Decrying Gravity

There's so much that I want to write and say.  I have an ever expanding list of topics of concern, ideas swirling around my head that I need to get out, need to elaborate upon, express, expand, enunciate.  I think better with writing, with talking.  I'm an oft-awkward, introverted social creature that craves craves craves company, hungry for others because I'm not real enough myself.  No wonder I'm draining; I need so much that although I want to give, I take by virtue of desire.  I cannot simply "be."  I'm a thought in a world of solipsists: when you turn around, look away, I'm gone.  Gone for you, gone for me, disappeared into the ether.

I wrote this poem For Caroline, my counselor.  It tells too much, and part of me hopes you don't read it, but there's something dangerously exciting about honesty for me.  I want it out, want it all out, want the waves and waves to crash forth and if you make the choice to jump in, I don't have to weep for your drowning.  Though I will anyway.  I worry I'm too heavy, in my thinflabby frame.  I think I scare, and justly so, but I've never "been" and been ok enough to know.

Caroline told me, she told me that yesterday was the day after the longest day.  The day of lesser darkness than the day before.  She told me and I laughed because we both thought it was cute and wry and true.

Or the wishful facsimile thereof.  Maybe you've noticed I'm not the who I'd like to be.  There's a pretension in paranoia.  I cannot say just what I mean to eat a peach and disturb the universe.

***

I want peace.  I don't know what it looks like.  Yet I can close my eyes and imagine not sunny beaches, not friends and family, not wealth and fame but simply a slightly altered me, gliding through a life not too removed from this one that seeks to share its blessings.  I think happiness will follow, but, if not, my sad smiles will have a warmth not shrouded.  And that, I think, would be enough.

I'm working on it.  One of my friend commented upon my strength of idealism and hope, a strange thing for someone to see in a self I often think of as so grim.  But they're there.  What I lack in faith I make up for in hope: the desire for better things without the belief they will come to be.  I can see a life so beautiful it hurts to believe, for the fear that it stops too short of true.  Yet I have said the same thing of a body, and it's a wonder what one shaved leg can do.

***

I try not to give too much credence to tests, but I can't deny that I like the validation sometimes.  For instance, and I really don't mean to brag, but my 800 on the verbal SAT gave me enough confidence to pursue English instead of Math.  It's not like it mattered; I did well on the Math, and it was probably harder anyway.  But it's the little things you cling to when you want to believe something but can't muster the will to make the change on a whim.

Right now, the Myers-Briggs is that kind of test for me.  I don't want to buy into it.  Reading the entries, much of the ideology behind it seems to be finding the awesomeness in everyone and the distinctions are often too subtle to my untrained eye.  It's also prey to the "horoscope syndrome," where you can fit what happens to the prediction instead of the other way around because you want to believe in it.  It's also rather amusing to read different descriptors and note how many times they say "one of the rarest of types."  The desire to make the reader feel special with adoring praise for unique capabilities, encouraging the reader to buy into the test's mythology seems, at least to my cynical eye, as much a marketing ploy as an ideology or thrust at "science."

So take that disclaimer for what it is: me acknowledging that this isn't perfectly rational but probably just a rationalization for what I want to believe.  There's probably nothing wrong with doing what you want, but I need reasons, and this is one I'm latching onto.

Anyway.  According to the probably unreliable internet test I've used, I'm an INFJ, tantalizingly dubbed "The Counselor."  "The Teacher" is labeled ENFJ.  The difference, of course, is the intraversion/extraversion axis.  And yeah, it's not a huge deal.  But I've noticed that teaching drives me crazy because there's so much going on.  I want to focus on one thing, one person, quietly, and yet I have this wild classroom with all kinds of demands and problems. It's not unmanageable; I like floating around and helping.  But I'm much more geared towards supporting the leadership of others than assuming it myself.

I like focusing and probing.  And I really like questioning.  One of the things I do well, I think, is ask questions (in discussions and conversations).  I try not to be a very prideful person, yet I can't help but feel good when, the few times I've had a chance to in my college courses, other students respond to how much they enjoy discussions I lead.  I genuinely enjoy it, too.

One of my more enjoyable collegiate experiences was participating in group therapy.  The questioning, the exploration, the desire to help and love and grow in a safe environment where everything mattered because it meant something to someone.  I've always liked learning the details behind the lives of others.  I'm not always good at eliciting them, but it's something I'm working on.  I need that safe, secure place, where there aren't worries about being someplace else, interruptions, chaos in general.  And it all makes me feel good, regardless of how well I am at it.

All of this is to say that it's been a secret desire of mine to be a counselor since high school.  Teaching made the most sense and seemed much more accessible, but the choice was as much a function of my low self esteem as it was a love for learning.  I never believed I could be good enough to compete in a smaller field, never believed I'd genuinely be able to help others with their own issues because I had so many miserable ones of my own, never believed it could work out because it was something I liked and wanted and seemed too good to ever be true so it probably was.

I worry I'm too emotionally distant, too reserved.  In high school, I didn't even like being touched, a desire founded, I think, in the idea that no one would do it of their own volition unless they did it for my sake, so I would spare them the trouble.  They certainly wouldn't benefit from it themselves.  I intellectualize my emotions, too, here and elsewhere.  Reading over some of my previous writing, it seems positively cold.  There's no fire, no life to it.  I worry there's no warmth to me, that I tilt at windmills thinking I'm engaging others but merely going through motions while others know better.

And yet, I've grown to like being touched.  Just like I'm afraid of revealing too much about myself for fear of driving others away, I don't engage in it much.  But I want it.  Just like I want to be vulnerable and warm and loving.  I want to be pleasant.  I want to be enjoyable.  I want to be so many wonderful, beautiful things.  I want to be a beautiful person.  And there's tragedy in that beauty, there has to be.  But there's an enduring, earnest warmth too.  And I want that.

Significantly, I think I'm going to start pursuing what I want instead of what makes "sense."  It'll take a long time, if it works at all.  But the lies my darker demons whisper in my ears haven't led me to happiness; they're led me to a base pragmatism, happiness by committee.  It's time to embrace aesthetic, appreciate desire, actually work for something that might mean nothing when the final totals are tallied.  I need to grow again.  I need to be organic.

And I think I'm on my way.