How long before someone becomes a burden too heavy for you to carry? Or how long until you yourself become that burden? It has been a question that has been plaguing me ever since I had the conscience to make friends. But it has been bothering especially after I made friends who I got close enough to be truly vulnerable with. Suddenly it is like I want to share my sorrows with them and seek support but it is simultaneously accompanied by the worry, “how much is too much? How long until they leave or decide that you’re probably not worth their time?” Not very encouraging thoughts, but then when have I ever cheerleadered (I doubt this is even a word but it is still a cool word to use) myself on?
It is quite funny because when I was younger, I was constantly told by my grandmother that I found it easy to make friends. She had seen me at the swimming pool one day and I had just managed to catch a couple of girls with whom I was talking (in retrospect, I believe one of those girls didn’t really like me that much and wished I would just leave her be). When I came back to the house, my grandmother just smiled at me and said that, with that ability to talk to everyone and anyone, I would go places. It is quite true, people can go places with the ability to talk to others, too bad that as time passed and I grew more aware of myself (a bane it truly was), and with that came the horrible withdrawing into myself that I had to effect.
I think a major part of this change in my behaviour was also the fact that I was constantly reminded, in many spheres of my life, that I was worthless and had things that were undesirable and worthy of scorn. It started from inside the family to outside and well, these were the only two places I existed in (or rather, could exist in). I never got the opportunity, I believe, to form deep friendships because I never let myself feel like I could show or should show vulnerability. I had to stick to my role, the joker, the one the joke’s on all the time, because well, surely everyone loved the joker right? So with nothing else in me that could ever be loved or liked, best to make myself into something that will surely be. What a farce.
I think until now, part of being the laughing stock of anything at all only reminds me of my self-imposed typecasting. It only brings to the forefront the times when I had to consciously make myself the joke because otherwise I might not be loved as much. And so I think I unconsciously try to be the dumb person who fumbles and mumbles and is a bumbling babbling baboon because I have, for so long, attached my identity to it that to not have it is to feel empty. There, I have said it, I cannot imagine myself as being a non-joker or the laughing stock of a group. And no, this is not about my own sense of humour and ability to make people laugh by smart comments, it is being the cause for other people’s laughs by degrading myself (at least in my head) and being dumb. And when people reinforce it, the performative just becomes all the more believable, reified, if I may. It is a messed up logic, but don’t we all want to feel loved at the end of the day?
And that’s my memory for the day.
The Memory Of A Storyteller 