can you see right through me?

postcard 37: on crippling perfectionism, rationalizing feelings to diminish them, and the elusive search for permanent happiness

from Pinterest

I don’t know how to do things halfway. Twenty four years in, I’ve realized that maybe that’s my greatest strength and maybe it’s what makes me think that I am a difficult person to love. It’s a perfectionist thing, maybe, like I have to do everything the exact way it goes in my head. I’m selective—maybe way too picky—with the people I choose to trust and love. It takes me a long time to do so, but once it happens, I do it wholeheartedly. I’m all in or all out. I keep a small crowd of best friends around me. I trust them wholly, I love them wholly.

I think I’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself less for people, a watered down version of me, trying to extinguish how intensely I feel everything. I’ve tried being the cool girl and the chill girl and the girl who lets everything slide because I do genuinely admire when people have that ability. I wish I could be relaxed about anything. I stretch myself as thin as I can across jobs. I write pages and pages of thoughts about a book. I pulled countless all nighters for my straight A grades. I love people fiercely or I don’t at all.

My entire life, I’ve hated the way I’m wired, hated the way I constantly feel like the frazzled end of a broken cord, like any tiny flicker of emotion can cause something that affects me for days. I feel things too intensely, so I live life passively. I place a candle snuffer in my arsenal, a shield for a weaponized mind. Mood swings are a foreign concept. Sometimes it feels like I’m a visitor in my own body, like I’m having an out of body experience. I make New Years Resolutions that I should live life more presently, actively, but words are just words. I’m a glass half full watching myself go through motions on autopilot, but I only feel partially there like a lazily caffeinated fever dream.

At night, my mind fills with scenarios, like a tide creeping in as the clock ticks closer to sunrise. Scenarios of failure, scenarios of people leaving, scenarios of the other shoe finally dropping. Once I think that I’ve upset someone that I care about, the guilt of it lingers like the residue of sticky tape, and I feel the sadness creeping in like the tide. I hate that I could possibly be perceived as not smart or not pretty or not interesting. And that hypothetical perception is debilitating for me, because I’m unwilling to change myself and bend over backwards just to fulfill a one second impression of me that could be a fraction of a fragment better than otherwise, so what does that fear even change?

I’ve tried to juxtapose this with the fact that I essentially don’t really care or mind about what people think about me. I used to do that a lot, be worried about every single thing that people could hypothetically be thinking about or judging me for. But now I know that as long as I know that I am a good person and I did my best, I don’t really mind what people think about me. But it’s a weird dichotomy because I care what I think and I dislike a lot of parts about my personality. And I immediately assume that I’m transparent, that I’m see through and everything runs through me like water; people can see and mark the parts of me that they hate with a red Sharpie the same way I do. That the people I value and love in my life will feel same way about me, even though historically that hasn’t been the case.

I’m overwhelmingly harsh on myself. I sometimes feel like I’m holding sandpaper in my two palms, grating my skin until the superficial dermal layers are gone and I feel completely raw. If I think I can’t do something perfectly, I won’t do it at all, but if that notion enters my mind, my body processes somatically and I feel a boulder crushing my chest and splitting open my ribs. I wait with bated breath for something to go wrong every time something goes right, for the other shoe to drop. I feel like I have to rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat until everything is perfect, everything is in 0s and 5s, everything is beautiful. Maybe this is the way I fix myself, a coat of walnut hued wood stain on chipped furniture.

I feel like I’m just an odd yard sale collection of random trinkets and puzzle pieces. I can’t make sense of myself. I lay out all the shards of myself at night and try to hastily fit the parts together before the sun comes up. Nothing fits. Everything is scrambled and so is my mind, and none of my four planners or my to do lists can figure it out for me. In the morning hours, I become myself again. I am smart. I am pretty. I am put together. I am funny. It is all effortless. My brain knows how to function without actually telling me, so I let it. Rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat. I’m hyper independent and hyper efficient; I’m a well oiled machine and I’m paper perfect. It’s almost an antidote.

In the idle hours of the day, I find myself trying to rationalize every inch of my feelings. Everything in my brain has to make a quilt, a perfect tapestry, and feelings often spiral out of control and become a creature of its own. Hope, at one point, mutates from an antidote into poison, and I'm walking with my heart in my hand across a tightrope between the two mountains. I call him and try to contextualize and intellectualize how I feel about him so it stops coloring my brain in shades of gray, a post mortem of something halfway between an illusion and the most grounded reality, asking him to tell me how he feels about me, so there’s a balance and an equilibrium, because I’m terrified he’s going to lose feelings faster than I am, like feelings are linear and parallel and consistent day in and day out, and why we both know deep down that nothing can ever happen between us, at least not right now, talking in circles again and again and again, grieving something we almost could have had, mourning perfect moments, walking laps around the hollow parking lot, until we’re both dizzy and exhausted.

I do this like an answer is going to magically appear like the X on a treasure map, like feelings are black and white and an answer I can pick out of five alphabet choices like a Scantron test sheet, like our feelings are empirical data I can write down like a lab report, like there’s something definitive that can come out of it. In an ideal world, I would be better at dealing with my feelings instead of the only choices either being repressing it and becoming distant, or rehashing it again and again until every feature of it feels like a pixellated Picasso painting. I can’t do things halfway, but a middle point has to exist somewhere along the horizon, this has made me sure of it. I wear my heart on my sleeve for the time in my life, become an open wound around him, and find myself to be unrecognizable in the mirror, a caricature of myself. Maybe this is what heartbreak feels like, but I’ve never experienced it, so I feel like a blind man trying to describe color to someone who can see. If so, this is the most low-stakes heartbreak that has ever existed, because we never broke up and nothing has changed between us. We made sure of it, because romantic feelings fade but feeling this seen and understood doesn’t, and this too shall pass.

I can’t do things halfway, and anything unresolved feels like it. I can’t let go of things easily, and holding on feels bizarrely comfortable because I don’t want to have to readjust. Nothing has changed; the only certain thing is that everything is uncertain, and I’m not someone who finds comfort in uncertainty at all. I try to fight it, my instinctive need to self sabotage and run away when something feels like this, because he’s terribly important to me, and I know I am to him. When all of these feelings fade, I know I won’t ever regret staying through the uncertainties, because I value who we are to each other above everything else. Maybe, if the timing is right, I’ll fall in love with him again down the road. The beauty and tragedy of feelings, I’ve realized, is that this won’t last forever, at least in the exact same capacity. The love you have for someone can metamorphose and pour itself into a different shaped vessel. I spend the next two days feeling horrible. His voice when he tells me, “we were just going around in circles for two hours”, lingers anxiously in my mind for the next few days, because isn’t that what I’m doing with my life as well? Revisiting something again and again, in the futile pursuit that it’ll one day morph into something perfect?

I make bargains with the universe. Ironically, maybe it’s self centered, but I’m terrified of other people becoming collateral damage for my flaws. Like a supernova exploding, and everything around me obliterating to smithereens. I pray that I’ll be so perfect, so flawless, I’m happy, I tell myself, closing my eyes and blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. I am happy. I’m happy until I really think about it, I’m happy until I try to figure out what I truly want with my life, I’m happy until I’m not. I look in the mirror. I’m happy, I tell myself, but I don’t know whether it’s a curse or a prayer, whether I need to be crossing my fingers or knocking on wood.

Is it that superficial for everyone, happiness? Sadness is profound, deepest shades of blue, maybe even perfect, and happiness is just monochrome. Is it supposed to be like that?