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Description
For Those Told We Feel Too Much

i.

I am six years old in a washroom stall. Six years old and teachers and classmates tell me I cry too easily, laugh too disruptively, talk too excessively, can’t run fast enough. At recess and in corners of classrooms, I will be shoved against walls, called ugly and disgusting, I will have my belongings stolen and destroyed – and my teachers will tell me that no one will hurt me if I just stop being so sensitive.

I am six years old in a washroom cubicle. I cry too easily, laugh too disruptively, talk too excessively, can’t run fast enough away. I look down at my legs, the curve of skin, fat, and muscle. I look at my legs and think: “there is too much of me.”

The next eight years, I throw away my lunch until the school counselor calls my parents and demands I go to the hospital. She strongly recommends I change schools – reason: “doesn’t fit in.”

I am fifteen. I pick up speech patterns and politics of everyone I talk to, dissolve in the static of other voices, become smaller and smaller. Learn to fit in.

Seventeen. I terrify my girlfriend with four A.M. phone calls: “would you like me better / if there / was less of me?”

Eighteen. When I think of love, I think of tearing off my skin. Think of nerves dissolving in fire, ceasing to exist. Break my body like the bars of a prison. I crave love like hunger, cells breaking down one by one.
My cells
breaking
down.

Eight years old. I run an eraser up and down the back of my leg. Try to disappear.

Eighteen. I gravitate towards people who hurt me. My eyes seek out sharp objects, wander towards the asphalt rolling past the car.

Nineteen. A stranger asks me out. I’m not interested in guys and I’m not interested in him, but I say yes because it’s polite and because I want him to like me. Because I want someone to like me.

The next three weeks. I treat our relationship like a medical test, an invasive but necessary procedure. I pass out from anemia in my own living room, and it doesn’t feel like “pretty” and it doesn’t feel like “control,” because these bone knives have never been about beauty – this is weaponry turned inward. I tell him I can’t love him and my spine bends like an apology. My body a hole in space.

Twenty. I think of him at night, the way an animal, bred in captivity, returns to a cage.

Twenty-one. I drink myself out of my self, smile agreeably, pretend not to exist. I see monsters under my skin, killers in every corner, and it doesn’t scare me anymore. I’m tired. Noise boils inside me but dies in my throat. I chew blood from my lips when a boy from class says he likes me, says I’m calm, quiet, agreeable, not “politically correct” “unstable” “another crazy chick.”

He tells me he wishes more women were like me.

I’ll tell you a secret – there’s a lot of women like me.

ii.

Twenty-two.

I wish I could say it gets better. That you grow up and learn not to hurt. But there are days I still don’t know if I’m six years old in a washroom cubicle or an adult in a waiting room. I lean into my knees as I fill out a form and comb my brain for a way to explain:

Yes, I feel bad. No, I don’t feel numb.

Yes, I feel too big for my body. No, I don’t feel like the greatest person in the world. Or a good person. Or a part of the world. Or a person, for that matter.

Yes, fear prickles my nerves into windchime and frostbit. No, I’m not afraid of other people. Only myself.

Yes, I have thoughts that aren’t my own. Doesn’t everyone? The echoes of “not good enough,” of “what are you doing here?” of “I feel like I am going to yell and not be able to stop.”

And when the doctor asks if I have chronic feelings of emptiness, I ask how often is chronic. I don’t ask: how do you feel emptiness?

Twenty-two. A constant sense of reaching towards something I can’t touch.

I wonder if four A.M. phone calls and crying my eyes out on transit come from the same place as song, and touch, and poetry. This need to communicate, to say “I am lost, and scared, and tired, but there is light inside me. It hasn’t gone out. I spent my life trying to vanish, but I am still here.”

How do you feel emptiness?

Feeling too much doesn’t leave a hole in you the same way as trying not to feel.

iii.

Twenty-two. I have spent too many years locked under the still surface of my face, the still surface of a lake. But there is life inside me – ecosystems don’t die off to be polite, and the weather doesn’t quiet to make others comfortable. So I storm – for strangers, when I watch the news, I storm – for my friends who have been hurt. I storm when I feel alone and I storm harder for the knowledge that I am not alone. There are so many of us who rip pages from the stories of our lives and leave our selves in tatters, who force ourselves to laugh as the punch line leaves a bruise. We learned to hate ourselves with each lesson and each letter of the alphabet, and were told to feel less instead of helped to feel better.

We grew up without room to grow, taught we’d stolen any space we occupied. Pruned into bonsai trees when we should have grown into forests. We believed that if we stopped speaking, stopped eating, stopped needing, stopped breathing, it would add up to survival, when really, it adds up to nothing.

Twenty-two. I am learning how to speak. I am not here to be calm, quiet, agreeable. I am not a still lake, I am a force of nature, and my ocean will not evaporate because someone doesn’t like it. And I will cry when I see a beautiful painting, or hear a poem that lifts me out of my body, or a song that makes my body feel like home. I cry rain over an abandoned house as a strand of ivy climbs the wall. I rain and I rain and I rain and I rain, in the spaces where life returns.

Love is not obliteration. It is the strength to put down the weapons you have used against your body and your mind. It is giving your heart permission to beat.

With the rhythm of the rain, I beat.

Description
For Those Told We Feel Too Much

i.

I am six years old in a washroom stall. Six years old and teachers and classmates tell me I cry too easily, laugh too disruptively, talk too excessively, can’t run fast enough. At recess and in corners of classrooms, I will be shoved against walls, called ugly and disgusting, I will have my belongings stolen and destroyed – and my teachers will tell me that no one will hurt me if I just stop being so sensitive.

I am six years old in a washroom cubicle. I cry too easily, laugh too disruptively, talk too excessively, can’t run fast enough away. I look down at my legs, the curve of skin, fat, and muscle. I look at my legs and think: “there is too much of me.”

The next eight years, I throw away my lunch until the school counselor calls my parents and demands I go to the hospital. She strongly recommends I change schools – reason: “doesn’t fit in.”

I am fifteen. I pick up speech patterns and politics of everyone I talk to, dissolve in the static of other voices, become smaller and smaller. Learn to fit in.

Seventeen. I terrify my girlfriend with four A.M. phone calls: “would you like me better / if there / was less of me?”

Eighteen. When I think of love, I think of tearing off my skin. Think of nerves dissolving in fire, ceasing to exist. Break my body like the bars of a prison. I crave love like hunger, cells breaking down one by one.
My cells
breaking
down.

Eight years old. I run an eraser up and down the back of my leg. Try to disappear.

Eighteen. I gravitate towards people who hurt me. My eyes seek out sharp objects, wander towards the asphalt rolling past the car.

Nineteen. A stranger asks me out. I’m not interested in guys and I’m not interested in him, but I say yes because it’s polite and because I want him to like me. Because I want someone to like me.

The next three weeks. I treat our relationship like a medical test, an invasive but necessary procedure. I pass out from anemia in my own living room, and it doesn’t feel like “pretty” and it doesn’t feel like “control,” because these bone knives have never been about beauty – this is weaponry turned inward. I tell him I can’t love him and my spine bends like an apology. My body a hole in space.

Twenty. I think of him at night, the way an animal, bred in captivity, returns to a cage.

Twenty-one. I drink myself out of my self, smile agreeably, pretend not to exist. I see monsters under my skin, killers in every corner, and it doesn’t scare me anymore. I’m tired. Noise boils inside me but dies in my throat. I chew blood from my lips when a boy from class says he likes me, says I’m calm, quiet, agreeable, not “politically correct” “unstable” “another crazy chick.”

He tells me he wishes more women were like me.

I’ll tell you a secret – there’s a lot of women like me.

ii.

Twenty-two.

I wish I could say it gets better. That you grow up and learn not to hurt. But there are days I still don’t know if I’m six years old in a washroom cubicle or an adult in a waiting room. I lean into my knees as I fill out a form and comb my brain for a way to explain:

Yes, I feel bad. No, I don’t feel numb.

Yes, I feel too big for my body. No, I don’t feel like the greatest person in the world. Or a good person. Or a part of the world. Or a person, for that matter.

Yes, fear prickles my nerves into windchime and frostbit. No, I’m not afraid of other people. Only myself.

Yes, I have thoughts that aren’t my own. Doesn’t everyone? The echoes of “not good enough,” of “what are you doing here?” of “I feel like I am going to yell and not be able to stop.”

And when the doctor asks if I have chronic feelings of emptiness, I ask how often is chronic. I don’t ask: how do you feel emptiness?

Twenty-two. A constant sense of reaching towards something I can’t touch.

I wonder if four A.M. phone calls and crying my eyes out on transit come from the same place as song, and touch, and poetry. This need to communicate, to say “I am lost, and scared, and tired, but there is light inside me. It hasn’t gone out. I spent my life trying to vanish, but I am still here.”

How do you feel emptiness?

Feeling too much doesn’t leave a hole in you the same way as trying not to feel.

iii.

Twenty-two. I have spent too many years locked under the still surface of my face, the still surface of a lake. But there is life inside me – ecosystems don’t die off to be polite, and the weather doesn’t quiet to make others comfortable. So I storm – for strangers, when I watch the news, I storm – for my friends who have been hurt. I storm when I feel alone and I storm harder for the knowledge that I am not alone. There are so many of us who rip pages from the stories of our lives and leave our selves in tatters, who force ourselves to laugh as the punch line leaves a bruise. We learned to hate ourselves with each lesson and each letter of the alphabet, and were told to feel less instead of helped to feel better.

We grew up without room to grow, taught we’d stolen any space we occupied. Pruned into bonsai trees when we should have grown into forests. We believed that if we stopped speaking, stopped eating, stopped needing, stopped breathing, it would add up to survival, when really, it adds up to nothing.

Twenty-two. I am learning how to speak. I am not here to be calm, quiet, agreeable. I am not a still lake, I am a force of nature, and my ocean will not evaporate because someone doesn’t like it. And I will cry when I see a beautiful painting, or hear a poem that lifts me out of my body, or a song that makes my body feel like home. I cry rain over an abandoned house as a strand of ivy climbs the wall. I rain and I rain and I rain and I rain, in the spaces where life returns.

Love is not obliteration. It is the strength to put down the weapons you have used against your body and your mind. It is giving your heart permission to beat.

With the rhythm of the rain, I beat.