🖤

I see you, 37 and still trying to figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Curious as to how you can get your bank account up over X dollars, how to regularly cook meals, how to exercise.  Wondering how other people keep their homes so clean. Marveling at the ease others seem to feel in their skin, friendships, routines, goals. Googling: Executive Functioning

You were attuned at 4 years old, standing up at the dining room table at that very crowded, very generational - trauma - esque family party, tightening your stomach and your lungs, announcing “I’ll sing” to unconsciously shift the room to feel safe again. 

15 year old you, not included to go out in the woods at night (nevermind the various ways you’ve already said, to their faces, that drinking in the woods seems dumb) but/and/also yearning as the social events go on without you. Having one or two very close friends, but missing the flirtations, jokes, (what on earth is a BJ?!) … exploration with others. Inside, you wonder why everyone else seems so settled in their sexuality, wondering if you’re queer, or no one is interested in you or are you just missing the hints? 

Feeling everything yet missing out on feeling what everyone else is feeling at the same time. 

Until there you are, two years later, lost and overwhelmed with the future. Using oxford commas where everyone else writes in run-ons. Panicked how to structure the days, the goals, the plans to get moving toward whatever “grown up” means. Procrastinating, avoiding work, shutting down emotionally only to work frantically on that AP assignment, flirting with burnout. Your locker, bookbag, car - whatever it might be the only obvious sign of a cluttered mess - and finally saying yes to that moment in the woods, because you’re just lonely. 

Through the 60 year old eyes of your mother, looking backward and seeing all the markers. The critical junctures where if only has become a scream into the void. If only… 

There you are, at 29, holding your first child. 

Disconnected from the labor of it all - only six months later: 

A shaking, a monster, a static field surround you 

Please don’t touch, I’m a live wire.  

Please, don’t look too close, you may see something real. 

Something feral. 

A new parent, so filled with rage and grief and loss and confusion and JOY just SO MUCH JOY that sometimes your body feels tighter than should be possible. Sometimes it claws up your throat as tears. Sometimes it doesn’t go anywhere at all, just curls up, a cat with sharp claws. 

Did the bell ring? 7 year old you, in trouble once again on the playground for reading (yes, reading) through the recess bell. 8 year old you, being the only one caught cursing as you simply can’t regulate your voice through something sneaky. 11 year old you, losing scissor privileges because you can’t cut in a straight line. 

A shining 21, but maintaining some sort of anti-other-humans forcefield when you brave the bars. Holding hair while others throw up, wondering how once again you’re here, but somehow not?

You are in your 30’s, learning your diagnosis for the first time. Learning how to breathe, how to meditate, how to be in your body (that no, never “snapped back” even as you love your child so.very.much). Learning how to give yourself a break, how to set up ways to love yourself even when you hate yourself, how to just be with this version of you, made up of so many different strings

I see you. All these versions of you. 

Each sensitive, overly wired, overly blunt, overly precise in your language…. all of these versions of you. How they add up to parts of the whole. How each and every one is somehow you. 

Unraveling the knots at 38 now, beginning to understand why that situation, that moment, that friendship failed plays on an endless loop in your mind. Beginning to connect the heartbreaks, successes, full spectrum of emotions back to a whole person once again. Beginning to untie the convoluted moments, one tug at a time. 

i see you, i see you, i see you 🖤