you can't go back but you can always go home.
The matryoshka (Russian nesting doll) tattoo on my left arm reminds me that I contain multitudes, and her eyes haunt me when I waste too much time resenting parts of myself. Many people see me as a confident person—someone who wears bold shoes and outfits, speaks loudly, and says and does hard things that others are too afraid to—unapologetic and unafraid to take up space. I am not always courageous enough to embody or even embrace that version of me.
Each of our lives is full of moments where we are tested: under pressure, will you shrink or take up space?
When I don’t love someone, I don’t give a single fuck what they think or how they feel about me. I have no issue being disruptive and breaking social rules for the sake of keeping people comfortable. But when someone I have deeply loved is upset with me temporarily, or worse, no longer wants anything to do with me—a hairpin trigger that sounds the alarm to abandon myself—I doubt you could find a bigger give-a-fucker on earth. And so I have, much more often than I would like, Alice in Wonderland-ed myself to be miniature enough that my tears can carry me through the keyhole of an anthropomorphic doorknob talking to me.
When someone pulls away, it feels like the Big Bang is happening inside of me and I am caught in the fallout. As my friend Sarah says in my favorite poem of hers, “I make a phone call and when you don’t pick up, the whole house falls down around me. I am the center of my own dramatic universe and it appalls me.”
In October, I ran into someone who I feel awful around because of our shared history. I’ve often stayed away from places I knew they’d be, not even to avoid them but to avoid the version of me who is small and sad. After letting my anxiety hijack my day, I felt frustrated with my reaction and brought it up in therapy. This led to rehashing a different relationship from my twenties that traumatized me into, well, running away from intimacy.
“I stayed way longer than I usually ever would instead of just leaving,” I said. Yes, when we first met, you had a lot of issues with leaving. “Yes, and now I’ve healed a lot and am better at leaving and also sticking up for myself when I do stay.” Well, yes, but life is not linear, healing is not linear. It may get worse again. You will get better. “But four years after leaving and I’m still—” and they interrupted me. And forever... Forever these things will come up. I sighed and started to cry. It’s not fair, but it’s knowing how they show up when you’re abandoning yourself. If you look at it like a retrospective, you are doing much better where you’re at now… and it shows that even if you are reactivated, you are still overall moving in the right direction while carrying that pain.
How often does [shrinking] come up when you’re dealing with conflict? they posed as their last question, with two minutes left. “Not very often. Only with people who act like there’s a villain and a hero, and they're projecting baggage onto me. It warps my worldview.”
I know you have a very solid self-concept. But you are not immune to self-loathing. You do a good job of keeping it at bay for the most part, but it’s there, and trying to pretend it isn’t will not help.
We haven’t been able to talk about this again since because there have been more pressing things to deal with. But in my own time, I have been sitting down with my demons for tea. I remind myself what I have been reminding myself for years: I cannot hate myself into someone I can love.
I didn’t always collapse into self-doubt in conflict. That, I inherited from an amount of gaslighting and abuse I wouldn’t ever wish on anyone, before finally leaving four years ago as of November 15th. It's been a month of terrible trauma anniversaries and my body has felt like it's on fire. I can’t go back to who I was before that was done to me, so I’m trying to become an older, wiser version of me who doesn’t shrink. This month, there’s been no shortage of opportunities to practice. I have since shown up to several events where I’ve had to be around someone who treats me like a bug on their shoe and I feel like I’m going to die. Each time, I breathed through it, and to my surprise, I lived.
The first person who ever told me to stop borrowing grief from the future is, ironically, a former close friend who abandoned our relationship abruptly and hurtfully. When I was younger and friends woke up one day and decided to never talk to me again, I tried my best to let it go on account of figuring they weren’t emotionally mature enough to handle conflict and that phase would pass and get better with age. I was forced to grow up too early and be the adult in my family, mediating conflict for people four or five decades older than me by the time I was 7. It wasn’t right, but it did imbue me with skills that I’ve found most people still don’t have even now in my thirties. I get that conflict is hard, and I also think we owe it to each other to sit through and do hard things for people we claim to love.
When I moved to a new school in second grade and got bullied by a group of girls, I looked up their phone numbers in the school directory, called their houses, and said, “I don’t know why you’re being mean to me but I think we should get to know each other and see if we can be friends.” What a beautiful little nerd. And there wasn’t a single person this didn’t work with. We all lived in the same neighborhood and I did turn them into friends. I was even so good at talking to people that it turned out I stopped them from bullying other kids, too. I dare people to match not just my freak but my patience and capacity for compassion.
I have been disappointed to find that for many people, aging does not mean gaining emotional maturity. Navigating relationships with depth takes self-awareness, dedication, and a willingness to look at yourself—like in one of my favorite movies, ‘The Never Ending Story’, where one of the heroes Atreyu, who is also only a child, ends up succeeding in his quest because he is able to do this—face himself in a way most people don’t want to. In a lot of ways, we're kids walking around bearing our wounds, taking out our angst on each other.
Not being loved by one person and not being lovable are two different things. Someday maybe my body and brain will get that. I have received external closure in very few relationships that have exploded or fizzled, and I have had to learn how to create it myself, and how to keep growing to attract the kinds of people and relationships that can match me.
Somewhere along the way, I internalized the idea that making mistakes or having unpleasant sides of me meant it's okay for people to treat me poorly. 15 years of trauma-informed therapy has helped to rid my brain of that perspective but my feet, until recently, continued to carry me towards the patterns and kinds of people tied to it. Lately, in honor of my friend, who died earlier this year of cancer, Andrea Gibson, I have tried to work soft, not hard, to stop that cycle.
On their newest album Pleaser, one of my oldest friends, Mel, who I’ve known since our teenage Tumblr days, wrote songs that feel like they reached into my soul and cooked it all into vinyl. A few songs in particular feel like Mel took them right from the poems we wrote at 16, probably because we’re still who we are and we come from where we’ve come from. In the song “Outer Heaven Dude Ranch,” they sing, “I'm getting older every due I pay … / Are you scared of your birthright? … / I'm ten years older waving the same white flag.” I don’t even think I can choose a single lyric from the song “I Hope You Do." There are many ways that, through the art they make, the people I love dare me to do better, and I am so grateful for that. What a privilege and an honor.
I cannot in good conscience be so busy borrowing grief from the past, or borrowing grief from a future where no one loves me that I forget to pay attention to who is loving me this hour. After all my healing, I don’t wish to worship worry. I don’t want to pray to pain and paranoia or build an altar for my anxieties and let my altar of joy and love get dusty. I don’t want to be so stuck in someone else’s version of me that I abandon myself. My birthright is to become the more healed version of me—one that requires loved ones to act like they love me, or hit the road.
Loving means caring enough about someone to accept all of them, knowing what people are capable of and meeting them where they’re at. It also means figuring out when saying something is necessary and when it is fruitless. I have a loved one, for example, who has the tendency to snap into a harsh tone of voice when annoyed—but that doesn’t mean they do conflict. They want to say something snarky, ignore the person they’re frustrated with, and move on. I don’t think that’s actually how they want to behave. I think it’s actually that they are who they are, and I can tell the difference between someone who’s an Asshole and someone who’s just cookie dough, baking, not yet ready for something specific. So when it happens, I tend to my feelings and remove myself from the situation, setting my own boundary because I know I deserve better. For now, I’m choosing to spend less time with them and expect less.
Discernment is a skill, and relationships take multiple people to create a dynamic. I won’t debase myself, but I also don’t need to leave everyone who is sometimes shitty just because they had a moment and are human. Sometimes love means leaving. Sometimes it means creating doors and windows in your heart that you can open up to separate things. This is the belief and habit I’ve replaced the former one with.
Because I’m trying new things all the time to practice constructive discomfort—I’ve been putting myself out there and making new friends even when it feels like the social anxiety is going to consume me. While catching up with my friend Lena at the beginning of this month, I mentioned I felt embarrassed and vulnerable because I’d recently been texting a newer friend long essays, different from my usual texting style and use of my phone.
I told Lena that the very act of texting this person made me feel like I am Too Much (which I have written essays on before)—old wounds have been dredged up, leaving me self conscious about my barrage of Shakespearean blue bubbles that feel more like they belong on rag paper.
Lena gave me a simple response. Dude… They either fuck with your essays or they don’t. “What?” I asked, feeling caught off guard. Like, people who love you are always gonna fuck with your essays, even if they don’t particularly like essays, if they actually love you. “Okay Mx. Plato… writing that down,” I replied as I started scribbling exactly what they said in my palm-sized notebook. Yeah, I started dating someone who really fucks with my essays and I didn’t realize that someone could like me that much before. Now I’m like… oh, I really don’t need to be giving my energy to people unless they show me just how much they fuck with me.
“They either fuck with your essays or they don’t” has since become an affirmation that helps me through social anxiety. It’s similar to another I’ve repeated to myself over the years: you can’t say the wrong thing to the right person.
I have to believe that the right people will choose me. Or maybe they will reject me at first. And then they’ll grow and come back later. Maybe I will. I am no stranger to receiving text message and email apologies at 3 am from people who were shitty to me in high school and have since realized what they did was fucked up. I have done the same. I have faith in us all and our ability to grow into versions of ourselves that can own up to who we have been and do better. It’s kind of my whole abolitionist life philosophy and practice.
The only way to stop abandoning myself and strengthen the muscles that carry me through discomfort is, unfortunately, for me to keep showing up in the situations that test me.
Two and a half months into the first semester of college, I left the first friend group I had made. One person started being seriously unkind, and because the group's whole shtick was ribbing each other, no one thought much of it. But then that person crossed a line. And when no one else stood up for me, I did. I got up from the couch in the living room and shouted, "Why the fuck would you ever think it's okay to say that to someone?" and I left. I marvel at my gumption and how little I tolerated poor treatment after learning my lessons in high school.
My therapist is right. I am not immune to self-loathing, but even that is an inheritance I can refuse. Instead, I can choose to remember my worth, and clutch tight.
To protect my heart, I have grown thorns-around-castle-walls prickly. I have grown hard and sharp in some places and softened in others that are no longer working for me. I have been a scared cat under a couch, hissing, and hiding from intimacy from the people I should let hand it to me, and begging for it from people who don’t want to give it to me. The cycle must be broken, instead of breaking myself for it.
The Damocles sword hangs. If I open my heart, I may be cut into many pieces. And so? I have stitched myself up already and I am Frankensteined together, made of all the love I have given and received. My wounds do not make me a monster but more human. I must ask for love in whatever form I need, even if someone can choose not to give it to me, and it feels like I’m dying. I have ample proof I will not, in fact, die.
I know I would rather be loving than cruel, or withhold love. I can always create more care but I can never get back the moments I wanted to be myself and chose not to be. I try to make decisions as often as possible by asking myself: am I running away from myself or towards myself?
One of my most recent tattoos, done by my friend Genna, is pictured above and encapsulates that guiding question. Right now, running towards myself means I must stop trying to plant my magic beans in unfertile soil and go sow them elsewhere. Instead of resenting versions of myself that have accepted less, I must remember that every part of me is still worthy of care despite the worst I've done to myself—indeed even moreso because of it.