Connective Cube

All I can say about 2017 is I need a major nap. Fragmenting, exhilarating, and exhausting immediately come to mind. If there is something that I need to work on, it is not pushing people away with my silence.

Sometimes I become mute when I feel extreme anxiety, even if I am comfortable behind a keyboard, paintbrush, or pen. Writing and painting gives me time to exercise my memory, to slow myself down enough to generate a coherent thought. Fusing memory with quick reactions means altering the speed of my thought process, which means ugly facets about how I communicate emerge. Without intentionality, I lose control over my automatic responses. With intentionality, I forget how to even respond automatically to my environment.

Sometimes I like to avoid my own stories when I meet people. Mostly because I dig to find any way to not dominate the conversation, and listen more. To speak my own stories to new people still seems like a daunting task, as I can feel a distance from myself as I tell a story about a past fragment. Sometimes I confuse the locations, the details,  or the people in the narrative for the everyday events.

My life-cycle rarely shows, at least to me, a unified narrative. One of the consistent feelings is trust issues toward other human beings. Perhaps that is borne out of fear that correlates with my past experience.

Another narrative that emerges is this deep desire to shut up a listen while also asserting myself. As a white cis(ish)-woman, I know that my tears can cause someone else’s suffering, and that we are given permission to cry.  Sometimes, my anxiety doesn’t need to eat the room. Sometimes, I need to cry alone.

But sometimes – it is okay to feel in front of other people, to show emotion off the stage, to have strong feelings about a performance choice.