Flaw Salad

I keep writing missives in my head. At night, on the pillow, churning words keep me awake. Whole sentences, paragraphs, essays. Ideas are born and die under the incessant whir of the bedroom air conditioner. When I sit to type, nothing remains. I am blank. Humbled by the extraordinary uselessness of my contributions — and the unforgivable lack thereof. 

Lately I regret myself. The slurry of traits and experiences that wears my name is hideous. I hate to see it, and I have seen so much of it. Everywhere I look, some new inadequacy. Some social failing. Some fundamental flaw. Pathetic even to mention it, but I cannot stop mentioning it.

After 18 years in my parents’ home, I emerged wrong. Without empathy, compassion, kindness. Trained in solipsism, I did not know how to think of others. On September 11, 2001, I sat in homeroom and wondered why Mr. P looked so shaken. I was 16 then, and none of the images moved me. They were not real. Not to my adolescent mind. I stayed quiet that day, sensing long before I had the language to name it or will to change it that some part of me was broken. 

Nearly five years later, I penned a Facebook Note. My first. I had just learned that some people don’t like to be teased. The information rattled me. Teasing was the only way I knew to show affection. Love was mean, as far as I could tell. It always had been. Critical. Mocking. Demanding. That was love. That was family. That was how I chose to marry.

When you’ve only swum in dark waters, it turns out, you cannot conceive of light. To be admonished and demeaned and controlled felt correct. Familiar. I would sometimes hear tale of people who never yelled in relationships, even those who never fought, but I had no time for fiction. Fantasy. What was a day without conflict? One I could not recognize. I married at 24.

At 25, though I had begun swimming for the surface, the way was hazy. My waters were dark. Had I won the race against brain development, perhaps my frontal lobe would work more like a parrot fish or a slick eagle ray cruising through the reef. But it is a blobfish. A grotesque deep sea thing that was never meant to see light, built to function in darkness, deformed by lack of pressure when it ventures too far from home.

My metaphors are as strained as my thoughts. I am trying to find a way to say: I came by this melancholy honestly. Every day I confront the large gap between who I’m expected and wish to be and who I am, and is it even possible to change as much as I want to? Would it not be easier to crawl back to the depths? It was colder there — and lonelier — but I understood the rules. I’m too lost in the light. Too misshapen. Everyone can see I don’t belong.

To what end, then, do I keep trying? Is there an upper limit to growth? Will thousands more dollars of therapy fix me? 

Unfortunately, I am incapable of not trying. To live is to strive. I am cursed to reach toward a light I cannot handle. At night, in the privacy of silence, my mind loops scenes of failure. I watch the mutilated, mangled blob float through colorful, easy schools of colorful, easy fishes. Why can’t you just be them? And so, I search for words to disguise myself, to make myself pretty on the page. But all I can type is the truth.