How To Do The Hard Things

How To Connect to Others

August 2023

You finally plan something with a group of people you hope like you in the same way.

You never take your walls down fully, and they think it's cute when you say you watch body language. When you tell them all to take the quizzes just to figure out who they are, you let them ask your tarot cards their secret questions, and get their astrology signs to make sense of it all.

What you don't notice is that you're hurting and paranoid. You've been for some time now. You've been scratching at corners just to gain some semblance of control. you let the walls drop a bit. And you tell them some things you've been holding onto in hopes of being understood, and later down the line you express your fears about the last time you made friends. And how much that hurt you.

And where you went afterwards, how you stayed inside for a year in fear. You don't tell them this.

You don't let them know that you always seem to be looking for understanding outside of yourself.

As if you're some untrustworthy thing with no true thoughts, and no true feelings, and too many emotions. So you look for answers from the stars, and the cards and the way their eyes squint when they're having a hard time, because you believe these things more than you believe in yourself.

What you didn't realize was that all your rules and all your worries and all the speculations and fears you kept swirling in your head were the very same things keeping yourself from connecting to others.

Isn't it easier? To have something to tell you who you are? Who they are, so that you'd never have to get up close. Never have to do the hard work of actually opening up, and in return getting to know them truly.

You do all of this so that you'd never get hurt again, so that that the pain wouldn't surprise you when it came.

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In August, you finally visit the city you've dreamt of ever since you've been told about its existence. It fills your head with dreams. You decide that you'll come back one day no matter what.

In this place, away from it all, was that when you felt it? Did you start to notice yourself again?
Was this the moment you started to wake up?