I’ve been here for a while
Reflections on my loneliness and performance
I am sitting legs crossed uncomfortably, waist beads pushing into my skin as I maintain an awkward eye contact with my used to be best friend on the couch at another side of her living room. My all too familiar loneliness rings through my body and I don’t know why it’s there or what to do with it, I never do. The clock in the corner is making ticking noises, yet the hands don’t move, and a million things run through my mind without my words forming.
“I’m waiting for you to talk”, she says, typing away on her computer with a look of confusion on her face. Whether it’s from our situation or from the work she’s doing I’m unsure.
“I was waiting for you, you seem busy”, I reply running my hands around the edge of my phone case.
She tells me that I’ve been distant since I came out as a lesbian to her and she wants to fix things, just like she did in her message to me days ago. I stumble over my explanation on how I feel like a different person than who she knows me to be. My hands shake as I tell her that I pulled away to try to protect myself from her judgement, and I realize that maybe I had failed at the protection part of my logic.
I remember walking to the little hair salon on the day I told her, holding out the slightest hope that even if she won’t understand maybe she would not see me as wrong and try to preach to me about a change I don’t want or believe in. I still feel the sun on the back of my neck as I was making my way back home that same day filled with disappointment, confusion and building tears at the result of our conversation. I am once again filled with such rage at how unreasonable I deem this circumstance to be. How is something as simple as who I like the cause of this much friction? I know the answer to that question, and I push it aside as I look up to her. Maybe I should have just said the quiet part out loud and ended it all on that day, there was no coming back from it if she’s still convinced this is all wrong.
I ask her clearly this time what she thinks, and she lets me know that she views it as wrong. It’s months later and nothing has changed, except this time there is no hope in my body as I tell her that I’ve made peace with us not talking or having any sort of friendship anymore. The shock and hurt in her eyes are gripping and it clicked to me the extent of my pretense over the years. You get to a point where there’s no performance left to give, and it becomes undeniable that there’s no essence being in each other’s lives if it means that one person is going to hide parts that the other sees as bad.
I could only look from the outside in, almost completely removed from what is going on around me, which is something I’ve become accustomed to in a lot of my relations with people. I specifically remember her saying to me ‘it doesn’t align with who you are’ when I initially came out, and I realized that all this while I knew her, but she could only know me as deeply as I presented. Seeing as what I presented was ultimately false, I felt unknown. I have been unknown too many times in a way that is senseless. It’s as though all love is lost and then I begin to question if what I thought was love was just something else.
She sets her laptop down and asks, in the rawest tone I’ve ever heard from her, what I want her to do. Frustration building in my voice I sigh and tell her that it’s not about what I want her to do, I just want to know what she really has to say to this all. She lets me know that everything is a lot for her to process and she’ll have to think about it all before giving me a proper reply. My gaze softens a little and I express that I understand, I really do.
Her mother returns home and it crosses my mind that this is perhaps the last time I’ll see her. In this same place where we gathered on her daughter’s last birthday and it was my turn to pray for her, which I did, and my voice shook a little at the start because I didn’t know how to say that I had put on enough of an act for the day.
I leave on a bike, wind beating my face thinking about how I underestimated the extent to which I struggle to form real connections with people. What would it take for me to undo all the suppression I have experienced from my hand and from others’? How have I not had the words to describe how out of loop I’ve felt growing up and adhering to every rule that I now see doesn’t even have to apply to or serve me?
In retrospect, the feeling of loneliness that has lingered with me makes more sense now. I recall crying in my friend’s room years ago after being encompassed with a sudden weight of loneliness in a place with people I loved. I guess that’s the result of seeing people as they are but not being seen as who I am because of the need to stifle what could be perceived as deplorable.
Crossing the road, I conclude that a gap exists between me and certain people I interact with that could never be bridged. People I’ve called friends, people that considered me close, people I have performed around with or without knowing.
When it comes to random people I meet, there’s a hesitance that comes up. In the world I live in I would encounter these people every day and I can’t avoid that. I’m learning what it means to interact with a good amount of people that are not accepting while carrying on, and I’m learning the importance of having people I can truly call home.
I get off the bike and greet the woman in the corner shop on my street, pondering if I’m naïve for believing that I won’t cave in to societal pressures. I feel scared in a way walking past the uncompleted building surrounded by weeds, because all my life had mostly been performance and a failed attempt at trying to suppress who I am. Last year was one where I felt the most myself in my body since I was no longer lying to myself, but I was still lying to others by omission or by redirecting questions that could hit too close to the truth. Is my newfound freedom within myself going to be just that, within myself only? I hope I’m not lying when I tell myself I’m not going to revert back to stifling.
I’ve been distancing myself from the approval of my parents, my mum especially. I grew up needing that approval, damn near surviving off it.
When I tell them I’m a lesbian I don’t know how they’ll react. It’s unnerving not knowing if all the validation they’ve given me, and the pedestal they put me on would be yanked away.
My mother thanks me as I serve her food, and I can’t help but question if she’d think the same of me if she knew. It’s a thought I try to chase that persists every time I get any form of praise. I hope I’m not overcompensating but I doubt I am because I’ve just always been someone that did a lot. Or was I just raised to be someone who had to do a lot? I don’t have an answer for that yet, maybe I never will have an answer for that.
I see my mother through my eyes with awe, intuitive and caring with a growing confidence I can only hope all women live to experience.
I wonder how she sees me through hers. Probably sweet, nice, smart, ‘the good girl’, her darling. Some of which are true to an extent, and I know that our definitions of those words are not the same. So much is lost in translation in how we perceive the world, and in essence each other.
I imagine the hurt of being antagonized and I know it would crush me, so I try not to hold on to anything as I prepare more for disappointment than for acceptance.
How much of myself have I betrayed trying to be safe?
Anytime I get close to speaking I remind myself of how busy you are, how much you’ve done for our family, and how you probably can’t add this onto that list of stress. I retreat yet again.
All of this and I hardly consider a good reaction. I do not think of you telling me it’s okay and that you don’t care, I’m still your daughter anyway because I cannot let myself have false hope. It will shatter me but I would rather take the pain of building up an issue that wasn’t there. I would take it.
And I don’t want to lose you before I have to. I don’t want to lose you to your knowledge of who I am before I lose you to death. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, I do know that tomorrow is not the day I tell you.
I can’t help but wonder what you’ll say when I open my mouth. If a slap would follow or if you’ll cry. If you’ll react the way you did when I got my septum piercing. As if everything I am and have ever done flew out the window and got replaced by a disappointment. But you don’t really know me and I would love you to, I would love you to come around if it gets down to it. I’d take us fighting for a bit and finding ourselves back.
I see my mother through my eyes still with some awe but mixed with resentment and apprehension as I leave her room and walk with my head facing the floor to mine.
After much hesitation, I pick up my journal from the shelf and feel a bit of comfort at the smooth covering as I laugh to myself about using my feelings as material.
In all my musings, the most recent one has been considering what the cost of my performance is and has been. Not even just for me, but for those I perform to.
As much as there is a lot of external shame and discrimination that is put on my existence as a queer woman, I have never felt as free and whole as I do now. There’s nothing like hearing the disdain in my mother’s voice when she talks about people like me without realizing that I am who she condemns. There is also nothing that compares to the joy I felt on the first of April. Being surrounded mostly by queer women, discussing life as it is and our musings on death, love, dreams, eroticism, spirituality and sexuality. Drinking beer, snacking on Choki Choki, laughing during mini dance breaks. Sitting on the mat in the grass, writing for the first time in a while because I felt full. Full of hope in the possibility of having a found family. Excited at the thought that I could feel less lonely in this world.
I wake up every day carrying within me so many truths, lies and questions. I decide that I’ll waddle through the uncertainty. However long it’ll take to find people I’m unbridled around; I’d do it despite the tug of war between my fear and my desire for connection.