I had a notebook, when I was young, into which I’d copy passages from the books I was reading so that I could go back and study those passages long after the original books had been returned to the library. This notebook was the first secret I ever kept. It lived in a box of old knickknacks in my closet, nestled into my old school notebooks so that any younger siblings who may have stumbled on the box and opened it would lose interest before peering into the only private thing I had.
This notebook didn’t contain anything that anyone else would have considered terribly private, I suppose, but somehow it felt intensely private to me. Somehow those copied passages felt damning in aggregate in a way they’d never felt when scattered amongst their native chapters. Each passage chronicling some fictional character’s patience in the face of terrible mental or physical suffering. Each passage formed a facet of my utterly romanticized vision of what it meant to be Of Good Character.
These fictional people never complained, though they pushed themselves to the very edge of human endurance. They never cried or gave up or backed down or let important things slide no matter how much anguish they were dealing with. And, of course, they always ended up inspiring true and undying devotion in some handsome man or lovely woman in the end.
There’s a reason this stuff is called “fiction.”
In real life, patience comes in fits and starts. In real life, even the most patient person I’ve ever known sometimes felt crushed by the burden he had to bear, even if that was on rare occasion. And in real life, I’m not the most patient person I know, not by a long shot, even though I’ve grown used to people using that word to describe me.
My real life patience failed me today, worn down by one too many betrayals by this stupid body of mine. I wanted to rail at my friends and get the sympathy I couldn’t admit that I craved, but other people were already doing that and things felt too crowded. I wanted to just give in to the hateful fragility that will not loose its hold no matter how many coping mechanisms I try, but I had a couple of things to look forward to that I’d have had to give up if I’d just dropped everything and called it a day.
In real life, patience is noble, but most people just slog through. And so I railed at just the closest of friends, stuck the day through, enjoyed my anticipated evening, and then began coming to terms with the fact that I’m not cut out for this kind of patience, that I’m unskilled at being fragile, that I need an outlet, and that this is the least crowded outlet I know.
By Monday I will have rebuilt my capacity for patience. I’ll have stepped back for a while from the group that has moved from feeling supportive to feeling oppressive. I’ll have read and stared at the wall and written and watched some movies and stared at the wall some more. By Monday I’ll have dug out that old notebook of mine and had a good laugh at the passages my pre-adolescent self thought were so important, so fundamental to character, that they had to be hidden from the prying eyes of the rest of her family.
I truly doubt, though, that I will have inspired the undying devotion of any real-life person by Monday.