“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”

Virginia Woolf

I haven’t come back here for a long while because I’ve been happy. Or maybe life has been happening too fast for me to think about unhappiness – no matter. When I’m happy, I don’t often feel the call to write. I want to be around friends and loved ones, cooking, reading, laughing. But when things begin to fall apart, it is a small solace to lock myself away with a place to put it all.

I’ve felt secure with someone. For the first time possibly ever, I have allowed myself to surge forward without hesitation. The fear has still been there, the worry, but the love has been so much stronger than that. It’s allowed me to acknowledge that both things can be true; I can be terrified to let someone love me while inviting it to exist.

Love has very nearly always been a black and white world for me. It has been love, and then it has been hate. Occasionally I have felt them at the same time, but they have always been oil and water. This time, something new has emerged. It is pitiful and sopping wet, shaking. Naked. Vulnerable. I am disgusted by it, even though it has come from me. Perhaps more so because it is born of my blood. I have let someone in, and they have seen me, and they have responded to it. It is as cold as it sounds. I want to kick the creature while it is down, let it cry my tears and dissolve itself from me.

My entire life I have felt as though there is too much within me. Too much feeling, too much reaction, too much me. I have yet to meet someone who makes me feel that this is untrue. It is almost as if loving me is enough to stave it off, until it isn’t. I’ll be bursting with it, with everything, and all it seems to take is one conversation to make me shove it all back in. I thought I was better, genuinely better, which makes this all the more bitter on my tongue.

To allow someone my physical self, the enormity of all that I am in someone else’s hand, has borne that pitiful creature. I have given myself over to people before and been scorned, and I can rationalize it now. It is the love that turns into hate. It is infinitely worse, it turns out, when it is no one’s fault. When you are hurt simply for the sake of being hurt, as it is the result of the way you both innately are.

How do you tell someone to see you differently? Do you beg, get down on your knees and offer everything you have, knowing that it would never make a difference? Do you disappear into yourself, hide anything that is too raw, knowing that it would never make a difference? Reconcile with the fact that there is nothing more you can do for reconciliation? I am exhausted.

I know that I am falling back into myself because I am here with you instead of in conversation about it. I do not want to talk about it. I do not want to fight, I do not want to force my point across, I do not want to create waves. I will hold my head under the surface instead and hold my breath for as long as I can, like I have always done. I’m scared, in the way that a child is scared, that I will always be me.

G.D.