shear stress, sheer stress

My insides are perfectly antiparallel to my outsides, and I fear the stress induced by that phenomenon will rip me in two. Said another way, my insides seek to alleviate the pressure I’ve imposed upon them by equalizing with the outsides, where pressure is lower. I’m therefore generating constant emotional wind, and I’m a bit tired of stormy weather. Said yet another way, my insides desire an emotional, mental, and spiritual concentration like the one that exists beyond the confines of the semipermeable membrane that is my consciousness. The pressure from the resultant osmosis, I worry, may result in an explosion. Let me be explicit about definitions: “insides” refers to the world within and “outsides” refers to the world’s gaze upon me. I’m coming to grips with the incongruity between my self-concept and the way the world views me, and I’m admittedly having a rough time with the realization.

Our society has a particular way of handling people who brush up against this tension. When someone feels that the world doesn’t see the light that they see in themselves, we love to lie and say that the world doesn’t need to see it. We say “you are enough”. We say “your opinion of yourself is the only one that counts”. And though these are adorable sentiments, they simply don’t reflect what it means to actually be a human being. See, if I could have given myself the world by now I would have done it already. I would have given myself all the opportunities and all the recognition I know I deserve, if I could do it alone. But when I sing into my microphone and post it online, I need people to hear and give me their thoughts. When I speak vaguely of possible career aspirations, I need people to open those doors, however distant and nebulous they may seem. When I write something comedic, I need people to laugh. And as I sit in the dark alone in my studio, typing this out on a Friday night, awaiting shrimp with black bean sauce due for delivery any minute, I realize I need company. I don’t mean the company of a friend, and I certainly don’t mean the company of a significant other. I need something in between. I want someone to see me. Someone with the capacity to affirm me on every level, and I them, without the pressure of being beholden to one another romantically. I think the closest language we have is “friend with benefits”, but I resent the job-like quasi-transactional language of “benefits”. What I want is beyond the land of labels, and may not even be fully formed. Maybe it actually is a significant other but that truth is obscured by a thick fog of fear and delusion. Whatever it is that I need, the confusion and tension I’m feeling has been building within me for some time, and I think we should go back to last June to investigate its origin.

I am pretty sure I’ve written a bit about the massive undertaking that was last June’s surgery to undo the ileostomy I’d had since 2015. I think I was under the impression that everything would change when the surgery was over. And in some sense, that was absolutely true! With no IV therapy I’m not beleaguered by constant pharmacy shipments, I’ve gained a little weight, and I have a level of freedom the former version of myself could only dream about. But in some sense, the inner revolution I’ve experienced is the very root of my turmoil. As everything has changed for me, the way the world sees me has remained the same. If I was a stranger to you then, I’m a stranger to you now. How is any given person at the coffee shop supposed to know that I survived a potentially deadly surgery last summer and now nothing in my quotidian life is the same? It makes me feel a bit unwell to experience the grating friction between the change undergone in the body beneath my skin and the utter sameness of the world beyond it. Moreover, all I’ve done is join the ranks of “normal” people who don’t have to consult a pharmaceutical company before they leave town for longer than a week. No one considers this an accomplishment because they’ve been in this club their entire life without giving it a second thought. The surgery that in so many ways has given me my life back has actually made it that much more difficult to relate to others, as the things they take for granted I have gone so long without. There goes that tension. I love existing in this body more than ever, but it’s simultaneously harder than ever to make connections with the rest of the world.

I wanted to see what living in this new iteration of my body would be like, sexually speaking. Would I be more confident? Would I attract different people? More people? Would things be easier? Feel less terrifying? I downloaded Grindr for perhaps the millionth time, knowing intimately its pitfalls, but keen to see how things would go this time around. One by one I tackled my questions. Yes, I was initially more confident. No, I didn’t necessarily attract different people or more people. Yes, things were logistically a bit easier. But no, I was not suddenly fearless. Did I say I was more confident? As the rest of the questions were answered for me, I think at some point that stopped being true. Once my newfound well of confidence ran dry, I was forced to get real with myself. I was exhausted of meaningless interactions. I tired of bouncing from person to person like a photon trying for thousands of years to escape the Sun. Empty exchanges. Wordless. Nameless. Kind men I’ll never see again. Unkind men I’ll never see again. I arrived at that crossroads I described above: content to be single but desperately in need of the kind of affirmation my platonic friends can’t quite provide. I want everything and nothing all at once. I have always been so, so easy and so, so hard to please. I deleted Grindr as it provided me nothing but headaches and shot confidence.

In ways, my confidence resurfaced slowly but surely; I am certain of my own beauty, skills, talents, and strengths, and cognizant of my weaknesses. I am self aware, and self assured. I know I deserve much more than I get. But do you understand how unbearable it is to have self-love operating at an all-time high, the very thing that every influencer and so-called mental health advocate says will save me, and it simply doesn’t translate to my interactions with the world? The love stops in its tracks at the border that is my skin. I try to radiate it, to project it, to let the world know it could be theirs as well. Is this border impenetrable? It occurred to me that if I wanted to make connections without the hell app, I needed to head outside with intention. Problem is, I had (and still have) no idea how to make my intentions crystal clear in the real world.

In the past month or so, I’ve been taken on quite the ride. If my life is the vehicle, something way bigger than me is the driver. And they drive like my father, which is to say I’m holding on for dear life but I’ll be damned if they don’t know where they’re going. My attempts to take the steering wheel into my own hands have resulted in a mixed bag of outcomes, as my driver swerves to put us back on course. Me trying desperately to convince myself I’m having a good time at places I don’t want to be, where everyone seems to know everyone else as soon as they walk in the door. My lost phone found serendipitously at 1 in the morning four doors down from my apartment. An early morning spent sleeping in the Emergency Room, then waking up feeling just fine, despite apparently drinking enough to forget an entire encounter with the police the night before. Walking home from said ER on that warm and bright Sunday morning with my shirt still tucked into my pants, without so much as a stain on me anywhere. There are also times when my driver wrests from me full control of the wheel. Classes cancelled on the day I most needed free time to do other things. Seeing someone I recognized in a group of friends-of-a-friend-of-a-friend. A text from someone I hadn’t talked to in months. An old friend coming to town and hanging out with his pals in the neighborhood I happen to live in. I can’t help but feel like there’s some enormous puzzle the size of my life being assembled, and I’m thoroughly out of the loop. It’s all I can do to tell myself to let go, and enjoy the feeling of floating. Sometimes I ask myself if it’s really even the feeling of floating, or rather the feeling of falling. It goes quiet inside my head for a minute, as I don’t have a solid answer for that one. Finally, I come up with an answer to give myself. I know from physics that those can kinda be the same. That’s called an orbit.

These past few days, I found it within myself to admit, aloud, that I am lonely in the aforementioned ways. As if on cue, once these words escaped my lips to be absorbed by the walls of my apartment, the mystery driver set off to work. I randomly ran into four friends in three places in three days. It’s possible that this means nothing. After all, running into classmates at various places near the campus we all attend shouldn’t be that special. But if it isn’t that special, why did it happen thrice in three days? Why hasn’t it happened to me before? My driver lightened the weight of their foot on the gas long enough for me to exhale. They leaned over and asked what I have to feel lonely about when it’s so clear that I am loved. Frustrated, I argued back that I understand the value of my platonic friendships, but there’s something else I need that just isn’t the same. My driver chuckled knowingly, and told me not to get flustered. They had empathy for my desires, they just wanted to remind me not to hyper-focus on what’s wrong when there is so much right. I nodded. They floored it. I don’t know where we’re going.