Kasu, if you are reading this then...well, you are, I guess. First step.
Before we go further, I would like to ask one thing of you.
You can close this now, and stop reading. I am giving you a way out. I do not think less of you now and I will not think less of you for doing so.
But if you decide to read further, then please promise me that you will see it through. That you'll read it all.
I put myself into the things I do. I make myself vulnerable for the people that are dear to me. You are no exception to that. This is no exception to that. This is a letter; it is not a lecture. It is not a reprimand.
So. Here we go.
[[Continue on, if that's what you want.->1]]
I have taken a long time, from my point of view, to write this; I have shied away from it in its various stages. I was not yet ready to write it in a way I thought would be best for you to see.
But now I know you a little better than I did, and I write to you in the hope I can reach you.
I will say frankly: you worry me. Or rather: I am worried for you. The things you do and say do little to ease my fears for your wellbeing.
(It's when you say you're fine that I worry most of all.)
I know you dislike this; you have told me that before. I won't say that I do this for your own good - that would be even more unlikeable. I am selfish, I am only human despite my best efforts; you are my friend, and I am offering my hand in the hopes that you might take it. I care about you very much, even if you don't want that to be so.
You might say, as you have said before - that these things I worry about are simply what depression does, that it is a result of what you have. And that is true. I don't discount it. But, I think, it is more than that.
I think I will start with a story, because in order to be vulnerable, you must share something of yourself. You must make the decision to connect. But because I am the one making this difficult demand, and because this is a format that means I cannot reply to you in the same way, I will tell you a little of myself and how it might relate to you.
[[I tell you this hoping that perhaps you will find something to relate to in it.->2]]
I tell this to you freely; I have many scars. People left their marks on me, whether I desired it or not, whether I noticed it or not; I was too little of a person to care, in the sense that an object doesn't care whether it breaks or not.
It has been years on, years away from those things and people, and I am still healing. I am still finding injuries that were left to rot. I ignored them all these years, thinking they were normal, or they'd heal by themselves; they festered without treatment. Those that did heal became scars.
But the years I had alone, where I dealt with those things by myself, thinking nobody would understand, not having the words to reach out, were the ones where I almost stopped existing. I was barely able to hold onto being the sliver of a person; I could hardly address my own problems that way.
Withdrawing into yourself, feeling isolated even when you're surrounded by people, is a defense mechanism. I became so numb to it that I thought it was normal not to feel anything; it's an attractive thing to be, especially when everything hurts so much that you can't bear it any more.
But being unable to feel anything, putting on different faces to present yourself to others, never connecting to them, is lonely. For me, it was unbearable; shutting my own feelings down made the emptiness in me grow. I felt like a monster, unable to feel things right, to feel things at all; the emotions I displayed, surely, were fake. I was convinced of that. I still struggle to throw it off.
I cried myself to sleep, too, in those days. But in the face of everything else, it's shockingly irrelevant.
You might be wondering what this has to do with you, maybe. And I don't know - maybe I'm wrong, about what troubles you.
But I see that same kind of numbness in you, more and more often recently, and that makes me afraid. Not of you, but for you.
[[That was a story, mostly about myself. This next part - is not a story. ->3]]
I understand only a little of why you hide yourself away from people, why you refuse to reach out to them (and you do, even though you have divulged a little about yourself; even those things feel as if you present only the parts you wish to be seen, and anything else is a mistake to reveal). But I think - it is enough for me to write this.
It's an entirely understandable reaction. In being hurt so badly, you retreat; any hint of a closer connection is only a future promise that nothing is set in stone. That you might be, or will be, hurt again. That possible risk, the someday promise of future pain, is too great for you to bear.
(It pains me, though I am sure it pains you more; it indicates a deep, deep wound, inflicted by someone who betrayed you.)
But - I am afraid of what it might do to you, consumed by fear, saying very little of what hurts you. What it might be already doing to you.
I have only my own perception to trust; it can be unreliable, even at the best of times. But it feels like you are far away now, that you have been getting more distant as time goes by.
It seems to me as if sometimes you are hanging by a thread. That you haven't healed much, if at all; that pieces of you are starting to fall away, or will fall away soon. That your old wounds are still fresh, and you're hiding them, unable or unwilling to heal.
It feels as if you could disappear so easily, sometimes. Like one day, you would fall to pieces, and be gone.
And your wounds are part of that. You have carried them for such a long time; they were there before I knew you.
As your friend, I ask that you allow yourself to close the distance between yourself and others, even just a little. Please allow others to take care of you, for once; to me you have always seemed sad, or lonely, in your own way.
You might say, again, that what I perceive is simply a result of errant brain chemicals. And I would say to you is that it is likely more than that.
[[I have tried not to make this too long.->4]]
Whether you think I have succeeded in that is up to you.
I write this not asking for you to take me into your confidence, or to make me part of your healing. Whether I am part of it or not matters little to me, as long as you begin to heal at all. Your wellbeing is important to me; I have no doubt that your other close friends feel the same way.
But you spoke of masks, once, of the fragmentation of your own identity, and I think that you still carry that burden with you, and it injured you more deeply than you like to speak of.
And that is fine. Confronting such a problem is hard.
Being vulnerable is terrifying. But you are surrounded by people who care, and I think they will not mind if you drop your defenses around them. If you take off your mask, every once in a while, no matter what the result of that may be. No matter what you think of who you are, deep inside.
I do not ask you to smile. I feel as if you have done too much of that, sometimes, saying that you are fine, and everything is all right. But I ask you to trust - in someone. In yourself, to have courage. I believe in you - I am sure others believe in you, too. I ask that you try to believe, at least a little, that they won't hurt you.
I ask, in short, that you risk something of yourself. That you hold onto someone's hand, or let someone hold onto you, before you are swept away.
I write this, too, in the knowledge that I may be wrong. I have talked at some length about how my senses are not terribly accurate. My perception is imperfect, to put it generously.
What parts of this you think are true, or false, accurate or not - that is for only you to know.
[[We are coming to the end of it, now.->5]]
If you have read all the way to the end, as I asked, I congratulate you.
I write this knowing it is likely you will turn me away again, rebuff my concerns. This is not an admonishment, or my blaming you; you have done it enough for it to become a pattern. I am good at pattern recognition, if nothing else. And it is perfectly understandable. It is easier to say that nothing is wrong.
There are other reactions possible; you may think I am wrong, or arrogant to say this, or that I overstep. Those, too, are understandable.
To me, it matters only that you read this. What you do with it, how you choose to react to it, and to me, are up to you.
You have said before that you view vulnerability as something that can be used to inflict pain; you are not the only one to think that. People have hurt me before, using what I told them against me. Sometimes they hated me. Sometimes they loved me. It came back to pain, in the end, no matter what it was.
But I put myself in this position, telling you more about the things that hurt me, in the hopes that it may help you understand more about yourself, no matter how faint. And because I trust you; I have no regrets about that.
[[Read again?->1]]