Truth

Truth: Telling the truth. Being honest. Expressing what is real. All of these are bedrock principles of the moral person, or so I choose to believe. It occurs to me however, that much more than these being the immutable cornerstones of life, these concepts - truth, honesty, reality - are, more than anything aspirational goals.

My truth, is not necessarily your truth. My honesty, not necessarily your honesty. My reality, not necessarily yours.

And this dissonance has nothing to do with intent to deceive. It just is.

The philosopher scoffs at the relativist, but some things are simply that: relative.

My objection to the dissonance is not the intractable space between the reality of you and me, or the truth and honesty of our perceptions. My objection is this: I have a hard time discerning my own truth, being honest with myself, discovering my own reality. I hide behind a multitude of words and platitudes; snarky comments and paeans of popular culture and professional sports. I rant and I rave about my pain and my dissatisfactions, but I try to be artful about it, I attempt to be funny. Whether it is actually amusing or potentially heartbreaking or simply boring, I try to package my pain to please. I had long convinced myself that I did so in order to keep everyone else from finding out how freakish I was, to spare them the torrential nature of my pain, but I think I do it in order to spare myself from really looking at it.

This year I am truly sad that baseball season is over. Every year, I lament the passing of the season, but this year is different. It really upset me, and not in a sentimental way. More than any year before it, this year baseball had become a crutch for me - the daily ritual, the continuous event, that, even in its disappointments, brought me nothing but pleasure, because it was the one thing that reminded me that I am still capable of feeling. That a range of emotions are mine.

And now, as the Bart Giamatti quote goes, I am left to face the winter alone. And I am scared because now there is nothing but the pain, and all of the uncertainty, anxiety, anger and disappointment it brings with it.

My therapist tells me that I am adept at a witty, self-deprecating cynicism about my pain. She says it makes it hard to see what really hurts and what is profoundly moving to me, one way or the other, because there is always "a show" going on. I am nothing if not an excellent raconteuse of my pain. Sepaking with my hands, animated movements of the face, well-timed pauses and lilts the voice, so much of it is funny, if only because it is so ridiculous. My paper-machiere ventriloquist dummy of myself is adept at fooling people I don't know very well or whom I am only limited in my exposure to. Or so, I have always believed. People who know me better, and who spend more time with me, recognize some sort of scrambling of the signals. At least the effort towards, if not the achievement of, the artistry of storytelling. Once upon a time, a friend of mine recognized this as "obfuscation" and told me so. She of the wisdom of this observation, at a point down the road chose to set down the burden than was trying to see through this obfuscation, thus freeing herself of any commitment to me. I always thought I was being honest with my friends about my pain: I do talk about it, if only in the obfuscating manner. But, even more importantly (or so I thought), as the energy that goes into the act of obfuscating is just so demanding, and eventually the wellspring always runs dry (sooner and sooner it seems), eventually, I always cry. I weep. Weep inconsolable tears. And then I apologize, profusely, for the burdening, the lack of control, the ugliness of it all.

And I thought in the salt water of my tears there was truth. But they bring no illumination. They are further obfuscation. Indications of my lack of language for all that hurts me, for the profound disappointments I feel, for the control that eludes me, for the anger I am unable to express, for the frustration at feeling so powerless all the time. They may be honest, but they are not truth.

Even now, I don't know that I am using the words correctly: Truth, reality, honesty, pain, feeling. They all seem to be a further layer of misnomer. Close, but not quite right. Even now, I obfuscate to myself.

The big words, the cumbersome sentence structure. All tools of the obfuscations trade. I cannot seem to put them down.

Pain is a misnomer, because more than anything, I really do not feel anything. But I am not numb. I just feel very removed from myself.

Trying to describe how I feel - to everyone, to anyone, to myself - is like trying to describe the color of the sky to a man who has been blind his entire life. It can only be spoken is fragmented approximations.

I imagine the palette of human emotion running across a spectrum from happy to sad (with whatever choice adjectives you want to stick in between them). For nearly a year now, I have been stuck with half a palette, so to speak. I have moments of relief, brought on by time spent with good friends, ballgames, and the initial months of the Happy Pill. But it seems that, at best, these get me to the middle of the spectrum, past "eh" but not quite to "pleased." They do help me forget, granting me a moment of reprieve, and for that I am ever-grateful. A measure of relief from an internal battle that is constant and draining. Post-Happy Pill, I don't worry so much anymore, at least not so much that hyperventilation seems like a daily and routine option, but like the ending of baseball season, without my little worries mounting and accumulating and drawing away of my attention, I am left to face the winter of my discontent - alone. And it is here that I have been mired for the last four or five months.

In the meantime, I have now transferred my anxiety - obfuscating to myself, it seems - entirely to my arch-nemesis in life, my body. The extent to which I hate my body is described best only in saying that it is "to an extent indescribable." It fills entire days for me - an eternal cat and mouse game, round and round, of anger and shame directed at it. And the more this spiral turns and turns, the more I eat to relieve the weight of it all, the more exhausted I feel, the less inclined I am to exercise and the more I want to hide from the world. My corpulence is the signal to the world that I am out of control. These days, anyone who has seen more than one Lifetime movie or afternoon special, knows that eating disorders are tied to control issues. It is utterly cliche to say so, but it is true. The irony of course, apparent to everyone around me, and not lost on me, is that I didn't really feel any better when I was thin. Or so it seems. But there were differences. The physical weight I carry now pains me - in a literal sense. The extra flesh hurts. I feel bulgy and protuberant, as though I might pop at any moment. The other thing is the distortion makes it worse. I am not in any sense obese. I know this. I probably am not anything beyond mildly overweight. But every room I am in, every time I walk down the street, every person I watch on TV, I compare myself to, and I fall short. Or rather I fall fat. I feel like a neanderthal, linebacker, moose-like person. It was to my shock and horror that I found that I was larger than a couple of friends I have that are both in their second trimester of pregnancy. They are growing entire other human beings within their bodies, what is my excuse? I am so embarassed for myself. For how I look, for my instinct to hide. For the implicit narcissism of such action. I have only ever been told I was beautiful when I was thin. But it is not about having to be complimented or trying to be beautiful. It is about being accepted. When I am fat, I am ignored, if not disdained. When I am fat, I am unacceptable. I would say that I hate myself, my physical self, but hate is not a strong enough word either. And I know that this is wrong, that my body should be my temple. I know that if I were to become afflicted with a debilitating health condition, I would long for my body as it is now. But even armer with this knowledge (the implicit recognition of the blessing that is health), I still hate it. I have been involved in a blood feud with myself for so long that I am not sure I know how to stop.

I am lucky in this life as I know that I have been/am loved by numerous people, but I am unable to shake that haunting feeling that the space in people's hearts carved out for love for me is impermanent: that they will know who I am, who I really am, and they will walk away. That they will have more important people and things come along that would make better use of the space. That it was always a secondary space to begin with - a love of convenience. The truth is, however, even if I was ever someone primary love, their priority in life, I wouldn't know what to do with it. The attention, the responsibility would be too much. I have always been so used to receiving love in meted out increments (both in a familial and a romantic sense) that I would be drowned by direct affection I think. I fear it, yet I want nothing more.

It seems so absurd to me that I cannot solve the problems in my head.