Puppetry for the Broken Hearted

My insides do not match my outsides. Most people’s don’t, to be honest. It’s why when we meet someone who is authentic, we are hypnotised by how real they are. It’s powerful stuff - meeting a real boy.

I learned pretty early on that the anxious, fretful child that I was, did not do. I was exhausting and difficult. So I learned how to smile and smile and be a villain. I exaggerated the parts of myself that people responded positively to. I pieced myself together and pushed all the parts that worked outwards to face the world. For the bits I didn’t know, I watched people. Real people were complicated because they were busy and impatient, so I turned to books that I used like manuals. The people in books were better because they didn’t get cross with me. I could go back to them time and time again. They were safe and reliable. Real people were not.

Copying the people around us is how we all learn at the beginning. It’s what play is. We try things on for size. We adopt, adapt and discard. We figure out what works in a safe environment before road testing it in the real world. Learning to ‘behave’ ourselves, to mould ourselves into a person that is acceptable to society is also, to a huge degree, what growing up means.

So far, so normal.

For me, though, it has never felt normal.

In hindsight I built my new self with all the best intentions. I meant well. But we all know how I feel about meanwells.

Babies have one job - to survive. They do that by banking on their family loving them and not sticking them on a hillside somewhere to fraternise with wolves. Babies thrive on love and attention. In the early days attention and love are interchangeable, so if screaming their lungs out for three hours gets attention, that’ll do nicely. It’s only later that they start to finesse and separate the two terms.

I knew from an early age that I was a difficult child. The things I thought, said and did seemed to make grown ups uncomfortable and cross. I needed to figure out how to be easier to keep. So I built my armour to protect the real me, the one that was still confused and frightened and difficult and I created the loud, funny, smart me that people tolerated more easily.

I fed the outer me and starved the inner me but somehow still expected the inner me to pick up that outer me every day and go about my business. Unsurprisingly, this only worked for so long.

When I think back to my childhood I realise that I spent large parts of it being very frightened. There were so many things I was frightened of large and small. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t frightened. I barely slept. I fought to keep awake so that ‘things’ wouldn’t ‘get me’. When I did sleep I suffered with night terrors that drenched me in sweat. I had recurring nightmares that I can still recall with utter clarity. The world was a terrifying place to me. No wonder I made such an enduring suit of armour.

Even if I had been able to sleep, carrying two versions of myself around all day, was exhausting, especially when I was trying to kill the one that was carrying the burden of the other. I had to remain hyper vigilant to keep the ‘good’ me in place but when operating under constant strain and sleep deprivation, the slightest stress caused things to buckle and crack. In this case, things was me.

Of course, what I hadn’t figured out then either was that the more I suppressed the parts of myself I didn’t like, the more they would pour out of me when the opportunity arose. Things got extreme pretty quickly. Every time the ‘bad’ me came out, I terrified myself and everyone else. The fear intensified, the shame kicked in and as soon as I was able I squashed that self down harder.

And the cycle kept on cycling.

When I broke down, aged 17, I had reached the point where I could no longer lift the ‘good’ me anymore. I was stripped of my armour and it very much felt like I was that baby on a hillside in the cold and dark. And all the time, the wolves were circling. During those months when I was exposed, fear stalked me every moment of every day. Fear that I couldn’t block out with a cheery quip or a pull myself together. It was the bleakest landscape I have ever inhabited and I made it myself, albeit inadvertently. I only had myself and I didn’t know how to make myself better.

Over painstaking years I have learned to piece together some kind of recovery and care. I have worked hard to allow more of myself out into the world but it is something I wrestle with on a daily basis, because I do not fit and I have never fitted. There is no place for me, except the place I make for myself.

People talk about finding themselves and being themselves and we are all big fans of being authentic now that wellness has become a commodity, but my experience is that it’s largely horse shit. At least I know I’m not myself.

The me that most people meet is a modified version of the me that nearly killed me. The more stressed I am, the more vulnerable I feel, the more the old me reasserts itself. It’s trying to save me from the things that threaten my existence. I appreciate that. Unfortunately it doesn’t know the difference between a job in retail where I have to be nice to strangers for eight hours a day and a sabre tooth tiger. Things get messy. It’s tiring.

It’s tiring holding the ‘good’ me up but I know how to do that. I’ve been doing it forever. What is more tiring and frightening is just being me. It’s not just the extreme vulnerability and fear of rejection/death that exhausts me, although that’s brutal. It’s the reality of me butting up against the reality of everyone else. It’s the relentless grind of sticking my head above the parapet, of swimming against the tide, of having to explain myself when half the time I don’t even know myself what’s going on.

I am in thrall to fear again. It’s been like that for a long, long while now. For a few years now I have been required to face things that would scare anyone, let alone me. These things are separate from the terrors of regular life. They are the added extras. They are worse than my own fears because they are not mine. They are other people’s. Other people who I love and who needed and need care above and beyond.

It turns out that I am good at this kind of care. It may have something to do with me being a woman who goes through daily life in a permanent state of terror and still manages to brush her teeth and comb her hair. I understand what living in fear is like and I am proof that it is possible to survive it. I have a talent for it.

But this work, this necessary work, has left me fractured again. I contain multitudes. The me that I present to the world, the me that I present to my companions in fear and the me that is just myself. I knew, when I started the work that a reckoning would come, because no matter how good I am at it, eventually it has to end, with a bang or a whimper.

And now I am left with the pieces of me that I must reassemble in a different, new way. A way that allows the light in. A way that allows me to grow. A way that allows me to find a bit of peace amongst my pieces.

It starts with as much honesty as I can bear, hence this post.

It’s easier to do it here, because nobody interrupts. Nobody looks uncomfortable and tries to make it better by insisting on something different. Nobody wants to fix you here. I’ve tried in the real world recently because I am increasingly unable to hold up the wobbling ‘good’ self without falling apart and crying. Before, I would just retreat, because it’s easier, but that’s not an option right now. Things in the real world however, go a bit like this.

‘How are you?’

‘Not great, actually.’

‘Oh.’

or:

‘You must be really excited about moving onto the boat!’

‘I’m not at the moment. It’s all a bit overwhelming and there’s a lot going on.’

‘But it’s so exciting. It’s so you. You must be thrilled.’

‘I think I will be, when I get there, but right now I’m just finding everything very hard.’

‘But the boat!’

‘Yes. You’re right. It will be great. I’m very happy.’

‘Yes! I knew it.’

It is hard. I know how hard it is when someone isn’t how or who you want them to be. It is hard, especially when you think you know that person and suddenly you are given a glimpse that makes you think that maybe you don’t. It is hard when that person has been hiding from you, maybe for years. It is hard when someone shows you their dis-ease with the world. It breaks the social contract. It shows the cracks.

I don’t have an answer. I just have a process and every day that I get up and do the work is a chance that things might be different. Today might be the day that I get to put a bit of my armour down or figure out how to stop being afraid. Today might be the day that I stop feeling like a huge weight is pressing all the life out of me. Today might be the day that when I say that I’m not doing so well, someone says: ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ in a way that let’s me know that they accept where I am rather than pushing me to where they feel comfortable with me being.

Today is always a new beginning.