Fishing

It was the most universally deplored and the most universally engaged in practice among the girls in elementary school, the subtle put down of yourself, knowing your friends would rush in with denials (except of course when they didn’t, the dull silence a painful one, only marginally better than being called (contemptuously or pityingly or both) on it: “You’re fishing, that is so sad.”) And this fourth grade equivalent of “This old thing?” was a toeing of a fine line between confidence (knowing your friends would rush in the denial) and self-deprecation, the insecurity wearing a mask of security, disguising itself as insecurity. There was no greater social sin than “stuck-up” and yet, it was the confident girls who had the alchemical magical ability to attract people, not the mousy fringe girls. The year of learning to put ourselves down was the year when we realized that we had been paying attention to the wrong things, that being the center of our parents adoration didn’t give us social capital on the playground, that we could be princesses at home and transformed into mousy fringe girls at school, and so it was not just confidence that magically bestowed popularity, because it was the year confidence got broken. It was years before we were differentiated on interests and abilities, when the cliques were based on which popular girl you followed. Ancient memory of trying to learn the art of self-deprecation by following the example of those who could work it, and tripping and falling, instead being called manipulative.

Somehow this lies archaeologically beneath the overwhelming urge to to rub the thoughts violent against myself, to make the little pains big enough to be worthy of attention, the “you’d be better off without me” thought, the “I am hideous” thought, the “I am so unlovable” thought, thoughts begging for denials, thoughts that aren’t really beliefs as much as words popping unsummoned into my head, challenging me, words I fight against, scrabbling for purchase, this is not a truth, this is a violence that must be resisted. Words that I am not even sure I can distinguish as either native or having been picked up by my clever brain in some self-assessment test “Put a check by all of the following thoughts that you have had in the past week…”

Worst are the moments knowing that mood could be turned around by one good compliment, one loving word, and so checking the email and examining the phone’s caller i.d., maybe I missed something? Asking, pathetically, “Do I look okay?” as we get ready to go out, husband-response, an automatic “Turn around, let me see. Yeah. Fine.” What I want has to come unasked for in order to count, to be real. And the elaborate rules in my head about putting myself in a situation where the needed comment could come spontaneously — the frustration in trying to write about it that there lies beneath the writing some manipulation for validation, further, that the validation will be invalid for my having put it out there. The half-formed resolution that this year I ask for what I need which doesn’t work with the rules about validation needing to be spontaneous to be real… And yet, maybe the resolution is as much about the courage to formulate in my own head what need is underlying behavior. Admitting a need is scary-vulnerable and it is so much easier to run around attending to other people’s needs.

Aside from the unreliable narrator’s gifts of “snorting abilify” and “edna krabapple porn,” the search term bringing the most people to my blog is “external validation.” (Oh, person searching for “people who need external validation” I ask you, who are the people who don’t? Honestly?) I remind myself that I am not the first to struggle this struggle, that I can write about this not to isolate myself as a freak who has the unspeakable thoughts, but to offer the mutual-struggler’s encouragement, the encouragement to my own self in the waves of intense self-doubt which will come again: you can do battle against these thoughts, they will intensify, maybe, but they will pass, that it’s not suppressing them that works so much as shriveling them by exposing them to air. In the startling respite this morning gives me, the courage to read old blog entries sitting in my “unpublishable” queue, I take this one and address it. Silence and suppression have failed, the attempt to be oblique and subtle have failed, so I put this one out there, a form of internal validation, I can hit the publish button without the little censor inside me screaming out that this is all a form of fishing.