I’ve always known that I enjoyed loving people. I’ve always known that I could do so even without knowing their names. The most important thing for me, above most other things, is whether or not I am open to them seeing ME as *I* am in the current moment. If I am able to let go, even for just a moment, to let them into me through my eyes for a second, then I have no choice but to accept and love them for all eternity. I do not know exactly when I chose this, but I have wanted to be unflinchingly affectionate toward other human beings for some time now. This doesn’t seem to have been the way in which I was molded as a youngster, but perhaps that perception of my upbringing is inaccurate. Perhaps, in reality, I was bred in love and embracing, despite the overarching memories of hostility and violence. Perhaps the one true thing that saved me from the heavier leaden truths of my childhood was my mother’s love for us…perhaps it always will be.
In any case, I grew up in such a way as to have viewed most physical touch from human-to-human-being as something that often led to future pain, namely physical violence and emotional turmoil. So often was my vibrant self torn down by the abuse I felt engulfed in that I came to perceive affectionate physical connection as a tool with which to shape others into manipulable creatures capable to do my own, self-serving biddings. Essentially, I complimented and flirted my way into niceties with other people as a means of pulling them in closer for use as protective sandbags between my own wounded self and the hurricane of secular violence. I padded my own insecurities with people who ate themselves satisfied only on the stories and bits of myself with which I selectively chose to feed them. I endeared people toward me with direct statements that demanded immediate sympathy and blind-minded solace. I was, indeed, a dejected and pitiful creature, but not pitiable for the reasons that I was staging.
I was pitiable in the very essence of my conception of life with regards to human interaction. I thought that, because the vast majority of people in my life had been abusers, EVERYONE around me must also be, and it was therefore the responsibility of someone knowing this to seek not to be the abused, but first to be the abuser.
Articulated Jargon 