I saw a post on X/Twitter about living three different lives since 2019. These posts act as silly little reflective prompts which don’t half get my brain juices flowing.
I also feel like I’ve been three different people since 2019. I meander in my thoughts, feeling like I’ve somehow created an image of myself so far removed from reality that I have you all fooled.
I’m someone who exists in contradiction. Always considered an overachiever but entirely average. Gifted and talented but neither. Easily overwhelmed but responds well in a crisis. Underestimated and overestimated in the same breath. It’s proven to be a heavy burden to carry – torn between the person you believe you can be, and the person you’ve been told you are. Being unwell and forcing myself to stop this week has forced me to confront the monsters I’m so ashamed to have. The monsters that, if anybody did see, perhaps they would have doubts about my capabilities too.
Unable to do anything other than bed rest and lament in my own complicated brain mess has had me stuck in old cycles. And I can see it happening. Rather than forcing myself out of these cycles, it’s often easier to stay stuck in them. Because it’s familiar. It’s safe. Even if it pushes you to the threshold of your limits. Even if you feel like the most unhinged, disgustingly awful human being that ever existed. In your darkest moments, nobody else has those monsters. You are the problem (I know I’m not).
We have a habit of trying to simplify our complex ways of being to try and understand ourselves. We reduce ourselves to absolutes whilst rejecting the reality that we can be many things at once. We reject the reality that others can be many things at once. And when we’re in these moments of distress and pain, the projections of others magnify the darkest aspects of ourselves so they feel like whole ways of being. Therefore, we justify it by concluding that any other representation of ourself must be a lie. Layers that have the people in our lives completely fooled. And perhaps, you’re fooling yourself. Living a delusion you could be anything more. Delusions that you can become the person you once laughed about in passing, not mentioning the sting in the way others laughed about it with you. The pity. The shame.
There’s a paradox in these thought processes when you begin to work through them. Recognising that the images others have projected onto you are based on the images we project in those fixed moments. They see one aspect. Understanding that is helping me to recognise these images comprise of much bigger tapestry. It’s stitched into our ways of being.
If we pick at those stitches, we lose sense of who we are and who we can become. We leave gaping holes of sadness as we try to undo the messiness of our first attempts. Soon, we have many holes and the task of repair feels too big to endure.
We can always add new panels that marry into our blood, and we look longingly at the panels that appear rough and unrefined. We might have a silent love for those unrefined edges, we might be deeply ashamed by them. But they can never be removed. They have to be repaired or patched over. And they still form part of the tapestry.
This is what I’m attempting to do. Mass repair work that often feels too big to undertake. Whilst i’m unpicking alone in a dark room, I’m opening a void into oblivion. I know that when I get started, the stitches will start to unpick themselves. I seem to forget that others have their own patches they can lend me in the repair and recreation of my own. That there is kindness out there, even if still feels like an alien concept. That’s it’s okay to borrow, because it’s likely you’ve lent out some of your own patches too. Whether you realise it or not.
And so these paradoxes seem irrelevant when our ways of being are so naturally complex. That others will always try to throw pieces at you that don’t quite fit. Or perhaps they do fit, but they’re much smaller pieces in relation. You can always patch over them so their colours and their sadness weave into much bigger, beautiful pieces of work we’re proud to behold. They become a little less noticeable. Always there, but never your entire way of being.