“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?” —Haruki Murakami
Waves of self-consciousness wash over me and I go searching for relief. I write these letters and don’t publish them, certain they will be found lacking. I pivot, thinking I’ll write about self-consciousness itself, but I don’t publish that either. Instead I rewrite it four, five, six times. I notice I am intellectualizing my feelings again.
I am so much better at writing after the fact, I think. A little distance calms me. I prefer to be a bit removed from my feelings before I share them. It allows me to tell you about it without showing you how much it hurt. I find it difficult to be vulnerable with my sensitivity. I am not good at letting people see me.
I’m beginning to inch my way past it so my brain is doing its thing—sifting through the feelings, putting them where they belong, connecting patterns and creating meanings—while I sit here and watch it all happen.
I’ve written and rewritten this letter so many times I’ve lost count. Even this published version, which I’m not convinced is as clear as it could be, has been edited so much it is unrecognizable to its original. I wrote other letters as well, but in my impatience and disquiet they were deleted. Now I wonder what could have been gleaned from them had I had enough sense to save them.
It blindsides me, this embarrassment. I wake up one morning and everything is wrong. Seemingly out of nowhere, I can feel people unwittingly begin to grate on my nerves. The endless requests sound like metal screeching against metal in my mind. The innocent how are you’s and glances in my direction put me on edge. I feel sensitive, a little fragile, unsure of myself or what I’m doing. I don’t know if it’s the post-holiday crash that caused it, or the gray days of the beginning of the year, or that January is a month that takes years, but I couldn’t stop it happening.
What I wish I could say is that the problem is everyone else. It would make this so much easier. But the real problem is being witnessed by everyone else.
Most of the time I would like to disappear so everyone I know could forget me. I want to go to a place where no one recognizes me and I can wander aimlessly, where anonymity is possible and I am free from the gaze of knowing. I convince myself this will make me happy. I convince myself it will mean I’m free.
In these bouts of self-consciousness I am painfully aware that I am a person whom my friends and family experience as something wholly individual. I suddenly remember that I affect people just by existing, which is somehow always humiliating. I become terrified to look people in the eye, scared of what I might find there.
What I really want to know is how I can disappear from myself. What I think I need more than anything is to be obscure, which I’ve convinced myself is the same thing as being untethered.
But it isn’t.
No matter how far I run from the people I love, I cannot escape me.
It seems I tend to feel manic about my writing when I begin to feel self-conscious, or else the self-consciousness fuels the mania? This frenetic energy floods my chest, and suddenly I have an urge to tear it all down. If I could just start from the ground floor again, I think to myself, I know I could build it better this time. I know I could build me better.
I’ve never known how to simply let it happen. I don’t know how to ride the wave. I seem to make it worse by trying to make it pass.
But this time I am going against my tendency. I am choosing not to tear it all down. I resolve that I must refuse to disappear, no matter how relieving I believe it would be. I’m trying to let myself be seen. I am not good at it, but I am trying.
“I’m going to promote myself exactly as I am, with all my weak points and strong ones. My weak points are that I’m self-conscious and often insecure, and my strong point is that I don’t feel any shame about it.” —Patti Smith
Hi, beautiful girl. It's been a long time. For some reason, you came to mind today and I went down the rabbit trail to find this.
You are seen. You are heard. You are known. You are loved.
I'm always here. <3