MURDER ME WITH WORDS

There is a version of maturity that looks a lot like silence- of metabolizing your pain in private and saving your true emotions for your therapist. I wish I knew how to turn away from my wounds instead of picking them apart and bleeding all over the furniture. But I’m always overridden by my need to feel understood.

So I bargain with myself, I loop back and forth, weighing which unbearable weight feels heavier: naming the chaos inside me, or suppressing it and praying that it reabsorbs.

When I was in the first grade, I didn’t speak. My teachers called me shy. But I wasn’t shy, I was just afraid of saying the wrong answer. And I had a lot of wrong answers.

I learned early that love and approval were contingent upon saying ONLY the things people wanted to hear. That listening made everybody fall in love. That telling my mother she was beautiful always got her to look up and see me.

Silence has never felt peaceful to me. It’s felt like a form of torture, like holding water in my lungs at the bottom of a swimming pool.

It’s hard to say whether my need to be understood is actually a form of connection or just a compulsive attempt to finally earn love and safety through entertainment. But it’s my forever struggle, trying to share my stories while simultaneously protecting the people inside them who never asked to be exposed. It’s part of why I started writing fiction- to avoid the inherent violence of taking a shared experience and branding it as my own. But even fiction isn’t innocent. It’s just a softer way to strangle somebody with your version of the truth.

I know there are more evolved ways to walk through the world. I know I should find less aggressive ways to cope. But every time I try to swallow my feelings, I choke.