10:15 a.m. - June 18, 2002
I feel like talking
Yesterday it sank in like a strobe light klaxon. There are two choices: I can keep being me, the oxymoronic personality that seeks people but drives them away, the one who's socially awkward yet the one in charge, the one who masks an overwhelming sense of fear and shame and incompetence under confidence and awards and accomplishment, or I can stop exerting all the energy required to maintain and direct it towards being able to foster meaningful relationships that are neither threatening or foreign by letting people see me, the laid back guy who likes to hike and laugh and be tickled.
I want to be tickled so much it isn't funny. I want to let down my guard and just lay there and allow myself be touched instead of lashing out and punching when the danger threshold alarms go off. This is an invitation to make me laugh and say This is not the end of the world if I'm tickled.
The thing with closet doors began when I was nine and his mother came home unexpectedly and we were in the closet in his room and he held one hand over my mouth and another around my throat and I couldn't breathe. His mother stood not even a foot or two away while we were in the closet and she didn't hear the slight tinkle of the hangers above that made me dizzy while her fucked up son made me feel small and insignificant and I couldn't struggle because I didn't want the mother to open the closet doors and see me. As I write this I'm the one feeling guilty and rationally I know not to but it's not as simple as that.
I can't remember the exact details but he did jump out of some hiding place, I remember looking over my shoulder and distinctly recall how my heart stopped beating it seemed and I couldn't escape or run fast enough. I don't know if that was before or after but I dream of it regularly, looking back in slow motion at darkness and two hands reaching out with the light glinting off some gold necklace he wore and his football jersey, the mid-length kind that just reaches the belly button and feeling overwhelming shame.
So that's one of my things, a weakness or peccadillo or flaw or quirk, take your pick. I don't like closet doors at all. It's the bogeyman all the way, isn't it?
Talking about these things is supposed to be helpful.
Yesterday my counselor and I talked about energy and what I've been doing with my life compulsion-wise, achievement-wise, personality-wise, relationship-wise. We talked about the drive for excellence which I've always called ambition but she called overcompensating and underneath that's what I've always known it to be. It was never enough for me to have the A's, win spelling bees and geography bees and science projects and scholarships and trying to excel in everything not just to win or be in first place but to show people that I was better than them by comfortable margins, margins I increased with every achievement but like most things like that, I had to do more and more to hang onto that comfortable feeling, and that's when I went into hyperdrive in high school and college, 3 majors, 3 minors, honors this and honors that, being the first to complete the GRE and the GRE English Lit and not studying for the LSAT because by then testing was something I could do cold. Academics, academics, academics. That's the only thing I do well at, and in high school when I realized I wouldn't excel at soccer or swimming I stopped playing the game to avoid not being the winner. Don't think I'm a poor sport, because I'm not. I wish I were, occasionally. Humble, yes, when I received the grant from the NSF to pay for graduate school and while I didn't brag it was known and that was good enough for me and on top of classes I taught to do observations and worked because I had down time so by the end of it I was in school and working 60 hours a week. And then had time to study since I wasn't sleeping, and then decided to start the textbook and this was after the first book was written and I derived immense pleasure from my CV because it meant I was okay, I was healthy, I was so far removed from the state I was in as a child, but I didn't realize that it's all the same, that I channeled my energy into maintaining this child's veneers and safety at the expense of everything else.
Everything comes to a head.
OK, that was enough for now.
