It's Hard to Write Honestly

     It's hard to write something that truly conveys what my experience. Not hard in the sense of it being especially complex. More in the sense that I'm afraid. I had a life that allowed me to be surrounded by many wonderful people. I ruined it. In many ways I felt stuck, unable to move toward or away from them. The circumstances I found myself in and the decisions I made created an unmoving, imploding sense of self. A girl I wouldn't let go of, friends I hid my thoughts and feelings from, and a family I was trying to distance. It's a nice thesis, but it's hardly that simple.

    To go over the history of everything would be to miss the point. I still carry the confusion and anxiety from that time with me. My perspective is split in half. One one side, I was a boy with a crush who valued humor and morals. I was just somebody who wanted friends and a girlfriend. I wanted to live up to the potential I once saw within. I wanted to be the ear that could hear and sympathize. A friend to all. On the other, I was a boy struggling with porn addiction and intrusive thoughts. Extremely insecure and anxious but unwilling to admit it. Depressed, alone, angry, and afraid. 

    For as long as I can remember, those two halves battle within me. Looking back, it feels like I deluded myself into believing I was the former, when I turned out to be the latter all the while. I remember now that I am and have always been both. In my darkest moments, I lived completely within, paranoid of every pair of eyes that met mine. I felt exposed, undressed in the eyes of others. That was shame and guilt paralyzing me. 

    My purpose in writing this has to do with a realization or perhaps a nervous thought I have about what I've been doing here for the last couple of years. I would express self-pity through writing, then write about how stupid and selfish it was for me to do so. So much of what I've written has been focused inward. Not for nothing, I focused inward with the intention of developing and expressing my emotional self. Strangely, there's one emotion that has gone without the focus it deserves. 

    Guilt is a selfless emotion, whereas shame is focused inward. I think because of how closely they resemble each other and how afraid I am of shame and it's power, I've strayed from expressing guilt. Another consideration, if I express guilt, why would I share it here? This blog is a public-private forum. Very few people, if any besides my girlfriend, read this. Yet, I share what I write publicly partly as an exercise in public expression and partly as a record for those who care to read it. I think that public-private power allows for a silent show.

    Calling this purely a performance would be unfair to me. However, I think there has been a fair element of showmanship in the idea that I supposedly pour my heart into expression and share it for the world to see, only to allow the link to sit passively in my Instagram bio and in the text logs of those few I've shared it with. My point is this: if I believed in what I was expressing; the palpability, the logic, the growth, the honesty, why would I hide it away here instead of sharing it with those who are subjects, directly or indirectly, of what I've written? 

    I think the answer might ultimately turn out to be simple. It's not that everything I've written is performance or dishonest, I don't think. If I want people who I hurt to read anything, it's that pure, honest, selfless guilt that gets suffocated and mixed up with anxiety and intrusive thoughts. The work, the parsing through what is shame and what is guilt, I feel is a never-ending cause. Is it one worth fighting for? If the time comes when the words I have to choose hold the weight of my shame, I hope that I'll speak well and honestly. Until then and after, I have to remember that I am both halves.