You never stop running out of chances to disgust yourself. It’s a Sunday night, and you’re too distracted by the animated calls of a wrestling match and your grasp too loose around a wine glass when it collides with the door of your kitchen cabinet, fracturing in your hand. And you’ve already realized how ridiculous you are for watching performance sport and for embracing that nerddom conversely with a glass of Albarino white; it’s part of your wacky personality that makes people think you’re cool on Twitter. But now you’re posting a photo of your bandaged hand with shiny glass shards resting in your palm. You presume to be unaware of why. But you know why you’re doing this. It hits you some days later. And you’re arousingly frightened at the idea of what happens to you when you’ve so much time to yourself.
Because it didn’t happen unless you tell people, conjuring up faux sentiments of your well-being from people who only know you for live-tweeting board meetings and pay-per-views. Those people don’t know that over eight or nine years, you’ve also groomed yourself into a pent-up single introvert who sometimes forgets it’s okay to invite people to do things with you. Like you want them to think you’re cool, but not that you don’t think you’re cool. Though you’re undeniably more comfortable alone, and you don’t realize the problem until … you get hurt — even just a little. You don’t know yet it’s also okay to want a partner to be there to help pick up broken glass.** It’s fine to not want to be single and to hope to leave the days behind when that status made you proud.
On the day it hits you, you realize you’ve made a lifestyle of feeding off the artificial reactions of your peers. You evade real connections with people who might care that you get cut by glass, and you don’t know how it got that way. You’re keeping yourself from meeting people, from becoming the person you should be. Moreover, you don’t know how to tell people about this realization. And so you write a random essay from the second person that you’d expect eventual readers to see as rambling, desultory and disoriented. What have you learned? What will you change? Maybe one day you’ll say you like watching wrestling and drinking wine by yourself and mean it. Maybe you’ll say that to other people. And then maybe once you do, you won’t have to anymore. Maybe you’ll say it more assertively. Not, you will change. I will change. I will figure out this mounting insecurity that’s dampened fun things. I just want to keep liking fun things and not care if people know I like them. That isn’t the only part of me. But I don’t know what the other parts are yet. Maybe someday soon.
Pent-Up Aching Rivers 