Loose Ends

Hey, hey! You, you!

Everyone has some shitty secret, some melodrama. Let out the avalanche of grief and emotion. 

You've woken a web of deceit for too long and you cannot just excuse yourself from this conversation. It is important. Tell me about a time in your life where you want to press delete. Don't let numbness envelope you. Share how you were stung! 

Did your history teacher like you a bit too much? Are you not over your parents' divorce? Did one of your best friends have sex with you and then not talk to you again? Maybe your siblings didn't hug you enough? Were you a doormat for an ex? Did someone's life expand and they didn't make room for you?

Secrets erode trust and shouldn't be left in a sealed box, they will eat you up. Air that dirty laundry and let me get a good sniff of it. C'mon, we both know cheerful is a synonym for dumb. We're better than that. You're better than that. Let's release some heat into our words, rip off the band-aid and feel the flames. Together we can apply empathy to the situation. It'll be liberating and consoling and monumental going through the whole gamut of emotions. Lordy, it's healthy to stop showcasing happy faces to the world for two minutes. Let's bring this universe back to rights.

Life can be sad. We should both be sad right now. Open up! This talk can become a shining beacon of support and companionship when you need it most. We can understand each other in a way no one else can. Screw tightropes and eggshells. We are confidantes with brilliant pearls of wisdom, positive vibes will be emanating from us. Show me underneath all those big thick layers. Babe! We can throw in some jokes in between to make the stories easier to handle, kind of like mixing in some peanut butter with your medicine.

I've been preaching these above words to people (many people) and leading similar conversations (many conversations) for a long time. This manic behaviour was go-to. I've been a neurotic vampire waiting to resolutely get my feed. I'd demand hungrily and I'd ask incredulously.

We all like to think we're right about what we believe about ourselves and what we believe are only the best, most moral things. We like to pretend that our most generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It's the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that continued beyond the very juncture at which they came closest to ending.

The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives.

Anyhow.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that talking through your problems makes them go away.

Well, not exactly.

Discussing through your trauma, as is often advised, doesn't necessarily diminish the ill effects, but can make them worse.

There is a right and a wrong way to work with things. There is a fine line between processing an experience to make it manageable, or reliving it and re-traumatising yourself.

I've been learning this the hard way, as always. And the high-intensity bullshit I've been host to has definitely not been a yardstick for normal behaviour.

For too long, I've been using a sob story to validate me. Because I thought, you have to take what you've been given and make the best of it and use it for the good in the world. I had overcome a negative situation and I had story and it was mine. It was real and therefore I placed it on a pedestal to show how far I'd climbed, clinging to it with blinded loyalty. I'd divulge my secrets quickly and except the same from others, I needed the space between us to feel meaningful and purposeful. The horse-play had slipped into my mental landscape surprisingly easily. I'd been internalising its presence, worshiping it as a false idol, fostering it for selfish reasons.

I always found a way to wedge traumatic history into conversation. I regurgitated, I recycled. As I'd walked through fire, bits of me had burnt off - those dead skin cells needed to be used for good. When bad things happen, often the only way back to wholeness is to take it all apart. I had that strength within me I told myself, no matter how soul-shaking or mind-fuckingly or life-altering it may be, and I needed and expected to see that same level of intensity from others too. I was brimming with questions from peers on how big and bound and hard it was to fall and how much worse it was to not get back up again. I used myself as a gateway to unwrapping and gaining entry into their own swirling anguish. That was my brain's baseline resting thought. A forfeit I had conditioned within myself, etched forever on my mind. I knew deep down dissecting bad affairs was a supernova of wrongness. But at the same time, trauma was so quintessentially me and I wore it like a fuckin' badge. Brokenness was an integral and even beautiful side of myself, something that should be bottled and stored and studied.

If we go beneath the skin into our psychic architecture, is it possible to change the joists, supporting walls and foundations of who we are?

I'd been operating high-volume bullshit because I thought it would carve something productive out of myself. I wanted people to be emitting secrets like sweat because I was seeking to nullify my own darkness and crediting exposure with change. The sanctity of the heart was the answer, the be-all and end-all. I festishised ruined pasts, I was a self-destructive fiasco of a person seeking closure in a twisted land. Because somewhere in the minefield I had decided that I should stop yearning to be fixed or trying to hide the scars.

Everyone has a rucksack. There's no innocent bystanders. The world is full of people carrying around a toxic narrative, pulled down by a sadness or grief that they don't know how to share. Yes, maybe even most of us are hiding it from each other, which is a sad reality, but that doesn't mean I have to psychoanalyze every Tom, Dick and Harry like an investigative journalist. I've stopped with the inquisition.

For too long, I craved the degree of narrative resolution that you find in novels. By speaking openly about my problems, other people's problems, our problems I thought we could rattle the sadness out of each other and decipher the hidden code. And it's not like talking through a problem is bad. In the majority of cases it is a good, if not essential, thing to do. But what isn't useful is if you keep reliving the trauma without learning to distant yourself from it and without gaining mastery from the memory.

Life is a glorious, unshaped mess. Humans are human. Things won't fit, won't behave, won't allow themselves to be finished, finite, completed. There's no graduation ceremony at the end of it all where we figure everything out.

You can't go back and alert the past, erase the memories, wipe away the hurt that has been caused, but you can go forward, become a person who remembers without letting it alter their shape. You have to evolve, change, take responsibility for your own life, steer your demons rather than being at their mercy, move rather than being stuck.

If you don't stop scratching the blister, it is going to continue to itch and may become infected. And I could tell you a million different stories or I could tell you the same story a million different ways but at the end of the day I haven't been putting distance and letting go between then and now. Knocking out a couple of breezy sentences isn't going to change that narrative.

I could spend forever delving into the whats and whys and hows. By writing this I'm holding myself accountable to release the dispiritingly limited vision of my storytelling. This is not how my story ends. It's simply where it takes a turn I didn't expect. I'm cutting the cord.

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