Holding Another
I’m unsure how many times I’ve been able to leave myself and hold another completely. I only know the feeling when it’s present. The intangible link created between me and another. Without worry of our wounds or embarrassment. I speak to my insecurities openly, but it doesn’t reconcile anything in an actualized way. It’s a step on the path that I’ve stopped walking because I’ve made it further than others. And I let that be enough.
When I hear someone’s words with my ego out of the way. That is affirming. That is life. That is love in the way that I’ve grown to understand it. Why has that act grown so difficult? Possibly because I feel so wholly misunderstood that it becomes hard to understand others. How can you grasp someone else’s pain when you’re unwilling to grasp your own? I think of my first therapy session. Where I said I didn’t need to talk about family. What farce was I perpetuating and to what end?
Neglect was large. Maybe the largest part of my emotional framework while growing up. My birth parents were far too young to be a reliable and stable place. Through no fault of their own, they were teenagers. And then my adoptive parents. Possibly trying to use a child to fix their own problems that were growing slowly, and then retreating into themselves when it didn’t work. I hold them to no fault now. They’re human, like everyone else, and we don’t always get what is owed to us as children in the form of support, love, care, and stability.
It’s pesky that the largest and most foundational emotional problems I experience grow quietly and slowly. It’s easy to know what’s needed in a moment of crisis or panic. I am hurt. I am alone. I am scared. Soothe me, hold me. But the existential thought and repetitions that are rehearsed almost subconsciously over time are what come to kill me. I have terrible self-narratives that are rarely verbalized to others. Maybe a glimpse, or a half joke. But what it would mean to sit down with someone and say “I am broken, please listen”.
Where do I fit? Am I liked enough to be included? Am I part of something? Do I need to be part of something? How has my time in the music industry enforced a tragic desire to be loved, admired, or approved of in all the wrong ways? How have I bestowed my own feelings of superiority into the world and what harm has it caused potential relationships? The pedestal is the enemy, whether looking up or down.