“How many different deaths I can die?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
There is a particular grief in being too much for someone who has capacity for too little. Not the dramatic grief of slammed doors and shattered plates. The small deaths. The daily ones.
Plath documented these deaths in her journals. The days she didn't write poetry because there was laundry. The mornings she looked in the mirror and saw "a nothing." The giving of everything--her brilliance, her body, her sanity--to a life that kept taking. To a husband who chronicles his affairs while she chronicles her desperate attempts to be enough for him.
To me, one of the small deaths is when you realize the ledger doesn't balance and it's not going to. When you understand that either you're impossible to understand--too complex, too crooked, too much--or you're simply not worth the effort it would take to understand you. And you don't know which one hurts more. Either way, you spend the rest of your life being misread. Or not read at all.
But do you know when it's time to go?
The small deaths are deceptive. They don't announce themselves. They accumulate. The acts of swallowing an invisible gulp to hold your tongue. The "I'm fine" that becomes your native language. The slow realization that you're pouring yourself into a vessel with holes in the bottom, and you've been doing it so long you've forgotten what it feels like to be full.
“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
But you expected. You expected because you were giving. Because the math made sense to you: if I offer everything, surely something will come back. If I become small enough, surely they will want to carry me. If I wait long enough, surely they will see me.
They don't see you. Or they see you and don't have the language to read you. Or they see you and choose not to. The small deaths are the days you spend wondering which one it is, not realizing that the wondering is itself the dying.
You know in the quiet. When the performance stops. When you're not trying to be the good partner, the understanding partner, the partner who doesn't make a fuss. When you're just yourself, exhausted, wondering how you became a stranger in your own life.
A stranger with beautiful things to want.
How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.
To be understood--really understood, the way you understand others. To be loved with the same intensity you bring. To be held, to be touched gently, to be chosen everyday. The way you lean in and listen for the meaning beneath the words. The way you track the pattern of their silences. The way you learn the architecture of their wounds and walk carefully around the sore places.
To be loved--precisely loved the way you love. With the kind of presence that makes the other person feel like they are the only room in the house worth entering. You want someone who gives as much as they take. Who fills as much as they drain. Who understands that love is not a transaction but a current, and it has to flow both ways or it becomes stagnant.
To be called beautiful--not just on the days you put effort in, not just when you're wearing the right clothes or making the right face or styling your hair according to someone's favorite idea of you. You want someone who finds the beauty in how you want them to find it. To call you beautiful simply because sometimes it is all that you need.
To have someone and be someone--to be claimed, fully, without reservation. To belong to someone and have them belong to you. To be claimed with pride just like you want the entire world to love them.
You want these things. You name them. You find yourself running toward every single person (or just one unfortunate person whose magnitude isn't as bright as yours) who you feel will understand you, who will love you the way you love, who will hold you without asking you to shrink first, who will fight for you even though it feels like a losing battle, who will climb mountains for you--
I don't know. I'm too sad to continue.