On intimacy, sharing and the urge to disappear. Unrelated to my normal work, but I’ve written this in an effort to be less guarded. Not really sure how to feel about it, but, that’s life!
“Intimacy, in its confusing glory, reminds me of a casting call. If I too honestly longed for connection, a role, the closer to impossible tipped the scale. To muster up a little courage and be candid, socially; to welt and wobble my voice, feign sincerity....well, there are cygnets less gauche. Clichés persist—little whimpers of small talk that I’m always in a hurry to boast as the sign of my wants to eventually be returned. Yet, when someone reaches toward me, there’s this rabid, instinctual urge to recoil and run. Where to, I’m not so sure.That’s my habit, threaded too many times to wave it off as anything but a character flaw. I am at odds with myself—I’m sure others who’ve prioritized fractured interpretations of themselves through the assumptions of strangers can relate. No, it’s not as if I don’t want to be; I do, but I struggle to visualize how that actually looks and what that even means.And, in the way that all 20-somethings are so adamant about how the world works, all while cascading in self-important dramas, I don’t think my voice is too shrill yet. I’ve decided not to spare the public. There’s a contradiction in the behavior of most socially-anxious creatives, I feel. I don’t think I want to find any value in sharing myself, nor hearing the opinions of my quirks, of my work, my particular fixations: myself, in short. Even so, there is this ravenous desire to be perceived. For people to read my words and say, “Damn it, I felt something!” I haven’t decided what that something is yet. To speak without error feels like nailing choreography after one pass—near-impossible. Despite fancying myself a writer, my speech is doomed to be an inconsistent, imperfect attempt at telepathy. If I string my language to illicit a vivid-something, there will always be surefire miscommunication. Hell, as I write this, I understand the air of sardonicism might make others choke. A constant fear looming around my peers is the threat of being taken seriously and what that reality entails.Intimacy, to be known—understood, respected...Mortifying. Lovely, sure, but Christ!The spaces between the words I have chosen with such deliberation are revealing, not unlike the peculiar staging a photographer might set or when a painter decides all the shadows ought to be tinted green. The way I barrel through a passage, suffocating a page with words, too many of them.If readers can breathe, they can begin to make sense of my words, so a stream of consciousness feels like an appropriate defense. And still, I share in earnest. I don’t know what the point of this is; I just know that these are all observations that have been taking up storage space in my brain. Laugh, roll your eyes, sympathize—regardless, it’s a ride, and we’re all on it until we’re too sick of it to go another pass.”
