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As we walked, I three times bit my tongue and did not tell a story that wasn’t true.

Do you remember when I used to do that, when we were little? I’d be willing to bet that you didn’t notice more often than you did, when I did it, because even then it was a special talent of mine: storytelling. I can’t tell a lie to save my life, not when I think of it as lying. But if I’m telling a story, ah, a story is my favorite thing.

Since I was young, my overactive imagination has been able to come up with the story that would best fit any situation. And, more often than I like to think, that story then comes right out my mouth, like it was true. Sometimes I’ll phrase it in “I read once,” or “my friend told me,” but more often, I just say “one time, I.” And it isn’t true.

It alarms me how much dishonesty comes out of my mouth when I’m not paying attention to it. These days I’ve gotten much better about the straight-out lying that my “storytelling” really is, but I still find myself creating some artistic embellishment pretty much all the time. It seems like I can hardly help doing it; the best I can do is catch myself each time and revise. I’m trying to do that now, even with exaggerations that are obviously untrue: “We were in traffic for like, six years. No, that’s an exaggeration. We were in traffic for twenty minutes.” I don’t know what the deal is with all this. I think of myself as an honest person. And these days, I can have a conversation where I admit to fears and desires, but I still make up stories when I think they’ll sound good. Let me phrase that more honestly: I still lie when I feel like it.

And I don’t like that at all.

I think it’s related again to my lack of real confidence: I want people to think I am witty and brave and full of good stories, so I make up lots of good stories (they are lies) where I am witty or brave. I am afraid that my real experiences aren’t valid, or aren’t exciting enough, or aren’t cool enough. Something. Not enough. I’m not sure where I got that idea, that I wasn’t good enough for the world.

Because sometimes, sometimes I feel like the world and I just aren’t compatible. I feel that we simply don’t fit together: I am too big for the world, and it is equally too big for me. Those days, I don’t feel like I’m not enough, I feel like I’m far, far too much. Like if I fully unfolded, I would reach to the corners of the universe, press them out, pop all the seams and spill out into – what? Into the place beyond time, beyond space, into infinity and omega, into god.

This is my struggle: I am concurrently filled with the fear that I am not enough, and the fear that I am too much. They are both tied to the exterior I have built: It is shinier and sparklier and more outgoing than the interior, but it is also more detached, and a whole hell of a lot less intense. So when I get close to someone new, I am afraid that they will discover that I’m not all I’m cracked up to be, and also and equally afraid that they will be overwhelmed with the intensity of my actual reality. Both of these things seem to happen after a while in my relationships: The boys get a strange combination of bored and besieged, or so at least it seems to me. Perhaps it is only my paranoia bringing things into being, but there must be some truth to it. I fixate, and I throw myself fully into relationships (friendships, too, but to a lesser degree) to the point that other things in my life often fade into obscurity. And at the same time, as I become comfortable, I stop showing off, let the shyness show.

You tell that me you loved me even then, when the shyness and the gangly and the awkward were all I had, before I learned how to keep my elbows and my hair in check, back when smart wasn’t sexy and neither was I. Perhaps then I should believe you when you say you love me all the way through. Perhaps I should learn from that.

All the fear comes from this creation I’ve made of myself, the veneer, the falsity. And I don’t know how to dismantle it, but it seems as though I ought to. Because I’m creating a persona to hide the inside part of me which I fear is too fragile but also too strong. In my mind I see an image, like stained glass maybe, of bright bright colors and also deep darkness, full of contrast and light and blackness. And over that I place a layer of vellum, or acetate, or tracing paper or something to lighten the dark parts and dim the bright ones, to make it a spectrum that will be accepted by the eyes of the people I pass, the people who might pass judgment upon me. And I decorate the vellum with glitter and markers and sequins to make it the right kind of pretty. And every time somebody picks it up, they see paper and glitter and stars, and don’t know that there’s glass underneath, shining. And I am afraid that they will drop it and let it break, or peel back the paper and see right through the glass, or get tired of holding it because it’s heavier than they expected it to be. So I put more glitter on top and try to match the pattern underneath, and I end up snatching it back when they get too close to touching the thing itself. Me.

I wonder if the people who really love me are the ones who somehow just skipped over the whole paper-glitter-marker ordeal and guessed at the glass underneath, somehow even saw it. The ones who knew me before I tried to make it up, the ones who stayed long enough to let me get comfortable enough to show them.

I’m not sure how to let the glass just be glass, how to have faith that my own native, innate pattern of light and dark are worth their own regard. I want to let go of the illusion, but I’m afraid I can’t even really see it anymore, afraid that it has grown into my skin and bones, part of my muscle memory, like when she had a cast as a kid and tried to scratch it with a piece of coat hanger, and then lost the coat hanger down the cast, and then the skin grew up over it and when they took the cast off it was gone. Still not part of her, not really, but hard to remove, impossible to remove without new blood.

I suppose I should just prepare myself for bleeding. But even then, I don’t know where to start. Besides that it’s scary to think of going back to how I was before – shy, paralyzed with fear sometimes, so awkward all the time – besides that I have now all these friends who know only who I’ve become, besides that I’m afraid of starting over: I just don’t know where to look first, what to let go of, what to change.

The best thing I can think to do is just to start being more aware of what’s really going on inside, be mindful of when some part of me is uncomfortable, and try to honor that. Stop making up stories, stop forcing myself to speak, stop trying so goddamn hard all the time. (Honesty: I’m afraid I’ll lose all my friends. If I thought that the crystal center of me was worthwhile, I wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.)

But better to be left with only the few who really know me than live constantly afraid that the rest will find me out, and leave anyway.

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