Muchness and Light

I'm not here for your entertainment.

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of my four-day, constantly-tearful breakdown of what established initial patterns in my relationships, I read Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.  La Bruja had recommended this book weeks ago, and I finally got around to reading it. 

Holy shit.

When she first recommended it, I did a little quick research online and came to the conclusion that I have an anxious attachment style.  "Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back."  I realized I mostly have dated and been in relationships with avoidants.  "Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness."

According to Levine and Heller, people with secure attachments—those who "feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving"—make up about 50% of the population.  Anxious ones like me make up 20%, while avoidants make up 25%.  The remaining 5% of the population is made up of anxious-avoidants, and I can certainly include a couple of my exes in that narrow margin. 

But when it comes to dating as an adult, the majority of secure people are in healthy relationships.  They're the ones you know who are still happily married after twenty years.  They're the ones I look to and wish I'd ever had a relationship like that. 

Secure men are generally not on the open market. 

There's a disproportionate number of avoidants in the dating pool.  This is part of the reason I am far more likely to encounter a Fragile Cat when I'm on the prowl myself. 

Anxious people are also more likely to be attracted to avoidants, as if something unconscious in us feels like we've found a missing piece of our puzzle.  Avoidants are usually reflective of a powerful, dysfunctional attachment in our earlier life, often from childhood.  Initially everything may seem really great, but then something happens and the avoidant backs away, which causes the anxious to move closer to close the gap, which causes the avoidant to back away even further.  Both partners are having their fucked-up emotional attachment needs met, but it's a pathological dance of getting close and backing away. 

In reading Attached, I was surprised (and thankful!) to learn I wasn't quite as screwed up as I'd thought.  Yes, I am anxious, though not nearly so off-the-chain as I could be.  (I'm less of an outlier than I normally am.)  Levine and Heller argue that there is a biological, evolutionary purpose and need for attachment.  Just as happens with parents and children, bonds are formed in the brain when we partner.  Synapses and neurotransmitters and a bunch of brain shit that I only understand as a layman come together to imprint that person on our brain as a matter of survival.  As inherently social creatures, especially ones who have sexual reproduction, we need other people. 

When an avoidant backs away from me, it activates that attachment system, and I've learned mostly unconsciously to do things and work in ways that will get a response from my partner, to deactivate that system.  (I'm talking phone calls and texts, not boiling bunnies, though I'd imagine this is exactly where and how stalking begins.)  When I don't get the response I need, it amps up my anxiety, so I step closer again and again until I'm either soothed or I get so worked up that love feels like a huge waste of my life.

Because of these patterns established throughout my life, emotional security is something I need in a different way than secure people.  That doesn't make it better or worse than anyone else—unless you're the avoidant on the polar opposite side of the need.  The avoidant's need for independence, their oft-refused acceptance of needing another person, is a defense mechanism and a way to fulfil their own established patterns. 

The avoidants' defensive self-perception that they are strong and independent is confirmed, as is the belief that others want to pull them into more closeness than they are comfortable with.  The anxious types find that their perception of wanting more intimacy than their partner can provide is confirmed, as is their anticipation of ultimately being let down by significant others.  So, in a way, each style is drawn to reenact a familiar script over and over again. 

My secure friends, and certainly my avoidant ones, have a very hard time understanding this.  They don't get why I can't always just suck it up and go on and get over someone, even when they've hurt me time and again.  But when that attachment system is activated and spinning out of emotional control, contact with that person can immediately soothe all of my anxieties, much in the same way an upset baby is soothed by the presence of its missing mother. 

Many individuals find it hard to follow through on their wish to break up, even after they've tried more than once to do it.  Anxious people may take a very long time to get over a bad attachment, and they don't get to decide how long it will take.  Only when every single cell in their body is completely convinced that there is no chance their partner will change or that they will ever reunite will they be able to deactivate and let go.

One of the things Levine and Heller stress is that emotional dependency is not bad.  It is, in fact, a natural part of a healthy relationship to make your partner's needs more important than your own and vice versa.  It's okay and normal and good to elevate someone else's needs above your own when you are healthily in love. 

But I have this history of addicted men.  Alcohol, drugs, sex—I've seen and dated and slept with them all.  I've written before about how I am historically and enabler.  So what about codependence?  Isn't becoming so enmeshed in another person that your boundaries are blurred just dysfunctional?  Doesn't dependency on a partner make you lacking or broken or just fucked-up in some way?

Not necessarily.  

Need and addiction are not the same thing.  Codependency exists, and it is especially relevant in the realm of addiction.  The addict uses their substance as a tool to maintain emotional distance.  They drink or get high or sleep with other people as a way to cope with their own damage, and that often means they are actively inserting something between themselves and their partners.  There are other biological factors that come into play with addiction, as well.  The times I have refused to leave because my partner needed me to take care of them—whether to pick up their drunkenly-abandoned car or make excuses to their boss or friends about why they weren't showing up or to clean up whatever mess they created while they were fucked up—that's where the dysfunction of codependence can actually be applicable. 

Just because you need someone, that doesn't mean that you are addicted to them.

One of the things Attached recommends I do is date a lot of people, to go out with several at once.  That way if an avoidant sneaks (bombards his way) into my circle, I am reassured by the fact that I have someone else over here who wants to go out with me.  It's no big deal that this one fucked up, because there's someone else who finds me attractive and wants to spend time with me.  Historically, I am not a multi-dater, but I'll see how it goes. 

So I put myself back on the market. 

Friday night, I had a date with a new guy.  I'll call him S, because I don't want to reveal his name and—as you'll see shortly—he's not worthy of a jellicle name.  We met nearby at a billiards bar.  We had a couple of slow drinks and talked, though we never got around to actually playing pool.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We sat on the patio of the bar talking about sociology and music and dating as adults.  We walked around for a while, still talking and laughing, and ducked into another bar for a last drink.  I even messaged the Castration Committee while I was peeing that it was going really well. 

With about thirty minutes left in my night, that first kiss was looming.  Okay, you'll get a kiss, and it sounds like there's a chance you'll get another date.  I was looking forward to the prospect of seeing him again and getting to know him better. 

Cut to the chase, and he turned into a handsy ass.  Now, I'm no prude.  While I've been mulling imposing a Three Date Rule for sex, I have never been one to live by such social proprieties.  That doesn't mean I've slept with everyone I've been out with, and certainly not always on a first date, but I am comfortable going quickly down that path if I feel the situation is conducive to such intimacy.  Yes, sometimes, it's just a one-nighter.  I had to be home in an hour; this was not going to be one of those nights. 

For the first time in a really long time, I felt like a 16-year-old piece of cheap meat.  I felt stupid and also insulted that I was being offered a quickie in the backseat of his car, parked down a dark side street.  Again, not a scenario I'm unfamiliar with given my history, but I am not that girl anymore.  I'm a grown-ass woman.  I am worth far more than what this man was clumsily and uncomfortably offering me. 

And after writing two weeks ago and talking with my therapist this week, it was like I was watching this from above, from outside my own body.  For a moment, it felt like Stephanie was sitting there with Quinn as this recently-nice man imposed himself on us.  I could feel myself now, knowing this was just insulting, but I could also feel Quinn sitting silent and petulant, wishing he would just take his rough hands and slobbering mouth off of her. 

Something in me clicked and shoved him away quickly.  I got out of the car and said I needed to go.  I walked back to my car, a block away.  I texted Pandy to let her know it had gone awry but that I was okay. 

This is where I will also interject that I called Bounder.

In the now-14 months since we met, dated, broke up, dated again, broke up again, slept together, slept together again, dated others, slept together again, et cetera, we have continued to have this weird connection.  One of us reached out to the other, usually via text, at just that right moment when the other seems to need us.  We still sometimes dream of each other at the same time, as we'll find out a day or two later. 

But in all of that time, with all of the men I've gone out with, Bounder always seems to know.  He has never failed to text me while I'm with someone new, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments that I don't see until after the fact.  He's never failed to reach within than four hours after I've been with a new guy.  Whether he smells my perfume on the wind or has a bug in my phone (no, he doesn't), he just knows.

It is unquestionably the dance of an Anxious and Anxious-Avoidant.

I'd even joked on Friday afternoon that I wasn't blowing off this first date with S just to go sleep with Bounder.  (It wouldn't have been the first time.)

I hadn't even left my house for the date when his text came.

Totally innocent response to something else from days before.  I was leaving for the date when I saw the message.  The man is uncanny, really. 

And I didn't shut down this thing with S because of Bounder.  He really doesn't have the power to cock-block my dates from a distance.  I wasn't caught up in the idea of him that night; I was completely engaged with S until it turned weird.  (Let me stress here that at no time with S did I feel unsafe or in any type of danger.  I was simply very, very uncomfortable.)

My voice shaking and low, I called Bounder to tell him thank you for having never made me feel like I owed him anything.  Honestly, I was thankful it was a late-night voicemail and that I didn't have to talk to him directly.  For all of his faults, for all of the times I have done this fucked-up pathological dance with the man I love more than any other ever but who is such a heartbreakingly-close-but-terrible fit for me, he never made me feel sexually worthless.  In fact, as I was working through some pretty ugly memories and trying to get past some things, he was incredibly, beautifully patient and supportive with me.  He failed me in a lot of ways, but he never, ever made me feel anything but beautiful and wanted for exactly who I was, not because I should or might be something else, not because there was an expectation.  And that, in and of itself, is its own kind of love. 

So I'm still learning how to step differently, how to dance to a different beat.  It's not like reading this book would suddenly make me not maladaptive.  But it did open my head, giving me some insight and tools to work toward the healthy relationship I likely never would've possessed, had I not started this process of intense self-analysis and re-discovery. 

As shaken as I was when I walked away from that uncomfortable moment, I know I am fully engaged in this process.  I'm not watching from afar, checking out emotionally to just let things happen to me.  Healthy or unhealthy choices are my choices, and they aren't dependent on what Cissie or Quinn might want, though their needs are sometimes still my needs.

I drove us all home and to bed.  Alone.

And as La Bruja commented on Facebook as we talked about this date, "The good things that I see from this: 1) material—duh; 2) nothing happened and you're fine; 3) when you meet the right man, and some hot guy starts flirting with you while you're in line at Starbucks, you won't wonder if you missed any fun experiences by not dating more. You'll know you've got a great thing going and that 97% of all the guys who flirt with you would not come close to measuring up."

 

Binding quarks into atoms like I am bound to you.

I believe in love the same way children believe in Santa Claus.  The way tent revivalists believe in Jesus.  The way cats believe in laser pointers. 

Like everything else in the universe, love is a manifestation of energy.  As a series of electrochemical responses in the brain, it has a measurable fluctuation and wavelength—like any other thought or body process.  It can feel kinetic or thermal, sometimes stored as potential, or even like a nuclear blast inside us. 

In my pseudo-scientific explorations and insanely intricate analyses of both self and others, I believe that love is the spark of life in the universe.  The same way we are all made up of atoms from the Big Bang, love is starseed. 

When two people come together, their own energies mingle and influence the other.  There's a push-pull, an ebb and flow, between the two of them that is unique to those people and that moment in time.  Falling in love is like nuclear fusion—the two energies collide with such force as to create something new that is unique and beautiful in its very own right.  It's like the conception of a star. 

I have argued for ages that the fragility and beauty of that is what makes love so incredibly and utterly vulnerable.  Like any new life, its value is incalculably priceless; it is defenseless and demands protection at all costs:

In his poem "the very old sings", Dutch poet Lucebert says, "All things of value are defenseless."  The words famously adorn the top of a building in Rotterdam.  The things that we as humans hold most valuable—love, beauty, knowledge, truth—are completely unable to defend themselves but are undeniably the most defensible, the most in need of defense.

The acts and actions required to defend the valuable are often the things that cost us the most.  Certainly there's an emotional cost to such an endeavor, but the real, tangible cost is often exemplified in productivity hours, marketing or outreach, and sacrifice of resources to help ensure an often zealous defense.  Maybe the true value lies in the cost the Editorial You is willing to accept in defend of the indefensible. 

So what is Self worth?  Again, maybe the value of Self is tied directly to what you're willing to sacrifice to protect and uphold what, by its very and pure nature, cannot support itself.  Because of its subjectivity, each person holds different things to be dear; they find their own self-evident truths.  For one person, it may be love or trust.  For another, it may be reputation or intellect, though there's an argument to be made that even those are partially monetary in nature.  

I think it's the acts and actions we require of ourselves to actively defend ourselves that make us valuable, that make us worthwhile.  And when those acts are performed in the face of adversity, especially self-adversity, they can often be those most costly while offering us the most to gain. 

For me, there is no greater or mysterious force than love.  It is God and creation and the foundation upon which everything else is built.  Love at first sight?  That's like my Higgs boson. 

No one fights harder or truer for it than I do, both for myself and others.  I believe in it.  I work for it.  Sometimes to the point that I will sacrifice myself to give it a little more energy, a little more life, to protect it because it is perfect and special and fucking deserves that above all else. 

Just like my children. 

But sometimes it doesn't fucking matter. 

Like a child, love has to grow.  No matter how perfect and adorable it is when it's born, no matter how much you may want to freeze time and hold that exquisite moment forever in your hand, you can't.  No matter what you do, it will change and expand, getting bigger and stronger until it is eventually self-aware and makes its own choices as it finds its place in the world.  Or it will die. 

Love demands attention and nurture.  It cannot give these things to itself.  It requires a healthy balance from both partners or it grows up dysfunctional and maladaptive.  At best, it then dies quickly and everyone gets on with their grief.  At worst, it becomes a cannibalistic, patricidal maniac. 

Thankfully, there's no legal ramification for neglect or abuse of love.  Indifference and carelessness are morally reprehensible to me, but no one is actually going to die because of it.  (We all know anecdotes of people who died of a broken heart, but I'm not tracking every outlier.  Though I have believed that, if anyone could die of heartache, it would be me.) 

Sometimes the intricacies and logistics of life clash with the philosophical ideal of love.  The responsibilities and actions of living have to outweigh the obligation to the sublime.  No matter how much you want to defend what you've created, the day-to-day realities don't support the metaphysical incorporeal, and we must content with the legitimate limitations of being human rather than suprahuman. 

Sometimes it just doesn't matter because it can't.

That's when the decision has to be made, to keep trying to breathe life into what is dying or to let it go.  Is it kinder to end it or to drag it out until the very end?  Is the sudden evisceration easier to heal from than the lingering infection? 

The worst is when you gut yourself and it doesn't stop hurting, cutting away the part of your heart that you know keeps you alive—you know it like you know your own breath or your child's name—and you can't bleed to death fast enough.  The pain never abates, but the staunching comes so slowly that sepsis sets in and you just wish you would die. 

But somehow I keep coming back, searching for that again and again, the sudden uprush that comes like lightning straight at my heart.  I wish for it and write letters to it like Santa.  I pray for it.  And I chase it like a stray, bright dot that flickers randomly around my life.

Catch it or not, see it or not, it's still there.  It still exists.  It may elude me most of the time, but I stay alert, hoping to catch the flash out of the corner of my big, green eyes.

 

My two cents is worth ten grand.

Childhood molestation.  Parental divorce.  Teenage date rape.  Abusive boyfriend.  Suicide attempts.  Morbid obesity and body image issues.  Marriage gone horrible awry.  Series of unhealthy romantic relationships with unavailable men. 

That's the quick and dirty laundry list of the bullshit that led me to now.  But that is not me.

Like so many other people, I fulfill a statistic.  According to the National Center for Victims of Crime, 9.2% of victimized children are sexually assaulted.  1 in 5 girls are victims of sexual abuse.  3 of 4 children who are sexually assaulted are victimized by someone they know well.  63% of women who suffer abuse by a family member also report rape or attempted rape after the age of 14. 

50% of children in America live through the divorce of their parents.  Adults whose parents were divorced are 50% more likely to divorce themselves. 

10% of high-schoolers are physically abused by their dating partner.  50% of youth who are victims of both physical and sexual assault attempt suicide.

15% of Americans are obese.  6.6% are morbidly obese. 

40% of people have maladaptive attachments in adult relationships, driven by the events of their past—with the seeds of dysfunction often beginning in early childhood. 

I am not special.

I talk very openly in public and in private about all of these things.  I didn't for a very long time.  There was certainly a sense of shame about all of it.  When I came to the understanding that keeping these things in secret only perpetuated that cycle of shame that never should've been mine, I began to attack these issues head-on and put them into a healthy perspective.  They've been analyzed and discussed and dealt with, at least until some other issue arises that is a direct or indirect result of what happened.

Muchness and Light was started, in part, as an outlet for dealing with the transformations that came from that self-scrutiny.  Hell, I wrote a book about a lot of it. 

But if you meet me in person, I will never offer you my hand and say, "Hi, I'm Stephanie.  I'm a victim."

I don't live like that.  I don't think like that.  Stephanie is not defined by her past, but she sure as hell is shaped by those events. 

Sometimes there's a reason to make parallels to something that happened with some new event in my life.  Usually it's because there's a problem.  Often the root of my problems surround how I crave and strive for intimacy and love from another person.  I do have times when I feel unloved and worthless, and that's when the self-analysis can become brutal.

I've written a few times about my sense of worth, both to myself and to the people I love.  Regardless of how it seems sometimes, I am acutely aware of my inherent value as a mother and a woman and a soul.  I get tripped up in my value to other people, especially when something has gone wrong. 

In my mind, as a combination of both head and heart, I have been worth very little to a lot of people in my life.  Other people's perceptions and mistakes and miscommunications shouldn't be a barometer of my value, but they often are.  And I know I'm not alone in this.

Even people who are in healthy, secure, romantic relationships see themselves in relation to their partner.  There's a natural loop of positive feedback—through words and touch and action, consideration and thought and care—that show you how your partner values you.  If they are attentive and thoughtful in their approach and recognition of you, if they are engaged with you, the neurotransmitters and hormones responsible for the physical emotion of love are released again and again.  You feel closer to, and more secure with, this other person, making you more willing to reciprocate in kind.  Then their body is responding similarly, and it's a wonderful cycle of love. 

You are important to each other and are showing the other their worth to you by supporting and cherishing and caring for them. 

But when words and actions don't match, or don't exist at all, it devalues the relationship.  Eventually it begins to undermine the self-worth of one or both partners.  If he loves me, he will care for me.  If he doesn't care for me, I am unimportant to him.  I am unimportant to the person I love, who is supposed to love me most in the world.  If that is all this special person thinks of me, I must not be worth very much to him. I must not be worth very much at all.  I am worthless.

One bad relationship shouldn't be able to damage your self-perceptions, but rarely is it one bad relationship.  There's is almost always a series of events—of romantic, erotic, platonic, and familial relationships—that build upon one another, piling on the sense of lessthanness. 

Look at it like an economy.  At birth, you're worth $1,000,000, just because you exist.  Your parents and family care for you and raise you and help you grow.  Eventually you're worth $2,000,000, and you set out into the world, socializing and developing your own interpersonal relationships outside of your family.  Your first boyfriend or girlfriend is pretty good; they add $250,000 to your value.  Your next one breaks your heart, and you lose $750,000.  Now you're at $1,500,000 when you meet your future spouse.  They add $500,000.  Your marriage adds $1,000,000.  Lost friendships deduct $300,000 each.  Kids add $5,000,000 each but have constant volatile flux for the first twenty years, so your value is in constant shift. 

When you find that you have trauma after trauma, especially when they've happened at the hands of the people who are supposed to love you most in the world, it eventually begins to feel like no one has ever or could ever help bring you back into positive territory.  No matter how hard you work to build your own value--$100,000 for graduating high school, $250,000 for college, $1,000,000 for the PhD, and $500,000 for the first great job—you're still constantly trying to overcome this deficit that's been in place and growing for as long as you can remember. 

What I want and will say I need (That's an entirely different discussion I'll get into later.) most is for just one person to step up and show me that I matter to them.  That I matter at all.  Because I was let down so many times, I don't believe in my heart that anyone is capable of loving me.  There are people capable of doing it, in general; I know many of them.  But of all of the people who have come through my life over its course thus far, it is with rare exception that anyone has ever shown up for me consistently and shown me that I am worth a damn to them. 

Even if I am worth $1,000,000 on paper, it means nothing unless someone is willing to barter for it.  It doesn't grow unless it's invested.  And if it's just used and depleted over time, it will eventually drop to $0.  Even the Hope Diamond is estimated to be worth $350,000,000, but it's just a shiny rock in a box until someone actually pays for it.

I recognize that it's not necessarily about me.  I am attracted to emotional unavailability, because it is what I have always known.  In my own maladaptation, in my own inherent brokenness, I search for people who are just as broken in their own, extreme way that is the polar opposite of my own damage.  Even if and when I learn new tools for handling that and making healthier choices, I will still be jaded by my past.  I can't forget that these things happened, and they will always be a constant, flashing caution signal as I move forward along my path.

If I build my house on a hill, I can build it with a level foundation.  I'm still building it on a hill.  There's a strong possibility that, given enough time, the foundation will shift and settle, needing to be jacked back up and supported from time to time.  I could always raze the damn hill, but that would require cost and energy to devastate miles of visible landscape to try to forget there ever was a hill in the first place. 

My hill is a slippery slope, but I fought my way to the top to plant my rainbow freak flag in the summit.  From here, there's a pretty damn amazing view.  But it's also sometimes lonely, and I'm tired of looking down and seeing all the people who shrugged and walked away from the clamber, who found themselves unworthy of escalation and therefore made me feel unworthy of their effort. 

So, yeah, sometimes I sit my ass down and cry, howling my lamentations into the wind.  Far too often it has seemed like a siren's call, bringing a reticent hero crashing into the rocks below; for rescue or marooned companionship, I don't know.  But maybe, just maybe, that song will be worth something to someone, someday.  And maybe someone else will be willing to fight their way to my summit and join me in surveying everything we've left behind. 

 

Catatonic, Catastrophic, and Catalytic

Ultimately, I'm a geek.  A geek with good hair (and shoes), but a geek nonetheless.  I often make weird analogies between high school science lessons and life-in-the-moment.  Heat denatures protein—never forget that!

This week it's been all about catalysts.  Because I know not everyone else is a geek, I'll refresh your faded high school memories and remind you that a catalyst is a substance that initiates or accelerates a reaction, without being consumed by the reaction itself.  It makes some stuff happen and goes on about its own business.

I've been on both sides of metaphorical catalysis at different times in my life.  I've done things that indirectly caused both good and bad to others, but I'm still standing.  Sometimes it was intentional, often not.  Either way, I have to bear the brunt of my actions, chosen passively or actively. 

Other people have played their own catalytic roles in my life.  They've come and gone—sometimes just as quickly—and often left me with nothing to show for their time and energy except profound change.  Those few people who have been in my life for a really extended period of time are part of a symbiosis, a mutually beneficial, long-term relationship.  They are the people I love, the ones without whom my heart cannot exist.  (BFF's, you know who you are.)

But that's the thing about a catalyst; they have no real investment in the change.  They aren't reagents.  They have no reason or impetus to stay and watch the reaction, to see the equal and opposite outcome of their own actions.  If they were really concerned enough to be willing to gauge their impact, they would have to be committed enough to accept and to admit their own culpability in the metamorphosis.  That's a hard thing to do when your own actions don't even change you at all. 

According to Wikipedia (you know, the experts on all things things), "Kinetically, catalytic reactions are typical chemical reactions; i.e. the reaction rate depends upon the frequency of contact of the reactants in the rate-determining step.  Usually, the catalyst participates in this slowest step, and rates are limited by amount of catalyst and its 'activity'."

Although catalysts aren't consumed by the reactions themselves, they can be inhibited, deactivated, or destroyed by secondary processes.  The fall-out of their equal and opposite reactions can kick them in the ass, can ultimately alter their very make-up forever.  It's a little karmic in its own way, the thought that people who fuck with your life—through  their own activity or passivity—may ultimately pay a price for what they do.

But you, as the reagent, won't necessarily be around to see it.  You may well be so changed, so far removed from the original interaction, that you don't even know what's happened to them.  If they'd mattered enough, cared enough to see how they were impacting you, they'd still be there and wouldn't be a catalyst at all. 

Ultimately, as some Wiki editor points out, the change depends on when and how often the catalyst interacts with the reactant.  Their role is often minute and brief, early in the process of change; they're there, and then they're not. 

But every so often we cross paths with those people who strike us dramatically, in surprising and overpowering ways, who alter us so profoundly that their impact is almost incomprehensible in its complexity.  I find the most difficult to come to terms with, the ones who leave the lasting repercussions that I'll spend years re-examining, overthinking in my own benignly obsessive way.

There's a narcissistic tendency to want to have been consequential in another person's life, good or bad, to know you didn't just spew forth some smoke from their tempered-but-fragile test tubes, but rather blew up their whole fucking lab.  For me, being who I am, it's really difficult to embrace the possibility that I could ever have been so influential on someone else's life.  Ever.  My own self-esteem, so substantially lacking and timid in its burgeoning self-awareness, just can't accept how my presence could ever be so permanently tangential.

I know, however, the changes others have made on me.  And I know how their very presence—their smile or grimace, their kind or harsh words, their undivided attention—altered my course, forced me to change my path toward my ultimate destination, wherever that may be.  I will still get to wherever it is that I'm supposed to be, but I know fully (and sometimes painfully) that I'm not the same girl who stepped so tentatively into this journey, all because they ever were there.

[Special thanks this post to www.thesaurus.com.  And blame Adam Taylor for the title.  Fucking genius or not, it's all his fault.]