what does it feel like to be you?
A small brown bird is dead in the backyard. No sign of how or why. I think it might have run into the garage window but the window is shuttered, not reflective. Still, the bird is dead. The dog sniffs it until I yell: let it rest. J shovels the bird gently into a blue metal scoop and I whisper a poem to myself because there are so many poems about birds and I like all of them.
*
Sometimes, I sit in my car and weep. Sometimes, I ignore the sadness because I do not want to be sad. There is a lot to do and it is not particularly enticing to cry for long enough that I have to sleep more the next day to recover.
Where I live we have emerged from a long and brutal winter only to encounter a Vancouver winter for a summer: rain, wind, and bare patches of sunlight that turn me mad with longing.
*
When I am really tired, I will stop myself from feeling everything. It’s an old and broken coping mechanism borne from a much younger version of myself. I used to think the only way to manage feeling so much was to try and feel as little as possible.
I had a short list of feelings that were good and a very long list of feelings that were not good. When I catch myself trying not to feel anything, I pull out my paper calendar and I make myself search for a day where I can let the feelings be big, be wild.
This is an under-represented aspect of self-care because it’s brutal to feel your feelings inflate like—a balloon is obvious—but I am actually thinking of a latex swim cap, the way if you take one and fill it with water it will expand impossibly, hold so much more than just the pinheads of our skulls.
*
At a sports bar, it is so loud I have to whisper my food order into the waiter’s ear with the hush of a secret because that’s what everyone always hears perfectly.
Later, a friend screams at my face: DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE?
OF COURSE, I scream back. I ACTUALLY THINK THAT’S MY PROBLEM SOMETIMES.
The thing is, I want people to like me but above that, above everything else, I want to live in alignment with the values that I hold myself to and I am realizing that for a lot of other people the former actually almost always trumps the latter.
After a few hours, I have to go sit on the smoker’s bench outside the bar for five minutes because the bar is too loud. I do this at parties too, except I lock myself into the bathroom usually and sit with my back against the door, eyes closed. My favorite people are the ones that understand the need for a break.
*
Someone I love asks me what the best kind of knife is and I am now days late in giving an answer because I have spent over six hours researching my response. I am not afraid of saying the wrong thing, I just love certain people so much that I want to give them the best advice that I can. This kind of love is not for everyone.
*
Often, people mistake me being serious about love as taking myself seriously or people criticize me for being too serious for their tastes. But mostly every person I’ve met that isn’t dead serious about at least something isn’t really sure day to day why they’re doing anything.
You can be for everyone, my therapist tells me. Or you can be yourself.
*
I do not think there is anything wrong with not really being sure day to day why you’re doing anything which is why I never really understand how it bothers so many people that day to day I do know what I am doing and why I am still alive.
*
Two years ago, it is winter, literally but also spiritually. I am wearing a bright green cashmere sweater. I am making a new friend. We are both drinking Bee’s Knees in a bar that is now closed.
When I ask her—what does it feel like to be you?—the woman thinks thoughtfully and not for as long as either people do.
A hammer, she says. I can break things down or build you a house.
This is my favorite answer to this question that I have heard but there’s still time.
I think being me feels like being a bunch of kids in a trench coat, really well disguised, so truly no one notices, in a way that is sometimes a source of joy (quick access to unbridled silliness) and sometimes not (fear, smallness, unstable sense of self)
Always, always, always love to read your writing, Amy! I treasure it.
I just discovered your Substack and I'm glad I did.
Lately, I'm the strongest most surest person I know. But I still feel like a very tiny child, like I need to curl up and hide from the world. I don't know how I can be both so strong and so constantly vulnerable.