When You Are Afraid That You Are Very Bad, But You Also Know That You Are Very Good

"It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the Earth as though I had a right to be here." -James Baldwin.

My dad likes to tell me about how I was almost struck by lightning when I was a baby, and how from that moment on, I became afraid. So I have never known peace then. I am a fearful, neurotic person, and the things that should come easily are instead difficult. I am afraid that they always will be. That I have been marked for some kind of exile from the very beginning. I am afraid that I am a person lacking in the qualities necessary for survival. That no one will ever want to live through it with me, or that they won’t know how. I am afraid that I simply do not belong here. I am trying to let go of all this, but it feels woven in.

I am not an easy person to love. That’s not meant to be self-deprecating, I just know what I am. It’s not easy to love someone who can’t tell the difference between a legitimate threat and something entirely psychological. It’s not easy to pull someone out of their own head. Beyond the fear, I have a self-destructive gene that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to help me in moments of crisis. I’m stubborn and obsessive. And there is something dark and isolating always tugging at me, which I succumb to every so often. To love me is to fight against nature.

When I was a kid, I was more like a breathing ball of terror than I was a child. I had to be bribed into eating because I was convinced it would lead to vomiting, coaxed into taking a shit, tricked into falling asleep, threatened or physically dragged into school, unpeeled from the fetal position in public places. Nothing about me has ever been easy. Even when I looked content, and I wasn’t bothering anyone with all of my fear, the OCD gripped my inner world. Over and over again, repeating everything until it was just right, the rigid counting, the pledging my life to God as a constant reflex, staving off “demonic possession.” I’m annoyed just thinking about it.

I also have a stubborn and disruptive allegiance to what is right - keep in mind that means I do not have an allegiance to what is painless or even strategic. I said I need things to be right. Not easy, not peaceful, not even logical. Right. I have never let anything go, and I am inclined to make the world bend towards justice, even if it unsettles something. Even if it makes everything worse. It is a kind of tunnel vision that is explosive, and self-destructive, and I don’t know how to handle it. I am a nightmare for the conflict-averse, a manic ball of fury and empathy that needs to be tempered into healthy outlets. My feelings are more extreme than most, and there is an intensity to me that can be exhausting.

Then there is the real meat of it all - I am deeply afraid that I will never be able to produce the kind of economic output that is required to be alive here. I am afraid that the qualities that make me difficult will permanently prevent me from that kind of normalcy - that I do not have it within me to get my shit together, to get somewhere safe. I have been trying for years. But I struggle with consistency, and every so often, I will give up in a spectacular display of unbelievably deep-rooted shame. Like a threatened armadillo, I will curl into myself and burn a thousand bridges. Everything feels elusive and outside of my reach. Belonging and safety feel like pipe dreams.

To be with someone, you are supposed to offer them something. It is supposed to be a union of two whole people. For as long as I can remember, though, I have been in the process of escaping something, so I haven’t been able to address the obvious. I am afraid that I will never feel safe enough to become someone worthy of companionship. That all my energy will always be exerted by the pursuit of settlement, and nothing will ever be left over to face myself or accomplish the things I want to accomplish. I have never had the luxury of self-priority. I am afraid that I do not know how to take my life into my own hands after a lifetime of being victimized. I do not want to be codependent on another person.

I crave it intensely. I think I have been searching for someone to see in me all the potential and ambition, to know that it is there despite all the failure, despite the obvious flaws. And to offer me refuge and support through it. I want to rectify what I didn’t get from my parents. That was supposed to be their job - To see the best in me, shelter me, and protect me for long enough that I might end up self-reliant. It didn’t happen, though. They didn’t care about that. Something about conservative evangelicalism and pumping out children only to absolve yourself from any responsibility for who they turn out to be. Children are not people to them - they are little disciples. Their job as parents begins and ends with beating their children into obedience.

I hate how hung up I am on that. I hate that I am an adult, blaming the injustice of the past on who I am today. I don’t want to be that person. I am afraid that, as much as I want to take responsibility for myself, the ideal of self-reliance is nothing more than a feel-good myth that people living in the thick of cooperation and interdependence like to tell themselves they have. I am decidedly torn between understanding I am liable for my own life, and actively hating the people eager to look down on me as they are surrounded with opportunity and safety, which I have never known. Self-reliance is both a skill and a colonial construct. I am doing my best at navigating this.

All of this contemplation comes at a decidedly pivotal moment. This is the year I started therapy for my emetophobia and began to learn that surrender and acceptance are the only things that will lessen its power. Then my relationship of nearly seven years dissolved right out from underneath me - All the safety and identity which I thought I could rely on, suddenly rearranged without my consent. Something out there waiting to see if I had learned my lesson after all. Would I surrender? Accept that I am not in control and go out gently with the tide? Or would I resist? And in that process make everything worse? I’ve done a bit of both. I think I’m proud to say that I have, finally, learned from this. I admit that such a death grip on things will not do me any good.

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

But I am still afraid that I am too much to be wanted by another person. The echoes of a few voices linger in my head.

My mom had a bad habit of telling people how awful I was in a way that I was meant to hear it. My dad used to tell me that if someone liked me, it was only because they didn’t know me yet. When my family kicked me out when I was nineteen the general consensus was that things were better without me there. Those were all sitting in the pit of my stomach for the seven years I spent with my boyfriend.

And then, when he left, it wasn’t enough for him to tell me it was simply time for us to let each other go, or that he wanted to be with someone else. He had to make me feel like I deserved to be left alone.

I thought we were two people in love, ending things simply because it was time to let go. Not all things are meant to last forever, and I did not consider the ending of our romance to be a failure or a tragedy. I was ready to let him go, I was beginning to feel strong enough to be on my own. But I was also trying to hold the significance of what we had shared. I thought it would be a delicate and bittersweet ending. One full of patience and love. Sacrifice and forgiveness. From each according to our ability to each according to our needs.

But he was eager to leave, and I wanted to indulge in that euphoric moment that comes before something disappears forever. When you finally begin to feel the full weight of things, and suddenly you can see how beautiful everything is, everything you have overlooked. I wanted to willingly go into that painful, yes, but also gorgeous process. Together. He had hurt me so much, and it didn’t matter to me. I wanted to savor every last embrace, every last look into his eyes, every moment of belonging to each other. I wanted to thank him for holding me through all our years spent together, through so much pain and love. I wanted to wrap him in my arms and tell him how much he meant to me. I thought we would both reassure each other that it wasn’t seven years wasted, that it was an honor to love each other for that long.

He had more contempt for me than I thought. Once he had decided that he didn’t want to be with me anymore, he wanted no part of anything. He did not want to carefully disentangle the life we had built together. The family we had formed. He wanted it to evaporate. He wanted to forget that it ever existed. And when I told him that I was afraid to be so suddenly alone, that I didn’t have the same support system that he had, he considered that an annoyance. When I tried to say goodbye to him, he turned his back on me and walked away as the words were falling out of my mouth. As if to show how little I meant to him. How little he cared.

And when I got the feeling that he left me because of all my flaws, he did not correct me. I began to beg him to see beyond them. I told him I was more than a broken thing he should throw away. I told him that I loved him beyond all of his worst flaws. I guess I was waiting for him to turn to me, and our home, our little family. And say something like, “how sad it is to let this go”. I wanted him to tell me that I was important to him, that he loved me beyond my deficiencies, and that I would be okay without him. That everything I had given him had meant something. I wanted to sit in our life and take it all in. Feel how meaningful it was, even if there would be other people to hold, other families to form.

It was the things he said to me, and the way he treated me, that made me feel so unlovable, that reanimated all those lingering voices always telling me how defective I am. Maybe it should have been a sign that I would often listen to “Paper Bag” by Fiona Apple during our relationship. Before any of this even started to end. A song about being disabused of the hopeful fantasy that you will be loved and understood by a man, reminded that you are too damaged. Wanting him anyway. He never did see past my flaws. I think he hated me for them all along.

I know I’m a mess he don’t wanna clean up

I got to fold ‘cause these hands are too shaky to hold

So we end here - With the awful feeling that he is right about me. I am afraid that I am everything he has implied that I am, everything everyone has ever said I am. I know that I am codependent and holding on to too much, and that there is a lot I need to manage. I don’t want to be so stuck in all of it anymore. I want to stop blaming external forces for all my failures. But I also know that despite the depths of my deficiencies, I am still a valuable person with things to offer. I have redeeming qualities. And as annoying as it is for some people to witness, I have been victimized. I have. I do not have the same advantages as everyone else, and that is true, and also I am ready for that not to prevent me from taking agency over myself. It’s all true all at once.

I am a person in motion. So I am going to let go of what I can, I’m going to be responsible for my own life, and I am also going to continue to insist that I have inherent value. Even if I am difficult. And if you are reading this and you are afraid that you are the worst person alive, you are going to be okay. Just like I will be okay.

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P.s. I can be honest enough to admit that I am self-indulgent, and that I get hung up on all the ways I have been wronged, but I would still like to bollywop the people who have tried to make light of my suffering, and how difficult things are for me. Coddled, naive little clowns. It is easy to look down on other people when you have mommy and daddy’s money and a brain that lets you take a shit without first having to drink the magic Yoo-hoo potion that will ensure your safety. But alas.