- I told my high school English teacher I was lonely and wanted a boyfriend. I meant: I am severely depressed, struggling with suicidal ideation, and don’t know how to survive my own life. He gave me an analogy about cake.
- I wrote a college essay titled “A Desire for God” — about desire and longing and searching for something that keeps eluding you. “Almost every aspect of modern life fix our minds on this world, and desire can be mistaken for many things in life, which causes people unknowingly to dive into many endeavors which they think will make them happy…” One item listed was marriage. I gave the essay to my pastor hoping he would see what I was actually asking. A real conversation didn’t happen. I wanted to talk about why I wasn’t happy, when marriage to Steven is exactly what I thought I wanted.
- In an abuse survivors group, an early assignment was to introduce ourselves. Mine was full of the idyllic rolling foothills with my horses and goats. Afterwards, a woman bravely approached me, “Why are you even in this group?” I returned the following week with a revision that included the rage, head bashing, and scalp wounds.
Throughout my whole life I’ve handed people the coded version and hoped someone reads past it. Tim may be the first person who has started to. Even so, I’m still getting it wrong — especially out loud, when someone asks a direct question and I answer with the wrong layer of the story. I wonder if that’s something therapy can fix.
Attachment: Five-Days-Since-You-Laughed-At-Me.pdf
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