Reflection Chapter: Hard to Put Into Words
After the last blog where I mentioned my heart has gotten colder, I decided to explore why. My heart didn’t get colder. I stopped feeling safe. Over the course of the last couple of months, I have become cautious. I am being careful, very careful, about who I open up to. I concluded that it’s not the right definition of what’s happening.
I am not becoming stoic, emotionless or cold. No, it’s worse: I don’t feel safe around people. I only feel safe around a select few, and it always has been that way. I can hold superficial conversations with strangers because I don’t care what they think of me; they’re strangers passing by. However, friends, or people I want to be friends with, hit a whole other emotional cord.
I already mentioned this before.
Just recently, I left a new friend group and, by default, the people in it too, and I kept asking myself why.
Luckily, Pieter, who has been my friend for close to 20 years, didn’t pressure me when he asked why I left. I said I needed time for myself. I felt guilty. The women in the group also wondered why. I gave the same answer. At a dance party a few weeks after it happened, I decided to take a risk and talked about why I left. I felt uncomfortable. In the end, I explained. This time was different; for the first time, I could explain it, not perfectly, not logically, and with a lot of doubt, what happened.
So I told them. I started at the very beginning: that at times I feel socially awkward, that I get overwhelmed and shut down without meaning to, and often when I start to care, or when I care deeply about people. I mentioned depression and the person I have become during and after it, and that right now I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I didn’t explain every detail of everything, and I didn’t have to either. After we talked, they told me to take my time and that it was okay not to know. I felt safer after that. That’s when I decided to ask if I could rejoin, and it was okay. Both of the women in the group said they were happy to have me back, and that if I wanted to talk about what happened, or if I need emotional support, I could talk to them about it.
But the truth is: I am done talking, and I don’t want to open up any more than I have about what happened or how I feel. At times it just feels unsafe to do so, It’s not them. It’s how overwhelm takes over. I don’t feel safe right now, even after opening up, the emotion still persists. I don’t want to go deep right now, but I do want to stop disappearing.
I want to keep moving forward, maybe in a very awkward way, but I want to keep growing. But yes, sometimes I am being pulled back where fear and doubt rule over me. And obviously I didn’t tell them that. I am just tired right now. Maybe I’m doing too much, forcing myself. But, to be honest, I really don’t know what I am doing. I do know that I am happier for it, and this part is confusing. How can a person be happier but not know what they are doing? It’s conflicting. It makes no sense. Maybe it is this in-between space that I mentioned before: not the person I used to be and not yet the person I want to be.
But the reason I left is this: I have moments where doubt and fear get so extreme that I get overwhelmed. Then I want to be left alone, and I shut down completely. I don’t do this on purpose, it is just pure overwhelm. After a while, I realise that it is wrong. Then another loop takes over: I feel guilty, sad, and the one thing I can’t stand, regret. Even around the select few I feel safe with, I still get overwhelmed. And when it happens there, the guilt and regret hit even harder. And this is something that happens too often to me, even long before my depression. People don’t understand when I do this, I don’t blame them. I barely understand it myself. They probably think that I don’t care. Or maybe that I am being dramatic, or mad, or something along those lines. That’s not the truth. It’s the same reason that, right now, I don’t feel safe. fear, doubt, overthinking and I feel like I need to shoulder everything by myself.
This is something I need to stop doing. I need to start communicating more, not shutting down and closing off. My old pattern, my current one, since I need to work on it, is the following:
I get overwhelmed and, to protect myself, I quietly, literally, run away, like I did a couple of years ago. I didn’t know what to do, so I stood up and just left for the airport. Not a word; I just left my friends in the hotel lobby. I just left… Or, in more recent years, I was visiting a war museum with friends and deep fear and doubt crept in. I didn’t want to enter the museum. I would rather have waited outside, but the tickets were already bought. I wish I had said something sooner, but instead, I decided to toughen it out and said something when we were in the queue, right when the tickets were getting bought. To them it probably sounded like I was being difficult. Once inside, I vanished to calm down, and sat down somewhere isolated from the crowd.
And worse: this bothers me still today, and I never talked about it. I disappeared at a friend’s wedding, overwhelmed. I didn’t know what to do. I do remember going somewhere alone and slapping my face hard with both hands, saying: not now, not on their special day. By doing that, I stopped panicking and shaking. I needed to snap out of it. I now know that it was a panic attack. Obviously, I didn’t tell any of the friends at the wedding, but someone did pick up that something wasn’t right and asked if I was okay. I have never told anyone about this before. I am not even sure why I am writing about it now. Some of those shut down moments haunt me still.
This pattern is something I started to become aware of recently, and never thought much of it to begin with. But this is something that has been going on for years.
Something else I know, but don’t like to admit: I am an emotional guy, and pretty sensitive. Whether I like it or not, I feel emotions deeply. This bothers me too, but can’t easly be changed. All I can do now is accept this part of myself as well.
But the next time I am overwhelmed, depending on the situation, I’ll take a minute for myself and tell them that I feel overwhelmed. Or at least warn them that I need some time by myself before I am able to talk. I know sometimes my jaw clenches up, unable to speak. I need to do at least something different from my current pattern. That overwhelm caused by fear and doubt can have different reasons. The airport was because I strongly believed I wouldn’t see those friends again, while the museum part is more about me not wanting to deal with death and human misery. The wedding one is harder to explain, but the results are the same: shutdown and runaway.
And maybe I should go back to therapy to solve this specific issue, because these are just a couple of examples of the things that bother me the most in recent years. But the examples are countless, without exaggeration. Not all of them to these extremes. I don’t know if I’ll be able to solve it, even if everything else has been going uphill on the mental front since the start of this journey.
I do think that what I described in the blog played a big role in my life. When it comes down to it, it’s confidence. I am not as courageous as some of my friends think I am. Solo travel, dancing, waking up early to go to the gym, going to a concert alone, etc. I received compliments on these topics, but I am scared when I do those things. I doubt most of it. Maybe that’s why I fell into depression, because fear became so big and I started to lose all direction, and eventually I lost the will to fight. Fear and doubt are still dominant in everything I do. But I am choosing to do most of it regardless. Now that I had the chance to explore this running away and shut down, it’s time to deal with it, no excuses anymore.
Author’s note: This pattern got interrupted only once. A friend grabbed me by the hand and pulled me towards our friends right when fear and doubt took over, right before I would disappear. I remember that moment fondly. I don’t think she ever knew how much it meant to me back then. But I did.
Alaska 2013- The magic bus from the movie into the wild.