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. 

Love's Labor Lost

I’m distant. If you know me, this is no fucking newsflash. I don’t really have a problem connecting with people so much as staying connected with people. I’ve spilled a lot of proverbial ink on this and why it might be. In a nutshell, low self-worth, anxiety, moving around so much as to never develop very strong connections, etc. Plus I much prefer face to face interaction and, well, with being in constant pain, I just don’t leave the house much. This is less to explain or excuse myself, but to show some work I’m putting in.

So I have an online friend. A very lovely online friend of recent acquaintance. We talk a lot, and in the short time I’ve known her, I’ve grown to value her counsel and perspective. We hit it off and fell into a fairly easy, fairly regular discourse. It was nice.

After a month or two, she pointed out that I essentially never say hi first. I gave her my pat explanation that it’s just sort of how I am, and that, while it might not look like it, I am grateful for her contacting me and our continued discussion. At this point, most people don’t press. But then, most people would simply fall back to interacting with me on Facebook, or take an “I’ll see you when I see you” attitude. But I’d never see her at Shadowland as she lives across the country, and she’d never see me on Facebook because she loathes it. So the ball would be entirely in her court to carry the weight and pace of our friendship.

I know this is unfair. I know this is basically the spot that I’m in with most of my friends. I know this is why I am rather isolated. I let it happen anyway.

But she asked me to bear some of the emotional labor burden. She was… not optimistic. She wasn’t wrong to be so, frankly. However, the next day, I messaged her. And then again soon after. It feels fucked up to me. Unnatural. Like being aware of my blinking or breathing. It feels forced. Because it is. Not the relationship or the ensuing conversations - those are perfectly fine. But the reaching out feels messed up to me.

So of course I had to analyze the shit out of it.

Ultimately, I feel grateful for the time, effort, and attention that anyone wants to bestow on me, and I hate feeling like I’m asking for more. Contacting someone feels like asking for more. As such, I sit like a fucking barnacle (not bragging about penis size, but read into it what you will) and wait for the world to check in on me. NOT because I want everyone else to expend their emotional labor, but because I ultimately feel like me saying “hi” is me trying to take from a person.

I know. I KNOW. When other people reach out and spontaneously say hi to me or check up on me, I view it as a near mystical gift. When I do the same, I view it as some horrible, needy ploy for love. I KNOW this is stupid. Many people profess to like me, for no conceivable reason than that they, in fact, like me. They would probably like it if I bestowed that mystical gift upon them. It might, in fact, be WILDLY SELFISH of me to not repay their consideration in kind.

Okay. So it’s that self-image thing. All I have to do to start connecting with people more is to stop viewing myself as poisonous. Gotcha.

I can’t imagine that there’s a level of empirical evidence that will make me feel like I’m desired as a friend, lover, etc. So it has to be me. Something inside. I have to begin the internal work, likely the seismic shift, of trying to view myself as a benefit to others’ lives. I have to start trusting that when people say nice things about me, they aren’t trying to manipulate me for some future betrayal or abuse. That people actually want me around. That maybe, if I say hi to a person, they won’t be annoyed or rethink why they ever pretended to be friends with me in the first place. I have to purge these shitty worst case scenarios.

I have to somehow find my way through nearly four decades of viewing myself as some sort of leper, constantly falling apart and infecting everyone close to me.

Or maybe it’s as simple as putting in the emotional labor? I know it’s just saying “hi.” It’s typing two letters. But the scenarios that spin out in my head bore a hole right through my chest. I literally begin having trouble breathing at the thought.

I mean Jesus Christ, my last lover of two and a half years - I couldn’t just ask her how she was doing. I had to search the internet for a funny meme to bring to her like a male bird bringing a gift for the female to incorporate into her nest. I viewed myself as having such little value to her (or anyone) that I couldn’t possibly imagine a world in which my acknowledging a person could be seen as beneficial.

Okay. End of the day, I know what I have to work on. I mean, self-image, that’s nothing new. But this is a new, specific application of it that I’ve contextualized for myself and with a specific set of actions I can at least fake until I make. I like people. I like talking to people. Sure, I need to disconnect often, but that’s normal. I’ve let my leg keep me stuck in my house, so I need to compensate somehow, so texting it is, despite how uncomfortable it makes me. I’m unhappy with the situation, so I need to change it. Simple enough.

All I have to do is not think I’m worthless.

Under construction. 

Eros and Thanatos

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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.