so how does my empathy for jeff work, then?
i empathize with jeff as a human being. i don’t empathize with his decisions. this is why it’s so uniquely painful to read about all he’s done. but i don’t think i ever lose my empathy for him, even in his deepest depravity — and that’s a hard pill to swallow, even for me myself.
when i read about him jerking off in front of 12-year-olds in hopes that they would stare at him admiringly, or when i think about how he molested somsack, i feel disgusted and sickened and horrified. and angry with him, too. REALLY pissed off at him, in fact. when he does stuff to underage boys, that’s the closest i get to wanting to just destroy him — even more than the murders for some reason. we don’t know what happens after death, and most of what he did to his victims’ bodies happened postmortem. still awful, but at least there’s a little comfort in knowing they didn’t feel any of it. but the living victims especially have to deal with sustained trauma, and i think about how those developing brains get that trauma irreversibly woven into their psyches.
he selfishly exerted power and control over the powerless in so many ways. and it angers me when i think about it. it doesn’t matter how bad your fucking childhood was; you don’t take it out on innocents. doesn’t matter what age those innocents are, really — it’s wrong regardless — but there’s something especially infuriating about it when they’re so young and they have their whole lives ahead of them, and you choose to inflict scars on them that impact their brain development and therefore go even deeper in a way.
strangely, though, i don’t lose my affection for him as a whole person. it stretches the limits of my empathy to painful extremes, no doubt about that. but my love for him never goes away. and that in itself makes me feel guilty when i think about it in the context of his crimes, like i’m doing something wrong. but at the same time, i remember how much he regretted his actions — and call me naïve, but i truly think he did have remorse, though that’s another tangent — and so my first instinct is to wipe the emotional slate clean [as much as possible] and give him the chance in my mind to do the right thing from now on. that’s the type of person i’ve always been and probably always will be. i’ve always been quick to forgive as long as i think the person really meant it. and if they did, then i think it’s only fair to prioritize moving forward. and jeff seemed to be trending “better” toward the end, so i can probably safely assume that this was a genuine change of heart.
i don’t think i have that Fi “repulsion switch” that’s talked about in MBTI, where a single action or trait of a person — or even multiple traits at once — makes you hate everything about them. i don’t naturally view people as angels or demons, and i’ve really felt more pressure from outside to feel this way than anything else. we’re all just humans, all forced to exist in grey areas. it’s just that jeff’s lows were THE LOWEST you could go without being an outright sadistic POS.
but he lacked that bitter “sting” to his soul that sadists like john wayne gacy had. he had the darkness and the heaviness without the sting of truly enjoying what he was doing. deriving pleasure from an act isn’t the same as enjoying it on a character level, if that makes sense. you can get a physical rush from something and be disgusted at your own body’s reactions to it, asking yourself “ugh, why the fuck do i LIKE this?” that sort of agonizing rug-burn of the soul can really feel like a war inside of you. i’ve been there with alcohol and benzos, just exhausted by my body’s cravings for those things. physically enjoying the rush they gave me, but hating that it brought me pleasure when i knew it was fucking up my life.
i think there was probably at least some of that going on inside of jeff with his sex addiction and alcoholism. the way he leaned into the “evil” nature of the exorcist iii, using the yellow contact lenses to “get into character,” seems like a coping mechanism to me. like he figured he was just going to be evil no matter what, so he may as well go all-out and embrace it. the way he said he felt “so hopelessly evil and perverted” makes me think this. if you can’t beat it, join it, i suppose. he said that he didn’t like feeling evil, though. and i believe he really was trying to be better, considering how perfectionistic he was about christianity toward the end.
this is how i see him after considering his life as a whole. not separating him into child jeff and teen jeff and crime-spree jeff and prison jeff. when i consider the entirety of his life and look at the whole context, i see a person who struggled immensely with tons of horrific urges — WAY more than most of us would ever experience in a full lifespan, to say nothing of his 34 short years. and i do see someone who was ultimately too weak and self-centered to admit to himself that he couldn’t handle it all on his own, though at the same time i do think that most people would have trouble admitting even a fraction of all that shit out loud. still, though, when push comes to shove, ANYTHING is better than murder, and he still chose murder [and all kinds of other awful things]. but i do see why he, as a human being who had really never been fully listened to or taught that it was okay to trust others enough to let them help him, would be reluctant to say anything to anyone. his own actions trapped him at every turn, and there are no do-overs when death is involved.
it’s just a huge mess. JEFF was a huge mess. but i see his struggles, and i can’t help but feel for him overall. no matter what point he was at in his life, he was still the same person by definition. and i love that person. i love him for making years of effort to battle the horrible desires and fantasies that “filled his thoughts all day long.” i love him for sincerely repenting and dedicating whatever time and effort he had left toward being a better person. i love him for the soul he was deep down, that soul that was buried under all the sickness and the domino effect of terrible decisions. that soul that had to fight himself all on his own, more or less. no one gets an instruction manual for how to live as the person they are, and if anyone would’ve needed one, it’d have been jeff. in many ways, he lived life on an extreme difficulty setting, at least internally. and try as we might, no one except jeff dahmer will ever know how hard it really was to be jeff dahmer. and he’s certainly not around anymore to tell us.
i know that his sincerity is contested, but i’m the type of person who gives the benefit of the doubt, i guess. thinking this way gives me something to live for. and even though it’s still important to have boundaries so you don’t self-destruct or get taken advantage of, you can still love and forgive someone from a distance. and that’s how i approach jeff. i would never actually want to be in a relationship with him or anything, if that were possible — he wasn’t capable of a healthy relationship by any means, and that was the root of his whole problem! but i can care about him as much as i want from thousands of miles and several decades away.
and if it turns out i’m wrong and he really was just a total piece of shit who’s duped me into seeing him as human, fuck it. i’ve lost NOTHING by emphasizing the potential for a good outcome in this highly-complicated situation where we’ll never truly know either way. honestly, if i wasn’t optimistic, i’d have killed myself a long time ago because there wouldn’t be any point in battling my depression. i don’t want to be here if i can’t enjoy life, if i can’t see the good in people and situations wherever i find it. so if nothing else, i’ve at least fulfilled MY purpose here by erring on the side of positivity when even the clearest explanation still seems ambiguous.
[ • dahmers-ashes • ]
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 