I’d consider myself a reflective person. The kind that would (hopefully) recognise what it is about myself that’s ‘not right’. Especially in situations where I end up losing someone I consider important to me. I think I lose about an average of one good friend a year. At least, that’s been the trend the past five years since I moved to Europe. I’ve gained more than I’ve lost, that much I know of. But there’s something so deeply unsettled inside of me, something that feels so viscerally disgusted with my being knowing that there are people whom I’ve lost because of who I am. Of course, not all of them are nice or even really worth it for that matter. But it’s a closeness I haven’t felt with people in a while. To me, someone who clings onto people’s thoughts and imaginations of me, I somehow naturally gravitate towards the high-high-high possibility that I’ve always been wrong and that their thoughts and imaginations and observations of who I am as a person will always be more reliable as a narration of me than the one in my head.
My inner monologue does argue back. Naturally, these people don’t know who I really am even if I wanted to show them. They don’t know my body, how it feels or functions, how it manifests in reality, how I view myself as a blob some days of my life. And there’s the part of me that’s deeply impressionable, who thinks that other people’s opinions are probably more well thoughtout than mine. All it takes to convince me is conviction, that you truly believe in your heart that you stand for something or believe in something so much that you are willing to share that part of yourself with the world around you without any hesitation.
I think that what makes me weak is my lack of a sense of self that isn’t just what I believe in. In fact, I feel so devoid of any other wants besides wanting to know and do. What I find a little jarring is how uncommon it seems to be someone who is just their advocacy and nothing else in between, at least that’s the feeling I have.
To be completely honest, I started to write this because I didn’t know where else to place my feelings. I’m angry and disappointed at myself. I don’t know where else to go, what else to feel, and how to make my day a little less gloomy or sad. I lost a friend. No, this person didn’t die or go far away. But I do feel like I lost her heart somewhere in the middle of our time together. I’ve said my piece to her, I’ve apologised. I know that there is a mistake that I’ve done and I don’t like making excuses either because I know for a fact that being hurt is a feeling, it just is there.
But losing a friend always makes me think that I’m the mistake. Not the act itself, but me the whole person. And it could be some form of self-loathing narcissism which I feel like I developed in the last few years of high school. Some of the friends I had then (I also don’t really talk to them anymore) weren’t in the best mental space either. This reasoning, being the mistake manifest, gives me a justified feeling that I can, in the future, simply disappear from this world and it would magically get better because I go. Again, negative self-associated narcissism at work. Objectively, I know that this wouldn’t be the case. My death or disappearance wouldn’t stop climate change. But it just feels like that, it feels like I’m one less burden on the world around me, on the people around me who really seem to care.
Have you ever felt that way? I find it hard to believe that others would.