live in my head as I reconstruct reciprocal attraction-awareness
imagining turning the audio... off
Okay, I need a little prologue here. Before I get into this, let me just say this post is a little.. different.
When I first decided to start my Substack in 2021, I wanted to become a good ex-journalist renowned for her takes on society, her takes on life. I used to want to be famous. I used to want to help people. I find myself accidentally helping people now. I find myself very dissatisfied with my career (which I am very afraid to write explicitly about, not yet, I’m not ready).
It’s not about the followers, but about the relationship to my work that has eroded significantly over the last few years in the name of self improvement. I’m rambling now because it feels like I’m about to fit two big themes, themes too large for life, in a single post. But I guess I’m going to leave them like this for now, because they feel important and connected and so be it.
First and foremost, what you should know is: I write for myself, and I write to process things and cement them once I have a realization. I’ve always written for myself, but it used to be more cope-related because I didn’t think anyone would pay attention. Now i Know people do, and it’s scary. It’s scary to realize that people are paying attention, because unless I can make them understand me, what if that attention turns negative? As I write these words, know that this part is actually written after the non-italicized portion below. This part was written as a weird way to force myself to power through the intense self consciousness I’m having about what I wrote below. Anyways —
I used to write differently, I used to do it way more masturbatorily (more on this in a future New Year’s post). I used to want to do things for my own fucked up self image signaling to myself who I am without actually thinking about how it comes off.
I’m learning now that I don’t really know how I come off half the time. Ironically, this post is about that. But because in line with that, I feel a need to give this disclaimer beforehand: this is going to be a word vomit post. I don’t expect you to care. I expect me to care about the fact that I’m writing this, and I expect someone (maybe a fellow ENFP) to relate to what it’s like to literally live so in the dark. This is my version of “unfiltered,” which sucks because I’m realizing that how I write might sound more contrived and intentional than I mean for it to be. This version is how every word comes off naturally. I rarely edit myself or censor myself. I might hesitate a bit to find the perfect word, but most of it comes to me in the moment.
Anyways, I’m slightly worried what I’m about to talk about is going to sound like… a little too intimate for my taste, because I’m deeply embarrassed I don’t already get this. I’m worried people will think I’m narcissistic rather than just super traumatized/autistic. So I feel self conscious writing this. But yes, this is not meant to be some sort of artful pointed piece. This is purely a dump of self reflection, of giving you a window into my processing. What is my intention here? To be the kind of person who is an honest writer, who pushes through. Do I want people to care about this? Ironically, not really, because I associate caring with judging. I guess what I want is to be seen and real to myself, and this post is about how I’m finally reconstructing my relationship with that. When I write things, they belong to me because I get to be proud I made something out of my neurosis. And I post it publicly because I want proof, signaling to the world, that I exist and am real at all
Anyways, it’s embarrassing that I’m 29 next month and I still don’t know how to deal with being attracted to someone. I still think I’m 10 and ugly and I don’t have a chance of anyone longing for me the way I long for them. This is probably my first time attempting to actually address (on Substack) firsthand my efforts in numbing out that audio. So without further ado, here’s a very messy little monologue about what I realized today:
In the morning, I woke up after the winter solstice noticing something had actually shifted in my brain. I hadn’t taken any drugs recently, yet I was somehow able to look around at the world and observe myself inside of it, from the outside. Instead of a weird filter in which every person fact action thought I gazed upon had a charge to it, where they were all connected to affect-memories of all of my subjective experiences — ever —… I was suddenly able to see myself as inside of the world, rather than as a ghost.
It started when I went about my daily routine and put on a song about a guy yearning for a girl. Historically, I would listen to these songs and find myself reflexively assuming such a song could never be about me. But now, instead of being a little resentful and jealous of some girl obtaining such affection from a guy, I suddenly was blasted into the object-seat, not the narrator-seat. I suddenly was able to witness-recall, through the eyes of thousands of men I’d met over the years, what it must have been like to experience me. To not have firsthand access to the thoughts inside my head, to not be the person looking through me but looking AT me. I suddenly realized, to my horror, I had somehow never obtained the ability to be objective.
But this was actually gendered. My inadvertent misandrist negligence seemed to only apply to men!
I made my way to Manhattan, feeling a bit more unable to mute people out on the train, because suddenly as I looked into their eyes, I felt weirdly like I could see my reflection in them. But usually, there was no reflection there. What is this feeling?
Now I’m sitting at this coffee shop now and gazing at the people around me as I type this. I’m suddenly aware that everyone is looking at me with an image of me that does not match the one I have of me.
The image I have of me usually isn’t even an image — it is an understood consciousness. It is fact, reactionary, a limbic system feeling.
When the young people studying for their bartender’s exam come up next to me hesitantly, asking if they can sit at my table, I feel a visceral difference between how I regard the woman versus the man. The woman is shy and taken by surprise by my reassuring, assertive, reflexive welcoming smile. I can tell she feels immediately comfortable with me. I’m noting that I unconsciously always know women are comfortable with me, and moving around them doesn’t open up a weird cavern of uncertainty.
The man with her is a little different, or so I think — until I realize it’s not objective. I’m noting that I by default assume women are good natured and men are… not bad natured, or evil, but simply oblivious and emotionless. I assume nothing about their nature. There is a blank slate with no reference material (that I’ve properly internalized). I’m noticing I can’t color him with appropriate regard to properly ascertain and understand what he’s experiencing. I try something different. I look at what’s in his eyes and viscerally try to think about what he’s seeing, aka myself. I place myself on the canvas of potential.
I am suddenly aware I am petite, I was concentrating on my laptop, and he had disturbed me from it, and that’s why he looks self conscious. I am aware when I smile that this affects him. He also looks like he wants to make conversation, because his smile is halting, but his eyes dart back at me as he sits down. I notice I don’t usually note these. I notice a split in my mind-canyon — usually the temptation is to divert into my own thoughts, rather than observe his experience carefully and ruminate on it.
I then make the cognitive leap, which rushes over me…. "Is he like, attracted to me or something…!?!?” I keep picking up nervousness, I keep picking up glances. I pick up information that normally I had no business (in my head) of picking up. This is extremely disorienting, because for the first time, it feels like I can match behaviors to a past archive of men that’d been numbed out, behaviors of men acting fidgety or hesitant around me in such an imperceptible way that, especially if I’m too busy paying attention to my own body, I normally can’t figure out. But now, I suddenly could sub in this idea of hunger, that men looking at me could even hunger at all, and it was immensely unignorable!
It didn’t freak me out per se — it freaked me out how little I’d ever believed this until now.
In this case, I wasn’t attracted to the person in question, so I wasn’t distracted by what I recognized was usually my own hunger. But the sensation of this all was making me realize, when I do fall for someone intensely, and start to care about reciprocation (which I don’t in 99% of cases), I am distracted by my own inability to get a handle on the situation at hand because what blocks me from registering the person as having visceral reactions to me is my own hunger objectifying them.
“Attraction” itself seems to be a misnomer, because my instinct isn’t to move toward. Sometimes it is to run. I fight that daily because that is bad for me. It really often transcends horniness — which is about urge to act — into simply absolute wonderous terror, of feeling psychologically torn apart and terrified that you are even in existence. Your hair, your smile, your strong arms, the chain around your neck, your shoulders, the way you move and tower over me, the kindness of your heart rippling out and radiating until I’m caught breathless. I fail to recognize that, even when I’m in control and chatting naturally, internally I am not registering what is happening before me so after it’s over, I have no idea what he thought about me. I have no idea what happened. It felt like a fever dream, and thus, usually then the assumptions I have (negative-coded) of reality can seep in.
I knew I do this already cognitively, but now I know exactly what’s going on inside of me to where I can actually control it. Instead of defaulting to, HE HATES ME when I sense hesitancy and trying to keep [something? horniness?] at bay, I am able to let in the nuanced sensation and hold space for me existing in their consciousness too.
Usually, I get distracted by trying to wrangle all the flood of overly self-aware and self-centering thoughts that come in, beating me up and making me recall (waterboard style) every single bad thing that’s happened to me, but now I was able to notice that it was attached to highly subjective memories and notions, and that this was imperceptible noise that the average person couldn’t pick up. The average person couldn’t hear my thoughts, and even if I’d always known that, I suddenly realized from the outside in, how differently I present to everyone.
I suddenly could look back at my life from the outside in, as if applying an objective narrator and observer to all the past, see how I was always able to open my mouth and put on the “charismatic mask” on cue and simply let it play in the background like a movie, muffling the huge internal scream I always wanted to unleash every time I saw someone I was very, very attracted to and the whimpering of “please don’t hurt me” I actually wanted to emit. I was able to flip it on and let it play in the background while in my head, usually I’d want to die.
For as long as I could remember, I always told my friends constantly how much I wished desperately that [love interest] could live in my skin for a while, that he could hear everything inside my head related to him, how often I think about him, how much I want him, how I would watch him walk away after being together and feel longing flood the bottom of my spine, to absolve me from having to say all this humiliating sensation underneath —
Then I’d turn to him and forget that, he hadn’t been there and heard that conversation. He didn’t know any of that. I would say I wanted that, without registering that that isn’t readily observable and apparent information.
I’d also turn and find this entirely pitiful, that the only way for me to ever be taken seriously was for someone else to live inside me? That I, for all my years of being trained at writing, couldn’t bring myself to say things that were probably perfectly normal?
I now have noticed my thoughts were no longer swirling with self pity and anxiety, but resting instead in the fact that I have a seat at the table. From the outside in, I’m just like you. I’m not a freak, I’m just like you. I’m here, and I’m a person who exists to other people.
I could finally believe this for the first time without feeling like I was beating insurmountable odds to take up space inside someone’s mind.
When I felt insecure today, I was able to remember who I was in the eyes of others. What they see when they look at me isn’t as terrible and humiliating as the image-blob I have of myself. And that is comforting. There is information out there far less damaging than the vestiges of my own imagination.
Now terrified of losing this ability to zoom out and look at the archive of my life without this, I have noted it down so I won’t forget. Because for how good my memory is, this is not something I am good at remembering, nor want to ever lose sight of.