Letting Myself Out To Let People In
I’m not sure when I became so self-absorbed, so isolated in the way that I live my life.
Maybe what matters isn’t when but why.
I. The Fear Of Everyone
It’s there, somewhere, this fear of what people don’t say they are. We put the best parts of ourselves on display and make it a duty to keep up the unsustainable, the very definition of futility.
But everyone is layered, and complex, and unknown even when we appear to be known. The ugly parts come with the best ones.
We’re afraid to be judged for flaws so we hide them as deeply as we can, buried under all the ‘good’ fluff that won’t hold up under close scrutiny. And because we know the fluff is insubstantial, we reinforce this charade by being emotionally distant. The message is, come close but remain far enough for the mirage to remain convincing.
We’re afraid to be seen, so we mould a perfect person who begrudgingly admits imperfection as a defence mechanism, then we present this person to the world as who we are. A clone with several missing parts, the ugly parts.
I am this. I am everyone, so I am afraid of everyone. I am afraid that I’ll believe a myth and allow it weave itself around mine, then discover that it wasn’t real to begin with.
Other people have been there with me, and it hurt me to watch them hurt when the broken parts of myself became real to them.
The dream falls apart quickly when reality dawns, doesn’t it?
I am afraid to dream with other people. You see, they’re rarely there when you wake. They’re often gone when you need someone to depend on.
That’s the nightmare, getting comfortable in a place they swear is yours for a lifetime then realising there was no place to begin with.
You make a home out of a picturesque film set, invest your time in irrigating a garden of plastic plants, pour water into a basket religiously, give yourself to someone who never really wanted you or had the capacity to have you.
I cannot live like that, so I live an insular life. As if to say that if they cannot reach me, they cannot hurt me.
II. The Love Of Rules
Love is not a cage, but I’ve watched myself build a prison from my love for myself – a good thing can be the foundation for a bad one.
I wrote the rules that keep me sane; the madness is in never allowing myself break them. Each one is a solid mental bar linked to the next, and to the next, and so on till inflexible walls of routine are formed. These walls are seen through but they cannot be sidestepped.
Everything in a set way, no room for deviations. Who lives life in a straitjacket and wins at it?
“How do you breathe?”, I’ve caught myself asking myself.
Is it even a life if everything is programmed, or am I just a bot having a superficially human experience?
Self-deprivation is only a virtue when it supports a cause, but safety was never meant to be my cause.
I was made to live life to the fullest, meaningfully, my very existence making a mark in the personal histories of people through acts of incontrovertible love toward them. I know this well.
So these rules, they don’t support the cause.
It turns out that letting people into one’s life is a kind of madness, a good kind, and sanity is overrated.
We’re all supposed to be a bit (good kind of) mad – we let one another in every day and it keeps us connected, keeps the world going, makes it slightly easier to carry the burden of being human.
Love is the only rule that matters.