Going back further than two years ago, I can tell you
who I was. I can tell you how I felt about the world
around me and the people in my life. I was a
dreamer--a child, really. I hadn't yet lost the
naivete of youth--the ability to trust everyone I met
and be entirely myself no matter what people thought
of me. I came across, of course, to those who
disapproved of my passion and excitement of the world
around me, as immature and childish. There were those
who would tell me point-blank that I was silly, and
even stupid, for taking pleasure in staring at the sky
at night or lying in the grass under trees for hours.
I loved myself then. I mean, my self-esteem may not
have been the best, but inwardly, I was more certain
of who I was more than almost all of my friends. I
never waivered in my feelings for people or things,
and I could speak of love. I could write of love. I
could exist purely in loving. I would walk for hours
at night (I'm writing now of my college years,
specifically), touching trees and flowers as I walked
past them, and feeling the cool night air on my skin
as if it were the fingers of a lover. I did more than
feel such things, but I could speak of it, too, if
someone were walking beside me. I could tell them the
texture of a flower petal felt like heavy cream or
that the air, right before a thunderstorm, felt like
the moments before an explosive, all-encompassing,
orgasm. I would never hesitate in sharing my feelings,
thoughts, observations, beliefs, or intuitions. I
trusted myself, and I was not afraid of appearing
childish or silly. Perhaps it was, also, that I
trusted the people in my life...
But then I went to Europe for four months, and my
traveling/studying companions were twelve people I had
never met. Twelve people for whom I could re-invent
myself, if I decided to do so, but at first, I had no
desire to alter anything of myself, but within the
first couple of days, it became drastically apparent
to me that of the twelve, I was the most dramatic--the
one most prone to reacting out of passion and feeling
rather than intellect and reason, and I felt out of
place and alienated. Of course, it wasn't the first
time in my life that I felt alienated, but it was the
first time in my life that I couldn't leave the group
and the space to find a more copesetic place and
people that fit my personality better, so I began to
adjust to those around me. I began to keep my emotions
and feelings to myself; I silented my observations and
my thoughts about the metal curve of bridges and slant
of sunlight on buildings. And I began to lose the
ability to articulate my feelings and wonderings of my
soul. All because, for the first time in my life, I
was afraid of being laughed at by my peers.
And then there was the day, in late September, that we
traveled to a concentration camp in a suburb of
Berlin. I choke with tears even now, remembering what
it felt like to be in that concentration camp--barren
of the tortured souls that stood for hours in the
fields now filled with wildflowers and tourists. The
smell of the barricks; the cremetorium ovens
collapsing into the ground through the broken cement
platform, and the feeling of smallness and
unworthiness when I walked away from the gas chamber
door--when I walked in the direction that thousands
never did--all these things infiltrated every part of
myself. No amount of fear of being ridiculed could
have prevented me, on that day, from being overwhelmed
by emotion that I couldn't hide from those around me.
In that group of twelve, though, I felt more alone on
that day than I had felt in my entire life.
That night in Berlin, after traveling back to the
city, I left the other students and the pension for a
walk by myself. In a strange city, where very few knew
and spoke English, I felt myself sinking into a
sadness that not only encompassed what I had witnessed
at the concentration camp but wrapped around
everything that had happened in my life up until that
point. I relived moments of the sexual abuse I
suffered as a child and adolescent. They crashed into
the back of my eyelids like metal rods--images of
hands and penis, memories of standing at the door
watching, and images of vomiting afterwards. I also
relived the day my sister died over and over again.
Flames. Smoke. The feeling of nausea and weekness that
made me kneel on one knee in the front yard, gasping
for breath. There were other events, as well, that
screwed their way into the back of my eyelids with
each blink. I walked for hours, getting more and more
lost and finally, I stopped in front of a corner
liquor store. I had no idea where I was, but I knew
how alcohol could blur the sharp images behind my
eyes, so I bought and consumed nearly an entire bottle
of vodka. The world did become fuzzy and muted, as if
I were walking under water, and the images slowed and
became less powerful in their lack of vibrance.
Eventually, by some miracle, I found myself back to
the pension. Perhaps my legs had remembered the way I
walked, but I truly can't tell you how I found my way
back. It was nearly dawn. I slipped into the room I
was sharing with one of the other students and fell,
exhausted, into bed, but I didn't sleep. I layed
awake, watching the shadows move slowly across the
high ceiling, and I cried silently. I cried out of
self-pity, very aware that I was too much of a coward
to kill myself, but knowing that I wanted more than
anything not to feel another emotion for the rest of
my life. And so it was then, in the pre-dawn hours, in
the Pension Kreuzberg of Berlin, that I made the
conscious decision to cut the chord of my soul that
felt the world so strongly.
That was an easier decision to make than put into
action. I couldn't help but *feel* everything around
me. I couldn't help to walk down the street and feel
the sadness of a woman walking towards me or the
loneliness of an old man sitting on a park bench,
bundled in a tattered, wool overcoat, but I was
determined. So I began the re-training of my inner
self. By late November, I was inwardly miserable. I
was quaking with loneliness and depression, but
outwardly, no one could tell. I smiled and I
interacted as I should. I went to class and out in the
evenings with the other students, and I can honestly
say a part of me was very happy--how could I not have
been? I was, after all, in Europe, but I had no space
of my own.
I began to search for something that would alleviate
the heaviness within me, and for some reason, I still
can't explain, I looked online. I searched through
what seemed like hundreds of personal ads; not sure
what I was looking for in the brief snippits of
people's personalities. I replied to one--only one. A
woman in Delaware, because she made me laugh outloud.
As it turned out, this was Catherine and so began possibly
the most intense relationship I've ever had in my
life. We began slowly--an email a day, but the emails
were novellas full of beautiful, intellectual,
passionate words, and after the first week, we were
writing each other two or three times a day, and we
were chatting through the night as I worked on my
major research paper and she studied for finals. For
the first time in months, I allowed myself to feel
again, but more importantly, to share what I was
feeling with someone else as I used to do before
coming to Europe. I poured myself into Catherine, emptying
my soul into the words that flew across cyberspace at
speeds faster than a soul transcends earth, and I fell
in love for the first time in my life, really. Up
until that point, I had loved many people and things,
but nothing had ever felt so elevated--so pure and so
complete. The depression lifted that had settled
around me under the gaze of Catherine, because I had found
a space to be me completely, and I was giving myself
permission again, to feel.
My last month in Europe went quickly enough. I
finished up my classes and walked, for the last time,
along the canals at night, and then I came home full
of expectation and passion for a woman I had never
met. And soon after I was home, I heard her voice for
the first time. Shivers enveloped me. I felt as if I
was being born again, and her voice was the sound of
oxygen rushing into my lungs for the first time. And
in another month, I saw her for the first time. I had
never been so nervous as I walked to her door. My
stomach was in my throat, and I was dizzy with
anticipation. As she opened the door, I inhaled
sharply, because she was the most beautiful woman I've
ever seen in my life. She hugged me, and that began
the most erotic weekend of my life, though hugging and
hand-holding was the only physicalness between us. We
didn't even kiss. That weekend in late January, she
held desperately onto the fear of wanting me after I
left and not being able to have me, and I held
desperately to my hopes of someday and beyond. We
laughed and we cried that weekend, and we had our
moments of companiable silence, weighted only with the
knowledge that soon I would have to leave.
And as she hugged me when I arrived, she hugged me
when I left. Later, we would both write to each other
of our mutual desire, and hesitancy, to kiss one
another. I cried four of the eight hours home in the
silence and privacy of my car. I was feeling so many
feelings--including the most basic of them
all--happiness and sadness. And on that drive, my love
for Catherine was beginnning its journey into bittersweet.
Again, as I did in Berlin, I found myself questioning
the intensity of my emotions, and I began to convince
myself that I would be happier--life would be
easier--if I didn't feel so much. Catherine and I began to
grow a part--mostly from my actions than hers, because
I was pushing her away. I was pushing everything away
that reminded myself of how I could feel. I met and
dated Samantha--a woman so incompatible with me that
I'm not sure how we even began to date. I had no
reason to feel intensely with Samantha, because she
encouraged as little emotion as possible. Things were
practical, functional between us, and ashamedly,
hateful. I resented Samantha more and more everyday,
because she represented what I thought I needed to be,
and she resented me more everyday, because I could
never settle into the practiced and rudimentary
lifestyle she craved. And let's face it, she wasn't
Catherine.
Samantha and I ended abruptly and violently--not
physcially, but emotionally. There was hours of
yelling and crying, and there was a lot of hurt. We
both felt foreign to ourselves, which hurt most of
all. We felt ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, Catherine
and I were barely talking. We went months without an
email or chatting, until the day Samantha and I broke
up. I called Catherine from a hotel room somewhere in
Tennessee, crying hysterically and feeling, again,
that encroaching desire to die. Months previously, I
had hurt Catherine terribly--lashing out at her in a
moment of frustration and hopelessness. Lashing out of
her with a jealousy that I was not the person she was
with, and with a certainness that I may never be,
hence our estrangement from one another. But on that
late night, she listened to me sob, and she was so
scared for me.
That night, however, was another stepping stone in
pushing myself further from feeling, and as the months
went on, I became better and better at not caring so
much. Catherine saw it happening sooner than I realized I
was succeeding. She began to pointedly state that I
wasn't the same as I had been before, and I would
become frustrated with her. Telling her that she
didn't know me at all, though if truth be told, she
knows me better than anyone else has ever known me.
Leslie and I began dating. And I convinced myself,
though it was difficult, to try one more time at
feeling deeply and intensely. I put all my emotions
into my relationship with Leslie. I was the romantic,
child-like self that I always enjoyed--especailly
before going to Europe and dating Samantha, but my
relationship with Leslie was, as I've said before, a
candle burning at both ends. I was trying to convince
myelf, more than Leslie, that I was in love with her.
I'm certain that I was, but I'm also certain that I
knew, from the beginning, that Leslie and I could never
be for each other what we needed. It was a beautiful
relationship, at first--full of roses and wine; music
and late-night rendez-vous, but even the best things
end. And we fell into a relationship lasting through
habit more than passion. New Year's was the true
beginning of the end. Leslie exclaimed emotions were
bullshit, and although I protested, I felt myself
collapsing inside--deflated, because I felt that I had
failed myself, because part of me couldn't help
cheering after she made that statement. Less than two
months later, we were broken up, and I was receding,
more quickly than I ever had before, into myself.
My interactions with others became less and less. I
could barely bring myself to email Catherine, which
compounded the issues in our friendship even more,
because not only was I less emotive, less intense,
less of who I was when we first met, it appeared that
I was making as little effort as possible to salvage
our very damaged friendship. But the truth was, in my
self-made estrangement from Catherine, and many of my
other close friends, I was quickly forgetting how to
be myself. I lost confidence in my ability to care and
interact. I lost confidence in my writing. I lost
confidence in my emotions. I shut off, and it wasn't
until recently--two months, maybe, that I finally
realized that I didn't know myself any longer, because
I don't know the me that doesn't feel. I don't
recognize the self that can't write a paragraph
devoted entirely to the way I feel about a blade of
grass.
I began to notice that the interactions with my
friends were curt and cursory, at best. I began, also,
to become aware that I confused my friends to the
point that they didn't even enjoy my company. Even
Dani made countless observations that I wasn't being
myself. And slowly, I realized that I didn't like who
I'd become, but it would have been better if I
realized it sooner than later, because I'm finding
it's more difficult to find myself than to lose
myself.
For the past couple of months, I have struggled and
fought to find the emotions and paths of myself that I
buried and tucked away. The hardest thing, I'm
discovering, is to be brave again. To be brave with
emoting and vocalizing my thoughts outloud. I am still quaking inside with a distrust of myself. I
spent so many months convincing myself of the
ridiculousness of being too much that it's taking me
twice as long to relearn, if it's possible, the way I
once was--finding, in essence, what I didn't lose. I
have sought Catherine's help, because she hasn't given up
on me. She pleads for the intense parts of myself, and somtimes I feel
she does back me up into corners, but I also relish her assertiveness and
strength and insistence, because she doesn't let be get away with the
easy way out--she forces me to be.