An Unraveling….and a Respooling
April has gone by in a blur. I promised myself (and you, silently) that I would write. I did but not on this blog. I found myself being able to write when it was in the form of letters. Even letters to people I had never written to before. As well as to people I had written to, decades ago. In each of these, I found myself examining pieces of who I used to be, who I am becoming and choosing what I wanted to keep.
Healing is a lifelong process. The pandemic brought me so many lessons in a rush and has probably been the single defining moment in my life. It is when I realised that I have been just as greedy, fear-driven and power-hungry as other people I’ve judged. I haven’t chased money or visible symbols of ambition. Instead, I have devoured knowledge, burning my way through books and content. I have blazed through conversations like a ferocious monster that eats you up whole and spits you out minus any insight you could possibly have.
And I have done so in the deluded sense that this would speed up the labourious classroom called life that I’ve found myself stuck in. I’m not going to say something cliched like living is the lesson. But it has not gotten me what I wanted. I have still fallen sick, very sick. I have still made bad choices and continued making them. I have still needed help, felt regret and self-doubt. Accumulating words has not made my life easier or better.
Yet, this undoing of myself has been soothing in a way that I have never known (or don’t remember). This happened to me today. Look how mental health unravels.
I looked at Instagram, telling myself it was on my browser so it was safe and wouldn’t suck me into a self-harming spiral for hours. I paused at a post about an event in an area I know. Read the names of people I recognise. Imagined who would be there. Recognised the conversations they would all have. Decided that I had seen it all before and was not going to go. Then I read the next few slides. A name came up in text.
I met him over a decade ago. He was charming and sensitive. The woman with him, not so much, with her nose up in the air and the overly dressed up demeanour in a room where we were all in jeans. Cut forward to a few years later when the MeToo movement shredded relationships and trust all over us. I discovered that he had been abusing her, brutalising her. She reached out and said, “You were the only one who responded to my cry for help. Everyone else just turned their backs on me.” I admitted that my first impression of her had not been complimentary, such a petty, shallow reaction. She told me that he would brutalise her and make her dress up for appearance while he flirted with other women in her presence. This man.
Instantly, I felt a tug back into that story. The one I’ve lived, the one I branded into my skin in the form of a paper plane, the one that filled me with enough anguish to blast my way into performance and past my stage fright. I went back to the source. Another name. He has been a runner? I would get abused for asking him to exercise. I worried that a potbelly at 26 could have lifelong health consequences. But I’ve cut myself with this enough of times. I knew I was doing it and the best I could do was to cut away from him.
Right into another name. Blocked. I had done that years ago. I found a way to unblock through his changed profile name and attempted reverse-block kof me. I could not stop myself. The fingers were just racing to keep up with the mind already gone to places that feel like home, even if they’re blood-stained dungeons.
But I was able to keep from following again, from scrolling. I did have to go into the messages. And what I saw last was my own message. Livid, writhing in pain, screaming threats. I hate that person. This is not me. This is not who I want to be. This is not who I have ever been except I let these people turn me that way. That was the impetus I needed to hit block again. For my own mental health, as they say.
I felt my muscles seize up. Fingers flexing to uncramp this clenched feeling inside. Who could I call? Who could I ping? Who could I wail helpmehelpmehelpme to? Not any of the people that I have been writing letters to. Why? They do not know this person I am feeling myself be. They have heard of her, in the past tense only. In that measured but warm, cautiously vulnerable and alternately funny way that I have. Would they judge me? Yes, they would. I would not mind the ones that distanced from me on seeing my truth. That’s relatively easy; they are not for me.
But the ones who would stay, I would always wonder whether it was their own people-pleasing, their own neediness of me, their own saviour complexes that made them do so. Was it their own weaknesses pair-bonding with mine? I would always wonder and I do not think I would have known who to bring us out of that place. Or trust that they would know how to.
I also wrote this thread two days ago and I’m adding it here as a reminder to myself. There’s a whole thead below this first tweet and it stabilises itself from the gendering and into how communication moves in a healthy way for me. Late last night, I found myself getting angry through the feed and deleted the apps. In the light of day though, I just feel tired the way one does after a chaotic event has passed.
I am yet learning, how to craft relationships of tenderness and trust. With my own self, most of all. So I waited. And then I opened this window. I feel better now. Thank you for reading.