The Self-Sabotage Connoisseur

Issue 164

New York 2015

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Self-sabotage is the most efficient type of sabotage. It is streamlined, precise, and justice comes without any delay: doing a job yourself, as it’s said, is sometimes the best way. And with self-sabotage, the role of defendant, prosecutor, and judge fuse into one very efficient body. In this endlessly repetitive game, the jury also deliberates before the crime is even committed. There’s no gap between the commission of the act and the consequence of the act. On this subject, I am cocky, surefooted, a little smug, not afraid to boast, because I consider myself a true connoisseur of the self-sabotage arts, understanding its nuances and textures and complexities with the same refinement that an elderly, wised French sommelier approaches a sip of wine.

If you’re in the self-sabotage business, and you’re feeling particularly grandiose, you should have a working definition of Greek Tragedy. My definition requires only two steps: a character acts to prevent some consequence, but that preventive act ends up triggering the consequence. This is the two-step shuffle that gives us a few thousand years of irony and, presumably, a description of the phone call that you were supposed to but didn’t make. Something is going to happen, you don’t want it to happen, you try to stop it from happening, yet, now, it is here.

To notice an uncomfortable but all-too-familiar sensation of recognition along your spine at the discussion of tragedy is perfectly natural, as the contemporary world has the peculiar attribute of being a tragic world without any conception of the tragic. You do, in fact, hear pessimism today—about relationships, with humanity, on the day-to-day toil of life. And you do hear nihilism today, with politics and culture as the main culprits. But neither of those attitudes are remotely close to tragic, as there’s no sensitivity about impermanence, nor any recognition of beauty—an essential ingredient in tragedy—with those postures. Pessimism and nihilism also forgo the potential for irony, that most redeeming tragic quality. Nevertheless, at its most exalted, self-sabotage does at least begin to approach the tragic—and if I’m going to have foibles, I do prefer them to be literary.

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Once you stop and examine the behavior, there’s something fundamentally peculiar about not listening to yourself. When you want to but don’t do something—who exactly isn’t listening? To say I’ve been trying to go to the gym, or I’ve been wanting to write more often, or I need to stop all this murdering, is to speak in a dissociative manner, as if your body is quarreling with itself, though it somehow sounds perfectly natural. It is difficult to believe in your own sanity while also noticing that you ignore your own advice, despite the commonplace fact that nearly everyone, at times, struggles to do what they set out to do.

Although if you’re a true expert, a true virtuoso of self-sabotage, you’ll far surpass the middling, pathetic junior failures who simply don’t complete tasks—you will achieve the more exalted state of someone who actively sabotages their own desires, someone who puts the villain in your life right inside your body.

I will call her; there’s no reason to call her; I should have called her. I will talk with him about it; maybe I’ll bring it up later; I should have done it yesterday. Tomorrow, without fail, I will send that email; tomorrow, yes, I’ll send that email; tomorrow, undoubtably, I will send that email.

On these occasions, the real subject is mutiny. Part of you wants to comply, is willing to obey; but part of you, alas, is a bit rebellious. Perhaps there’s comfort in knowing that, yes, you do contain multitudes, and that isn’t so unusual: look at all the habit tracking apps, the progress measuring tools, the internet blocking timers, the accountability groups—it seems that you must self-sabotage to be a fully realized and balanced human in the contemporary world.

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And you’ll certainly experience a vertiginous sensation if you spend a few minutes reviewing the research on split-brain patients, which is one place that you might look if you’re contemplating the mysteries of self-sabotage, or trying to understand the various selves within you. When the corpus callosum is severed between the brain’s right and left hemisphere, patients who are otherwise perfectly functional in the world can express two personalities: with different perceptions, preferences, and desires coming from each hemisphere. They can confabulate unknowable facts, or one hand, in extreme cases, can begin to fight against the other hand—which should prompt you to question exactly who you are, as you’re only a procedure away from expressing two competing perspectives about the world. How reliable is the narrator in your mind if just one overly-enthusiastic surgeon can make you, suddenly, have two narrators? With all this it is easy to believe that mutiny is the natural state, with the classic solution—the psychoanalytical solution—describing how little we consciously know, which sounds perfectly reasonable to me. The narrator inside my head is, at best, misleading—much like, incidentally, nearly all narrators.

Although Rebecca West didn’t need any split-brain studies to get there long ago. As usual, she binds the political with the psychological, her words coming in the combustible year of 1942:

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

Thus the stage is forever set for a tragic show, with the protagonist always primed to be the antagonist. All your dreams and plans and aspirations—thwarted, ceased, overlooked, by a villain who has perfect knowledge of the hero. However, perhaps the lens is screwed on backwards in this story, and, in fact, the villain inside you is the one actually following your dreams.

This is one grace that’s worth saving: although your plans might not work out, although you might miss what you’re aiming at, self-sabotage is always successful. To work against yourself and ensure that you’ll miss that deadline or overlook that necessity or forget that friend is to ensure that your actions achieve results. Rather than risking uncertain success—and deal with unknowns, mystery, confusion—you can, instead, relish a very certain failure. Only with self-sabotage are you assured of such great control.