Bear with Me

So…it’s been a minute.

Being a person? Pretty hard. Being vulnerable on a regular basis? SO tough. I’ve really created an uphill, dance battle for myself. I continuously run into this one problem, leaving my writing to hang with the tumbleweeds of the internet. I get the urge to write, my favorite thing to do in the world, and then, out of nowhere, the sails can find no wind, there’s a train and no track, there’s a will but certainly no way I can sit down and put thoughts to paper. I hit this same wall every time and it crushes me. It all starts with what feels like the biggest question in the world:

Why does it matter?

It’s something my favorite journalism professor always urged us to think of when we sat down to write a story, a great mantra when I was just a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed student who wanted to uncover truth, hope and purpose through the life around me. Now, a sardonic, latest-twenties, 9 to 5-er with an undying love for bedtime, I find the levity in possibility and the belief that my words mean a damn thing to be a little more sparse. My heart is not completely hardened. I’ve lived deep down in the forest where pessimism rules before and it got way too cozy with my depression for me to ever go back there. I also just genuinely find that life and people at their deepest core are truly good. You can call that naivety, but I call that growth. At its simplest, my problem is this: I don’t know how to write about the hard stuff when there’s no happy ending.

When I started blogging (before the mass-death of longer-than-6-second attention spans), I was just a kid in college learning all that fun, emotional life stuff that no one talks about or preps you for. I have no degree or documented steps or authority of any kind to back this up, but I would love to argue that the first few years of being an adult; learning that you are as human as those who raised you, learning that the powers that be are a little more fallible than the power we gave them would suggest, and finding how to be confident in waiting and uncertainty, requires as much growth and learning as those first few years of school, if not more. Life was just epiphany after epiphany. If you weren’t learning, you weren’t living. Change was inevitable. As an added bonus, I had just walked out of my very own Jodi Picoult novel and was still absorbing the idea of escaping death by flesh-eating bacteria at 18, while also fleeing almost a decade of abuse at the hands of someone who had promised to love me as their own. (Both stories for other days and times or maybe a cup of coffee or a shot of tequila.) It was…an adventure, to say the least. Though those were some of the hardest times of my life, they also were some of the most clarifying. Sometimes giving names to your monsters makes them way less scary. I was bound to feel renewed and liberated and all of those wonderful sunshine things that make you feel like you just passed a Bio exam you were sure you failed. The high of relief and clarity is undersold, if you ask me. The catharsis and peace of understanding and feeling seen are their own unmarketable drugs. I was a fountain of new knowledge that kids my age didn’t have to learn yet and that generations before me had been conned into thinking were things better left unsaid. Though I appreciated the lessons I was learning and the newfound joys I was finally open to accepting, my brain was constantly torn between feeling crowded with possibility and singled-out by the rarity of my experience. I found myself ashamed of my loneliness, and held tight onto the coattails of the joy I felt I had finally caught up to. With joy as my driver, hardships were in the rearview, bumps in the road were dodged, those not following joy with me said their goodbyes, chapter after chapter had its ending. However, what I had yet to realize was that I was not joy’s passenger, I wasn’t even in the backseat. At best, I was a dog chasing tail lights, I was twine-tied cans on the bumper. My legs were bound to get tired and the string pulling me along was fraying.

It is impossible to explain to you how disheartening it is to be a rising phoenix one second and a girl getting recognized as a regular customer at her neighborhood Taco Bell the next. (Crunchwraps will probably, literally, be the death of me.) One March I fought death and won, then another March I had 7 Shamrock Shakes in a week. It is impossible not to drown a little in the idea that I should be something spectacular, or that I should, at least, be one inspirational speaking tour in by this point. I felt and still often feel that I owe it to others and myself to be the constant image of humility and strength that surviving a life-threatening illness made me. Now I am not blind to the idea that this is also on me, I am not under any sort of impression that I am deserving of a platform or title or benefits just because life was scary once, nor do I think I’m some spotless image of survival. Sometimes, it just feels a little pathetic to go from being known for something harrowing and brave to hoping this same acquaintance I’ve been introduced to 10 times remembers my name. I know this might be the peak of my narcissism, probably a culmination somehow of my privilege, a whisper from my depression. This is surely one of the many downfalls of my undying need to be independent which closes me off from things like having communicative and long-lasting relationships or makes people wonder how I really have any friends or makes me seem stuck-up and no fun at parties (exactly who I wanted to be in my twenties, of course.) However, knowing this doesn’t make me feel better just like how getting a new lease on life didn’t cure my depression, just like knowing happiness exists doesn’t mean I can just choose it. There is so much I can see, joy being one of those, no matter how intangible it is, no matter how the chemicals in my brains decide they don’t want to flow, but getting to that is hard and endless work. Know, however, as sad as that sounds, I am not without hope. Hopeful may just have to replace my “happy” sometimes. I can accept that.

I so deeply fear sharing this huge part of me that is not the sparkly, sunny, comfort space that I’m frequently selling. I want to be peace for people, that place of calm and levity and understanding that I have been peddling like I have a mortgage that depends on it. I know that I am mostly to blame because even when I’m a car bound to crash without oil or gas or brakes, I’m still trying to make it seem like all is smooth sailing. I crack often in my own sardonic, snarky and defensive way, but I try to smooth it over with a million, “I’m fines” until I start believing it too. I have often felt like the only person who is protecting me is me, and that’s probably true and fair. However, I often get so exhausted fighting my invisible war that I wish someone else would carry me through it, if only for a second. In the end, either they get caught in the crossfire or I end up feeling suffocated, and then I start building walls I don’t know how to knock down. See, this is the stuff I’ve been afraid to tell. This is what makes me think, “Ah, there’s the unloveable parts.” This is where I prepare for a million eye rolls, this is where I assume I lose everyone and hope they at least choose to tolerate me after this, this is where I worry that this is too much to put people through, that I am too much. Vulnerability is not my strong suit. The trauma of someone telling me my feelings are too much has trapped me in a box where giving anything away feels like performing an impromptu tap dance in front of a Madison-Square-Garden-sized crowd of strangers. Hell, just this past year I told some of my best friends about a huge event in my life that they didn’t even know happened, that I didn’t realize anyone would want to know. I find that in the moment, I am genuine, myself and no one else, heart on my sleeve at all time, but when it come to looking back at things, my feelings are locked in the Pentagon of my brain, not in the name of deception, not because I don’t trust others, but because I don’t trust myself. I silence myself with that question that once inspired me: Why does it matter?

I like to go on long drives to clear my mind, it was always the surefire thing that brought out my best writing and thinking. (Cue the song “My Church” by Maren Morris) The monotony of corn fields and empty roads with few and far between speed limit signs is the perfect canvas to outline my thoughts on. I tried it a few months ago, hoping it would inspire something in me, even if it was just the self-acceptance I desperately have been seeking. Just as hard as it is to chase after joy, it is also exhausting to run away from self-doubt. I followed the sunset down the same path I knew so well, one that led me to the same roads I’ve traced since I was a 20-year-old torn between who I was at home and who I was at school, the place that knew all of my heartbreak, grief and failure. As empty as it always is, being alone doesn’t feel like loneliness there (why does this feel like the Nicole Kidman AMC ad?), even just hearing myself out makes me feel peacefully understood. This time, though, nothing about it felt like peace. I normally let the lyrics of my favorite songs carry me over the winding hills and into my thoughts, but this time, in the silence of my car, I searched for not just words to put on paper, but the reason to keep writing. I repeated over and over again, “Why does it matter?” I am just another 20-something millennial in an average midwest town with an average job who, sometimes, can write well and has just as much of a perspective as anyone else does. What do I offer to the world? What can I share that others have not or will not? What makes my words worth sharing? What gives me the authority to write or talk or act like I know anything at all? Naturally, I made myself too anxious with all of these questions (and a hell of an existential crisis), came home pouting, and didn’t write for weeks after that, too exasperated by the fight I was having in my own brain to let myself fail again. Being the sole player on both teams meant some part of me had to lose. I honestly wasn’t sure I could handle that disappointment again. For a couple of weeks, ideas would come up here and there, I would write down a few sentences and then lose the want to try, unsure of where I was headed or why I was writing what I was. The pressure of trying to write well or with purpose put my entire passion to a halt. I know, it sounds like insanity, the plague of the creative type, but I didn’t grow up with the idea that anything at all was “just for fun” or “just because.” Roads always lead somewhere and the pressure of making the hours traveled productive in a way that made me not look foolish or selfish was causing me to combust.

I sat down in my favorite Starbucks a few weeks ago, headphones in, one of two people sitting in the cafe on a Tuesday night, just staring blankly at my Google Drive. The baristas must have thought I was having a crisis as my laser focus could have burned holes through the screen. After months of looking for ways to emotionally let go, even in trying to find new hobbies or sleep more or drink more water, I found little spurts of “better” but I always came back to writing, mentally writhing over the invisible wall I could not figure out how to get around. I had lost the spark in me that allowed me to process and dug myself deep into a rut. So, I thought I’d try the most classic tactic for finding something I had lost and started retracing my steps. When I looked through all of my most recent writing I found myself discussing one common theme: me and my insecurities. Which really just made me think, “Awesome. I AM a narcissist.” I had promised myself before this journey that I wasn’t going to be too harsh on myself, though, so I let myself process this without judgment or schedule or boundary. It’s weird to live in a purgatory where you don’t even let yourself be you TO you. I would roll out the welcome mat for anyone else, let them make mistakes, be vulnerable, forgive and understand until I had nothing left to give, but what I offered myself? A lot of judgment and dismissal and even a little hatred. I was so afraid and ashamed to be me that I didn’t even let myself be that. I didn’t know who I was, which isn’t a rarity in your 20’s but the world sends you in a tailspin about that enough. When I’m staring into the darkness behind my eyelids at the end of every day, it’s just me in here. Why would I want to trap myself with someone I wasn’t allowing myself to trust or even like? What I had been searching for this whole time snapped into place in that moment: I just wanted to let myself be me. I had spent so long writing with the hope it would offer relief to someone else, that I forgot this love of mine had all started with a 12-year-old girl who just wanted to find a safe place to just be. I think if it didn’t feel too dramatic to cry in a Starbucks at 7 p.m. I might have right then and there, but I felt like that would be too much for my favorite barista, Richard. (Shout out to Richard. He’s a cool dude and is definitely fueled daily by, like, 7 shots of espresso.)

I don’t know where this leaves us. I don’t know what moving forward looks like for my writing or my blog, because yesterday I had no words to give and today I could float an ark on the flood of my thoughts. I’m leaving you without closure, and I hope we can all be ok with that for now. I’m writing more down than I have in months, but I’m trying to decide what’s just for me these days. I still believe deeply in the importance of vulnerability and relatability. I wouldn’t be where I am without the honest and brave discussions I’ve had with caring friends or heard from writers and artists who I respect. I always wish I had seen more of this kind of vulnerability sooner in life and wonder what kind of world we would live in if more people had been willing to be uncurated and imperfect in a public arena years ago. Yet, we’re all just learning, right? When they said, “Sharing is caring,” they were onto something. I just worry about returning to old habits, about my addiction to putting everyone else before myself while mentally drowning in the “Pick me! Pick me!” cries of being uncommunicative for too long. Also, honestly, scheduling my time is not my forte. Something else I need to work on. Just know I’m trying my best to be present and to learn and hopefully find this to be a space where I feel ok to be me again. I am always happy to give perspective and love over a cup of coffee or a gluten free pasta, and am truly very open to suggestions if you just need perspective. (As a nerd, I thrive on a prompt…judge if you must.) At the end of the day, I hope you remember this: We are not martyrs in the name of humility. Caring about yourself is not the absence of care for others. Sure we can definitely love others before we love ourselves, but we have a better chance of survival when we put our own oxygen mask on first, when we have self-love, self-trust, and self-respect. Let yourself have the good things too. “It” all matters because you do.

-Mary