to be like Georgie. Sure, I think she’s a good person. But I also think she’s stuck, unable to move forward. Maybe by choice.
The first thing I did when I got home that afternoon was listen to “Live Like You Were Dying.” (If you don’t know the song, give it a listen. I’ve linked it here.) Anyway, I thought about how difficult it must be for Georgie to be Georgie. I thought about my own issues. Silly, most of them. I smiled when the song’s key changed and Tim soared right along with it. I thought about the man in the song choosing to live. Then I sent my sister a text asking if we could talk.
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