I’m Having Trouble Being Personal
On Feeling Insecure About Sharing
“You don’t open up to me,” my boyfriend said. Not for the first time. It was a couple of weeks ago and, since then, it has been said again. I wonder how many times you think those words have been uttered, lol.
I used to call myself an open book. It wasn’t true but, to be fair and to forgive myself for falling for such a blatant lie, I genuinely believed I was. Turns out a tenacious knack for volunteering information, much of it not solicited or wise to divulge, is not the same as being vulnerable.
In my personal life, I’m closed off. Despite a remarkable ability to yap and yap in such a self involved manner that you’d have fair reason to believe me a narcissist, I don’t invite people in. Not in a way that matters beyond the surface, which for me, is such a vast sphere of thoughts, interests, concerns, political leanings, etc…that I’m not surprised that so many people presume to know me. Nor am I, retrospectively, surprised to have mistaken all that yapping for a kind of openness.
The reason I’m a tough nut to crack is because I don’t trust people. Actually, that’s not true. I have a crippling trust in people; something I will probably never unlearn because I will always overestimate their ability to behave rationally or ethically or in good faith. What I mean is that I don’t trust people to understand the unusual. I don’t trust people to understand me.
That’s my personal life, though. An arena in which, as slowly as is required or possible, I can work on deficiencies in my willingness to be known. Writing, however, is an arena where I better get down with getting personal and I better do it fast or I might lose touch with my purpose when it comes to putting pen to paper.
You see, writing is the arena of my life where I go to find the others. The other aliens. People who by nature and ill luck in life’s rotten lottery find themselves deeply estranged in some way from what the masses around us have deemed “ideal” or normal. People who know that there is literally no one whose life comes even close to that ideal but whose particular lived experience is SO different that it sets them apart from others in a way that can’t be ignored.
Like I said in my April recap, I want to express myself more but I find myself feeling as I do in my personal life. All caged up. Frightened to unhinge my jaws, be it for a grin or a bite. Unable to let myself be vulnerable and find the others.
There’s an opportunity I want to try for. It’s competitive and my chances of succeeding are slim. But the theme is gorgeous and there’s a litany of things I could dress up in the pretty words of a personal essay. Yet every time I make the attempt, I find myself nervous.
What if the worst thing in the world happens and they say “YES!” Then there my words would be, out in the open for everyone to see. Open wounds moonlighting as introspections. Truths about myself and my life that would have people in my life and a bunch of strangers consuming, dissecting, judging, pitying…and whatever else they’d like to do because that’s the point of writing. To let people into your head. What they do after that is never going to be up to you, the writer. And it’s what makes my knees wobble.
Maybe this post is a good sign. Maybe, as with my special man friend, I am slowly rising up to the challenge of vulnerability. After all, I wrote all of this instead of simply stating, “I’m having trouble being personal.”
