Baker 1 Negative Capability: I like you; I like you not.

The poet John Keats is famous for believing that there are no definite answers in life. To him, everything was a beautiful mystery, a crashing together of separate ideas with no prevailing ideology. What some would call indecision, he would call negative capability1. As a person whos known for her dazzling ability to avoid giving a straight answer or engaging in anything resembling conflict, Id prefer to call myself negatively capable, not spineless. However, the people in my life would much prefer if I could at least be somewhat positively capable. So after much mocking and provocation, I shared an opinion. I told my friend Natalie that I didnt like her boyfriend. The problem here was that I had set a precedent for ambiguity and understanding and shattering it caused a bit of a shock. Id spent hours sitting in Applebees every week with Natalie and Kevin, just to hang out. I was always a bit of a reluctant third wheel in their relationship. Theyd call me up before they went to the movies or when they were bored sitting around Kevins apartment and insist that I join them. Exhausted from protesting, Id always concede. They both got a certain kind of joy out of getting people to do what they wanted. My patience with Kevin, however, had begun to wear thin, and Natalie and I ended up spending a lot of time alone in different IHOPs. We spent most of our time talking about their relationship, because I was almost as much a part of it as they were. Shed demanded before they ever started dating that I be honest with her and tell her if I ever thought there was a problem

1 At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.- Keats to his brother.

Baker 2 with their relationship. I can see now that she allowed me such freedom because she was counting on my commitment to withholding judgment for the sake of the benefit of the doubt. After her many insistences, I tried dropping a few hints here and there. Shed sit back from her plain crepe under a mountain of whipped cream and exclaim for the thousandth time that she was so happy that all of her friends really liked Kevin, and Id respond that of course he was great, but he was a little condescending2. Shed say that he was just joking. Once I tried to let her know that all of our friends had at different times expressed that he generally made them feel as if we were all some sort of subhuman frivolous excuse for mammals by telling her that I didnt really feel that he respected me very much. She just stared back at me, eyes turned to stone in determination, and spent the rest of the day interjecting the conversation with rebuttals like, But once Kevin let you borrow a DVD. That kind of shows that he respects you, right? She was so hellbent on defending him that I decided to give up and continue telling her that I supported their relationship entirely. I took comfort in assuming that there was a possibility that she was right, and I was all wrong. Then Kevin pushed me to my empathetic breaking point. Keats posits that the truly empathetic intellectual is comfortable in uncertainty, so Keats may have been disappointed in me, but my love of compassion and understanding is exactly what poisoned me against this guy. I could tolerate anything but an openly provocative, overly confident, judgmental, chaos-loving pretty boy. Where I tried to listen to and understand people, he got off on finding ways to make them look stupid. His shining accomplishment was his ability to make people doubt themselves and agree with him.
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He was known to pat her on the head and tell her that she was still pretty any time he thought she had done something stupid (several times an hour). He also had a habit of explaining basic concepts to people who didnt ask in his best school-teacher-to-kindergartener-eating-crayons voice.

Baker 3 I knew it was over the day he claimed there were hummingbirds in the projector. Our sign language club had disbanded for the night and I was leaning against the back wall while Natalie flirted and chatted with everyone still scattered around taking care of last minute business. She was particularly enthralled by a tall blond boy in a suit when I decided to try to be somewhat friendly and stop sulking by the wall. As I picked my way through the tightly arranged chairs I heard him ask Do you heart that noise? No one past the age of seven is particularly flabbergasted by the function of a projector, so no one answered him. Or if they did, I didnt hear it. I had just walked up behind him when I heard him inform everyone that, Its because the projector runs on hummingbirds. Their wings power it. I spun right back around and left the room. That was all I ever needed to know about him. Everyone in that conversation was damned. Imagine if one of them excitedly asked, Wait, what, really? Just because they were taken aback or trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. Hed tear them apart for being an idiot. Or if they tried to contradict him, I could already see the condescending sneer, the no-shit-Sherlock burning from his blue eyes. That was the first time we talked to Kevin, and Id heard all I needed to to know: that he loved conflict, discomfort, having the upper hand. Now Im known for having a flair for the dramatic, but my name isnt Cassandra3 for no reason. I can scream doom into the clearest blue sky, and as everyones eyes roll, the heavens will open up and pour before theyve made it full circle.

Cassandra was a prophetess in Greek mythology. A doomed one. Apollo gave her the power to see the future, but not the power to convince anyone to believe her. Essentially all she was good for was screaming Watch out! before someone came running around the corner to stab you while you explained to her that she was being ridiculous.

Baker 4 A week later and my friend and this boy were inseparable. They started dating and slowly everyone around them got tired of him arguing that abused children were really to blame for their own problems or that anyone who told him he might want to stop using so many racial slurs was violating his right to free speech4. Id known from the moment I met him that he enjoyed offending and provoking people, but he could always find a way to explain his reasoning. My negative capability allowed me to find a way to understand him, despite all of his abrasive opinions, so I always hoped that he was just one of those insecure bullies who took their pain out on other people because they felt so bad about themselves. Then, one day after being insulted for trying to congratulate him on his graduation5, I was riding in the backseat of his truck with Natalie next to him in the front seat. He was in a particularly bad mood, and this always brought out his cruel antagonism. He looked up in his rear view mirror, met my eyes, and told me that people were just his rag dolls. He manipulated them because he could, because he enjoyed it. He told me this friend-to-friend, because he trusted me. He wasnt actually messing with me, he was just being honest. Despite his general belief in the inferiority of all other people, he couldnt help but like me. He didnt want to, and he still didnt really respect me. But, he gave me more compliments than anyone I knew and always laughed at my jokes. He made a special point to listen to me and talk to me, because he genuinely did like me. It just so happened that every compliment came with a stinging put down. His fondness for me didnt outweigh his obsession with superiority, and I was one of the few people Id ever seen him treat kindly.

The right to free speech protects you from punishment by the government, not from anyone calling you out on being a dumbass. 5 This is not unlike the time we baked him a birthday cake, and he made a long performance of gagging over it and complaining that if this was his birthday celebration, he was leaving. Later he told us he genuinely liked the cake.

Baker 5 Our relationship had alternated between him throwing me a birthday party and him being too ashamed to actually admit that we were friends because I didnt meet his standards. Sometimes he would look at me and let me know that I was the funniest, most intelligent person in the room, and other times he would look at me like I was just incompetent and common. He was all ambivalence. Shocking acts of undue kindness followed by humiliating shut downs. Id never asked a single person so many times if we really were friends, and every time he looked me in the eye and promised that we were. So admitting that I didnt like him freed me from being smothered and yanked around, but lost me two friends6. I said it at a moment of unbelievable stress, and I often wish I could take it back, just as often as I wish Id said it every day before that day. Being friends with him was burying me in uncertainty. One moment I hated him and the next I adored him. I broke and made a decision because I felt like it was the right thing to do. But there was no real resolution: I didnt like him and I didnt not like him. Living with an absolute answer is so much more restrictive than enduring a beautiful uncertainty.

Natalie insisted that we would still be friends, but we never really recovered from my admission.