Maybe she’d lost her center.
Sure, she knew she was still basically the same: a depressive, privileged intellectual with a dark sense of humor and a curated disdain for humanity.
But every time she thought she’d nailed down a consistent character trait, she surprised herself. She was both reckless and careful. She hated routine but enjoyed small rituals. She was cynical, skeptical, and pessimistic, but also hopeful, curious, and selectively optimistic. She had little regard for most people, but could easily see the good in them. She was extravagant and frugal, selfish and selfless, loyal and dismissive, mean and kind.
It seemed to her that any attempts to label herself as one thing inevitably awakened its opposite. She bought international tickets on a whim and wandered strange cities aimlessly, while carefully planning each hour of her work week. She loathed sitting at a cubicle for weeks at a time, but reveled in her daily morning tea with honey and gym routine. She believed the world was a never-ending torrent of pain and shit, but also had faith that it is always slowly progressing toward a better future. She knew nothing really mattered in the grand scheme of things – that there is no meaning of life, and it’s hopeless to search for one – but she found small fulfillments regardless.
Slowly, she learned to love this about herself. These contradictions were not some sort of flaw to be fixed. She wasn’t required to be one thing or the other thing. The discrepancies were not an indication of her “lack of character” or her inability to really be someone in the world. She had accepted her nebulous sexuality, why couldn’t she accept other ambiguous identities?
But if we are constantly selling an identity to others in the hopes that someone will buy it, who was she supposed to sell? Which aspects should she display, and which should she hide? Relationships fall apart because, over time, people start to see the traits that were hidden at first. They’re betrayed by their own assumptions, and by false advertising. They think they know the person they’re with, that they have a sense of that person’s self. But if there is no definitive self to know, who are they really loving, laughing with, arguing with, living with, fucking?
Perhaps that’s why she’d never felt comfortable in relationships – it wasn’t that she couldn’t be herself. She’d been some of herself in relationships. It was simply that she couldn’t maintain that particular self over time. She didn’t know how to be a person that laughs easily and fucks a lot, while also being a person that takes the world very seriously and doesn’t orgasm often. She didn’t know how to show people that she’s confident and intelligent and curious, while also showing her self-doubt, ignorance, and loneliness. She’d become someone for them, a two dimensional partner, and she’d find her center there. She’d build an identity around it. And then it would end and she’d lose the person she thought she was, and it would feel horrible, but also it was a relief. Because then, she could release her other selves, give them some air. She hadn’t been wearing a mask, she’d been locking her other selves up.
Why, though? Certainly, it had been proven that some people couldn’t handle all of her. But so what if they couldn’t? Why bother putting herself into boxes that fit neatly inside other people’s homes?
Fear of abandonment is real and ever-looming, but perhaps, sometimes, she needs to be abandoned – if only to remember herself.
