#comingofageagain

If it ever happens...

I’m afraid you’re using me.

I’m paranoid you set up situations.

Secretly, I repulse you.  I’m something to fill in your time when you feel terrible.  Bored.  Needing to fulfill a dream of paternal bliss where you’ll dispose of me after you get your spawn.  

I’m afraid your kindness is that of a psychopath:

calculating, fake, methodic, nefarious.

Simply because,

without prompting,

you lovingly fit your hand against the back of my head.

I have such ugly, self-defeating, ridiculous, unfair, troubling, judgmental, damaging, poisonous thoughts about 95% of the people in my life, 100% of anyone that I’ve ever shared intimacy with.  

I don’t understand how you can look at me with such clarity and purity.  And care.  How can you look at me the way that you do as if I created the moon?

How do you fold into me so easily with such trust and abandonment of every moment before and after we existed in the same space?

The prospect of being alone hit me even more in the last few days.

 I didn’t think he was a forever partner, although I was willing to try.  I thought he would’ve been the perfect person to understand and even celebrate those darker layers of me that I have yet to partition and integrate.  

He invited me to open up.  Agreed to be more thoughtful.  Enthusiastically shared that he wanted to be ‘my rock’ and contend with the fire lit beneath his heart.  

I ended up getting roasted.  Again.  He didn’t respond.  Again.  I understand my father so much more.  Again.

“It’s because you’re strong, it seems like you don’t need anyone.  They're intimidated.  They’re douches and they can’t handle it...”

...says the man who was one of those exact people towards me.  

I’m overwhelmed with self-pity.  Fixated on the insidious, passive rejection with without a known or offered reason. Still with decades ahead of me and stuck in an extended frame of loneliness in a movie I can’t seem to keep moving forward.

Always rewinding.  Always pausing.  Always painstakingly drawing and pouring over grossly pixelated details.  

I can’t cry.  I can’t even write the way that I want.  I feel stuck again in that pit.  

I do feel angry that it’s still there, that everything I feel always feels amplified.  It’s like in a dream when you’ve discovered the power of flight, access an ethereal, fantastical dimension of life, able to manipulate the environment.  Then, once that power is realized, you’re suddenly taken back to earth and unable to lift off the ground again.  The light stops pouring from your hands.  The lucidity keeps everything fastened to the earth.  The dream becomes apparent and the simple awareness robs you of the key to a different life.

Every relationship is one dream after another, too painfully aware, unable to wake, and watching myself fall back down to earth every single time.

I always...ALWAYS took a running leap, and every so often, I got back off the ground, but not for long.

This time, I feel like sitting.  I don't think I ever saw anyone else above or below me when I was soaring.  Maybe everyone else figured it out.

I’ll stay on the ground.  Maybe, once I become aware of that, it’ll end.  Or maybe the earth will give way.

I don’t feel like a real woman.

Or even a real person.

Not perky enough.

Too strong for a woman, not strong enough for in-between.

Not feminine enough.

Not passive, submissive, tolerant enough.

Hair isn’t thick enough, nose isn’t small and dainty, shoulders and back broad enough to inspire an embarrassing conversation by strangers in public.

I tell myself that it’s okay to be strong. That it’s okay to not “act” like a woman, whatever the fuck that means. That it’s okay that my voice isn’t as soft and high-pitched, but soothing and capable of bringing the distressed back down to earth.

That it’s okay to have stick straight, fine hair...a storm without wind.

I tell myself this, but I don’t feel it.

And I don’t believe that anyone could be genuinely attracted to me and appreciate everything that I hate about myself. I don’t believe that someone probably won’t even notice them.

Not enough to be a woman

and yet I already exist with so much less.

I feel like an awkward, misshapen rock floating along the outer belt, crashing and disrupting the orbits that formed without me.

A giant space-potato.

A sulking, lumpy, thin-haired, stocky, breakin-up-the-party space-potato.

What would be left of me if I couldn’t run anymore? Or lost my sight. Couldn’t speak. Suffered a brain injury. A total loss where I have to confront my character and how I’ve spent my time giving love, building others up, offering support. What would be remembered and appreciated when what I and all of us value on the outside is stripped?

Am I as passionate about the health of my spirit and morality as I am my body?

…at 32…

But for whatever reason, that seems to be exactly what needs to happen.  Or, what I feel needs to happen.

I have thrown away every journal I’ve ever written in.  Ripped out pages moments or days later.  Looked at the words with disgust because I didn’t feel authentic.  For someone that totes not giving a shit, I give so much shit that it explains why I feel like it so much, sometimes.  I think I always expected someone to find it or read it and it changed the lens in which I viewed myself and the world.

I guess I need to look at this differently.  I expect the people that I work with to have a propensity for vulnerability.  I expect risk-taking.  I get to witness their growth and their regression.  Why I don’t demand as much, if not more of myself is beyond me.  Maybe the possibility of one or a million people witnessing my own depth will cause me to take more accountability.  Even if there isn’t a single one, the implication is enough.

It’s not about being 32.  It’s about the two year old, the six year old, the ten, fifteen, 25, a-day-ago entity layered upon each other that needs to integrate it all together.  And fucking accountability.  I minimize and rationalize way too much and pick apart the details that suit me in order to feel better about not following through or surpassing.  

I started a goal this year to make myself as uncomfortable as possible.  Ironically, I think I’ve done really well with that goal and literally started at 1pm, January 1st.  On the surface, it was overcoming the general discomfort of 38 degree water with a couple hundred other people.  A mile below, it was about battling severe anxiety and fear– including a fear of suddenly dying.  What a way to begin to mindfully begin to tell my mother to fuck off.  And perky tits.  Not the point, but that was a pleasant, brief benefit.  My only regret occurred during a post-swim spontaneous local news interview where I didn’t respond with  “so I could maybe feel something” when asked why I did it.  

Well, fuck me, the dark humor all these months later is unbearably true.  It’s messages all over the place guiding to these areas I’ve never been to that feel like home.  All these pulls to stress my body out as much as possible, to meditate, to disconnect, to wander, to restrain in order to indulge, to channel all that Jungian bullshit and meet the shadow parts.  It is, after all, what we seek when the light is too much.

So what does that all look like?  What are the odd messages? What have I been hearing for years?  How do I separate these ideas from the spirit of defiance that seems to enjoy self-punishment?  

Cover myself with tattoos.  Poke some more holes.  Run mountains.  Be alone.  Starve.  Fall asleep outside.  Surround myself with dogs and heavy music.  Play it.  Suspend thought.  Cry.  Beat the shit out of something.  Teach.  Suffer great loss.  Remain silent.  Continue devotion to public service.  Fire.  A home.  Acceptance.  Contact.  Breakdown.  Love.

A sublimation of all of that suicidal and dysphoric energy for years and reframing it into a cry for authenticity and meaningful stress.  Not martyrdom.  Targeting discomfort seems to be creating the holding space I need, but I have to keep going.

I don’t know what it’s towards.  I just know what the intention and journey prevents where I came from.  I’m no longer seeking an answer.  It would imply an end for me.  

I, like anyone else, and meant to be a blend of the absolute best and absolute worst of the human experience.  I’m meant to accept and appreciate those insidious nightmares as much as I do the moments that remind me that I’m okay.  But I have to be honest about them when they’re there, even if I fear that it will destroy me.  I can accept that part still wanting to die while overlooking a beautiful Honduran landscape or in Patagonia and feel equally as deserving to live.

So, here it is.  I’m going to talk to myself and work through everything from the meaning of some innocuous event to some brutally honest realizations and experiences– most of which I hope to induce.  

I’m meant to kick my own ass; for once, it doesn’t feel like for reasons of punishment and shame.  What a gift…