Letters to my former apartment part 2

I’m laying in bed at Macon, maybe two weeks left on the lease, and reflecting. I asked you if you thought that I handled stress well and you laughed. It shook me to my core. I have been building a myth that I do, and I have to admit you know me better than myself, or at the very least I cannot fool you as easily as I can fool me.

As a testament to me, people have fallen in love with me because of how calm I am, my identity is how calm I am, how well regulated, how measured, how patient, kind, tolerant.

I’m so attached to this idea that I can put on the air of calmness when I’m having a panic attack. When I’m breaking down, when I’m angry, when I’m confused or when I’ve completely given up.

I read about the stoics early and my first attachment to their ideas was the validation it gave me in appearing calm. To seem as though unaffected was my daily practice for decades. At times it was a crime against love.

As reactions go, appearing calm is not the worst one, and so it was that much more difficult to open up. To let anger pour out, to lose control, to admit confusion or ignorance, to beat my fists against the floor and scream. Calmness has become such a home to me that to shed a tear, to raise a voice, to walk away, all feel like a tantrum in the supermarket. Everyone watching me over reacting for not getting what I want.

You know, though.

It ain’t pretty. 

When I retreat inside of myself. When I’m there but not there. When I run away for hours without moving at all. 

It’s worthiness that sends me there. It’s disappointment. 

The first leap is a compulsion to avoid. To look into the depths of the universe for a distraction. It chases me there. A patient waiting clever chase. It knows me, and it waits. 

It looks from the eyes of everyone I’ve ever met, of everyone I have, could, or will let down. A sacred geometric proof of my lack of worthiness. A perfect argument against my appointment as my self.

Past this infinite wallowing of self pity, the depths of the mud of me, floundering for having failed, is a realization that you must not love me for my calmness. I haven’t fooled you, and maybe in the middle of the mud I can ask myself without a shred of doubt:

What do you see in me? Can I let myself see it now?

We’re moving soon, and I have the need for the world to believe in me. For you to, for you are my world. For me to be believable and to believe in myself.

I love that. Thank you. Your love is the trampoline that springs me further up the deeper I go. It’s terrifying, and beautiful, and strong. And it’s intoxicatingly fun.

I love you.