Oceanography and Intimacy

A few months ago I made plans to grab coffee with an old friend, and I swear I would’ve been less nervous to travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. I got ready by doing my makeup— blush, concealer, lip stain, the whole nine-- despite the fact that she has seen my face, my real face, more than anyone has in the past year. I when I was applying my makeup, I looked at myself in the mirror and rehearsed subjects to talk about, subjects to avoid, and subjects to only discuss if she brought them up first.

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We ended up going to a local diner and staying there for eight hours. She ordered toast and eggs, and a side of bacon a little bit later into the day. I ordered coffee, and then more coffee, and then more coffee, allowing myself to go hungry as I worried whatever food I chose would be too revealing and eating in front of her would be too vulnerable. Never mind the countless peanut butter and jellies and apple slices we shared in preschool. Despite this, the series of loosely connected conversations we had were great, and I felt almost cathartic as I left the restaurant. The rush of human connection was sweet, but fleeting-- and I found myself crashing shortly after as a compilation of awkward moments played through my head. “Great” I thought. “She hates me. She hates me and she never wants to see me or talk to me again. I messed it all up like I always do.”

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My interaction with her was no different than the majority of my interactions with anyone else. I’m on a self-imposed “don't speak unless spoken to” basis with almost every person that I know, even my roommates, and I need at least 12 hours of constant exposure to somebody until I allow my guard to be let down, unless they see through me first. It all boils down to two things: a catastrophic fear of intimacy and a catastrophic fear of rejection. Not malice or antisocial tendencies, but just good ol’ avoidance. It took me up until I was fourteen to learn how to make eye contact, and even longer to understand the rhythm. It took me until I was fifteen to learn how to write about my emotions, and seventeen until I learned how to talk about them, but only after a few drinks. I fear that I will never be comfortable talking about them sober, which is incidentally why I am a writer and not a public speaker. And now I am twenty, trying to figure out how other people operate so easily, and how they’re not scared. Because more often than not, I am terrified and running on manual. Everything is manual until I feel settled.

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So when I say that I would be less anxious about going to the bottom of the Mariana Trench than going to grab coffee with my friend, I am sincere. The ocean is impersonal, it is vast. I can take up the space that I need without the threat of inconveniencing anybody else. In the ocean I am small, so small that I could go unnoticed. Relationships are the opposite. They define me-- I am a daughter, a big sister, a teammate, a friend, all before myself, and with every fading connection, no matter how impersonal, I take damage. People change, people grow, people move on, and I know that, but at the same time I can’t accept it without looking for the fault in myself. It was something that I did, it was something I said, it was the way I conducted myself. I should’ve known better.

I’m not really sure how to deal with my fear of intimacy, especially when it’s the thing that I need the most. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do, and I'm not really sure who to ask because everyone else seems to have it so figured out. Or they're better at pretending than I am. I think confronting my fear is a choice, and I think I just need to choose to try to get better every single day. Choose to continue to cast my hook out into the sea and force myself to not drop it the moment I feel a tug. Choose to be vulnerable in all of my awkward, tense, and jumpy ways. Choose to get coffee, and stay for eight hours, and maybe even next time I’ll have the guts to order some food too.

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