Author: Michelle

I’ve been talking to the wall and it’s been answering me
Oh darling how I miss you
I’m just the mere shadow of my former selfishness
–Elvis Costello/Human Hands

Oh, don’t worry. My selfishness level is at a perfectly normal operating level.
Sometimes the walls answer me though,
but never tell me anything I want to hear.
Why is that?
I mean, I know that when the walls answer me it’s me talking to myself. I may be a little crazy, but I’m not insane.

The question is: why can’t I manage to say nicer things when I’m the one saying them to myself?
I’d never talk to other people the way I do to myself.
Hardly ever, anyway.

They say that it’s important to use positive self affirmations in self talk.
I agree, they are kind of pompous.
Why don’t they just say you should be nicer to yourself?
Wouldn’t that be clearer for everyone?
Not that we would listen anyway.
Well, maybe we would listen if someone else told us. We don’t seem to listen to ourselves very well.
Why is that?

Yes, this is kind of what it sounds like in my head a lot of the time only with more profanity.
That’s why I call myself a dumbass so often.
If you sounded like this, you might call yourself names too.

Maybe you do sound like this, how would I know?

So let’s make a deal:
Let’s try to be nicer to ourselves a little bit more.
Let’s not go overboard about it. I mean, sometimes you have to kick yourself in the ass. You just do.
I’m not saying we should wake up in the morning and get all Stuart Smalley, but would it kill us to treat ourselves as civilly as we would treat a stranger? Or with as much compassion as we treat our friends?

It probably won’t kill us.

If I die tomorrow, please stop being nice to yourselves because it might turn out it actually is lethal.

If I don’t die tomorrow, either I’ve failed to be kind to myself or it isn’t lethal.
Either way, it’s a win for me.

Wait, what?

When she walks in the front door, there is nobody there.

At first, that was a relief. He wasn’t there anymore, and she didn’t have to pretend that she was glad to see him. She didn’t have to pretend that she was the cheerful person he married. After a year, though, her apartment, tiny, started to feel huge. She felt like she could never be enough of anything to fill the space. She felt even more empty than the apartment.

Maybe, she thought, there is still nobody here now, and closed the door behind her.

It’s pretty easy to pretend to be someone while she is at work. She is busy and useful. She can make herself smile because so many of the people there have so much more to be sad about than she does. They are really there, in their lives, hanging on. If she feels anything at all, she feels bad that she wants to let go of her life when they are all fighting for theirs.

Each night leaving work, she asks herself how many days she would be dead before anyone noticed. She knows what the answer is, but she still asks the question. It’s the number of days before she has to go back to work. Someone would miss her on that day at 07:05. Not before. When she is not working, she does not exist for anyone.

She does exist, of course, but she has lost touch with the place inside of herself where she can feel it.

She drives home each night, somehow, without driving her car into a wall. Off an overpass. She doesn’t know how many more nights she can keep her car on the road. The only thing she really wants to do is hit a wall. Crash into a tunnel and explode. She reads about people who die, and she thinks it must be peaceful not to have to pretend to be someone. Then she thinks of her mother, and decides to stay for another day.

One more day.

She stops pretending she is OK. She isn’t sad anymore. She isn’t lonely anymore. She isn’t anything anymore. She isn’t anyone.

Her friends and colleagues worry about the missing smile. The missing laughter. The empty eyes. They try to talk to her but she isn’t there so she can’t hear them.

She floats back and forth between work and her empty apartment over 300 acres of lonely. Resisting the call of the overpasses and concrete walls. Picking up a bottle of pills and putting it back down.

Every day.

One at a time.

If you walk away, walk away
I walk away, walk away
I will follow
–U2/I Will Follow

In reading some of YearOfElan’s other posts after seeing the viral rude Thanksgiving airline passenger deal, I came across this post about unfollowing people on social media which really clicked with me. He called it “the Unfollow Dilemma.” Elan’s take on unfollowing is that you unfollow someone because seeing all of their updates is painful. You need them gone because knowing the minutiae of what’s going on in their life is painful. I haven’t had that experience, exactly.

I have not unfollowed very many people who I know in real life. I follow and unfollow people on Twitter for various reasons, but don’t actually know most of the people I follow there. Twitter isn’t about anything personal for me, it’s more of a news and interest aggregator. Facebook is where most of my personal connections reside. There are several people I have hidden for various reasons, but I’ve only unfollowed a few, mostly because they were so offensive to me in some way that just hiding their posts wouldn’t get them “gone” enough. I don’t want them to see anything about me, either. Those people? I don’t really think of them again. They haven’t been people I’m close to, so making them virtually disappear left me indifferent.

If I unfollow someone I actually care about, it’s more likely to be because knowing what they do only by social media proxy hurts. It’s not because I know too much about what is going on with them, but because I don’t know enough. I want to know more about what is going on with them, but all I have is this sliver of a window. Not even a window I can see through. A darkened window that is all boarded up. I can see someone is on the other side, but they aren’t talking, at least not to me.

It’s not that I want them gone, but I want them to un-board the fucking window and actually invite me in the house.

As I was thinking about this, someone I’m Facebook friends with (but don’t actually know) wrote a status update saying something like this:
You choose everything in your life. Will you or won’t you is the question.

That’s pretty much it.

If you want someone to be in your life, you share yours with them and you want them to share theirs with you. Being busy or not might impact how often you interact, but it doesn’t lessen the desire to share life. What are you doing, who are you seeing, what are you feeling?

If you aren’t sharing that, then what else is there?

Maybe they want you to want to be part of their lives but don’t want to be part of yours. Maybe they just aren’t good at sharing. Maybe it’s too painful for them. Maybe they don’t feel like they have anything worth sharing. Maybe they are concerned about security. Maybe they think their lives are personal. Maybe they just don’t have time. Maybe they don’t know how to use a computer or smart phone.

Maybe there’s a reason they can’t or won’t share. Maybe there are a million reasons.

If you aren’t talking about it, it’s all just a bunch of maybes.

So you keep following and peek in through the boarded up windows, or stop following, and…what?

I don’t know.

I have trouble with maybes.
Among other things.

Just invite me in. I’ll bring booze. We’ll talk.