Object of My Affection

I’ve had a boy I only held hands with tell me, "I love you". My favorite moments during my teenage years were during long one-on-one conversations in cars or sitting on curbs with friends. Hearing their thoughts and listening to music. 

I wasn’t the type of girl you’d try to have sex with unless you wanted to keep me around. I’ve been called crazy more than once. I only had my sights in that department set on two goals that were finally obtained after years of planning on my part. This post isn’t about sex.  Although I’d probably have more readers if it was. 

I’ve been remembering all the hugs I gave and all the hands I held as a teenager. For someone who considered herself angry, ungrateful, and failing I sure spent a lot of time foraging intimate emotional connections with those I came across. In my opinion none of my time was wasted. I have all of my life to learn science, read literature, and practice math and instruments but some moments are once in a life time. 

I often skipped out on my responsibilities. My homework, classes, and practice were often sacrificed when anyone called out in need. I couldn’t say no to my friends. I felt they were all as lonely as I was and I always wanted to help them. I have a savior complex I learned to let go of recently. It isn’t our job to save people. They need to save themselves and it is our job to offer support. 

I can remember being lonely, now I am anything but. I recently had to fight tooth and nail to regain control of my life and bring myself back to a place where I have alone time. It was hard as a mom with a supposed career path and a child. I needed time to think and process all these connections I have to people. I was on a path of convenience instead of a path I chose on purpose.

I see now how not knowing about my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder may have hurt someone I loved very much. I didn’t understand as a kid that goodbyes are rarely forever. The only permanent goodbye is death. I didn’t know yet that most of life consists of waiting. My lack of patience and inability to handle changes hurt more than one person I never meant to. 

My life had always been jam packed with a schedule of activities. Swim teams, swim clinics, dance classes, CCD which is Catechism classes, choir rehearsals, piano lessons, guitar lessons, are among the many things I was busy with all the time on top of school. I didn’t know that not working hard at life was an option. It wasn’t for me. I felt and still feel that I am never doing enough. 

I think now I didn’t do my homework for a couple of reasons. The first being that if I already understood the concept and it was just practice I wouldn’t do it. If there was no artistic aspect (writing, painting, drawing) I wouldn’t do it. If it was busy work I felt I knew how to do I wouldn’t do it because if it wasn’t done perfect without a single mistake it wasn’t worth doing at all. That was the OCD. 

It was thought perhaps I skipped it for attention. Like the cutting, it is said we do these things for attention. That is why adults think children do everything, for attention. A lot of the time that is correct except when it is not. The last thing a kid with a social anxiety disorder wants is negative attention. The fear that causes the inability to get something done is the same that comes if you screwed up and just didn’t get something done because you are human and forgot. Sometimes I forgot to do my homework because my outside of school life was too busy. I never ever made an excuse. Perhaps it seemed defiant. I thought there was no excuse valid for the failure to fulfill responsibilities. 

My dad worked nights and needed to get to sleep, my mom worked all the time, often well past dinner time or bed time. I was there in the basement in the salon doing homework or watching T.V. on the nights I didn’t have an activity. I was there before or after that activity if I did. I liked being in an adult environment a lot. I had cousins to hang out with kids but I didn’t always like kids at school. At school there are too many kids per adult. I was an only child who was raised in a business. I knew how to talk to adults. I thought it was ok to talk to adults. Although I was very smart and I hated being laughed at. People will tell you they are laughing with you or because whatever you did was funny, especially when you’re a kid. To someone suffering from anxiety you are not laughing with them, there are two very different emotions attached to being laughed at and laughing with someone. 

I found out as a teenager that embarrassment is learned. You can only be embarrassed if you let yourself be. In high school I knew I was clumsy and fell down a lot but if you are the one to laugh and see the humor in what happened you don’t have to worry about what other people think. In reality we should never worry about what other people think, because in most ways we will never know. 

I paid little attention to adults as a teenager. I thought my teenager peers would leave school and grow into adulthood and wind up as mature, accepting, and smart as I was. Turns out when you are smarter than most people, they don’t get the chance to catch up, whatever stage you’re at in your life you are always one step ahead of the pack and left out. Luckily there are a lot of people like me out there and I have found some of them.

When girls reach puberty it is like a wall goes up around them. Adults in their lives no longer what to touch them, they are hormonal, they bleed now. What to do with all these crazy teenage girls? I don’t understand why we separate boys and girls still. Our culture is so obsessed with sex that we can’t even realize that nakedness and sex are not inherently linked. Nudity isn’t shameful and only because of our overtly sexual culture that objectifies children and is rampant with abuse do we think that they are. 

Why do the boys get to go to the gym and play basketball while girls have to learn that from this moment on one at a time each one of us will start bleeding for one week a month? Except we mustn’t tell the boys what we talked about lest they think we are dirty because they just cannot possibly understand. How about it is time we teach them to understand? the part of patriarchy I am just as tired of as female subservience is this belief that girls are somehow superior creatures to men. Men are not incapable of learning to clean up after themselves or of processing complex emotions.

Somehow little 10 year old girls can handle the real anatomy of the human body and boys can’t? Why because boys are inherently immature? They are not. We only teach them they are as a way to perpetuate the status quo. I know some very emotional guys. They are often forced to feel like "less than" men because of it. Sometimes they find alcohol and drug addictions to quell their desire to connect on what is considered a feminine level but is really connection on a human level. 

I think part of why we mistake all hugging, handholding, kissing behavior as sexual is because in this culture there is no other place for it. We have put affection behind closed doors with sex. Because of this our children suffer loneliness. I may not be able to hug adults for no reason but I hug every kid that I see. I hug my son in the morning, at night before bed, when he gets on the bus, when he goes to his grandma’s. I kiss him goodnight every single day. And it’s not just me, my husband does as well. Affection isn’t gender specific.

As a married women I find the friendships I made where sex was never involved are easier to keep. Where we didn't confuse affection and friendship with romance and passion. The lovers I had who loved me back I still keep tabs on. The lovers I had who I feel didn't love me have gone away entirely. I don’t feel like I missed out on sex any of the times I just held boys hands and listened to their most hidden thoughts and feelings. Those moments are more special sometimes when you don’t have to wonder afterwards if they were just after your body and not your mind. Without those moments sex can become as lonely as any other part of life.

As a teenager this culture promotes the idea that you have to get to sex as soon as possible. Sex will make you feel good and your life will be fulfilled. We fail to teach adolescents that they can orgasm on their own and not wind up in intimate emotional relationships they are not ready for involving sex. 

When you are married you can have as much sex as you want and you find there are many things in life that are as important as sex, affection being one of them. I am a lucky enough girl that I’ve had very few sexual experiences that weren’t also affectionate love affairs. I realize that is probably not common in general and certainly not common if you’re a man. 

People have trouble communicating; people have trouble speaking the truth. I don’t have trouble with these two things. I had problems with asking too much of just one person when I have an obsessive intense personality that will keep me coming back for more. Sharing I am good at, holding back, not so much.

I didn’t realize when I was young that I have absolutely no power to actually fix other people’s home and life problems and that when those things are hard just being alone can be necessary. In this world of instant gratification we aren’t used to space. We aren’t used to turning off the phone, or the text messages, blowing off responsibility, and being only present where we are. The arts and music aren’t held up as important anymore and people suffer who can’t express their emotions with words. Everyone has a different language of emotion and you have to find your way to vent your story to others.

I’ve felt a million times like I lost someone, a friend or a lover only for them to come back to me in an unexpected way. It is important not to be mad when we separate from those we are connected to. We should embrace them when they return and let them communicate to us all they have seen and experienced while we were apart. Moving onto something new and starting new connections is essential to life. We cannot subsist on only one connection because we will suck that energy dry quickly. 

The web of connection is where the powerful energy of human interaction is contained. It is a give and take. Life is a balance. Don’t worry about those who don’t return your love, sometimes they come back to you. Don’t worry about the ones who loved you and you lost, make sure to remember what you learned from them. Move on to loving someone else and you will continue to be fulfilled. Love is not finite. It doesn’t lessen your love of anyone from your present or past to add a new person to the web. When you add to the web it grows and the positive energy that is created can be enough to heal the wounds of negative energy we all carry inside ourselves.

Be My Friend

Don't Panic

I haven’t thought about this in a long time. 

Someday I will have to explain my mental illness to my son. 

I don’t even consider myself mentally ill. I haven’t been to a doctor for it in years. I haven’t questioned whether or not I should cut myself in years. I only relapsed once at 19 after the official end to my cutting habit at age 18. I never really think about it anymore.

I used to after my son was born. I would worry about the day my son would ask about it after seeing the scars on my arms. He did finally ask one day around 3 years old. I don’t even think he remembers now. I know someday he will ask me for more details. When he was first born I thought somehow I would just never tell him about the depths of my depression in my teenage years. 

That is a silly thing to think looking back on it. 10 years later at 28 years old I still have many prominent scars. I realized today what made me stop finally, what was different about that last person who found out. They asked me to stop. That person spoke to me openly and without judgment and said, it makes me sad when you hurt yourself, will you promise me to stop and I kept it from that day forward with one relapse the summer I was 19. 

It’s still hard for me to quantify what it was all about. Maybe proof that I wasn’t crazy. To me it was proof that no one really was paying attention to me. 

I feel like an uninhibited person. There was, and is, definitely a part of me that puts it all out there. I’d focus on the pain instead of focusing on fear and anxiety and do really brazen things. Eventually I just became that overtly confident person without the cutting behavior. I didn’t want to explain myself anymore so I conformed. My cutting behavior went away. I would never even consider doing that and explaining it now to my son or his friends’ parents or anyone I know. To me it doesn’t make sense and I was there in my own head. 

But the old scars remain. It seems as though they might never fully go away. You don’t realize as you’re experiencing your childhood that every little thing is going to affect you for the rest of your life. You think you will forget and that will save you from whatever happened to you but mostly that just makes it worse and elongates the process to dealing with your history. 

I treat myself like a person without an anxiety disorder because that is how I see myself and also no one has ever acknowledged I have an anxiety disorder. I eat away at my fingers and bite my lips. I cried every day on the way to kindergarten. Before I left my job I cried every day on the way to work. And yet I would keep it all together and act like a normal person when I was around other people and no one was any the wiser. I have to be aware of my history to realize that these things have causes and I am not entirely at fault as I feel I am after having a panic attack as a supposedly in control adult running a household.

I wouldn’t say I am afraid of other people but I am. I don’t understand why they are so mean. I don’t understand why they don’t pay attention. I can’t stop paying attention. I can tune out everything in a room if I am reading or watching something. A defense mechanism I developed somewhere along the way. But if you have my attention I am listening and will remember what you said. People said as a kid I was overly embarrassed. Now I think I was sensitive from verbal and emotional abuse that manifested in an anxiety disorder. 

I went through a phase as a teenager where I handled my anxiety by being the biggest personality in a room. If I commanded attention I was in control. I constructed a persona that also kept people from feeling they have the right to put their hands on my body. Worked out well for me, I am still in the 2/3 of women who haven’t been raped. 

The me I was as a teen met the me I am as a mother this winter as I read my journals. Teenage me wasn’t as dark as I thought she would be. She was as hopelessly optimistic as she remains. The primary theme was loneliness. Broken family all around in so many ways and friends so broken they couldn’t form trusting relationships. 

I knew in high school that my group of friends had little in common. We all were smart, but also we all came from broken homes. Not all in the traditional sense of divorce although that was some of it. Other families were torn apart by other things like staying together without being in love, addiction, or mothers competing with their beautiful teenage daughters for attention. Alcoholism touched almost every one of us. 

I’ll admit I didn’t come up with cutting on my own. I was 15 when I started and I had the internet and there were plenty of pop culture references to death by suicide by then. Teenagers are obsessed with death because they haven’t had much real experience with the grief it causes. Unless you have, sometimes that is enough to not want to be suicidal. Sometimes it isn’t. Death is different when you are young because you are farther away from it. 

Better to be alive and struggling than dead, can’t fix anything when you’re dead. It seems like an easy escape but it only is for you. The people you leave behind have it that much worse because of the extra painful early severing of ties. I may not entertain the thought these days but I can remember how it comes up. I can hear the thought but I know for me it would never even be a considerable option. I want to see as much of the global story as I can before I go. I know even when I do, all the mysteries that make me curious won’t be solved. In reality the human life span is rather short. 

I was having a writer’s block for some time. I could write in my journal but not to the world. It is hard to open yourself up to judgment. I am trying to share more of my story for the people that care and have asked. No one is eager to open themselves up these days because there will always be someone full of hate there to share with you their disapproval. 

The holidays are coming. I hate them. I hate the pressure to buy terrible processed food, this year I will be because we are on the “whatever is on sale” diet. I hate the pressure to spend money on things we don’t need for people we care about instead of just showing them or telling them that we care about them. 

I always used to give out stuff for holidays in school. I never thought it was weird at the time. Sometimes I wondered why kids were so excited. I didn’t know other people’s parents didn’t celebrate every holiday with their kids just for any reason to celebrate. I’d give out M&Ms for Valentine’s Day, key chains at Christmas, flowers for Veterans, ribbons for breast cancer, or carnations for no reason sometimes. I remember people trying to convince me not to be that way. They were wrong, as an adult atheist I think we should use any excuse to celebrate life. We just don’t necessarily have to spend money on plastic shit made in a factory in China or Indonesia to do that. 

Now I don’t like to spend a lot of money on people and I don’t like them to spend a lot on me, but small tokens of friendship, from a faraway place, a handmade bracelet, or a found crystal ball are deeply meaningful. Those things were a way to keep our friendships and connections alive with people we met along our life's travel before there were photographs, phones, or Facebook to feel those connections were still real. We should reevaluate our beliefs on what is of value and get rid of the rest of the clutter taking up our minds. 

Without the feelings of isolation and lack of real connection I felt as a child and teenager life never seems like it is worth giving up on. My family makes me laugh every single day. My household is full of hugs and kisses and signs of affection. The world forces us to build walls to protect ourselves. Sometimes we build them so tall and so strong that the connections we need to survive as social beings are severed. Even if you can’t change the past or perfect the future as long as you have those connections it is worth it to be here experiencing life. 

Be My Friend