Goines On: Freed to be himself, or not?

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Goines felt a quiver of thrill at the insight that offending people – if that was what he did occasionally – had to be expected, if he wanted to go on just being the way he wanted to be. Acting on a fantasy of earlier that morning was unnecessary.
    The fantasy had been to try to reach his group therapist of 30 years earlier for another lesson in how other people saw him. But what this therapist had helped him see then was still true: not everyone would like Goines, and it was unrealistic to expect them to.
    People could take him any way they wanted, it was their choice, their reaction, their right. It was who they were. If he were going to tailor himself to always try to please people, he would be giving up too much of his own self. He would no longer even be himself. And being himself seemed right, even a sort of duty somehow.
    So Goines told himself to get on with it, just don’t do other people any real harm when you offend them.
    But he wanted never to offend Mrs. Goines, whether she were responsible for how she took him or not. Toward her he aimed to live by another principle taught him by another therapist, twenty years earlier still. A married couple should support one another, give each other what they asked for, with no critical questions about why.
    Still, though, as he discovered on a walk later, he had been offensive to people in ways he couldn’t approve, couldn’t rationalize as being acceptably himself – not the self he wanted to be, anyway.
    Like the occasion, upon walking past a neighbor’s house when her 18- or 20-year-old daughter was trying to hustle her own two children into her car, when Goines, upon being introduced to the daughter, had addressed her by exclaiming, “Oh, my dear child!”
    Goines thought he understood completely why neither this neighbor nor her husband had replied to any of his emails following the incident, nor followed up on their invitation, previously made, to have the Goineses visit them in the house they were about to move to.
    “Dear child” indeed! Goines recognized that he still had some growing up to do himself.

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