Strangers Called It Home

Before I published some of my poems, I tried to make them behave.

I softened them. Criticized them. Sometimes threw them out.

I could write a sentence that felt true and then spend longer judging myself for it than I had spent finding it.

Someone would think it was about them. Someone would make assumptions. Someone would see how much I felt and decide something about me that I had been trying, for years, to disprove.

I sound pathetic.

Sometimes I worked up the nerve to post anyway.

Then I cringed.

At me.

What embarrassed me was how badly I wanted to be understood.

I wanted to say that something had hurt me without watching that admission become another reason to question me. But even alone, writing, I could hear myself doing it.

Maybe I was being unfair.
Maybe I had misunderstood.
Maybe this was another feeling I should have managed privately.

I would read a poem back and think, I sound pathetic.

Sometimes I threw it away.

I wish I could say I only discarded the poems that weren’t good. Sometimes I discarded the ones that said exactly what I meant.

I knew how to write longing. I could make devotion beautiful. There was room for what I missed, what I understood, what I could forgive.

It was harder to leave a sentence on the page that suggested I had deserved more.

Because I wanted more. There. Even writing that, I want to explain myself.

I wanted clarity. I wanted consideration. I wanted my hurt to be allowed into the conversation without having to arrive with an apology.

And I wanted someone to know me beyond how carefully I could phrase all of that.

I had learned to choose words according to what might happen after I said them. Certain words could end a conversation. Others might keep a possibility open. When I still hoped for connection, I became careful with anything that might cost me the chance of it.

Eventually, I didn’t need someone else in the room to feel that caution.

It was there when I wrote.

My earlier work stayed obedient. I could describe pain while still protecting someone else from what the description might reveal. I made room for their circumstances, their struggles, their reasons.

Then I looked at what remained of mine.

Having a diagnosis made this harder to untangle. I knew I had things to take responsibility for. I was working on them. I also knew what it felt like to explain my distress and hear it understood almost entirely through what was already known about me.

Anxious. Borderline.

I began bringing those words into conversations with myself. Was something hurtful happening? Was I responding to it? Could both my history and the present circumstances matter?

I could ask those questions endlessly.

What I struggled to say was simpler.

That hurt me.

Without immediately following it with everything I might have done wrong.

I missed being authentic. I missed the intimacy of my words. I knew they could make people happy when they were obedient, but I wanted to find out whether someone could recognize me when I let them say what I had been leaving out.

Maybe the heart of me would reach one person.

That would have been enough.

So I posted.

Then I cringed at myself for hoping.

There wasn’t one person who changed everything. It was one person here, another person there.

“This.”

“You read my mind.”

They were small replies. I had spent so much time making those feelings smaller that I didn’t quite know what to do when someone recognized them at their full size.

Those readers didn’t know my whole history. They couldn’t settle what had happened. But they knew something about wanting an answer. About being hurt. About feeling ashamed of a need that would not disappear just because we had learned to phrase it politely.

I had expected to have to explain myself.

Sometimes, they understood before I did.

I wish I could say their recognition immediately became my own.

It didn’t.

I still worried about what people would think. Still softened things. Still felt embarrassed by how much of myself had found its way onto the page.

I hadn’t had much chance to practice standing behind those feelings elsewhere. Sometimes the poem could say something I still struggled to say in conversation.

But I went back to the page.

As I wrote more honestly, I began giving my own experience space I had once reserved for everyone else’s. I let the hurt remain. I let a need be a need before asking whether it was convenient.

And people kept recognizing themselves there.

Something I had almost deleted could give another person words for what they had been carrying. I thought about that when I wanted to throw the next poem away.

For a time, I looked at other people and thought everyone had someone.

Everyone had a person. A love. Somewhere to put the things they couldn’t carry alone.

Of course I knew lives were more complicated than they looked. But knowing that did very little for me when I felt alone. I could understand, intellectually, that other people suffered and still feel as though no one could possibly feel as horrible as I did.

Then I began hearing from them.

People who had been left in silence. People still trying to understand an ending that had never been spoken clearly. People carrying questions they felt embarrassed to keep asking.

So much of what I had questioned through the lens of borderline was familiar to people whose lives and histories were different from mine.

They knew this pain, too.

I had spent so long wondering what my feelings revealed about me that I hadn’t understood how much they connected me to other people.

There were more of us than I knew.

Hurting deeply. Getting through the day. Wanting someone to hear what we were struggling to say.

Sometimes I wrote a poem hoping someone would understand me. Then someone answered, and I understood something about them.

“This.”

“You read my mind.”

“Me too.”

I began to feel more heard than silenced. I don’t mean that the silence stopped mattering. I mean that it was no longer the only response I had to measure my voice by.

I wrote the thing I believed made me unlovable.

Strangers called it home.

And slowly, the comments became more than reassurance about my words. They were people letting me know they were there.

I had wanted to be authentic somewhere.

I hadn’t known how many people were waiting for somewhere, too.

— Amy Steinhauser