Losing it

Finding the intricacies of your own being is a difficult task. Reaching into the crevices of your body and brain to excavate the roots of yourself results in both mess and strain.

I was born into a family of loud voices, big personalities, and a demand for a certain amount of toughness that allowed for little system of reward. My mother raised herself amidst haphazard movement. From a rickety trailer park in Dumas, Texas to an arid roof apartment in Saudi Arabia, her life was both transient, chaotic, and independent. With an alcoholic mother, and a responsibility for a brother eleven years younger, she believed in overcoming obstacles through determination, and could not understand accepting anything less.

They call it fight or flight. Some people meet danger with resistance, throwing themselves eagerly into the brawl. Others shut down, run away, hide. I have always been a student of flight, panic and distress my most reliable reaction. This is what my mother has never been able to understand. Insurmountable circumstances have always energized her.

It is this tendency that has always plagued me, has made me feel less than. Lessening means loss because telling yourself you are weak means losing the part of yourself that is strong.

The first time I lost myself I was six years old. A kindergartener with loose blonde curls, I planted myself in front of the bathroom sink atop the rickety wooden stool I used to be able to frame my face in the mirror. My mouth open wide, I wrestled with the wiggly canine tooth that was starting to peel away from the puffy pinkness of my gums, finally prying it free to stare at its white smoothness. After gingerly wrapping the fragile tooth in toilet paper and enclosing it in the palm of my hand, I trekked down the hallway to my room, where I surreptitiously slipped the tooth and its wrapper underneath my pillow.

When my mom came to tuck me in that night, I remained silent about my newest lost appendage. I laid my head down and closed my eyes. A tinge of disappointment reminded me of the reason I hadn’t informed anyone, the reason that had settled in my gut and in my mind, pestering me. My mom hadn’t noticed.

Sitting in my father’s lap two and a half weeks later, I giggled and shrieked as he tickled me. The small wad of toilet paper still remained under my pillow, crumpled but untouched. As my father reached under my armpits, I screamed out in laughter, tilting my head back and opening my mouth wide. He stopped tickling me and reached to pull back my upper lip with his thumb.

When did you lose your tooth?

A while ago.

Why didn’t you tell me?

I dunno.

I experienced the rush of shame and heat as I hung my head low to avoid his eyes. I felt guilty for setting a trap I knew my parents would fall into. I didn’t know then that these traps would follow me throughout my life, catching the feeble paws and hearts of the people I loved in their steel teeth.

The next morning I found a dollar under my pillow where the toilet paper had once lain. I didn’t care much to learn that some woman in the sky wasn’t inventorying my teeth to build her castle. It hadn’t been about that, not really.

It had been about the number of placemats at the dinner table and about the way I tried to raise my voice over those of my brothers, trying, grasping, clawing to be heard.

The second time I lost myself I was nineteen years old. I fell in love with the way his stubble grew dark across his cheeks and how he was able to motivate an entire surge of people behind him. Most of all I fell in love with his gaze. I adored attentiveness, and I basked in the light of his eyes as they lingered on me in conversation, in a group, in a room.

At that time I did not know the reach of my own wanting. I could not recognize that loving is in giving but not in substantiating. I grasped desperately for enough but it sifted weightlessly through my outstretched fingertips, incapable of holding it within my grasp.

I found myself setting traps as I went, leaving him caught in the wires. Running from someone to see if they will follow is not evidence of their love but merely of your own insecurity. Seeking validation, like looking under your pillow for an untouched piece of crumpled toilet paper, is both futile and reckless, regardless of how deeply you are loved.

When this boy who I loved found himself facing the greatest loss he had yet experienced, I surrendered myself to him, molding myself against his body as he cried in the night, shaping my days to his desires. I spent that year stuck in a room that became a square box muddled with the fog of depression and the rotting stench of stale sadness.

I learned hurriedly to be a student of fight. I was present, stoic, and reliable. In this case of role reversal, he was counting on me to keep him calm. His reliance imbued me with the confidence I had felt peel away from my body over the year of our relationship, layers of an onion progressively stripped from its core.

When he leaves, that assurance is ripped from my hands and I realize it was not mine to hold. I am searching for my own strength now, peering under rocks and in dark corners, among friends, and in warm spaces. I work to amend bad habits and vow not to look in the mousetrap; the validation from other people that lolls limply in my snare will never give me what I need.