Seeing sides of yourself (through other people)
Today, someone told me I was the most outgoing person here, and maybe the most outgoing person in the world. That was after she said “You’re everybody’s friend!” and gave me a big hug.
This did not immediately compute.
I could see where she was coming from: In the first week here, I decided to purposely meet every single other resident. A few of them I’ve only said hello to, but most of them I’ve had multiple extended interactions with. So, I know basically everyone.
But ‘outgoing’ is not a way I’ve ever thought of myself. I spend most parties as a wallflower, and always have. I am usually hesitant to make new connections. I spend about 40 hours a week completely alone, another 25 with just babies, and the rest of the time the only person I see is my boyfriend. I don’t feel sufficiently emotionally well-adjusted to even consider living with housemates or working in an office with other people. In 2022 I once went a full month without speaking to anyone except the partner I lived with.
And yet, the me that people here are seeing is outgoing, and that is a real thing that’s really happening.
This is not the first time someone has made a comment on my personality that seems obvious to them, that has blown a giant hole in the way I’d been thinking about myself.
When I was eleven, I was just starting to emerge from the dark chaos of childhood, when you’re more a kid than a person. At school I had anger issues; I bullied other kids, and I didn’t even know how to be nice to my closest friends.
But that same summer, at my theater, I was a constant ray of sunshine. The 18-year-old director particularly loved me. One day I made a bad joke to her that I was wearing all black because “it reflects the inward color of my soul”, and she said with easy conviction, “I have never met anyone for whom that is less true.”
It sounds dumb, but that throwaway comment changed the course of my entire life. At school, everyone thought of me as judgmental and acerbic. I hadn’t previously realized that it was available for me to just… not be that. That I could be kind and positive instead.
I decided that, now that I knew that I had a choice, I wanted to be kind. So when I went back to school that fall, suddenly I was the nicest person around, and even the people I’d formerly bullied forgave me and became my friends. I stayed nice for five years (until it bit me in the ass and I became much more closed off for the rest of my life).
Seven years ago, when I had been living in my ill-fated group house for about a year, one of my housemates got high and drew a picture that looked roughly like this:
Some of my housemates were laughing over the picture, pointing at different shapes and suggesting the housemates they should be named after. One of them pointed at the blue one and said “That one’s you.”
“Why?” I asked.
He looked at me like it was a stupid question. “Because you’re the prickliest person I’ve ever met!”
My housemate probably forgot that comment immediately, but I never did.
I hadn’t, up until that point, known that the people around me thought of me as prickly. I didn’t feel prickly on the inside.
But then I knew, and couldn’t unknow, that this was how people saw me. The people who had lived with me for a year. I had tried showing up in that house as my kind and giving self who dances a little bit when I speak, and I’d been looked at like a weird bug and made fun of for wanting to feel loved. Knowing that they saw me that way only made me feel more alienated; it was a self-perpetuating dynamic.
A couple years later, after everything went to shit, that same housemate reached out to me and tried to tell me that he cared for me as a person. But I was just incapable of believing that. I don’t think he ever saw me at all.
I have been living as that last person for a long time.
I’ve been my kind self, but only in private. I know it’s one of my big strengths as a partner, my ability to be kind and giving and loving and gentle and supportive. I do that for my boyfriend, and the kids I take care of, and I do it for my family from afar. But I haven’t had anyone to be that for, outside of those existing close relationships. Or at least I haven’t been willing to offer it.
I love the person I’m being here. Multiple people have said I’m one of the people they’ve talked to the most. Someone said I was the first person here they’d hugged, and another person said “I think being friends with you has made other people nicer to me”. I like being a positive part of the experience.
I would love to show up as this person in more of my life. It’s just that experience has taught me that that isn’t rewarded. That if I give kindness, it won’t be reciprocated or understood, and I will be hurt.
I’m managing to unlearn that a little bit, here, I hope. I hug people and ask them how they’re doing and bring them their jumpers when they’re cold, and then they do the same for me, and they let me nap in their rooms when I’m tired.
Of course, this is not the whole of me. I have trouble feeling that people really know me when they haven’t seen the ugly shit for themselves. I feel that they only like me because I am tricking them into thinking I am good, and when they see the truth they will not want to be around me anymore.
My boyfriend says it’s unhelpful to think of myself as being a fundamentally good or bad person. That is the kind of advice that’s obviously true, but is hard to actually take onboard.
I still worry all the time that something will happen that exposes me as Bad, and anyone who has only seen the Good side of me will immediately abandon me. This fear sounds stupid, but it fits with the training data.
I am not so afraid here, because I know I will only be with these people for a limited time, and I don’t feel in any danger of being anything other than Good for this month.
I’m realizing, in writing these blog posts, that my entire way of looking at the world is deeply fucked up.