We live to understand ourselves. Or at least, we try to. That is the great, unfinished project of being human, the constant excavation of why. Why do I do the things that I do? Why do I react the way I do to the people around me? Why am I, in the specific and particular way that I am, me?
I have always been a believer. Not just in God but also in people. In the whole, I am the sort of person who, when you tell me who you are, I will hold that declaration like it is gospel. I will see you through the eyes you want to be seen through. I will give you the grace of your own self-image. If you say you are a good friend, I will believe you. I will file that away and return to it every time my instincts try to tell me something different.
They told you who they are. Believe them.
The trouble is, people are not their announcements, and I am intelligent enough to know that it is a very simplistic worldview. People are their patterns. And patterns, as I am learning in a rather heartbreaking way, don’t lie. You can tell me you are a good friend and genuinely mean it in the moment, and still not show up. Still go quiet when I need noise. Still choose comfort over inconvenience when all I’m asking for is inconvenience.
Actions speak louder than words. I know. Everyone knows. It is perhaps the oldest adage we have. And yet I keep pressing my ear to the words, straining to hear something that the actions have already drowned out.
I am holding on by a very thin thread right now.
I say that plainly because I am tired of dressing it up. I suffer from an invisible illness. One that sits inside me quietly and turns everything just slightly grey, and just slightly heavier than it should be. Most people around me cannot see it. Some of them don’t seem particularly interested in looking. And that is its own particular kind of hurt. The kind you can’t really explain because there is no wound to point to, no scar to hold up to the light. Nowhere can I say I am in pain.
And in the middle of all of this thinness, I have been watching. Watching the people I call friends. Watching what they do when I need them. Watching the gap between what they’ve told me they are and what they are choosing to be.
It is extremely heartbreaking. I want a softer word, but I don’t have one. For wordsmith, I can’t quite conjure up the right one.
The trouble with navel-gazing is that it can become its own trap.
When you spend enough time looking inward, you start to assume the problem is always in there. Surely, if someone hurts me, I must have earned it somehow. Surely I am the aggressor. Surely I did something, said something, was something that made this happen. The navel-gazer’s curse is that you are so concentrated on your own centre that you forget the world outside you is also moving, also failing, also choosing.
And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, the world outside you is simply the problem. Not you. The world.
I am almost what you would call the gutter. This is how I unfortunately see myself on most days. I am not proud of that. I know it isn’t a fair assessment. But it is an honest one, and honesty is the only currency I have left when everything else feels like it’s running thin.
But even in the gutter, there is a question worth asking. Am I not owed, at the very least, the same courtesy I give? Is that not the most basic contract of friendship? That I will not be required to pour endlessly into a well that never pours back?
I think I am allowed to ask that. I think, even from the gutter, even from my very obvious imperfection, I am allowed to say this is not okay.
The navel, it turns out, is not the whole story.
I am still here, although I don’t want to be. Still asking questions. Still turning things over in my hands, and looking for the meaning underneath. Maybe that is enough for now. Not the answers, nor the healing or the resolution. Just the asking. Just the refusal to stop looking, even when what I see is hard.
Maybe one day I will look inward and not immediately assume it’s my fault. Maybe one day I will believe that wanting to be treated well is not asking too much.
Maybe.
For now, I am holding on. By a very thin thread. But holding.