Once they find out ...

Once they find out who I really am, they’ll go away.

For so long, that was my truth. A deeply held belief. And to be fair, there is plenty about me that can send something running for the hills (and has done so).

My love of Dad jokes, IBS farts, a propensity for info dumping and a bad habit of getting so deeply stuck inside my own head, that I forget that people around me have lives as well.

I’ve had people change their mind about fooling around with me after the first kiss, because my intensity was not their cup of tea.

What has never happened though, is someone getting to know me and deciding I was a monster, or even a bad person.

Go figure.

I have a somewhat odd anniversary coming up. This August, it will be four years since I made a mistake in play, that left both me and the person I played with devastated.

In retrospect, it all makes a lot of sense. I wasn’t in the right headspace to play, and it made my ADHD worse. I did something that was meant to be playful, something I’d done before with other partners. What I’d forgotten in that moment though, was that this was a major trauma trigger for the person I played with.

I tried my best to console them, but I spiraled into self-loathing and was such a wreck that I just made things worse.

That was the incident that landed me in therapy.

Four years later, I’m at my second series of therapy, doing EMDR to get to the bottom of all the old pain underlying that feeling. That sense that if people were to see behind the mask, if they’d see the messy reality behind the carefully curated facade, they’d respond with revulsion.

Writing that makes me chuckle, because honestly: that facade was never that good. Everybody could see the mess a mile away. I wasn’t fooling anybody anyway, I was just wasting a ton of energy trying.

I’m doing so much less of that masking now. If you’d have told me that 4 years ago, the thought would have terrified me.

But here’s the difference: it’s no longer scary, because I like myself a whole lot more these days. And since I like myself more, it’s also no longer unfathomable that other people like me!

Not everybody, and that’s fine. But the people in my life: they like the chaos, the passion, the intensity.

A while ago, @Reannah said something that stuck by me. I’d lamented that I felt like I should be making her life easier, and she scoffed at me.

“You make things easier? That’s never going to work. More fun, interesting, and horny? Definitely! Easier? Forget it. That’s wasted effort.”

It took me aback for a second, but there is a deep truth there. I was still in the mindset of what I should be bringing to the table, and how I fell short. In that one comment, she showed me what I was bringing to the table, just by being me. No effort required, just be myself.

So, once they find out who I really am … they won’t run away. Some will go: “Meh, not for me”, some will say: “That’s nice!”, and every now and then somebody will go “Fuck yeah!”

So simple, but such a big difference.