You can't predict when it will happen again.
You step into a room and it grabs hold. Jostling you, one arm around your throat, the other taut around your chest. Your breath is inconsistent and your words tumble like rocks yanked loose from the mountainside. Unexpected, heavy, and conspicuous - crashing below. You want to let the force pull you into the shadows. You want to let it drag you back into your car, its hand guiding yours as you turn the key. You want the engine to rumble, to feel the car reverse down the street, flow silent and surging backwards into the river of headlights. You want to let it shove you back through your front door, slam you down hard on your bed.
It isn’t humility when you find yourself suddenly kneeling unintended at the presence of others. It isn’t the awe of staring upwards into the branches of a massive redwood or of being swept into the stratosphere by a string of music. The feeling is humiliation. It is a sudden thick shadow shooting out from you, saturating the world around you. You handed away your power, let your anxieties seduce you. How did it happen? You don't want this.
You simmer in this silent injustice and fury. In this quiet, uncontrollable, unintended, dehumanization.
Some will take advantage of it and perform their invisible rituals on you, manipulate you, exploit you, experiment with push and pull and gifts and insult. Some will try to save you to save themselves, to lift you, to frantically convince you of the virtue that you have inside - and some, will allow you to just exist as that whisper of a person, casting their gaze to the floor as you drift by.
There are others though, that will stick with you at a healthy distance, allow you to navigate your own ascent into understanding, to ride your own wave of strength and weakness, and expect you to soothe them when they fall. Because this shocked and shaken creature isn’t you. It happens. it’s a symptom of something that is in you, but you’re bigger than it is, and you’re losing it - you’re way too hard on yourself. There is no way you must act with these friends, these companions. The effect of the mixture was predetermined. It is chemistry. There is a way things will go because of the ingredients involved. You may react oddly when another element is thrown in, but some things are just more conducive to one-another than others.
So fuck it. Go out into the world and be the conflation of elements that you are, see how the world around you reacts, hold on when you feel something dragging you away, and look for an opportunity to grow and for those that will grow beside you. Be fascinated as one moment and one feeling slip into the next.
Posts
