Notes on not getting along with the world

or: learning how to exist

I.

I have always had a miserable time existing. Being a person dwelling in a body has caused me immensely unsettling feelings since I was a kid, which is to say I have spent my life shrinking.

This tendency to make myself small has served me well, in some instances. I take pleasure in my shrinking, in my ability to render myself barely there; look what I can do. If I don’t want to exist, I don’t have to. This is neither healthy nor entirely true; shrinking is a form of existence, a form that I am exceptional at and one that feels like a second shadow, like something that cannot be cleaved from me easily.

I wrote once:

‘My mother tells me she does not understand. I have been shrinking since I took my first breath.’

Taking up space is reckoning with a worthiness that you perhaps have never recognized or refused to see; when you take up space you face your significance. I was a child who did not feel worthy of anything, let alone the space I took up. I have spent years learning how to make myself less, and I have spent years learning how to let myself be. It is not easy to allow yourself to take up space.

Via Laura Makabresku

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II.

When I was a kid, I was utterly obsessed with the moon, so it is rather unsurprising that I took something unfamiliar—that deeply uncomfortable feeling that I would later identify as anxiety—and put it into something familiar.

I, like any normal, well adjusted, mentally healthy child, used to say I had the moon in me whenever I got so anxious that I felt sick. I still laugh at it now, but I look back and I think of course I thought that, what else was there to think? I look back on it now and I feel all the heightened despair again, because if it hadn't been the moon, it would have been something else beyond my understanding; that feeling was out of my realm of comprehension, so much larger than anything I could wrap my mind around, that of course I equated it to the moon. The moon was a grand thing, up there in the sky, and all I understood was that it should not have been contained to a nine-year-old’s body.

From Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, my favourite book as a child, surprising absolutely no one.

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III.

I am going to talk about a specific aspect of anxiety that I used to label as general discomfort but a while ago I read this piece by

Jane Eyre Incarnate

and the word ‘friction’ has stuck with me, so I am going to take it (theft!) and put it into the context of anxiety. While you’re here, though, go read that piece, it is wonderfully written.

Discomfort is a pit in my stomach—I am a walking cliché, I know this— and sometimes it's indistinguishable from actual anxiety but often it’s a less severe form of being anxious. The discomfort that has plagued me for my entire life feels, as much as a feeling can be captured in a word, like the word friction. It’s friction between myself and the world. I feel wrong in what I wear; my body feels like a body that was taken apart and put together incorrectly; I make too much or too little eye contact; I cannot stand still; my words never come out right; I never know where to put my hands—what do people do with their hands when they’re not using them? Someone let me know, please. 

My existence in the world creates friction, and I do not know whether it is me or the world that is fundamentally wrong, creating this friction. I can never tell. It must be one or the other, I presume, because friction does not come from nothing.

By Keaton Henson

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IV.

I don’t get along with the world. I don’t think I ever have. It feels like an innate thing, to hide from a world you don’t get along with it. That friction drives you back into a realm you feel safer in, and you feel like an animal following its nature, and it makes sense to you; do what is comfortable. I have a tendency to shrink away from things that make me uncomfortable, from situations that bring about friction, but if there is one thing I have learned it’s that the only way to get along with the world is to get comfortable existing within it. 

It is simple and undemanding to mould yourself in the shape of your worry, to contort yourself to fit within its bounds. It is easy to avoid, to postpone, to keep yourself from living under the guise of self-care. This is not to say that the avoidance of certain things to protect yourself is not valid (of course it is) but if you are like me, you have used this as a crutch, because it is an easy one to lean on. It requires nothing. It is safe, it is knowable, it is comfortable. But it will not save you.

This, of course, isn't a new concept. Any moderately decent therapist or New York Times Best Seller self-help book will tell you that you have to face what you're afraid of or it is never going to get any better, but being an anxious person means seeking comfort anywhere you can get it. Sometimes comfort is all you have, all you can grasp. Too much comfort gets you nowhere, and too little is harmful. There does exist a middle ground (apparently) but I am still trying to reach it. 

It feels silly to say that I am still learning how to exist at twenty-one but I am. I suppose I will spend my life learning how to exist and that is fine by me. It is a strange, singular, tender thing, this learning, and I have long since let go of the notion that there exists an end to it, something that can be achieved. The world is always shifting, as am I, and I must let this learning be a strange, singular, tender thing without an end.

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