Tell Me I'm Pretty

Like it or not, humans are social creatures. This isn’t an accident, it’s survival. If you aren’t part of a tribe, your life expectancy drops precipitously. It’s pure evolution; we need others.

And god, that sucks sometimes.

We need to be relatively functioning members of a larger body of society. It’s why we have moral systems, why we can divide labor and specialize, the very essence of history as a moving system. It’s how we exceled beyond subsistence farming. In even the most reductive sense, we are life support systems for genitals that need to mash together to create more life, an impulse ground into us by the mashing gene being successfully propagated by the mad mashing of our forebears. And we need to be social to have any hopes of that singular purpose of replication. Assuming you believe in the evolutionary psychological approach, all of human behavior spins out from that.

We need others to listen to us. We need to be heard, seen, and we need to feel at least partially understood, or we wither.

In short, we need validation. Aside from the very basic needs for continued existence like food, water, shelter, and warmth, validation is probably the most important need that isn’t strictly biological. The first step up Maslow’s hierarchy. We need to feel… something from others. To feel important. Valuable. Like our input is appreciated. Because if it isn’t, we’re useless to our tribe, and if we’re useless, we’re on the outside. And if we’re outside the tribe, well, that’s where we can get picked off by the predators.

Due to our general advancement, our predators aren’t hyenas or wolves anymore. We get chased down by depression. Alienation. Loneliness. Roving packs of personality disorders track our journey from the shadows, waiting for us to fall too far behind the tribe. Without our kin, we fall prey these savage forces.

Often, falling behind starts robbing you of the ability to keep up, a vicious cycle. Read a social psychology textbook; people who are perceived as lonely are often ostracized by others even further. Cruel, yes, but on a corrupt level, understandable. As individuals, we need to make sure we don’t fall out of the pack, and if we dedicate too many of our resources to helping another lost person, we may find ourselves marginalized, too.

You likely know someone that you feel bad for in this way, but you just don’t feel you can help them without hurting yourself. This sucks, but it’s not uncommon. Sometimes these people are too far gone. Sometimes they aren’t. It’s nearly impossible to tell the difference. So they get lost in the woods and the growing darkness. And yeah… maybe we could have done more.

This validation, it can make or break someone’s life. We all need it. We all know we need it.

My question is, if we all know this in our core, that this is a fundamental fact of the human experience, why is it seen as so wrong to openly ask for validation?

I need to feel smart, or desired, or funny, or wise, or fucking something so that I feel like I’m contributing to my chosen body of humanity in the hopes that they will protect me when I fall. And I will fall. We all fall. You need this, too, even if it makes you feel somewhat uncomfortable to admit. It’s the same impulse we have to feel like we’re good at our job so that we don’t get fired, but writ large. We need to feel good at being human, so that we won’t get terminated from the body that sustains us.

It is so critical to our existence and yet so many people feel ashamed to reach out and ask for help with it. I have had to force myself to ask for it from time to time, usually couched in a joke or some long-winded musing (hi there!). To some degree, my fear - which is probably common - is that if I ask for validation, I will be seen as weak. Even worse, I will be outright denied it, confirming my fears that I’m not worthy of the safety of the pack. It’s almost better to worry that I’m not good enough than it is to have confirmation that I’m not.

Is this something we can move past? Is it universal at this point, or is it perhaps a side effect of the rabid American individualism that is slowly isolating and atomizing us? Can I ask you, openly and earnestly, to love me? To tell me you that you care? To tell me I’m worth effort? And how much asking is too much?

Can we learn to offer more of it, unsolicited, so that someone doesn’t need to fall before figuring out if others will care enough to offer a hand up? Can we move past the bullshit notion that openly admitting a dire need is somehow weak?

We fear that weakness because we know in our bones that most people are too busy fending for themselves and fighting off their own battles to care for us. We get stuck in this loop of pretending we’re fine, so that others won’t see us as burdensome. All while we slowly lose the ability to keep up.

Perhaps this is why romantic partnership is so prized. We have a chosen person who, for however long we can convince them we’re worth it, is dedicated to helping us along the path. The school field trip buddy system, except instead of getting lost in the Titanic museum that one time in eighth grade, we’re lost in our own sadness. There are fewer clearly marked exits there.

How do we fight this irresponsible expectation of emotional self-sufficiency?

To change societal expectations, you have to first not be bound by them. Openly ask for validation. Openly give it. Bring people into your pack. Let them know that they are of your tribe and that that means something to you. Life is hard, and we’re all we’ve got. Make it easier on the people walking your path. Aside from bringing skills to the table, one way to do that is to let people clearly know your needs. If you are open, they will feel open, too. Your bond will grow. Your torches will light up the night and the journey through the woods will be safer.

Obviously not everyone will be walking the same path as you. That’s fine. You do have to curate your resources. The entire point of this statement is that you need to care for you and yours, and that includes removing toxicity. Let other tribes pass as they may. Let people go when they jeopardize the health of your cohort, but not by throwing them to the wolves. There are kinder ways to protect yourself, even if those ways are more difficult. Find those ways anyway, because you will be better and stronger for it.

Just fucking walk with love and compassion. We may go faster alone, but we go farther together. 

Tunnel Vision

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.

Outcast

It was April of 1992. I was just entering my fourth school in two years, two each for fifth grade and sixth. Oakcrest Elementary in Pensacola, FL, Brevard Elementary in Brevard, NC, Fletcher Elementary in Hendersonville, NC, Hughes Middle School in Greenville, SC. No friends, no roots, no support.

Hughes was the worst. Figures it would be the school I spent more time at than any other in my life. It was a class divided. About half of the kids were the children of successful white business people. The school was less than two miles from the 10^th hardest par golf course in America, Chanticleer. On the other side of the school was a very depressed collection of houses, a place of rotting porches, domestic violence, and frequent house fires. From here came the other half of the school’s population, the poor black kids. They at least had strong community ties and all seemed to be friends, huddling together against the oppressive reminder of inequality.

Right between those two halves was a tiny sliver of outcasts, the poor whites. There were a few of us. We were ostracized by the rich white kids, and therefore easy targets of the aggression of the poor black kids. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they were the only people I could sit with at lunch.

I fucking hated them.

They were constant reminders of my solitude. The only thing we had in common was our place in the caste system. Might as well have been lepers.

One I hated more than the rest was Seth. He was this skinny ginger kid who smelled of fried food and his mom’s cigarettes. He was even lower on the totem pole than me – people didn’t like me, but they didn’t really hate me. Everyone hated Seth, and he seemed kind of okay with it. We rode the same bus, but different stops. Of course all of the pariahs rode my bus, we all lived in the same shitty neighborhood.

One day, Seth pushed me over the line. We were sitting across from each other at the lunch table after we had finished eating. I was reading Stephen King’s Tommyknockers, but was about to put it away to return to class. I looked up at him and our eyes met. He smiled and sneezed right in my face. I was always a fastidious kid, and this was an all out assault. I whipped my thick paperback across his face. Ms. Leiffer only saw that last part and I was given detention for the next day. Seth smiled as he walked behind the teacher and went about his day.

The bus ride home was tense. Randy, the fat kid (every school had one then, there seem to be more now), kept whispering at me, “You gonna take that?” Everyone loved a fight.

I got off at Seth’s stop. He wasn’t smiling anymore. A couple of other kids got off, too, also not their usual stop. It wasn’t a far walk for any of us, totally worth it to witness what they hoped to be an epic ass kicking.

I walked behind the frail little prick, pushing him in his cheap plastic backpack, trying to get him to stop and face me. He was silent. Shit, as they say, had gotten real, and he wasn’t smiling any more. I kept at him, knowing we only had a block until he could escape into his home to hide behind his notoriously litigious mother. I didn’t care if she sued my parents, we had nothing anyway. Finally, I kicked his right foot so that it caught on his left and he tripped. I could vaguely hear whoops from the onlookers, but they faded into the back. I was so mad at his affront. This little shit had the audacity to strike at me, his better. I was lower than basically everyone, but not him. How dare he?

I turned him over and he tried to ball up. I stood over him and did my best to punch him in the head a few times, but I was eleven years old and was not in the habit of punching people. It was pathetic, a thoroughly stoppable force striking a fully moveable object. After some time, hard to say how long, I was satisfied that he looked sufficiently frightened. Then, trying my best to block out the sun, I stood over him and gravely spit in his face. He took it with a sort of depressing aplomb. I turned away to walk home, trying like hell to not cry. It was a while before I heard him getting up. I turned around to walk backwards so I could face him, to stare at him to make the indignity last. He had no expression on his face at all.

Just another day.