I never learnt how to dance or an illusion of vulnerability

ℹ️ Quick note

Initially, my idea with this blog was more to share my views and opinions on certain issues with the hope they’d be slightly original and somewhat interesting to the 5 friends that decide to read this. Today’s post, however is much more personal, and I feel this is necessary for it’s meaning to come across clearly, if that is even possible. This doesn’t mean it’s easy, I have learnt to talk about this stuff over the past 5 or 6 years and I am at a point where I feel like I’m capable of expressing it in a way that is understandable, but it probably won’t be concise. If you decide to read through it, please bear with me, I do think there are some interesting points and specially, some interesting questions waiting at the end.

If you were to ask one of my peers from primary school about me, they’d probably have a hard time remembering enough to give you a coherent picture of the little silly guy I was. Many of the people that’d be capable of saying something, grew up with me almost up until the end of high school and their perception of me is likely to be muddled by time. A thing you’d probably hear repeated, however, is that I was quite studious or academically inclined.

Have that same conversation with my parents and you’d probably get a very different answer: I barely studied, I left everything for the very last minute and yet, it is true, school stuff came very naturally to me. A lot of it is probably down to how my parents raised me through early childhood, the rest probably just the result of the genetic lottery. Needless to say, this made going though primary school, and later high school, relatively easy. And by this, I mean only the passing of subjects, as almost everything else I don’t remember as fondly.

Whether it was that ease with the academic stuff or a genuine lack of social skills, something about me made me an easy target for bullying and isolation. I can’t claim I had it bad by any means, as I have seen others suffer much worse, but the reality of the situation was that most of my relationships with people my age where shaky and unstable, one day they’d be friendly, the next belittle me or insult me or straight up hit me.

This, probably coupled with the atmosphere at home, meant that for most of my adolescence, I never went out with friends. From the age of 12 to the age of 16, I spent most of my afternoons playing Minecraft, and that only changed for the following two years because I started dating someone who became my only social connection outside of school. For almost all of my teenage years, I didn’t go out, I didn’t get invited to parties, to hangouts, to lunch with a friend. I felt pretty lonely. I couldn’t vibe with the music at the time, and so I never learnt how to dance.¹

Drawing distance.

During the last few years of high school I started dissociating, and treating my interactions with others more like a videogame, where I wasn’t really myself, but merely a character that I presented to others. This mental barrier helped me create a sort of fictional distance between the opinions of others and the way I felt. And slowly, social interactions became tolerable. Humor was also a huge part of it, making people laugh, felt like the realization of this constructed characters purpose, and thanks to this emotional distance² I had created, it didn’t bother me so much whether they were laughing with me or at me.

I had a bit of a change of attitude once I finally graduated high school: feeling at once both free from the grasp of the people that I had grown up with and their influence, and a pressure to make sure a similar situation would not repeat itself, I started talking to more people (Maybe 10 in total, but that’s a lot for me). For a while, it felt freeing to think I could mostly be anyone I wanted, there was no longer the burden of my past weighing on me, and so it kinda felt like I could rebuild my personality from the ground. This is all a very idealized and perhaps childish way of describing it, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt.

Somewhat surprisingly, even for me at the time, I slowly started opening up, more than I ever had during high school. I still wasn’t comfortable being vulnerable with anyone, so I mostly masked everything as a joke. The then members of the student association I joined might have the most accurate retelling of that period. Of particular importance was my first breakup, which I milked thoroughly, sometimes to the point of exhaustion for laughs and giggles, which sometimes seemed to heal the very real pain I was feeling.

Here I’ll make a slight pause for two important and related things: First, what I’m trying to describe is more a picture of my overall feelings back then than an accurate depiction of how I interacted with people. I’m trying to build a coherent narrative, but of course, not all my interactions where the same. Which brings me to point two: The few genuine interactions I had at the time left me, more than anything, feeling misunderstood. There was something I was trying to convey, and it felt like nobody quite got it, so I grew frustrated with my ability to communicate, and in a way, gradually stopped trying.

³

However truthful I was, I never felt like I was really honest. The content might have been present in what I was telling, but it always felt like telling someone else’s story. I had distanced myself enough that it felt like I wasn’t involved. It did feel good, however, to have friends to hang out with, and so, for a time, I felt like I was finally who and where I wanted to be.

During my years at uni I, as part of a student association, gave a few talks about programming. I found out that I enjoyed teaching and public speaking, and that a good portion of the people that attended thought I was pretty good at it. However, whenever I helped people understand things individually, I felt like there was a communication barrier. Many times, no matter how I explained something, I could’t shake the feeling that the other person wasn’t really grasping it. Sometimes it was a lack of attention, the same way many people spend a lot of their time in a conversation simply thinking of what to say next. Other times, it felt more like a barrier: the way I understood things seemed completely incompatible with the way the other person processed information. And so I wondered: How much of this translates to normal, every day conversation?

⁴

I just can’t stop talking about my semester abroad.

On the first semester of my fourth year of university I went on an Erasmus. Much happened in those three years, another relationship, part of my friend group graduating and leaving, and in a way it’s all important, but I’m trying to keep this short.

Going on an Erasmus was the second time I felt like I could choose to be anybody. My time in university had solidified this character I had built in peoples minds, but this time I was not necessarily unhappy, perhaps simply, growing bored. This new chance to meet people and to rebuild myself felt short too, and I had gained some confidence during these years.

At the same time, I started watching a lot of video essays on YouTube. A video from Shaun about the two bombs dropped in Japan at the end of WWII pulled me into the “breadtube” sphere and I spent a lot of my time alone at home listening to Big Joel or Abigail from Philosophy Tube speak. This did somewhat change my views on a bunch of things, but primarily, it taught me the language of a new way to express myself.

During my stay in Sweden I became completely and entirely sincere. Almost to a fault. I was willing to share anything, so long as it was good conversation. And people, some more than others, seemed to really enjoy it. I tried to talk to people with complete transparency, about what I thought, how I felt, what interested me, and in return, I got some really interesting conversations. Some people, was my impression, felt safer talking about themselves, with the version of me that was comfortable talking about himself.

And so finally, we get to what I wanna talk about. You see, interacting with people this way felt great, and I got to know some pretty awesome people this way. I felt happy with who I had become. But this feeling that I was simply playing a character, choosing the best thing to say to get the most interesting answer back, almost as if gaming conversations and choosing a path in a dialog tree; that feeling, never disappeared. At times, everything felt planned, premeditated, crafted to appease, even as I shared some pretty intimate parts of my story.

In conversation, a dance.

As I came back to Spain from Sweden, I pretty quickly reverted back to the version of me I felt like everyone expected, and for a while I felt trapped. With time, as I met some new faces, parts of who I’d been would sometimes come out. Particularly in private conversation, I’d allow myself to go back to this me that now only existed in my head. And yet it’s never felt the same.

At one point, I dropped my inner expectations and started worrying less about the content of conversations and more about the aesthetic. I’ve always loved to play devil’s advocate, and I have developed a natural tendency to disagree with people if only to squeeze the most out of their opinions and stories. So lately, in many conversations, I’ve started look for wild shifts in focus, strange or controversial opinions and, still, moments of complete sincerity, in hopes of simply having fun, tickling my brain with the expressions of amusement or confusion of the person I am speaking with, the silences and the uncomfortable moments.

⁵

I’ve seen what isolation and loneliness can do to people, and I’m deeply afraid of it. And still, to different degrees, a lot of my friendships and relationships with people feel like performances put on with the purpose of not being left alone. I’m approaching times of big decisions and I’m afraid I’ll have nobody to rely on when they come, so I dance terrified, in search of an understanding that I know I cannot get.

Not even my mirror talks back to me.

The idea for making this post was born after a couple of conversations I had during the last couple of weeks. I was feeling frustrated again with the apparent impossibility of being understood, and wanted to write a little about this childish idea I had of treating many intimate conversations as a dance in search of meaning. I wanted to have a big point about this sort of absurdist attitude towards personal connections and the non-existence of this meaning that I speak of.

It has taken me three days to finish writing this and, as I re-read it and try to finish the last section, nothing in it makes sense. I tried to transmit a bittersweet feeling about enjoying the aesthetics of human conversation while feeling completely misunderstood and, in the end, I find that I can barely even understand myself. I have written a pity story about the ways in which I have felt misinterpreted throughout my life and my attempts to fix it, in hopes of providing a somewhat interesting or original idea. However, now, reading it, it seems whiny and even fraudulent, going on and on about the same thing while offering a depressing and heavily biased view into my life. And yet, this feels like the appropriate ending.