I've been picking up broken pieces of myself for as long as I can remember. I've been shoveling them into compartments that I seal away in the back of my mind hoping that one day, they will erase themselves.
Recently I've noticed that this doesn't happen. Those pieces are me. They aren't just garbage. They aren't just waste. And as much as I'd love to throw them away with the rest of painful bullshit in my life, they are still appendages of my being. They are prosthetic emotions. Gorilla in their tactics. Savage.
As much as I want to sit here and say I'm healed and I'm good and I've moved onto bigger and better things, I haven't.
I was sitting in a strip club the other day. Unfortunately, this has become normal. See, for some reason, I've convinced myself that it's a great idea to try to engage a relationship with a dancer. It hasn't worked however, and at that moment, while I was by myself, watching her do her thing elsewhere, I felt jealous. I felt vulnerable. I felt like the old me. So I got out of my seat, went over to her in her little corner and approached a very real conversation.
"Whats going on? Will you please talk to me?"
She didn't say a word as she fiddled with her mini purse. Now, theres a little back story to this but it doesn't matter. What matters is that the best part of my instinct was telling me to walk away and give up. It was screaming at me to do this for my own good. Begging me actually. But I didn't listen. I sat there convinced that I could get her to open up to me.
"I just want you to talk to me. Whats going on?"
"Nothing."
It was one of those nothings that meant everything. It was in her eyes. It was in her tone. And once again, that little glimpse of healthy inside me was yelling at me to say fuck it. To walk away as quickly as possible and never look back. But I stayed in that discomfort. I stayed so long that the discomfort became tears. Yup... I actually felt a pain so familiar that from the bowels of my emotions came a huge uproar of tears that didn't fall with a whimper or a quiver in my lip. They fell freely. Like they've been waiting for this moment. This feeling. This hurt.
I sat back and tried my hardest to not let her see them. Wiping them away didn't work though and as they sat on my cheeks, she looked at me like a child and told me to stop. Like it was something I was doing for attention or pity. Like somehow, I was controlling this god damn gorilla emotion. But ultimately, I was as confused as she was. I didn't know why this was happening. I just knew it was and it wasn't right and it wasn't okay. I got up and walked to the bathroom to compose myself.
After a few days of thinking about this, I've understood why this happened. It sucks to have to admit this but somewhere deep down, theres still a part of me that wants to hurt. That needs to hurt. I'm attracted to people who will hurt me and who can validate some compartmentalized self loathing that has nothing to do with my current mind space or the positive path I've been traveling on. Its sneaky and quite but when it has the opportunity, it will show up and fuck everything in the face. And not gently or softly. It rapes without conscious and then leaves with bread crumb traces of all the broken pieces it took out of hiding... I hate that. I hate feeling that way. I hate knowing I'm not healed. At all.
I'd like to say theres some moral to this or that there's something I've learned but honestly, theres nothing here. I still feel drawn to her. I still feel like I can be the person who she liked in the first place and I can tuck all those emotional shards back into their hiding places and play it off like I was just having a bad day. Maybe if she can hide her real self from me for this long, maybe I can too.
I feel like I have the potential to be different than who I have been. I've been feeling it for months now. Maybe part of growing has to do with compartmentalizing the old in order to make room for the new. Maybe. Or maybe I'm completely wrong. And this uproar will continue to happen. And I will keep making the same mistakes and become more and more confused with why they're happening. Maybe. I don't have the answers. I never have. But hopefully, at the very least,
I'll continue to wake up knowing that today, I'm going to try to be the best version of myself I know possible. If that means I cry at strip clubs, oh well. At least I'm fucking honest about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment