We feel love, joy, excitement, and exuberance. We find the things that make a heartbeat change. The things that make us happy. The small moments and little victories. They’re magically delicious. The things that make us whole. But we also feel their fragility. How they make us different. How they make us weird. The way the world tries to corrode them, to encroach them. The way it splits the process of our personing in two. Two separate parts. Two distinct identities. Our inside and our outside selves. The part of us we show to everyone, and the part we keep to ourselves. A self made of iron and plated steel, and the one made of something gentler, soft-down and semiplume. The one we wear when all eyes are on us, and the one we guard behind closed doors. We experience the world as bifurcating, because we’re dividing up ourselves.
You might say it's dissociative. It’s depersonalizing. It’s detachment. Verging on a disorder, you could suppose. Silly rabbit, vulnerability is for kids. Repression is a rite of passage, they tell us. It’s called being an adult, they say. It’s all part of becoming a semi-well-adjusted member of a society. Smile. Nod. Stay in your lane. Dress for the job you want. Do as you're told. Pay your taxes and your rent. And, most importantly, stuff all your otherness way the fuck down so no one knows, and no one sees. We experience the world at a distance, because we’re strangers to ourselves.
We collect the instances of what's expected of us. Air-quotes-normalcy. Air-quotes-conventionality. Air-quotes-respectability. In other unsaid words, side-eye-conformity. It’s the breakfast of champions, they say.
You wrap yourself in thick layers. Sheets of plastic. Polyethylene film. Air-filled hemispheres in regular intervals. Shock resistant pockets of tension in uniformed rows. Isolating barriers of protection in neat, even half-globes. A concerted effort to hold back the sharp angles of the world. It makes it difficult to move and hard to breathe. Snap, crackle, pop, but, you'll never shatter. Never break. You'll never feel anything. You’ll never feel. We experience the world as suffocating, because we’re strangling ourselves.
Inside, we build something different. Something inner-kid tested and mother approved. A bowered structure. An inner-court. An archway with an avenue. A tender expectation. A cradle of waiting. Frail and delicate imaginings. We "assemble a life from the usable fragments", Lewis Hyde says. Sacred relics of the wreckage, gathered and connected. We experience the world as wholeness when all our pieces have a space.
To put it all on display, to let it all be seen, is the surest sign of growth. Of acceptance. Of Survival. Of endurability. A Satin Bowerbird attracting attention. A dance. A song. Coo-Coo for the call of something beyond ourselves. A flagrant show of will. A curated collection in blue. We experience the world in color, when we let our truest ones start to show.
To be open. To be prone. To be exposed. It’s something subversive. To bridge the distance between the inside and the outside selves. It’s two full scoops of wellness and repair.
We experience the world’s capacity for love, when we can love the fullness of another, when we’re capable of being loved in return.
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