No Hope, No Harm

o one keeps more than one foot in the present. There’s always some new storm on the horizon– a date, an interview, an argument to contend with– where the other person is an unknown. In hopes of mastering the situation, many choose to rehearse the future; locked in a thousand-yard stare, we predict what our interlocutor might say, do, and feel. Lost in a procession of scenarios, we spend most of our waking hours talking to nothing and no one. Let us call this tendency “social projection”: entering a daydream to better respond to life. It is a mental mechanism to cope with social uncertainty. In social projection, anxieties are manifested so that they may be overcome. They come as bosses, as family members, as prospective paramours– ghostly appartitions of real people. Like the Cottingley Fairies, we superimpose images of others over life, fanciful renderings of what they might do, and we respond as if they’re real. Pull back the curtain, and we’ve only ever been in conversation with ourselves. It’s a thrilling fantasy to be able to say what you mean. Everyone knows it well; winning an argument in the shower is a sublime joy that scarce few get to act upon. Behind opaque glass, spangled with hot droplets, you’re given a private refuge– more importantly, the space to express yourself without consequence. You might worry that they’ve won: after all, you’re the one thinking about it four hours later, naked, muttering under your breath. But you have this moment of quiet triumph, and that’s all that matters. Social ostracism is a primal wound that’s stuck with humanity since its dawn. In vigilance against this outcome, the human ‘sociometer’ is miscalibrated; we tend to believe ourselves less-accepted than we are. Humans are built to catastrophize: if this situation goes badly, everyone will leave me. For fear of drawing the short end of the pottery shard, we try, however possible, to win over the tribe. The knee-jerk reaction is to practice again and again, to train until victory is certain. Left unchecked, this can become rumination: a repetitive, borderline-obsessive thought pattern that unites depression and anxiety in comorbidity. This habit lies somewhere between wishfulfillment and error-correction. Unlike the shower argument, though, social projection is a response to a hypothetical scenario– nothing’s happened yet, nothing but fear. Even so, they come from the same impulse: to make oneself perfect, to represent oneself perfectly. We imagine, in flights of fancy, that we can ‘win’ the social situations we find ourselves in. As if rejection is not only preventable, but unacceptable.

In social projection, the mental images soon stop resembling their real-world counterparts. They fit into the roles we proscribe, distorting them in the process. Like Amigara Fault, the further they burrow into our psyches, the more impossible their dimensions become. With enough time, they emerge on the other side, grotesquely and unrecognizably deformed. Some let their imagination show on their face. I don’t just replay the scenes mentally; there’s a physical aspect as well, a rehearsal before showtime. Reality doesn’t quite melt away, but it blurs at the edges, leaving room for welcome spectres to materialize. Many late November nights, I would stalk the streets of my city awash in a dream, thanking God for the advent of masks to conceal breathless speech. In the eighth grade, I repented on my livingroom couch. Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite strummed softly into the pitch-black living room. I was taken somewhere nice. I imagined, for a moment, speaking to she who wronged me. We’d been here many times before. There was dead and crackling grass, dry enough to engulf us both in brush-fire; there was thunder, roiling-red, rippling like muscle overhead. In daylight hours, I’d tried to deliver my ultimatum; my efforts fell on deaf ears. But here I could be heard. I had forever to find the words. There’s an unattributed proverb that goes: to conquer a beast you must first make it beautiful. Social projection, at its core, seeks to conquer the beast– social ostracism– by conquering the hypothetical conversation. We ensure our stories come across as cleanly as possible, wrangled into a tight five. Beware: enough time grooming the beast risks it going unslain. You grow so attached, so sunk in your cost, that the beast becomes a part of your life. Eventually, like sea glass, our ruminations become so weathered that they’re soft at the edges. Something erodes in that process. And then, with a clink, we add it to the collection of processed moments.

My moment for confrontation arrived in June, over chamomile tea. Now or never. I told her, in the kindest way I thought possible, the animosity that had been festering for years. How she’d hurt me. How we could move forward. Halfway through my speech, though, she was agape with horror: I would never even think those things. I remembered, suddenly, that I had no enemy in her; it was envy, all envy, and every word from my mouth pushed deeper the red-hot poker of shame. It was plain as day: using social projection, I’d only ever been hurting myself.

We haven’t spoken in months now. I hope that’s a coincidence.

Sometimes she comes to me in dreams; sometimes I let her hang around when I wake up. Lean on my kitchen counter, take something out of the fridge. Light conversation from a world just out of reach. In reality, this process leaves us chasing our tails ad infinitum, never to say what we mean. Spend forever finding the right words, and they will rattle around the walls of your skull.

WRITER AMINA CATTAUI GRAPHIC DESIGNER KAMRYN ALMASY