#54 - Accidentally Rasputining People

The first time I saw the movie Anastasia was in a movie theatre in Paris. The seats were red velvet, there was no popcorn, and looking back it was a seminal moment sheerly because it was my first Meg Ryan movie even if I didn’t know that at the time. I referenced the little bat sidekick Bartok this week and made everyone groan when they realized they too knew exactly what “And I kick her sir,” was from.

But the villain of that movie, Rasputin, would haunt me for years. It got worse when I found out he was a real historical figure, because actually none of the “facts” about him are at all comforting and only increased my belief that he could definitely still be a ghost haunting me. (He sat up during his cremation after the like nine attempts to murder him failed. They baked an arsenic cake and he ate it no problem. Eventually he died from hypothermia after being stabbed, rolled in a carpet, thrown in a freezing river, and shot at by a firing squad. He didn’t drown, or die of wounds, he died from the cold. WHAT!!) Specifically, I always saw him whenever I closed my eyes in the shower. Like, every single time, for years. It freaked me the fuck out, so I stopped closing my eyes when I was washing my hair—and actually still forget to close them sometimes. His rotted little animated (and then more real as I found pictures, which again, not helpful!) face would pop up, I would get scared, rinse, repeat.

I told a bunch of friends this in college as like a silly little haha what-a-weirdo-I-am kind of stories. (In trying to remember what fucking context it was in, I realized it was definitely because we had been playing a lot of Just Dance during that time, and Rasputin is the undefeated champ of all Just Dance dances. It’s so fun. They’ve been making that series for well over a decade now, still haven’t beaten it.) I was still seeing his face sometimes, but I wasn’t nine years old so it had stopped being such a jump scare at that point.

One of them later told me that he had started appearing to her—I had passed on my shower demon entirely by accident.

After that, I started referring to my not-so-on-purpose influence of others as having “rasputined” them. (Mostly this has to do with vocal tics and getting songs stuck in their heads.) But recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of influence—beyond how that word has now been so thoroughly co-opted by peer-to-peer marketing that it almost induces an automatic eye roll response.

It’s so easy to be influenced by others. (I mean, duh, it’s literally why that form of marketing is such a boon for advertisers, though I don’t see it lasting forever because it used to work because we thought these were cool girls and we wanted to get the same products for the proximity to coolness, now it’s just a bunch of people parodying each other—however untintentionally—and shilling and we don’t trust them for a second soooo idk castles crumble blah blah blah.) But I don’t want to be the one dragging everyone else around me down when it comes to my weird shit that’s happening in my brain. And when it comes to anxiety in particular, I don’t want to accidentally splash everyone with my anxiety—not because I don’t deserve comfort, but because I know the storm is only a danger if other people paddle out into it. I am the ocean. I am not going to drown in my own waves, I just have to let them run their course, ideally in deeper waters and away from the shore.

And it’s not that I don’t want to be a burden. I actually don’t believe that humans can be burdens—I think that’s a fundamentally flawed way of seeing ourselves and one that only really exists inside of a capitalistic landscape that requires measurable output from participants—but I don’t want to feel like a burden to others when the problems are not theirs to solve. I don’t want to rasputin people with my bullshit that they can’t help with. Real problems? Absolutely. But feeling a little funky about the interaction I had at a bodega because I’m stuck in a mode of over-analyzing is not a real problem. It’s not something anyone else can comfort me through, because I don’t actually need to do more than a ‘lil self-soothing about imagined slights. I just need to get over it.

My attachment style? Anxious!

The solution? Not asking for reassurance all the time!

Has this worked? Kinda, yeah!

The alternative is to constantly hit people up for what amounts to compliment sessions that can’t penetrate through my anxiety because they’re not the actual solution. It’s weird, it’s like sitting in a soaking tub full of comfort and love but wearing water-repellent clothes. Nothing’s getting through, no one is in the appropriate setting, it’s sloughing right off and creating a mess all over the floor to clean up later.

I’ve been thinking a lot about reverse-manifestation, or what happens when you get fixated on what you don’t want to happen. If that’s taking up more mental energy and space than the positives, it’s so much more likely that the thing I’ve been trying to avoid is going to happen. Like, if manifestation works, why would the negative version not follow the same principles?

Anxiety is mean and tells me that by focusing on a problem ahead of time, I can “solve” it. But you can’t solve for love. Love isn’t a math problem, you don’t put in good deeds and add up jokes and multiply them by factors of care to determine a score. Love is all the shit in between! And if I was going into every relationship I was ever trying to forge with the idea that I could make them love me, or leaning into the safety mechanism of creating empirical evidence as to why someone should love me, it was never allowing for the natural evolution. Also, people don’t like desperate energy, it makes everyone uncomfortable. And I feel like my energy throughout my 20s was so fucking frantic, just the constant equivalent of slamming into rooms with wide eyes and looking around for someone to help with whatever problem I was imagining. Y’know, like the Kool-Aid Man, but the red stuff is pure “please don’t leave me” energy in liquid form. No one’s favorite thing to drink! (Has this metaphor gotten gross enough yet?)

In my attempts to understand my anxiety, I got really good at articulating it, which has the unintended effect of making it seem rational and real when I explained it. Just constantly rasputtining my fears onto others. But anxiety is often not real in terms of what it assumes it’s keeping you safe from, and I don’t actually need concessions or special treatment. I think I’m much more responsive to “shit or get off the pot” handling rather than being treated as breakable. I’m…not delicate. I’m smash-and-grab (with the caveat that I cry real easy, but I don’t expect any behavior modifications to occur when/if I start, that’s just my shit, plz ignore and move on). I don’t need kid gloves, in fact, I really think that expecting people to treat me with any kind of accommodation beyond basic human decency is unnecessary.

Now, do we always get basic human decency? No! (And if you spend a lot of time online, I think it gets even easier to assume that there is none left in the world at’tall.) It turns out the best way for me to combat that fear is to just prove it wrong over and over and over again. My friends aren’t all mad at me, they’re not rolling their eyes every single time I text them, and if we drift at some points, that’s okay. Sometimes currents lead out, sometimes they come back together in the future, sometimes you just needed something specific from a passing ship and it was never supposed to be a long-term partnership. Being like the ocean is my ultimate goal, strong enough to hold up ships, soft enough to slip through your fingers.

Anyway, I’m doing my best not to rasputin my friends anymore with my anxiety, specifically any anxiety that has to do with relationships and how I relate to other people. I just have to trust that people will tell me if my behavior is inappropriate or needs to change, and while I don’t have a ton of evidence that other people are always capable of holding those tough conversations, I also have to be willing to give my friends feedback in order to establish that this is a thing we can do for/with each other. Not in a “do this or I’m walking away forever” way, just in a normal friendships should have boundaries way. (I feel like online discourse around what we owe each other as friends has really warped the very natural ebb and flow of friendships (Also! Stop ratting people’s venting sessions about their friends out online!! It’s my least favorite new TikTok harbinger of doom, “If you’re name is Alyssa and you have a birthday this weekend, just know that Jill and Maddy don’t really want to go.” Like!!! Jill and Maddy deserve to shit-talk in peace, they actually probably don’t hate Alyssa at all this is a very natural thing to do and doesn’t make anyone evil?? Surveillance culture trickle-down is my LEAST favorite kind of trickle-down!) and I’m trying to remember that ~discourse is often the most flattened version of the human experience and an area in which people can apply academic-sounding language as a rationalization for their shitty behaviors.) See the good! Recognize that everyone is an individual with a complicated past and we’re all bringing everything with us all the time and that’s okay and beautiful! Bond with the bodega guy by paying in cash for a week straight until he likes you enough to give you limes for free sometimes after you explain that you like to make your Diet Cokes slightly fancy and he seems tickled by that notion!

Seeking out the positives, the things that I bring to situations rather than worrying about all the reasons I shouldn’t bother showing up in the first place, is the way forward for me. Bringing up my fears just makes everyone around me fearful of things they never would have thought about otherwise, and it’s not fair to make a bunch of my friends shower with their eyes wide open the whole time.

« Plucky movie narrator voice » Anyway, that’s the story of how a 20th-century Russian mystic blood healer helped me solve my anxious attachment style.