Coming Unpeeled

I wrote a six page Christmas letter from hell and sent it to all of my friends and family for whom I actually had an email address.  It was a dark masterpiece in which I informed everyone how things are really going.  It occurred to me, while writing it, that I am closer to many of you that I have gotten to know through my blog than I am with people I've been friends with in my real life for many years and without a doubt there are many friends I've made here who are more in touch with my life and who I am and who I'm becoming than my own family is.  I sent the letter to a couple of my blog friends with whom I have previously exchanged emails over the course of our developing friendship, but most of the friends I've made through my blog and theirs, are lucky to have been spared this stark and truthful missive.

But that's just it, no one here has missed a thing, you already know everything I've been going through, discovering, and learning about for the past few years.  I could quiz my own Dad and he couldn't tell you a quarter of what I've been going through, yet, you...you all (most of whom I've never met) know all the gritty as well as the good details.  This has come home to me as a significant detail.   It was somewhat depressing to me at times that relative strangers have become my main support through our tough times, that most of the time when I have wanted to throw myself in front of a train it was kind comments here, little pushes of encouragement from here, and not my family or real life friends who gave me a sense of being appreciated and needed and also gave me a sense of worth in that for some reason you seem to value what I have to give here.  (Always excepting Chelsea who has never lost touch and always listened to me when I needed her to for the almost four years since we moved away from California.)

Of the god knows how many people I sent the letter to, only a few people have made any comment about it at all, or even acknowledged that they got it.  This missive, in which I pretty much poured out everything of myself and cried while writing it, was like a little ripped out piece of my spirit.

The resulting silence wasn't particularly surprising.  It's what nearly always happens when I let the truth come rolling out like a river of sludge.  People don't want the truth unless there's some distance between it and them.  I think what I hoped to accomplish was to get people I care about to understand why I don't call them anymore and to close a kind of gap and possibly invite them to share their truth with me.  To encourage us all to stop telling the version of life we think others want to hear.

Except that everyone else IS telling the version of life others want to hear. 

It reminds me a lot of the book "Ordinary People" in which no one really says what's going on in their hearts or their minds and everyone says the expected thing which leaves them all isolated inside with no place to lay out the bones of their true spirits and without air or light things die.  And when some people feel too isolated for too long they do dire things like kill themselves and then everyone around them is guilty and angry asking each other "Why didn't he say something to us?"  even though "he" probably tried a hundred times to open up the road to the conversation that might have relieved his loneliness. 

People, in general, don't want to hear the bleak story.  Mostly they want (and expect) everyone to always put a positive spin on things.  Otherwise you're just a mean and negative asshole trying to ruin everyone else's peace of mind.

What I always wonder, when someone kills themselves and all their friends and family are stunned and asking why that person didn't reach out for help, is what they expected that person to do to get their attention?  It always strikes me that a person in need of support makes many subtle tries for it but no one wants to deal with them unless it's dire, at which point they're apparently expected to put a knife up to their own throat and say "Hey!  I will kill myself if you don't give me some support and talk about real shit for once and tell me that you understand and that I'm not alone with this feeling!!"

But what person in distress wants to go to anyone who won't listen to them until it's almost too late and be that pathetic figure of pain and suffering that evinces more pity and fear than compassion and empathy?  I know my tribe well and the reason why so many friends and family of people who kill themselves didn't have a clue about what was coming was because they had their underwear stretched up over their ears and had their eyes shut tight.

I'm not on the verge of suicide.  But I am a very tired person.  I am very tired of life right now.  I can promise that after writing the dreadfully stark Christmas letter, I will never open up that much to any of my friends and family again who have not commented even enough to say (as my three friends did) "Hey, sorry it's so rough.  We're going through a lot too so I can totally relate..."  That simple acknowledgment can mean so much.  So if I am ever in a dire enough space to even contemplate suicide* I will go about it as silently as all people do who are already too far into the silence of alone-ness, who have already reached out in countless dignified ways with no real acknowledgment.  I have waved a lot of flags of need in the past few years of darkness and I never forget those who have spoken up to soothe, to tell me their own tales of heartbreak and trouble so that I know I'm not suffering this mortal coil alone.

Writing that letter, and the resulting lack of response, has forced me to acknowledge a couple of things that I have tried to ignore.  One is that Facebook turned out to be very unhealthy for me.  It's basically one big virtual party in which a ton of people call themselves "friends" but very few people really are.  I never do well at parties.  I hate them.  They give me endless opportunities to say the wrong things, to open up to people who don't give a shit about me at all except to exchange a couple of witty comments so that we can congratulate ourselves for being so clever, and in the end I always say the thing that no one wants anyone to say.  I bring down the tone of every party I go to and I end up feeling really bad about myself and angry at others.

I am not a formal person in the sense that I don't like to stand on ceremony or observe strict customs.  Drop by my house unexpected- that's fine!  Thanking me for the dinner I made you as you leave my house is enough reward, there is no need to send me a formal note of thanks later on.  But, I am not good at casual friendships.  Either you're really my friend or your as good as a stranger.  Facebook invites me to feel I have so many people around me that my life is warm with them but the reality is that out of 105 "friends" only a handful (literally) of people on Facebook are real friends in their actions.

I'm going to shut down my Facebook account for good.  I'd like to find a way to destroy my account completely.  Not sure it's possible.  There are a couple of people I hope will get a google email account so we can still instant message each other...but the majority of those people are just collecting names on a list and enjoying the casual happy arrangement of it all.  I am finding that my self esteem has significantly lowered since joining facebook and my sense of isolation and loneliness has only increased. 

The other thing writing the letter forced me to realize and face is that I am angry at quite a lot of people who are supposed to be in my support system and are supposed to give a crap about me and my little family and for whom I have exerted, even in these darkest few years, considerable energy towards.  Many of you here have called me brave for the things I write and I don't consider myself brave at all because it's one thing to pour out what I can't help pouring out anyway...but I know that I am a complete coward.  I don't tell most people when they disappoint me or anger me.

I have learned from painful experience that I am not worth the trouble for most people to "work things out".  I am loved well when I am always agreeable and supportive and sweet and everything good, but let me just tell a person how they have upset me and suddenly I am ungrateful, wrong, selfish, and stupid.  When I attempt to express displeasure or anger, people abandon me.  I trust my family least of all when it comes to expressing anything but love and support.  No one, including myself, likes to hear that they have caused disappointment or anger in someone else.  But the cost, often, for expressing such things in my family is long lasting pain for everyone involved.  In my family it is common to disown anyone who dares to bring on confrontations, or try to work out the very deep folds of pain and resentment that have become the texture of our lives. 

There are a multitude of subjects that even now, as we are all trying to move forward in our lives, are never discussed.  There are some topics that have never seen the light of day.  There are others that surge forwards, the way the crust of the earth shifts and thrusts upwards every now and then when it moves, and these topics of sorrow and resentment and forever wounds are then briefly viewed, topically dressed with band-aids and then safely tucked away until the next time it forces itself up under our noses again.

I have a lot of anger that I know I can never really address directly unless I would like to go through the unpleasant process, all over again, of crushing the calm. 

What all this boils down to is that I am finally seeing that this blog is the only place in my life for reality.  Not in phone conversations.  Not at parties.  Not in public.  Not with family.  I always end up turning to this spot in my universe to exhale all the thoughts and truths as I discover them.  It has been in plain sight for three and a half years.  Anyone who may wish to really know me, has all they need to do so, right here. 

I don't think that many people really want to know me, and I couldn't blame anyone for wanting to back away slowly.  I'm not cheery.  I'm not very positive.  I'm not very light.  I don't bring joy.  I am the dark cloud over everyone's summer.  I am the one who picks under the surface to find the true grain of everything at emotional cost to everyone.  I am the one who says the thing no one wants anyone to say.  I am the one exposing the thick sludge of mankind which always courses under the surface.  What's to like in that?  I exhaust, exacerbate, and annoy my friends and family.  I can't just sit on a thing and pretend it isn't cutting into me.  I can't just be quiet and go with the flow and be fun. 

To protect myself I will stop going to parties.  Period.  Virtual or real.  I will stop putting myself in a position to be left out or shamed.  I will stop punishing myself by being around any sort of group of people.  I will not reach out to people who have never shown a capacity to give a shit for anything but my rare moments of ease and humor.  Reaching out has taught me pain in the oppressive silence it creates, just as I have been known to silence an entire room of happy loud drinking people.  I can accomplish this anywhere, even in a virtual reality.  Social media is unhealthy for a person like me.  Ungenuine interactions are poison.

I retreat further inward now.  I am becoming, slowly, the reclusive writer of legend.  Retreating further into a padded world in which only the people who hear me are heard.

My main thought yesterday was that I don't belong among people.  I have a hunger for a social existence, like most people do, and I get lonely easily, yet I am nearly always lonelier when I am with people than when I am not.  My Philip and Max excepted. 

I like myself quite well when I am not flushed out in a crowd of people so different from me they make me hideously aware of my otherness.  Usually without realizing they are doing it, they make me ashamed of my otherness.  When I have to see how things are for other people and then look at how things are for me, I become resentful that other people find it so easy to stay afloat.  To change themselves as need be.  To find adequate support.  But when I am here, just with my guys who are also quite different, I feel normal.  I feel loved.  I want to strangle them a lot, but they always listen to me.  Always.  And I do a lot of listening myself. 

This coming year I want to find better ways of supporting mine and my guys' otherness.  I want to retreat myself from hurtful people.  I want to retreat myself from painful situations. 

But right now, before Philip, my mom, Max, and I head out to the lake for a walk with the dogs on this cold Christmas day, I want to thank all of you who have been here for me.  Who have listened to me, who have taken an interest, and whom I think about when I'm going about my daily business.  I want you all to know that you and your comments and your interest are a definite light in my life and through some of the hardest months I have come back up again for air sometimes only because I don't want to be a disappointment to all of you.  You take the dark with such open arms it makes me want to find more light to share because you deserve it.  So many of you are going through rough times yourselves and I feel honored whenever you share your own troubles as though I was someone you could trust.  It's the sharing, back and forth, that keeps us humans from feeling alone.

I'm going to go looking for pretty things to photograph and take pictures of the joyful galloping dogs to share with you later.  Happy things. 

I don't really believe in Christmas** but I do believe in the magic of the solstice and the rebirth that winter brings to everyone each year and I would like to wish all of you a bountiful and hopeful New Year!

XOXO!!






*Which, contemplate away, I will not commit because I couldn't break my husband and son in so ruthless a way.  I will never purposely leave them.  So the risk is nil, but I can't promise the desire won't crop up.

**Not in the whole religious way.  Christians co-opted the solstice and winter celebrations of non-Christians but it doesn't really matter because each of us may celebrate according to our individual faiths.  For Christians this is when they celebrate Christ's birth and this takes  nothing away from my own beliefs that this is merely a time to gather together to keep warm and to light trees to lead the way through the dark hours of winter.