I've been thinking for several weeks how to put this feeling into words. I'm not sure I'm ready, but I think I need to try.
There's a certain delicacy I'm becoming aware of that is making me feel awkward because I'm becoming aware of it. I'm usually generally just not aware, or even if I can see something around what I don't understand, like looking through a mist, I'm able to navigate enough to avoid this feeling. Once I'm past it, I'm usually ok and busy dealing with other stuff, so it gets forgotten.
As far as I can tell, nothing else really changes, just my awareness, and that awareness is what causes the awkwardness. Once I'm in the middle of that awkwardness, everything I know becomes profoundly distorted and I have no filters helping me escape a point of view that I can't be sure is even real, and other people are usually helpless to help me out of it because they can't understand how stuck I'm feeling and they don't know what to do or say to help.
When I put other people through awkward stuff, usually on purpose, I have a reason and a purpose that involves reaching a destination where we both arrive to a similar place and can more easily talk from there. I am aware I sometimes make other people uncomfortable with my methods, but once we're past what for them is the awkward part, stuff smooths out enough to not be stuck in the awkward part. I don't feel guilty for shoving relationships around like this because I know from experience the outcomes are often better than not doing it, because those relationships are the ones that last.
Some people don't cooperate and we wind up not talking, which is fine (well, not really, but better than being stuck in awkward), and some people just skip all that and ignore me, which is also fine, for the most part. I know I'm difficult, but sometimes the only way I'm able to continue is to drag someone through a hedge to help them see the other side, even if they can't imagine what in the world I'm doing, and I know it's faster than trying to walk along the hedge in between us and never finding a way past it. If I know someone would rather keep that hedge between us, that's fine, too, but I can't be expected to stand by that hedge on call, because hedges are tiresome and, well, in the way.
That's not the point of where I'm going, but it needed to be dealt with.
Reverse the POV now. I am becoming aware that other people might never drag me through a hedge to make stuff easier, and that it's awkward because I know I can't get past the hedge on my own. I don't have the means to be the one to do the dragging myself part because I'm not sure what reason or purpose there is except to make more awkwardness if I can't see the other side. It's very slowly sifting into my vision that a person can be like a ghost just standing at a hedge, neither inviting me over nor walking away, which is fine (if it's better than not having them there at all), but maybe something that will stall out into simply standing by hedges at each other. I don't know how to do that.
I don't think this is anything new, just something I was never aware of before.
So I'm awkwardly standing around at a hedge being exceptionally more awkward than usual because I'm so aware of being awkward now, with no idea what to do or say, and being the wild thing from the wild woods that I am, the hedge spooks me and I run away over and over in between stepping tentatively back to the hedge. I don't know what's on the other side of the hedge. I will probably never know. I know that I could be dragged over if I'd allow it, but a moment froze on me getting a glimpse through twigs and I saw worlds of stuff I don't even know what to do with. It looks like the only way over the hedge I want over the most is to kick off and let go of ever getting back to my side of the hedge, like a deer soaring out of sight.
This close to closing accounts. Shaking myself, slapping myself, throwing myself against walls, yelling at myself this is *not* what I'm out here for. I didn't come all this way to go back into seclusion.
I cannot be what someone wants or needs me to be. I am breaking my own heart standing at a hedge.
