dissonance.

It's because I'm lying. It's because instead of being direct and truthful (and thereby hurting someone), I am managing the lie, ignoring my truth, and becoming a grumpy, false, anxious, unsettled, and uber super avoidant being. Who then feels like she needs a shower after a phone call, just to wipe off the grossness I have caused in myself. Interpersonal relationships feel like such crap right now because I have not been direct or honest. Because I have let things build up, because I have let myself fester. Because I am lying. It would be gentler to say I am "pretending." I am trying to over-ride what is true for me, because I feel bad, because I feel like I should want to be friends with people that I just really do not. And then I feel like a jerk, both for not wanting to be friends and for lying about it.

Can I just say I am SO TIRED of feeling like a ball of awkward badness everywhere? So tired of feeling the huge chasm between my before life and this life, where in the before life, I was direct and honest and so at ease, and the places I had that far more than offset the smaller places I still struggled with incorrect friendships and things that did not work. Now, however, there is only the dissonance, and no home and no place that is not full of effort and awkwardness and I am so so so very tired of this. All of it. Being me, being not the me I was, for a jillion different reasons I don't feel like going in to now, and you have heard me say before.

I am tired of wrestling with myself, being mad at myself for not wanting to tell sweet, kind, giving, good hearted people that I don't enjoy their company and would much rather just stop pretending that I have any interest in wanting to be friends. I would love to be direct and kind and truthful, and truthfully, I am not. It's not a kindness to lie. Instead, I ignore phone calls, do not call back until I think I will most likely get voicemail. You know, all the things you do when you are managing the fact that you are going against what is true because, right now, it is easier than telling the truth. How can you possibly say to someone, "it's not personal," when in fact, it is. Just not the judgment kind of personal. It's the "I am not enjoying this friendship, though we look good, in some ways, on paper."

But can I also just please say, in my own defense, that NO ONE IS MATT. I take tiny little brave steps of being direct and honest with things I know someone will not love to hear, and get the absolutely wrong response of placating, minimizing defensiveness that makes me not want to bother even making an attempt to see over my own personal avoidant tendencies to do the right thing. And enough of those, real or imagined, makes me not make any effort at all when there is an "opportunity" to do so. Small things that, while difficult, would be long over by now, build up and fester. The dissonance and awkwardness rubs off, then, on new situations where I might actually like a person I meet, and I become self-conscious and weird, and that feeds the whole "no more people, ever" feeling in me. I am so f-ing sick of challenges to every part of my interpersonal being. That may possibly be an over-statement, but I don't care. I am tired of feeling broken and different, and that every single interaction is so hard and dis-satisfying. I wasn't that. And I want to go home.

This is, in huge part, why vows of silence and the monastic life are so appealing to me (I mean, other than the whole god thing). No more trying to pretend I am "like" other people. No more virulent dissonance. No small talk. No "movie nights" with people I'm not yet comfortable with, trying to not lose my mind. No more having to quietly assess whether or not someone can handle my being direct without reacting in such a way that it turns me off of ever trying. Please, no more seeing only how awkward and not well I am doing, no more having that be the hugest reflection I get in this world. Okay? I want to go home. I want to go home, where I am known and loved, and nothing needs to be translated. Where hard and difficult things are received and discussed in ways that make the difficult easy.

I want to be where I feel confident in the goodness I do and the skills that I have. I want to go back to where I felt confident in myself, and the way I am in this world. There is none of that right now, not with anyone, and not anywhere. Of course I feel like a massive ball of awkwardness. My "choosiness" in friendships feels like it is thrown into huge, vast, stark relief, with no goodness to balance it out. In the absence of my own solidity, every little flicker takes on magnificent proportions. I need some serious opportunities of goodness. Some engagement where the natural calm goodness of me comes out, for me. So I can see it. So I can remember who I was.

Man, I want to go home.

Awkward in a hundred ways, clumsy in a thousand, still, I go on.

 - Yueh-Shan

----------------------------------------------------------------