This Might Take me a Second

I don’t think I know how to be vulnerable.

I used to once, but now I feel like I’m fighting a little bit to get back there. I very fortunately grew up with a big group of friends I had known since pre-school or shortly after. We had so many sleepovers in the almost 15 years we were all friends that I couldn’t even begin to separate what events happened when, I just know those nights were where I found the most comfort growing up; baking in a packed kitchen, (Ok, who am I kidding, I was watching everyone else bake. Occasionally, I was handed something to stir while I sat in the corner being the one-woman peanut gallery), jumping off of swing sets we had grown way too big for, or stargazing on a trampoline. Those nights were where I first learned that verbalizing my feelings was necessary relief. I swear to this day that sitting around a bonfire has magical, disarming abilities because that always seemed to be where all of my fears and insecurities revealed themselves. On my worst days, I wish I could just pick up the landline to make a 4+ way call, gather all of my best friends and their sleeping bags for a night of walking in a rowdy mob to the grocery store for ice cream and/or s’mores ingredients and stopping at the Redbox for a comically terrible horror film. I haven’t kept up with many of them anymore, for various reasons, but I know I have them all to thank for creating any sense of trust I have in other people. They were a great source of stability and comfort in my life when I really needed it and I will always be grateful to them for that. Through them I learned how necessary it was to have a safe place to be vulnerable, to share the parts of myself that I was taught to hide and belittle.

When I started blogging, it was to sort through trauma. (Which kind of sounds comical considering most blogs give more of a live, laugh, love vibe than a depression, cry, therapy vibe.) I still haven’t really decided how much I want to talk about it here. It was the catalyst for my more truthful writing and is a huge part of my story, so it’s hard to avoid entirely, but I think it’s really easy for it to become my entire identity or a gimmick, and I am so much more than the parts of my life that have shock value. What I will say is: It’s hard to avoid learning vulnerability when your whole life hangs in the balance, especially when you’re still in high school. It changed, in some way, everything about me and how I view myself, life, and the people around me. It was a major wake-up call for me, and though I would never relive it or wish that time on my worst enemy (you know, which I totally have as a 28-year-old PSL-drinking, Taylor Swift-loving, former Tumblr girl), I am eternally grateful for the pages on pages of lessons it taught me. So, when one of my high school teachers asked me to write a reflection on that time in my life, I thought it would be a no-brainer. I had spent 2 months creating tons of memories for my future therapist to take notes on. Reflecting on it should have been a piece of cake. Yet, I spent 2 days in a row watching the cursor blink in a blank Microsoft Word document, surrounded by the smell of old books and whatever generic cleaner they bought in bulk to mop the way-too-glossy high school halls with, hoping the librarian looking over my shoulder from her desk wouldn’t think that, on top of not being able to walk right, I also had lost every semblance of intelligent thought.

I had tried so hard to look perfect back then…I failed but, man, did I put my all into it. I worked so hard at school to be anything but complicated, to be the occasional comedian, stress-reliever, the pillar of dependability, the quiet steadying force, to be spotless. It rarely ever worked, but I tried until it ruined me, nonetheless. When I got sick at 18, I was kind of exposed by the spectacle of it all. For years I flew under the radar in high school, happily. When I got back, people were so kind, but they also were curious, and I can’t blame them for that. I, for the first time in my entire life, actually felt seen. In most cases, that moment should have been beautiful, but being spotlit in all your very human glory is a risk. More often than not, it’s a worthy risk, but still something that exposes us to pain, shame, and error, inevitably. School was my getaway, something most teenagers don’t feel, but for me it was where I could happily turtle into my shell and just be. When I came back, “the girl who lived,” my peace was upended. I had to figure out how to navigate, how to answer questions about feelings when I really had just learned that I could feel in front of people and not be seen as weak. So, when given this assignment, I felt the ultimate pressure to put a smile on and be my own PR team. Surely, no one wanted to hear about the panic attacks or that I feared looking at my own, scarred body or that I was losing sleep with the echoing memory of heart monitors living in my ear. People wanted to hear about the triumph, wanted to tell me I was brave, they wanted to be the rainbow post-storm, but I felt like I had been watching the Carolina Panthers game from Topeka, Kansas. (I once had a Journalism professor tell me he knew nothing about sports but found sports analogies to be the most helpful universally, and that really stuck with me, I guess.) I was merely the reason for the spectacle, but otherwise I was removed from it. My doctors were the ones deserving of praise, the home team. I didn’t feel brave, I felt like I caused a lot of pain and stress. I felt like a fraud. So, I wrote the essay; plain, monotone, matter-of-fact. It had stats and research and probably a bibliography. My teacher read it and said, disappointed,

The embarrassment I had from that airball of an essay nagged from the back of my brain, through graduation and into the summer. I wanted to redeem myself, to continue riding the vulnerability high. I was a regular emotional-risk adrenaline junkie. I knew I had loved to write, that I had found solace in the openness of others whether it be through poetry, blogs, Youtube videos, etc. So, I started putting pen to paper, hoping my heart and soul would just pour out on the paper like it did when I sat and wrote my short stories and poems just for fun…but very little came out. These small excerpts put dents in the wall I had up in my brain, but nothing brought it tumbling down. I spent that summer catching up with family and friends who I hadn’t seen since I had been sick, regaling the war stories from my point of view. One night my dad said to me, “You should really write your story down. I think it’s interesting for people to hear it from your point of view. It might even be good for you”

That night I wrote it all out in a matter of hours, consumed by the clicking keyboard, eyes tiring in the glow of a massive HP monitor. I took all of my feelings from the past few months and let this unassuming word document take them as I fought through tears - sad, relieved, and hopeful all at once - just to get this out of my brain. When I finished, took a deep breath and re-read, I finally saw what everyone else had acknowledged, what I felt I had fraudulently been selling: I got through a lot, to say the least. It wasn’t just about the machines and stitches and procedures, it was the hurt and perseverance and hope that I had to maintain to make it through. It wasn’t just my body that had survived, but somehow my brain and heart (in the intangible way they convey feeling) had made it through this too, and that was all my own doing. I recognized a familiar lightness in me, one that I had felt over and over again in the glow of a bonfire, or a creaking swing set, or bundled up in a sleeping bag, but this time I had that all on my own, which felt kind of badass. From there, I had the idea to start a blog, to find meaning in being vulnerable either just as myself or through others, both their own kind of therapy. I talked happiness and trauma, both in anger and in relief. I learned a lot, about myself, about others, about being human in general. I am so grateful for the growth that all of my writing has given me, shared or not. Even the posts that felt less genuine, held some sort of truth for me even if it wasn’t the truth I thought I was writing about. It taught me what was important to share and who I wanted to be as a writer (a title I always feel silly claiming) moving forward. Eventually, though, after years of unsteady posting and unclear motivation, I hit another wall.

It certainly wasn’t that I had learned everything I needed to learn or found answers to the millions of questions that run through my brain late at night (and in the morning when I wake up and the middle of the day and…) Something in me just felt like I was forcing it, creating an uncomfortable friction between my thoughts and my words that didn’t give me relief but brought me (more) anxiety. Sharing trauma is necessary, it is brave, it has value, but it also has a place, a time, and has to have purpose. I kind of lost that. I had processed and healed from most of the trauma of being sick. Now I was sorting through the average day to day issues that weren’t so unique. I got lost trying to figure out what the phoenix does after it rises. (Comparing myself to a phoenix seems like a bold move, but here I am.) Sure, it flies, but all birds fly. What does it do when it’s not flying? It feels kind of lame to write about the sitting phoenix, or a phoenix trying to make sense of Bachelor in Paradise on a hand-me-down couch while drinking a $1.10 (sometimes $1.09, depending on where you are) Coke from McDonalds on a Tuesday night. I started scrambling, trying to decide if my struggles were even kind of as important as the issue of life and death, but I had been really afraid to work on those, to acknowledge that they even existed. There was no rainbow at the end of the trauma storm to run toward there. I was just wading through the pain I was still in, unsure if it actually ended, so aware of the other people my life was intertwined with. At this point, I was just exasperated. All I had was my anger and my writing showed it.

My blog then became more about laying out my issues and worries and hoping someone would help me because I was too busy hiding in my anger to help myself. I would broadcast my insecurities and fears, sometimes hoping that offering it before people could see it in real, imperfect time would make it ok or absolve me of any thing I did that would make others uncomfortable or upset. Though rooted in something relatable, understandable and heartbreaking, at the end of the day, it’s negligent. I had started handing out the most convoluted parts of my life and asking other people to untangle them even when they had their own things to carry. My friends (who are way too good for me) would listen to me for hours, hand out the best advice they could over and over again, but it never really made me feel better. It wasn’t because they weren’t good or true words, but because I wasn’t really looking for them to make me feel better, I was waiting for me to allow myself to believe it. The best way I’ve heard it said is: Your trauma is not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility. As much as I like to think the validation of others is going to be my salve, it never truly fills the void I need it to. This is all undeniably hard to work through for a middle-child, high school theatre kid, who thrives on quality time. It's like I need other people to make sense of myself, to tell me I should like myself, when it should really be the other way around.

As I started to turtle in life again, I’ve carried my feelings into my shell with me to hide. It’s almost like I traumatized myself after realizing what a walking monster of insecurity I had become. I stopped telling friends about big important things in my life, as if friendship was only what I could offer to others and not what it meant for me as well. I stopped claiming my feelings and gaslit myself into silence. However, a shell can only carry so much and from time to time my insecurity monster would reveal herself again, this time I would spend days beating myself up about it. That certainly didn’t help anyone and it didn’t make me feel any better either. The thing about the relief and risk of vulnerability is that it’s not just about coming out of it triumphant and heroic. It’s about sharing in the messy and ugly parts of yourself as well. Because, sure, scars are technically blemishes but they are also symbols of strength. Deeper than scars are the things that make us all relatably (totally a word) human: The fact that I really need to do my dishes and that I’m really bad at interrupting people when I think of what to contribute to a conversation or that I’m terrible at answering texts, the fact that I thought I was an open book but here I am finding out that I wasn’t quite as open as I thought. All of those things seem so simple but are what builds up the intricacy of just being a person. Those are things worth knowing and accepting. Simple and small does not mean it’s unnecessary, because those make the foundation of the big things. Even acknowledging that gives me that campfire therapy kind of relief.

I’m still on the hunt for what the grown-up, vulnerability-junkie version of stargazing on a trampoline and Redbox scary movies is. If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

-Mary