Agency & Apology

Is everything actually your fault?

In the last months I could still make major changes or additions to my first nonfiction book, The Möbius Book, I realized I had omitted an important scene—a brief but impactful incident that happened between me and another character in the book when I was 31.¹

By the time I corrected this oversight, my friends who appear in the book had already read the manuscript, and it had even gone out to a couple writers for possible blurbs, but I still had a little time to work these new pages into the text.

A few weeks later I was talking with my friend Sara, and when I mentioned having added a scene to the book, she asked me what it was about. I was surprised by how difficult it was to get the words out—the hesitating, the throat clearing— even with her, one of my closest and dearest friends. That discomfort is less surprising to me now; I had avoided writing that scene until the last possible moment because it troubled me so much my stomach still turns when I think of it.

“I can’t remember if I ever told you about this?”

No, she said, I absolutely hadn’t told her, and I soon realized I hadn’t told any of my friends, not a single one, but I had written about it in my journal and I’d sent a detailed email to the other person involved at the time, both which helped me confirm I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (In Beauty it is finished), 1983-2002, detail (via Gagosian)

I’m not going to summarize the omitted scene here because it needs the context of the rest of the book, but I will say it involves what I think of as a self-betrayal on my part, and blatently controlling behavior on someone else’s part.

Now that I’ve written something into a book that I had once tried to forget entirely, it will soon be transformed from something I tried to forget into a public artifact, impossible to retract. Knowing this, I decided to get more accustomed to the story’s existence by telling several friends. More than one of them told me that some version of this had happened to her, too, and immediately I was outraged for her in a way that I hadn’t been able to be outraged for myself back then. One of them said she’d never seen such a thing described in a book, though she knew it was common, and while I’m sure someone, somewhere has recounted her version of this story, I’ve also never come across it.

As I was telling my friend Avery about the scene and the email I wrote afterwards, I described my former self as “an apologist” for the other person’s behavior. The email, in particular, made it painfully clear to me the lengths I’d gone to in order to excuse something I must have known, on some level, was simply hostile and harmful.

“What’s the difference between an apologist and a victim?” she asked, and though I’d never put it exactly like that, I knew I’d been asking myself this same question for a long time.

When something awful happens to you (or, put another way, when you’re the “victim” of some kind of mistreatment or manipulation) I do not want to accept that you must also forfeit any attempt to understand what was going on with your agency in that moment. Of course there are situations where a person’s victim-hood is total or near-total, but what happened to me was not such a case. I wanted (and I still want) to reserve the right to be able to understand what forces were at work within me that worked against my ability to be an advocate for myself, or to even see the situation clearly.

The Möbius Book also includes a long piece of fiction (and no, it’s not auto-fiction nor a fictionalized retelling of the nonfiction) and on that side of the story a character says that harming someone is one of the surest ways you can become permanent in another person. I agree with this, up to a point, and certainly that’s one of the issues the book is trying to understand in general, but also—fuck that! Who needs every person who’s ever harmed you living in your brain rent-free?

So, what is the difference between an apologist and a victim? Of course it depends on the situation. And of course a person can be both. But I think when you’ve been in any way victimized by something or someone, there can sometimes be a utility in being able to look back at the situation and recognize the way you may have participated in your own harm, even though this may mean experiencing anger or disappointment with the person that you were in that moment.

But both Avery and Sara and other friends bristled at me describing myself as an apologist, which, according to Oxford is “a person who offers an argument in defense of something controversial.”

Was I an “apologist” or was I just a woman who had been socialized all my life to accept this kind of mistreatment as something I deserved? Was I an apologist or was I, as Sara pointed out to me, simply unwilling or otherwise unable to accept the cost that completely objecting to the situation would have cost me? Again, I do think a person can play concordant active and passive roles in so many incidents in our lives, incidents that may seem, from the outside, to be simpler than they are. But I still wonder if claiming the purity of victim-hood flattens and possibly falsifies the narrative.

Derek Parfit standing on his head. (via the Estate of Derek Parfit)

The same months I’ve been thinking about the agency inherent in apology, I’ve been re-acquainting myself with the work and life of Derek Parfit, one of the most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, whose work helped me tremendously in the past.² His writing about making ethical decisions and the malleability of our identities through time has had a dramatic impact and far-reaching implications, at least within academic/philosophical circles, and among curious laypeople like me.

The very idea of agency is almost entirely irrelevant within the Parfitian framework of why we make the choices we make; like many philosophers, Parfit didn’t believe in free will. Our lives are essentially set before our births, a predetermined course that we more or less witness until death, a truth that, if you accept it, has a complicated ramifications on many ethical concerns—such as punishment, blame, and a host of moral issues. If you’re new to this kind of philosophy or if you can’t get past the disbelief in free will, Parfit might seem like a fatalist, someone who might conclude that nothing matters. On the contrary; his last book, a thousand pages long, was titled On What Matters and he was far from a fatalist. I’m not going to try to sum up Parfit’s positions here, nor am I applying his theories directly to the question at hand, but rather they’ve provided an un-ignorable backdrop to all this reckoning with apology, agency, and afterwardsness.

My friends repeatedly tried to soothe me when I said I was still angry at myself for how I reacted/excused/abetted this other person’s bad behavior. But I felt if I accepted their soothing then I would have to see myself as more of a victim of the situation, a victim of my socialization, a victim of society itself or perhaps just this person in particular.

I don’t disagree with the Parfitian idea that both I and the other person involved in this almost-omitted scene were both guided by forces that were to some degree totally outside of our control.³ But I do keep wondering about how any of this applies to those people who seem to defy their contexts with clarity and audacity. Some rare people, despite their socialization and despite their contexts and despite their lives, are able to radically stand up for what they believe to be true.

Emma Goldman is the ultimate example of this kind of person. Though she came of age in the late 19th century in a traditionally patriarchal family, she seemed to have totally transcended her context to become one of the most important anarchist thinkers and activists of all time. Perhaps she had some ideal mix of rebellion, outrage, and stubbornness in her DNA, yet I know that even she was still shaped by the world she lived within, the people she encountered, the books she read, the pains she felt. (This is part of the reason there’s a very different Emma Goldman in my novel, Biography of X. Context always plays a massive part in creating a person; since the novel alters history and alters her context, a different version of Goldman emerges.)

In describing myself as apologist of someone else’s destructive behavior, it may be true that I’ve been trying to give that former self more resolve and intention than she had. Perhaps this is just another kind of self-soothing or sugar-coating, the particular way I’ve devised to feel able to bear such a memory.

But the question that still remains is not why wasn’t I as strong-willed and clear-eyed as Goldman, but rather why did I accept a situation that I knew, even then, that I should have ardently opposed? I still do not feel that “socialization,” powerful as it may be, is a sufficient answer, yet perhaps it’s more upsetting to imagine what kind of answer I would be willing to accept.

1. I’m using the terms “scene” and “character” but I mean a literal event and a literal person.

2. The biography by David Emmons was amazing, as recommended to me by Henry Oliver.

3. If I was a victim of my context, so were they.