Leaping into the dark

I need a new story. 

In the story I have lived by, I am a weak and fragile thing. Too dependent on the good opinions of others. A people pleaser, useless at boundaries. It’s my fault I get hurt, and rejected, and used as a doormat or a punchbag. I’m too needy. Too emotional. Too easily persuaded to give all that I have and accept there will be nothing in return. With that story comes the idea that I would have to be firmer, less willing to care, more self protective and less emotional in order to be a healthier, happier sort of person. Whenever I try to go that way, it just all gets worse and the misery is deeper and the self-hatred is stronger.

There are a lot of stories out there about how you are supposed to be in the world, and those stories don’t work for me. If I try to be closed and self protective, I make myself sick. Every time. Perhaps the most significant mistake I’ve made is being persuaded that other people’s ideas about how to be a person are a good match for who I am. 

A new story, then, about all the same things. 

I have loved, passionately and unconditionally people who did not know what to do with that. I have loved people who were afraid of being loved, and whose feelings of not deserving love caused them to push me away. I have loved people who were full of demons and who only knew how to cause pain, but I loved them anyway, for as long as I could, with all that I had. I have loved people who did not know how to love, who were afraid of love, who experienced love as a kind of demand they did not know how to answer, even when that simply isn’t true or real. I have loved people who could only understand love as something small and transactional and limited, to be rationed carefully.

I am by nature extravagant, generous, wholehearted and passionate. I’ve let other people who were themselves in a lot of pain persuade me of all kinds of things – that I am unworthy of love, that there is something creepy, unhealthy or sordid about me. That I am too much, too difficult, too hard to love. All of those things were no doubt true for them, but that doesn’t make for absolute truth. I am allowed to have a story about myself that does not sit neatly alongside those stories.

I love unreasonably. It is in my nature to love, and to do that with no interest in boundaries or limits or rules. It is in my nature to give and not to measure the cost, and to break myself over that, and keep breaking. I am not gentle. How I love is ferocious and bloody. It’s also been lonely, because what my soul craves is other souls as wild, intense and unreasonable as me. I haven’t known how to show many people my true self, how to trust anyone in a sustained way with how my soul is. What I long for are the people who are not afraid to love until it breaks them. 

It’s why my poetry is full of broken bones and violent imagery. I’m looking for the other people who will make bone soup out of themselves when that’s all they have left to give. I’m looking for the people who, when they feel so torn apart by life that they are sure it will kill them this time, take the best and brightest pieces of whatever they have left and try to do something good with it. I’m looking for the people who do not look at what love will cost them, but who throw themselves wholeheartedly into whatever there is, because that’s the only way to live, the only way to be in the world.