Sad, but true: I have a habit of casting the people in my life as idiosyncratic stock characters and incorporating them into existential through lines. As a result, I start to impose on my life—or a series of events in my life—some punch-line moral.

Life, as a morality play, struts all kinds of personified vices across its stage. The guy tripped up by his own self-pity, the sister figure with a savior complex. The habit gratifies me, but it fuels a feedback loop of psychoanalytic frustration: How can you overcome a thesis when you spend your life seeking out evidence to support it?

Psychologically casting my life has the potential to externally flatten individuals I internally conceptualize as much more than mere characters in my life. I know we’re all solipsists, but I can recognize that the people I love have ineffable and inviolable value. Genre-readiness and internal depth needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Others disagree. Any imposition of pattern on people is to them—and often to me—a form of violence.

Over lunch, I was complaining about how a boy in my life had proven my casting of his character to be true—yet again. A particularly optimistic friend leaned across the table, frowning and smiling with the joy she took in her own accuracy, as she always does.

“You always say these awful things about him,” she tut-tutted. “My father always says in situations like this, ‘If you met this character in a book, what would you think of that character?’” And she smiled smugly. It was time, we both knew, for me to stop serving up vignettes of abuse and expecting her stoic sympathy.

I wasn’t gaining a whole lot from watching myself proven right over and over again. She failed to identify my assumption that there must be some way to prove this pattern a product of my own reified superimpositions. I’ve stuck around; there had to be a reason why. This man, cast as a character, must not be a character.

The study of literature arouses a deep fear in me, and that’s probably why I’m attracted to it. It foments an addiction to metaphor, an addiction that either defines or defiles my life. I haven’t decided which. Doubtless, though, the joy I take in exegesis also traps me in an internal logic that, without the utmost care, points to the system’s accuracy more than to its insularity.

Reading Tamburlaine the Great this week, I realized that my instinctual sympathy for tyrants springs from the assumption that they push the envelope only in the hopes of being rebuked, like a naughty child. Indeed, their greatest fear is that their grandeur isn’t delusional at all.

If everything they say is true, if the tyrant is the moon and stars and rules by sheer willpower until Death snatches the scepter from his palm and the breath from his lips, then the world he inhabits proves no less bleak than that of his vanquished enemies. The prophet that brings the apocalypse must live in the mess.

Not only tyrants are waiting to be proven wrong. Their victims are, too. Our sense of horror goes hand in hand with cosmic disappointment: We’re paralyzed by the knowledge that we live in a world in which atrocities can happen.

I’m addicted to the pattern of disrespect in relationships because I’m convinced that no real relationship could possibly function in such a predictable way forever. Surely, victimhood isn’t a potentially perpetual condition; surely, aggression self-destructs. Isn’t learning inevitable? Mustn’t evil out itself? And if not, how can we know it’s evil?

And I believe that my conviction that idealized patterns are waiting for disproof haunts the literature with which I really engage. I read books with the assumption that the author’s need to establish a pattern also has something to do with the conviction that the pattern cannot hold.

An author doesn’t proffer a thesis merely to elucidate and glorify her own powers of insight. She proffers the thesis because, as a pattern, it’s helpful to understand both its presence and its failures. Metaphorical truths must be culled from reality not because they comprise reality but because we assume that they do—we ought to know the paradigms that we’re naturally inclined to fulfill.

It works both ways, then. The articulation of a pattern makes it come true, because we’re naturally tempted to make the expected happen. But the articulation of a pattern, by subjecting the issue to willful correction, also enables the pattern’s being overcome.

The facile explanation of neurosis has a lot to do, I think, with an assumption that patterns are comfortable. The idea is that people develop patterns in order to shield themselves against the terror of reality, against the possibility of being hurt and against the understanding of their own raw despair.

Yet, to me, a neurotic pattern is deeply uncomfortable because it posits a cyclical lifestyle as personality-encompassing. A neurosis just waits to be proven wrong; the person who entertains it wants to believe that she isn’t circumscribed by it.

When the tyrant is finally knocked off the throne, we can all breathe a little easier. The victims, at last, can believe that he knew better all along. He was just frightened that violence made sense.