There is this thing that happens in my brain? I don’t get any say in it? I am aware of it. Sometimes. But a lot of the time I am unaware of it. I’m usually only aware of it when I mention it and someone else finds it absurd. Or someone mentions something that triggers it and then their mention feels absurd to me.
I’m getting ahead of myself tho because I feel like I’ve lost you. Lemme start again.
I am unaware of my affect on others. Like, on a deep level. I heard last week that this is a pretty significant enneagram 2 thing. I cried. I feel like maybe I should write about that soon. But for now I’ll say that for me, for the most part, I assume I am pretty disposable to people and I don’t really matter much one way or the other. People feel fine to have me around, but also, outta sight outta mind–I’m dispensable and forgotten. And I say this relatively ambivalently. It feels like fact more than feeling. It is what it is and it’s been a reoccurring theme since childhood and I’m used to it. (Or…I should be.) I don’t think to think about it too often and I don’t feel the need to feel about it even less.
But then someone will say something. Like yesterday. Chris and I were talking about the inbetween time of our relationship. Where we knew one another existed and we’d said hi, but hadn’t started dating yet. This was a four month period. We were just people that passed one another and we were both unaware that the connection was deeply and entirely mutual.
So we’re talking yesterday and he says that even if we never got together. Never became more. I would have always been the person in the back of his head he compared people to. Other people would have come in and out of his life and still, it would have been “they have beautiful eyes, but they’ll never be Jill’s eyes” or “I love when they smile, but it doesn’t quite light up the room like Jill’s smile” and he kept listing things “like Jill’s <fill in the blank>” and–this is the thing absolutely no one who knows me knows or could possibly comprehend.
Seven years of a relationship later, Chris can say this to me and my only thought is “…he knew my name?”
And I can only weep. Weep so inconsolably. Because how absurd and pathetic is that? Of course, logically, he knew my name. But logic doesn’t exist here. Only feeling brain exists here. And feeling brain tells me no one sees me and I’m not worth seeing.
It only serves to validate feeling brain more that so many people I love deeply have disappeared from my life. It feels impossible that I matter at all, if people like Kristi and Mandy can just abandon me without thought. That my dad could and my grandmother could and my mother could. Then how could I believe anyone would ever want me at all? And I know reasonably that anyone who leaves me left because of themself and not me. Left because something in them made it so they couldn’t stay. But reason does not exist in this part of my feeling brain. Only feeling exists. And feeling dictates that I am not enough to stick around for.
And I can’t stop sobbing and I can’t catch my breath and L is sitting here playing legos and I am falling apart.
. . . . . . .
I took a minute to pull myself together. And in doing so, my feeling brain has already switched itself off.
I am sickly good at the compartmentalizing.
When I sat down to write this, my intent was not this. My intent was only to give an amusing anecdote about my skewed perception. It was not so much to say I don’t have any ability to understand what I mean to people. It was not so much to say that no one has the ability to comprehend how acutely incapable I am of believing my worth to others.
And yet…here we are.
