I've cultivated some fairly decent social skills over the years. I credit my family with this; my mother is a "people person", able to initiate and sustain conversation with just about anyone. My upper-middle class suburban upbringing also exposed me to a number of well-bred and well-mannered individuals, providing me with many models of etiquette and polite conversation.
On another level, my personal experiences (read: mental illness, rehab, etc) have given me a profound sense of empathy and compassion for anyone who's ever felt awkward, alienated, trapped, or invisible. Having suffered all these feelings myself, and being still susceptible to insecurity, I have an instinctive desire to make others feel comfortable expressing themselves. I wouldn't call it compassion, so much as a compulsion. A yearning to comfort my past self, or maybe redeem her; to show her the kindness of an encouraging smile, a friendly gesture, and inclusive embrace.
Back then, and now, I am unable to do these things for myself. I have built in a resistance to comfort, a barricade of self-sustainability that is at once self-destructive and self-preservative. It is a way of protecting my ego from feelings of rejection and failure. At the same time, it is a way of starving my soul, which needs to connect, to bond, to share in the same way that my body needs air. Spiritual asphyxiation. That's what isolation is.
My situation isn't desperate, don't get me wrong. Quite the contrary, in fact. I have wonderful relationships with my family, a small but vital number of friends who know me deeply and truly, and a blessedly large and diverse circle of more casual (yet still vital and enriching) friends and acquaintances who amuse, educate, challenge and inspire me. I am supremely fortunate in my relationships.
Yet still, the old anxieties remain. The walls have not fallen away completely, though in some places they have crumbled away considerably. Small talk exhausts me. Large gatherings overwhelm me. I sometimes avoid social situations altogether, unwilling or unable to summon the energy it takes to engage with people on a superficial level. I cannot entertain and be vulnerable at the same time, not truly. I can bare what seems to be my soul, but in truth they are just facts. The details of my life are not personal. It's the contents of my soul, my memories and impressions and the way I feel at night or in the morning or when I clean the cat feces from the litter box. These things are private. And it's not that I don't want to share them with you. It's just you so rarely ask. It's not polite. And I only want to share with someone who's sincerely interested. Ideally, someone who's willing to share with me. And such people are rare. Such relationships are rare. As they should be. But I love those relationships. I thrive on them. I long for more, even as I resist them with my "I'm-fine" demeanor and witticisms and antics.
I make people uncomfortable when I reveal too much. My intent, my desire, is to make people more comfortable with revealing too much. We should all be less comfortable more often. But somehow I don't think HR would approve. And what is HR but a representative of polite society? Someday I'll plot my escape. 'Til then, tell no one what I've revealed here today. I need my job.
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