Though I’m sure it comes from
many things, I think a large part of it was from moving around so much.
Kindergarten through graduation, I went to ten different schools. Sometimes,
they were rapid-fire moves. Between fifth and sixth grade, I went to four
schools, and I went to four high schools in those four years.
I was used to being impermanent.
Unnecessary. Superfluous.
Possibly worse still, I was used
to every person I ever knew or liked being only a fleeting presence in my life.
I would know someone just long enough to grow affection for them and then I
would never see them again. “Well, my parents are moving to another state. I
guess I’ll never see you again, so... bye.”
I coped by devaluing the outcome
of closeness and substantive interaction. I accepted that no relationship would
last. People became shades, only existing when right in front of my eyes. When
they were gone, they no longer existed. That sounds so cold, and it is, but I had
no other way to live. Had I tried to maintain my ties, I would have collapsed
under the weight of loss. So I gave up trying to care. I gave it up and came to
know the difference between isolation and loneliness.
My mother, bouncing back and
forth between her obsession with me and her tremendous neglect, made this
worse. She would tell me that she was all I needed, but then she spent three
years in bed, leaving me with my step-father. He was a fiend. So much so that I
never speak his name. He is a monster that looms in my past, my own Unnamable
Terror. His seething hatred of me, his constant, explicit reminders that
everything I said and was would never be good enough, they drove me further
inside. My mother’s insistence that I was her perfect little boy, just as long
as I adhered to who she wanted me to be, pushed me deeper.
I became a performer. I Complied.
I Appeased. I was whomever others wanted me to be, because who I actually was
was nothing anyone cared to see, as far as I knew. I was always a
disappointment. Not Good Enough.
Somewhere along the way, I lost
who I was. I never got to know myself, not in any clear sense. I can look
inside and I can see the trash, but anything good is alien to me. All I see is
the broken little boy, terrified of everything and everyone, unable to take any
positive affirmation from others.
It seems like I have emotional
tunnel vision. My sense that only what is in front of me is real has limited my
scope of the world. I see the world through a pinhole. If you are in my field
of experience, you take up my whole reality. And when you aren’t, you just fade
away. It’s so rare for me to miss someone when they are gone. My mind just
doesn’t work that way. When I see a person that I love after a long time, I
immediately realize how much I wanted to see them, but I have no prolonged
sense of longing for another’s company that I believe others experience. It’s
like everyone in the world is The Silence from Doctor Who, except in that
moment of seeing and remembrance, it is a feeling of love. And guilt.
Because all of this makes me feel
so fucking guilty. I feel like a terrible friend or loved one. Trying to be
charitable to myself, I feel like I’m fun to be around. A good
conversationalist, good for a laugh. But not good at any of the stuff that
cements bonds between others. The little gifts to let others know that I think
of them. The spontaneous invitations for a beer. The simple, out of the blue
statement “I miss you.”
I live in my own little world,
and because I am somehow trapped inside, I require others to knock on the door
to my reality. It’s up to everyone else to drag me back to reality to remind me
that they exist. I can only assume that to be exhausting, and I’m sure that it
is very detrimental to a person’s feeling of being valued by me. I never
contact someone first. I am always the respondent. Surely that must make people
question if I even like them.
To casual relationships, that
strain is likely not so bad. To my closer relationships, this is crippling. How
could anyone think anything except that I don’t care?
Possibly my biggest problem to
overcome is that, despite the fact that I want to live in the world with people
and passion and meaning, I resent it. I resent reality. Even now that I am an
adult and have relative control over the path of my life, I still fear
everything being swept away, again and again. So I am my own warden here. And,
while I need to leave the confines of my head from time to time, I resent constant
knocking at the door.
I am trying. I’m trying to reach
out occasionally, just to bring some energy to my relationships, so that they
aren’t all so one-sided. I don’t want to be this way, and it is probably one of
my biggest sources of dissatisfaction in my life.
I mean it when I say I care, but
how I care is stunted. After a while, words aren’t good enough, and I know it.
I truly want to have stronger connections, to expand the boundaries of my world
to include others. I want to annex you. Or maybe just have thriving trade
routes, I don’t know, my metaphors are getting away from me (as usual).
What it boils down is that I want
to feel like a decent friend. At this point, I have no idea where to start
rewiring myself, but as little as simple words mean, I do hold so many great
people in my heart, such as it is. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re
one of them.
