My heart is heavy and cold, my brain a tangled mess of wishes, dreams, and reality.  The Shattering wants to set in, but my productivity has not allowed it.  I am disconnected, I am invisible, and I am surviving in a world I so desperately want to thrive in.  Torn between things I have always wanted for myself, things I want for others, and what I am actually able to accomplish.  There are things that I have always wanted for myself, in my life, things I dreamed about when I was a child… now they all seem contingent on how others feel about me, how I am viewed, what I can accomplish at this age. This growing into an adult for the third time in my life.

My life feels like a spiral, but not in the traditional sense. I have not spun out of control.  I start in the outer brinks of control and slowly wind in to my core, the gravity of reality grounding me.  My beginning has always been the spinning, the uncertainty, my only goal to feel like I have a grasp on myself, on this life, on anything. I have not had the luxury of counting on too much; this life has been littered with self-doubt, death, depression, and deep and powerful longings that cannot be named properly. I am only sure of a few things in my life. One, that my back will continue to crumble and cause me significant pain, as if enclosed in this younger body of mine an 80-year-old woman weeps for her childhood.  Nothing can be done, my bones will not recover, I can maintain with surgery, and at times that feels hopeless.

I am also sure that I will continue to grieve things that I never experienced, and that I will always desperately want for another person to fully understand me, see where I have come from, what I have learned, mistakes I have made and love me because and in spite of it all.  How desperately we, as humans, want to be known to our core, and how ridiculously we try to hide that very core.  I have come to understand that I demand complete emotional security, and that emotional security can never fully be given or received.  Perhaps in vain, I continue to try. Never fully able to express what I want for fear of rejection, for fear of wanting too much, for fear of not being the person people believe me to be.

The final thing I know I can count on is my own stubbornness clothed in shallow words of protection, covered in the insecurities I suffered as a child, and the ridicule I have felt in my past for sharing too much of myself.  I cannot count how many times my silence has been my refuge and my unraveling.  I have cowardly found safety in places that I had no business being.  My fear of abandonment, the fear of being “discovered” for who I really am has stopped me numerous times from enjoying the pleasantries of my heart… even for a second.  These things leave me feeling lost, insecure, and hardened. I have come to recognize my own invisibility within in my life. Some given by others, and some I have taken up as protection.

I have the strange ability to walk amongst people without being detected. I have lived with others as a ghost, a shell of the woman I truly am, I have survived lengthy relationships where my heart and thoughts were never revealed, or even asked about.  I am not so naïve to think that it is other people’s responsibility to make me feel less invisible, I do know enough to know that this is my own battle, my own war.  Oh, but how I crave someone to fight with me. To look at me and see me and decide that I am worth fighting for, and with.

Of all the character traits I admire in others, courage is among the top.  I enjoy people that show courage, that are unafraid to let themselves be seen, to be known for exactly who they are.  Those people that stand firmly in their lives, in their beliefs and do not budge, or sway, with other’s feelings or actions.  Those people that can say how they feel and not apologize for those feelings, or worry about how their confessions will change someone else.  I suppose a lot of my codependency stems from lack of grounding in my own courage.  Forever afraid to be the fool in any situation I have created an exterior that is able to defend my lack of words and emotions when they should come spilling forth.  Instead, I wait for others to show vulnerability, so that I can find comfort in their fear, and only then does my confidence blossom enough to share the smallest pieces of me. Only then do I find reason to become vulnerable myself, if only to help them to feel more confident.

Yet there are times when I want to stop. Stop all of it. Stop the struggling, stop the act of moving forward. I want to sleep and be comforted, I want to strip down to my very core and show myself to the world and not care what words and reactions come back to me.  I want to be the woman that can laugh in the face of anything, and that can show enough courage to walk this life alone if need be.  I want to be known and remembered for my acts of compassion towards others, and not my fear of showing that same compassion to myself.

I want to be known, accepted and loved for exactly who I am, without ridicule, without judgment.

Just to be known. To be, just as I am.