If You’re Needy and Vulnerable and Damaged as I am...

(And I’ll find myself getting internally defensive?)

I think my writing is worthless… a LOT.

And not in a “compliment me. Convince me otherwise” kind of a way, but in a genuinely “wonder if I’ve been doing this too long to be making an impact anymore” kind of way.

What a self involved thing to even think about, right?!?

But I think anyone who has done anything for a long time eventually convinces themselves they’re sh*t at it, and they should now and again. If we don’t doubt if something is worth it… is it even worth it? (Or is my compass just broken?)

It’s not about being good or bad by any subjective standpoint. It’s just about … not wanting to become redundant.

We say the same things over and over again likely because… well, they’re still the problem that pains you.

If someone’s suffering hasn’t necessarily changed - shifts to new organs and vertebrae and on - and neither has the need for activistic change in the pains that need change:

Then maybe it’s better to be a pain and just say the same thing for as long as you have breath left?

Most of the people I love [in person] don’t read what I write at all.

Truly.

And so that’s a lot of what the next few days of writing are about [told in parts, but unfiltered and uncut and with extra for Substack Word Nerds specifically so… thank you!]…

But it’s NOT just about the phenomenon of many of us being needier than we want to admit (do any of us actually ever get to admit it?)…

Or about how easy it is to be so close to the people close to us that oddly, sometimes snd somehow, miss some of the biggest parts of them?

And though this was first written because I had the chance to meet a dancer I admire because she treated my daughter and I to a magical show.

And we rushed there and had a beautiful, electric night.

And we kept thinking and saying, “How have sharing parts of life somehow brought so much MORE to our lives? How can we feel so close to so many artists we’ve never even met in person… but yet, it’s been literal years in the making? How is the world so big yet so beautifully small?” along the way (especially after my daughter saw her dance, watched our sacred meeting as the crew expeditiously called ‘strike’ on the stage, and processed in her own way how much not being stereotyped as only a sick person or only a Deaf person or only a dance person can be

And even though I had to process through so many complicated emotions at 2 AM as I write this, and aimed to describe the gift of being able to meet someone known for so long but not yet met… I weirdly had to warm my brain up by circolomcuting around how complex closeness and community can be.

And it’s not just about me and my own fallible self perception and ego - even though that’s the only thing I could reflect on with any honesty, since I didn’t have permission to dip into the mind of my partner or others, for example.

But I can say with resolute certainty that even though I hype up and believe in his talents the very most… I have it very lucky that he doesn’t produce any of them on a near daily basis. (That’d be a lot of homework to tend to, you know?)

Nor do I appreciate his skills at the level that I should or could.

I don’t know if anyone who’s super close to their friends and loves can at the rate they want to… but we probably all want to.

And we probably don’t admit that we don’t enough.

And I’m certain we should.

And I’m certain that the real reason I wrote this - which you have a wild ride to get to first - is still worth the takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to meet your heroes, as they say.

Meet them.

Meet more people who are just far enough from the looking glass that they can still see objects in the mirror as they sometimes appear.

If you’re needy and vulnerable and damaged as I am, you might hurt (often) when you’re around someone who refers to you only as an older photocopy of yourself. A friend or a family member who perhaps doesn’t see past the old edit - decades since you’ve redrafted what needed to be grown far beyond.

We all have those relationships in life, and we all probably ARE one of those people for someone else.

So here’s a reminder to keep an eye out incase you are… and be open to change and being changed … and to see your best supporters as the professionals they want to be or the paragraphs and pages they put forth sometimes too. (Best supporters like my love or my best friends, to be clear- who thankfully have never held me fully glued to a past photocopy, nor I, hopefully, they.)

This scrambled-egg intro is written just for Substack and thus a Stream O’ mess.

A 2 AM confessional that’s a time that’s sometimes most sacred because I initially feel frustrated Ive lost all chances to reply to overdue texts or report on work related emails by that rude hour.

In this case, after a week of almost never being able to be on my phone.

Yet then I realize how rare and freeing that time is, as well, because I can scribble in my metaphoric therapy diary without deadlines or demand as the only allowed motivator in life these days.

Sometimes my husband will remind me that it’s okay if I’m not motivated by writing online…

Or he will remind that this is such a tiny part of who I am…

And I’ll find myself getting internally defensive?

“This helped me connect with so many people I’ve known for a decade,” I’ll say… “Yes, it’s sad when someone who knows me in real life seems to have that confused with the small part I share of myself online because they couldn’t be farther from the truth…”

“And yes, I worry all the time that writing about something like suffering - that hasn’t changed much over the years - actually just makes me redundant and annoying. That my writing is bad because it’s honest, but being honest means it’s much of the same…

And yes, I talk a lot about how maybe I should stop writing all together for that very reason. But…

——.”

It’s beautiful to have someone who loves you and doesn’t define you by just a square in the larger quilt… but sometimes I wish that this ongoing scrapbook of diary entries that IS my only personal social media wasn’t so far apart from my social life.

You might be surprised to know this but…

Most of the people I love “in real life” don’t read what I write.

I am extremely against performative relationships (humanity is about our private convos and secret giggles, not how much we show that we share on a group chat or forum)… Yet, here I am often wishing that those who require the least amount of postage, would still want to drop dorky little postcards to one another too.

“So cute!” we will all say to longtime friends or former coworkers or cousinsandsiblingsandkin…

And we mean it. And we can’t control what the Wizard shows us when we are on our screens and not in Reality, so it Bites that ALL of us probably miss more chances to drop supportive messages than we’d like.

But we all want to give a little postcard and then feel cool enough to get a little postcard.

We all want the people who know the good snd the bad to still think we did a good job at work, or at our game or gig or whatever we do to express ourselves.

Here’s an ugly thought: I think that a lot of writers and creatives are two people.

Hell, most of us are two people.

I’m a different person when I’m on the clock as off. I’m a different person when trying to be brave and nonchalant-for-the-huzz for my doctors and surgical team. I’m a different person when I’m just… code switching.

I teach my high school students about code switching a lot lately (an art that is slowly being lost), something very important to sign language … but we ALL probably are neediest to those who are closest.

I get the most nervous if someone I know is in the audience when I’m dancing, for example. I put the most pressure on myself. My best friend is the opposite (she loves knowing that family is out there and getting to shine for them), so we all are different… and that’s why maybe np one will relate to this embarrassingly see through share right now.

This hemorrhaging diary is such a nominal part of who I am “in person”, that I should be grateful that some of those closest to me don’t boil me down to just… sickness and satin.

I can always tell exactly who in my 3D life has or does, and you’d be surprised whom and how brutal it can be.

There are those who see people as people (who maybe happen to have a sickness they have to deal with sometimes, or other minutia that doesn’t define them)… and there are people who accidentally always wrap everything back around to that. We read someone’s sloppy syllables such as these and, even with the Madame Tussade figure firmly not in wax in movable, knowable form before them… they still somehow buy the plot of this piece of a soul as if the only plot of soil of a person.

It’s hard to write “so cute!” on someone’s post about profound pain or a new surgery…

But, even if you’re someone who sometimes wonders what’s the point…

I do have a story in the next few days about meeting an amazing dancer who I connected with purely over this strange little sharing space and it made me wonder: Doesn’t that make so much of this worth it?

So much of what most of us do might not be for what we think it’s for…

But maybe it’s just to try connect with anyone or anything in this fleeting dance.

PART ONE.

More tomorrow.

These were extra long Substack words as thanks (or torture?), just for you!

Thank you.

Share if you like… encourage scholarships for those who need…. reach out to collab… know my gratitude, pretty please, as you read this.