Just Admit It, or Aren’t They Right There?

My siblings and I are close in age.  Like, we are talking minutes and months apart, not years.  We grew up right on top of each other in a lot of ways.  There wasn’t a lot of privacy.  It was pretty tricky to keep secrets in our house.  No place was safe from the prying eyes of one’s siblings.  And we really weren’t always nice to each other.  It didn’t help that our family went a little banana cakes when we were teenagers.  That is just never good.  And it made us much worse people to each other than we otherwise might have been, I think.  Because honestly, we were kind of jerks to each other a lot.  I’m not sure we liked each other very much or at all, in fact, until we were much older and there was much more space between us and All Those Things That Happened when we were younger.

One thing I learned growing up in my house was that diaries were simply never safe.  They would be read.  Which I suspect is not atypical of any household with siblings.  But, likely because we were so close in age and because things were a little Nuts In General, it was a tad intense.  Your deepest secrets and thoughts and fears would not only be read, but also exposed publicly, expressly to make you look and feel small and stupid.  I learned, for many reasons, that vulnerability was something to hide (and of course, never to commit anything to paper that you didn’t plan on sharing).  When you are a teenager, and everything feels messy and raw almost all of the time because your brain is still all half formed and you just kind of want to get stoned and have sex a lot but you also have pimples in weird places and are never quite convinced that anyone likes you as much as you like them, except, of course,  when you are stoned and having sex, it can be hard to not have a safe place or way to admit just how unsure of yourself you are or that you are scared or worried or sad.

It took me a long time – well into college – to begin to be able to actually articulate my feelings on any level that approximated actual emotional honesty.  Really, it took Jared, who had this ability – this what seemed to be an amazing ability – to say these simple things, like “I feel ashamed” or “I feel lonely” for me to be able to admit those same things.  And honestly, I don’t know that I had ever said them before.  They were so terrifying to me and, because I grew up thinking that admitting these things was somehow shameful or bad in and of itself – that these were things to hide and not safe to admit – it took a long time before I actually came to understand that they were really just feelings and that it was powerful, not weak, to be able to admit them.  It took – and continues to take – me a lot of time and effort to really embrace and understand that admitting these things is what ties us, as people, together.

Lately I have been in this weird place, trying to process all of these weird things.  And that can feel really lonely and overwhelming.  Because it’s hard.  It’s hard to acknowledge the ways in which you are broken.  It’s much, much easier to Just Always Be Fine.  It’s much, much easier to just ignore or deny the ways in which we hurt ourselves and others and hope that they go away on their own, or that no one notices.  It is much easier to stay in a pattern, even a destructive one, than it is to break free of it.

I met someone recently who is one of those people who makes you feel like there is hope for you in the world – that maybe, someday, you could be like her – that your life could be that good and that meaningful,that you could have that kind of integrity and resolve.  It’s been really inspiring.   And it has just been good.  It makes me feel braver and like I’m not alone at all.  Because it scares me to deal with shit sometimes.  It scares me because sometimes dealing with shit means losing things – people you love and things you want or hope for.  And it scares me because sometimes it feels very much like pulling on a loose thread – so small and seemingly innocuous but it will unravel everything.  And it scares me because it means being honest in a way that is uncomfortable and raw and vulnerable – it requires admitting Your Real Truth.  And Your Real Truth isn’t always pretty or something you are terribly proud of or would really enjoy other people knowing.  It makes you feel all naked and not in the fun way.

But being able to admit all of those things means I feel like I can now see them more clearly.  And I can see more clearly where I am and where I want to go.  It feels like figuratively dumping your purse out on the table and then just identifying what all the crap is in there anyway.  Which is kind of exactly what some of this is – just putting all of this information out there and then slowly going through and recognizing what each bit is.  Because it isn’t always clear, is it?  Sometimes what you think is one thing is really quite another altogether.  And sometimes it takes someone else to see it with you for you to really be able to recognize that.  At least that is how it is for me.  It is like when you are looking for your keys, and you look all over, and then your roommate comes in and says

Aren’t those your keys on the table?

And then you feel like a dumbass, because how did you miss that?  They were Right There the whole time.  Sometimes you just need someone else to help you see that.  And to do that, you need to be able to tell the truth about what it is you think and feel.  Which is hard and sometimes sucks.  But also means there is hope; if you can identify it, that means you can work on changing it or embracing it or doing whatever it is that needs to be done.  And that is good, right?