The food doesn't taste as good if you have no one to share it with.
You don't try as hard if you have no one to impress.
Have you ever felt like you had no value, no meaning, no substance?
It's as if you weren't there. You were nobody.
My body is outlined by an intense perimeter of shame. That I'm an imposition, a drain, an annoyance, a waste of time. Pieces of this have always been there. As I've aged they've come into focus, a burdensome clarity about why I live in exile, why I fear judgment, why I'm afraid to open up, why I am afraid to share a world with others.
I wouldn't call my childhood traumatic. On the whole I was taken care of. I think I just lacked the resilience to brush off the anger and abuse that I did receive, that I let that anger and abuse touch me deeply. It wasn't that bad of a childhood. I always had a bike. I could watch cable TV or play videogames. I had lots of toys, and I was always fed. If anything those creature comforts took the place of substantive gestures of genuine affection. I hold the few I did receive near and dear because there were so few. And to others, that should be more than enough. But I couldn't tell you if receiving more unconditional love and attention would have been a cure.
If anything it's been my tendency toward solitude, which has created practical limitations on my ability to share space with others. I can't laugh off smells and noises that a body makes or even accept them because I didn't necessarily have a lengthy experience of having to deal with them among others. Nevertheless, I did, and I suppose it was the sense that I wasn't there communicated by family that allowed me to believe that I simply was not there. And now the prospect of being in the presence of somebody creates an overwhelming anxiety about the others' life; one that is oceanic. It washes over me, consumes me totally, terrifies me. I think of the possibility of any one person and recognize that they have a life that is complex and personal and knowledge of it I feel should be somewhat forbidden, that I shouldn't be there witnessing it, that I'm in the way of others' fun.
I suppose these things take practice, a practice that I'm lacking by decades at this point. It's still my first day of school, emotionally, and that's a serious obstacle to my desire to share my life and accept another's without fear and judgment.
