Sometimes, I’m gripped by this feeling that people will forget me if I don’t remind them I’m here. That my presence is so insignificant that the moment I’m gone, it’s as if I never was.
Sometimes, I’m gripped by this feeling that people wish they could forget me, that my presence is annoying, like a pebble in their shoe. I feel that I’m tolerated, and barely, and find myself apologizing for my existence, apologizing for needing air to breathe, for needing to take up space.
Sometimes, I’m gripped by this feeling that I should just disappear, that I have no use, no purpose, and I haven’t earned my place on the planet or in the lives of those around me.
Sometimes, I’m gripped by this feeling that each and every one of us is precious and important, just as we are, in all of our flawed imperfections. Sometimes, I even believe that applies to me.
Most of the time, I feel like I need to be useful. I feel like my worth and keeping my friendships is dependent on what I do for other people, how much I support them, how much I make things easier for them.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be useful, helpful, giving.
Most of the time, though, I’d rather disappear than ask for anything back.
When I’m feeling good, it’s easier to ask for things. Easy to ask to hang out, easy to ask for input, easy to ask to reschedule or choose the location for the hang. When I’m stressed and depressed and anxious, when I really need the support, that’s when those feelings of “just disappear” tend to get a grip on me.
I apologize, excessively, for things that don’t actually require an apology. “Sorry,” drops from my lips and I irritate myself with its frequent appearance in my sentences.
For a time, I trained myself out of this excessive apologizing. This past year, I’ve noticed it slipping back in, invasive and out of control.
I’ve been trying, for a while, to identify the root cause of this invasive vocabulary, this resurfaced feeling that I need to apologize for existing, and there’s an interesting tension in two particular aspects of my life:
- Writing my book, in earnest. Not just this “write some words once a year during NaNoWriMo” that I was doing for a while.
- Un-numbing when it comes to my needs and desires for relationships—romantic, sexual, and otherwise.
With my book, I’ve been writing this memoir since 2017, the first year I did National Novel Writing Month. While I did a little writing and revising here and there in the months between Novembers, it wasn’t enough to make real progress on the manuscript.
The past two years, I’ve gotten more serious and intentional about making writing a major focus in my life. I left academia and restructured my work life so that I could give more to my creative self, so that I could live more aligned with my values. I took writing classes so I could improve my craft. I started reading a lot of memoirs. I submitted writing for publication (it got rejected but I still submitted it anyway). I started revising my memoir in earnest.
The un-numbing process is harder to track. It began in therapy, when I was trying to process and heal from PTSD. There were many major turning points in therapy, but in this particular arc, I feel like the yoga retreat I went on in September of 2023 pushed me through my walls and left me humming with want and desire.
Desire for what? Well, everything I’d told myself I didn’t get to have.
The convergence of revising my book and finding myself filled up with the desire I’d been shoving down for years swirled around and created some sort of vortex where the unapologetic action of telling my story, my truth, and the unapologetic action of wanting things, pulled up my old patterns of apologizing anytime I wanted something, anytime I made other people uncomfortable, anytime I didn’t live up to expectations or fulfill the desires of others.
So now I walk around saying “sorry” for existing, even while I act in rather unapologetic ways, as I tap back into those old feelings and as I confront the fact that I still don’t wholly feel like I deserve to be here.
For a long time, I reacted to this feeling of being unworthy of living by just making myself prickly and unlikable. Outspoken opinions, blunt and direct feedback, outright defiance of authority figures, arguing when the polite thing to do would be to concede the point… I felt like no one would ever like me, anyway, so I just gave them reasons for their dislike, instead of putting it down to the fundamental and inexplicable wrongness of me.
These days, I feel less like my existence is wrong, and I feel less like I don’t deserve to be here, but I do still feel it. I do still feel as if needing things could make me unlikable and unlovable.
I feel, deeply, the vulnerability of my existence and I resent that vulnerability, too. I want to need less, to need nothing. And so I apologize.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I’m still here.
Ink and Vein 