getting older shedding fucks like a snake sheds skins expanding into my fullest self into magnificence
Sometimes hardship really is the best therapist.*
I have experienced situational mutism (as a symptom of anxiety) for as long as I can remember.
I am currently, literally, learning to speak my actual mind.
I remember how it felt, as though I were speaking a different language. The same words but people would hear different meanings. I would choose my words for accuracy and the response would answer some other question, some less specific question, a more casual question. And I developed a complex over being misconstrued.
And when I’m under emotional / existential / social pressure, the words stick in my throat -
maybe my voicebox is paralyzed for that moment - maybe the neural mechanism that triggers the voice is paralyzed, stuck in muddy fear -
And the thing that brought me through, that carried me - finally - out of the mud, was the heartbreak of not being seen at all.
I learned that you always share. You share freely of your time, your resources, your love - But I learned no requirement for me to be understood.
Every thought was composed, processed, and calibrated for my audience between thinking (which happened without language and so was already being translated once) and being said. Just to make myself clear.
And it was hard.
It takes so much cpu, there’s not much left for processing emotion.
High emotions always trigger mutism.
So the solution, then, is not to say my fears aren’t real - my life has told me repeatedly that I will indeed be misunderstood. I’ll never believe that’s not a valid fear. It’s part of being human, I assume. (Aren’t we all some degree of misunderstood? Many have it worse than I do, for as many reasons as there are people in the world.)
The solution then is to accept that I will be misunderstood.
And it hurts, accepting that. Knowing that there’s truly nothing I can do to prevent that from ever happening. The best I can do, is to let those who are committed to misunderstanding fall out of my life. I’m not required to share my life with them, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘nice’ a person they are. It’s ok for them to misunderstand, and find themselves elsewhere.
They can go be awesome somewhere else.
Getting here took heatbreak
after heartbreak
after heartbreak -
But I made it to the first shaky step.
And I’m getting glimpses, now, of the happiness, the freedom, the comes from surrounding yourself with people who are not pushed away by your weirdness.
My weirdness is becoming a tool for cutting away the restrictions of social weights that dragged me to drown in other people’s expectations. It’s a tool, now, rather than just an ill-fitting cog in the social machine, one that constantly needed translation to be functional.
To be fair though, sometimes what I was wanting to people to understand was really just half a Spoonerism and the other half wasn't said out loud at all because voicing it would have ruined the cadence of the words as they flowed out, andmaybeprobably that's a bit too much to ask of any audience. Sometimes, you just have to ruin the rhythm. And then you find out that there were other rhythms you could have been using all along.
So it turns out that the key to conquering my fears is not to deny they exist, but to question their importance:
When people misunderstand me, fundamentally and in a way that removes them from my life, that’s not a bad thing. It’s actually very ok. Despite the pain.
Maybe this is the real parable of the phoenix.
If you read this far: holy crap, that’s amazing! Serious question: how did you manage to plow through that entire rambling morass? Inquiring minds, and all that. For real though, this is what happens when I try to parse an epiphany that took a fraction of a moment to have. But then it had to be translated into words… and, well… see above.
*Not really. I definitely still need an actual human therapist. But damn if I might never have understood the heart of this without all the hurt along the way. The heartbreak’s just another member of the therapy team, and sometimes it takes the lead.