The sun was blazing hot, the sand and rocks were unbearable to stand on. It was an August day in the Mediterranean. My friend Jasmine and I decided to cool off in the sea. From the previous day I knew the water was quite chilly and salty. When I dried the day before there were salt crystals clinging to my skin.
Jasmine slipped right in as the translucent aqua water elegantly parted for her to join. I stood on the dock ladder with my feet in the water, it was so cold and I detest being cold. I crouched and scrunched up my face like a baby trying lemon for the first time. I lowered a rung complaining the whole time as Jasmine swam around laughing at me. In a high pitched voice, “Don’t look at me!” I screeched. Something else came out of my mouth as well but I don’t remember what I said.
I mentally said fuck it and splashed into the water with a stifled gasp. Once the water settled, Jasmine said something that I think about to this day. She said, “You hate to be seen as weak, don’t you?” Jasmine and I have deep conversations all the time about various stuff so the deep question wasn’t out of the ordinary. What was out of the ordinary is that I never realized such a deep truth about myself until she put it in one small sentence.
I’ve said before how I dwell in my mind so I know myself really well; it rocked my world that I didn’t see something that was chilling in plain sight. It makes complete sense.
At the time I was aware of several manifestations like how even in the face of crazy things I act calm and continue to try and think rationally even though I’m shaking like a leaf on the inside and my stomach is so unstable I feel like I could puke. I have friends that have witnessed me in this state and none of them ever had guessed what I was feeling inside.
For me, stark honesty is a defense mechanism to act strong as well. A lot of people don’t admit when they are wrong or don’t know something, but if you admit you don’t know, people see that as a strong action. Honesty has a lot of admirable qualities and it isn’t a bad shield to have but weirdly enough I think I use honesty as a way to distance myself from people. I don’t see honesty as a thing that brings people closer to me because things that I am honest about I am not emotionally invested in.
Several days ago a professor of mine asked the class if we knew what an anvil is. I am a total wiz in this class and usually know the answers and will say them when he asks because no one else does and I think some professors find it discouraging when no one answers. To the question about an anvil, no one said they knew so I said that I didn’t know the answer. He made a side comment about how it is a rare quality to admit when you don’t know something and I agree that can be true. If you are wondering, an anvil is a metal working tool for horse shoeing.
That was a small example but a bigger one is me being fairly open about my past. I openly talk to people about what it is like to be adopted and be a teenager in a wheelchair (at the time I had no idea if I was going to even walk again). I think I had a weird childhood even after being adopted that I wish was different and I am open about these topics. I have distanced myself emotionally from these events. What is done is done mentality.
I am open about how things that have changed me influenced my decisions as well. One of the reasons I do not want kids is that I don’t want the responsibility of someone relying on me. I am open to adopting older children because I know what it is like to be given up on and want to be there for someone, but it makes me feel sick at the idea of having a baby or any kid under the age of five.
There is something that happened at 19 to me that I have not distanced myself from and it is hard to talk about if because of that. I still cry about it at times. I have kept this event a secret from people but will randomly tell other people. As I have gotten closer to people I am more hesitant to talk about it even if I had brought it up before. After it happened I called my mom the next morning ugly crying, uncontrollable snot coming out of my nose. I was in a foreign country and bought a ticket to leave that day because I couldn’t stand the thought of staying, I wanted to be anywhere else.
On the phone my mom was no help and told me she felt bad I felt how I did and other stuff that clearly showed she didn’t understand. I ended up in Germany after my last minute flight. To this day, Germany is my least favorite country because of how miserable I was trying to not fall apart. It is associated with bad things. I was staying in a shared hostel. I locked myself in the bathroom and turned on the shower to try and get some privacy. I called my best friend. I tried to force myself to say what happened but I couldn’t really. I whispered jumbled phrases trying to get my point across without saying it. Even writing this I am tearing up.
For someone who prides themself on honesty I couldn’t say it. I have told complete strangers, much like posting online, what happened or people I have barely met.
The first time I talked about it with my best friend after I had called her in Germany was a year later. I was shit faced. I puked all over her fiance’s bathroom and was sobbing until I was dry heaving. I admitted to her things that to this day bug me. I am unsure if I want to share them here because I don’t want to make this less abstract for my sake. I have given friends my blog URL and I don’t want them to read about this. It’s funny because I want to be a fucking wreck, I want to scream and yell and break shit and tell people exactly what I hate with a passion for hours on end and probably more than once. I want to call people out on how shitty their behavior made me feel but I can’t. I don’t even feel like I can talk to my best friend about what happened. Here in about two and a half weeks it will be exactly three years and it feels like I should shut up about it and what more could I say to someone who already knows. And I want someone to feed my hate, not feel bad for me. I want someone to let me say the same ten things over and over again.
There is something bigger holding me back for acting on my wants and that could be me not wanting to be seen as weak. My family jokes all the time about me being uptight, that one day I am going to snap and go on a complete bender. It may be more true than they already think.
I know my reasons for being intensely private, even if it doesn’t seem like it, are because of unhealthy reasons. I don’t want you guys to think my personality is a facade, it isn’t, but everything I tend to show is with my permission. I find some people funny, some admirable, some relatable and some annoying. I show people my passions, I genuinely am interested in what people have to say and I like to help people when I can. I just don’t want people to know how weak, dumb, and emotionally robotic I feel at every turn. I know I am different and it is not bad, but sometimes it is hard because I don’t know where to turn. I have always loved being more than people expected, partly to prove them wrong but partly to show how much I have to offer. Some things are just not worth it. My experience at 19 is one of them.
I’ve had an unhealthy relationship with weakness since I was young. I remember in therapy once Theresa, my therapist, pointed out that refusing to puke and swallowing it was not normal. My parents that ended up adopting me gave me some good qualities but boy did they not foster emotional openness either.
At this point, I don’t know what I am doing. My comfort is that it seems like at every stage of life there is something going on that people have no idea how to handle, I have just had a lot of practice. I know what I am doing for school and I know I am not in any state to be dating so I am fairly certain I am doing pretty alright.
Ashley Grace 