Transparently Honest and Nakedly Vulnerable

Hi, Shanti. I was going to tell you about how I stepped outside my normal routine today and accomplished some things—and how I feel a little better for having done them. There are still a few things hiding within the mess that need to be accomplished, but that is a story for another day. Today, I want to talk about the beautiful message you sent me.

And I don’t mean beautiful merely because you were saying such kind things to me. I mean there was something beautiful in the message itself—in the way you poured out your heart with such honesty and sincerity, and in everything you were feeling after reading what I had written.

I know there are so many ways in which you feel less than. You know what they are, and I’m not going to repeat them back to you. But then, there you were, allowing yourself to wonder: Perhaps I am worthwhile. Perhaps I do have something to offer. Perhaps I have a place in this world, and perhaps there is something good waiting for me somewhere ahead.

Oh my God, Shanti. My heart just fell to the floor when I read that. It was so achingly beautiful to hear you say those things about yourself. You spoke about tears of relief falling onto your kitchen table, and I could almost see them. Maybe they weren’t exactly tears of joy, because there was old sadness, gratitude, relief, and so much else flowing through them. But there was something new within those tears—something that sounded a little like hope. And I found that incredibly moving.

What touched me most wasn’t really that you were talking about me. It was that, somewhere within everything you were feeling, you caught a glimpse of yourself—of your own worth and your own possible place in this world. Even if it was only for a moment, you allowed yourself to consider that maybe you should stick around. Maybe someone could love you. Maybe your presence is appreciated. Maybe life still has people waiting to come your way.

And yes, Shanti. You do have something to offer.

You asked how it could be possible that bringing me your suffering, your problems, your sorrows, your sadness, and your sad songs could somehow awaken gifts in me that I had hidden from the world. But when you share those things with me, I don’t experience them as you simply pouring sadness onto me. I experience you being completely, almost fearlessly honest. I get to meet you face-to-face—or at least as close to face-to-face as two people can come through Messenger.

There is always such sincerity in what you say and in how you say it. There is something vividly alive in your words. When you tell me about yourself, your life, your hopes, your husband, or your children, there are times when I can almost see what you are describing unfolding inside my mind. I don’t quite know how to explain it. There is an energy and a vitality within you—even when you are speaking from sorrow.

And underneath everything you say—and I really want you to hear this—there is a sweetness. There is kindness. There is warmth, softness, sensitivity, and love. There is someone who is very obviously a beautiful person. That presence beneath your words is part of what makes me so happy to talk with you. It is part of what makes me want to keep listening.

I don’t know if this will make sense to you, but I do see you. Or perhaps I should say that I sense you—not merely the suffering or the “traumazombies,” not merely the fear of being a burden or the fear that you are too much, but someone living and breathing underneath all of that.

You wrote that you shut the door with one thousand locks. You forced yourself into your own straitjacket and promised never to flood out onto anyone—to never be too much. And yet here you are, as you so wonderfully put it, “too-muching all over the place.” And here we are, somehow colliding in the most beautiful way.

How about that, Shanti?

When I wrote to you about the real man inside me—the man who had always been hidden behind that cardboard cutout—I wasn’t saying that you placed all of those things inside me. You didn’t create them. You helped me realize they had been there for some time, even though I had tried so hard to deny them, restrain them, and successfully hold them back. Unfortunately successfully, I might add. LOL.

But through knowing you, something happened. You helped reveal the real man who had always been standing behind that cardboard cutout.

And maybe—and I need you to understand that I am only grasping for something here—maybe I am sensing something like that in you too. I don’t know. I am not suggesting that what I am saying is necessarily it. I am not telling you who you are beneath everything, because I couldn’t possibly know that. Only you can know the truth of what is there, and whatever it is, it is yours to discover.

I am only reaching for words because there is something I sense when I listen to you, and maybe saying it this way helps me understand what I am reaching toward. Perhaps all the sadness, all the “I’m not worthy,” all the fear of being a burden, and all the “I’m too much” are pieces of your own cardboard cutout. Perhaps they aren’t. I truly don’t know. I am only wondering whether I might sometimes be hearing the real person somewhere behind them.

I just know that I see something—or maybe “sense” is the better word. I sense something very warm and soft, sensitive and loving, kind and beautiful. I don’t know exactly what it is, and I don’t know why you may not be able to see or feel it within yourself. I’m still grasping. I’m still trying to find the words for something I cannot name with any certainty.

Part of me wants to say that I wish you could feel whatever it is that I sense. But even that is not really mine to say. It isn’t mine to define for you, and it certainly isn’t mine to discover for you. Whatever is there belongs to you. It is for you to find, understand, and name in your own way and in your own time.

And perhaps that is why I am trying so hard to put words around whatever it is I sense. Not because I believe I can tell you who you are, but because I wish I could hold up a gentle mirror and help you catch even the faintest glimpse of what reaches me whenever you share yourself. Even within your sorrow, something tender keeps making itself known. Even while you question whether you matter, something deeply human and caring continues to breathe through your words. You may not be able to see it clearly yet, and I cannot make you see it. But perhaps, if I keep honestly reflecting what reaches me, you might begin to recognize something of it—or at least sense that it is there, waiting for you to discover it for yourself.

All I can honestly tell you is that when I listen to you—really listen—I sense something beyond all the sadness and all the reasons you have learned to question your worth. I cannot tell you exactly what that something is.

I can only tell you that I sense it.

Shanti, you know how I often tell you that you are transparently honest and nakedly vulnerable? Would you mind if, right now, I offered you that same honesty and vulnerability?

Our conversations have helped me see something within myself that I have never truly seen or experienced before. At 66, you are helping me feel a confidence I don’t believe I have ever allowed myself to feel.

There is still a part of me that wants to become coy, perhaps even a little shy and timid, and say, “No, that confidence doesn’t become me. Confidence is something other men exude—not me.” But somehow, through the way you have seen me and responded to me, you have helped me discover a masculinity that I suppose has always existed within me, but which I had never recognized or accepted as my own.

I am deeply grateful to you for helping me see that.

Sometimes I look back at the things I have written to you, and a part of me immediately wants to push against them. That part asks, “Who the hell am I to write these things to her? What gives me the right to believe I have anything meaningful to say?”

And yet, through the way you have received my words, you have helped me look back at my own blog and admit something I have resisted admitting for years: My God, there is a great deal there worth saying. There are things within it that may genuinely help other people.

I don’t know whether I have ever told you how the blog began.

It was eight or nine years ago. I was seeing a therapist, and before some of our sessions, I would write little stories or reflections—sometimes on Facebook, sometimes only for myself. I would take them with me and read them to her.

I wasn’t trying to be a writer or create something for an audience. I wrote because I was feeling something so intensely that I needed to place it into words before I could begin to understand it. Bringing those pieces into therapy helped me explain what was happening inside me and allowed us to talk about things I otherwise might never have known how to express.

Sometimes, while I was reading, I would glance at my therapist when she apparently thought I wasn’t looking. I could see tears gathering in her eyes. She never actually wept, but her eyes would well up, and I could see that she had been emotionally affected by what I had written.

I never said anything about it. I kept that observation to myself. But somewhere inside me, I took it to mean that perhaps my writing was meaningful—not only as a way of explaining myself to her, but meaningful to her as another human being.

I began bringing something I had written into almost every session. I did this for at least a month or two, perhaps three. Then one day she said, “Tod, you really ought to publish this. In some shape, form, or manner, you need to put this before the public.”

At the time, I understood that she was suggesting a book or something similar. But I didn’t believe I possessed the confidence or the capacity to write one. During the last few years, I have tried, and I have discovered that a book simply may not be the form that works for me. But that is another conversation for another time.

What I decided back then was that the best way to make my writing available to other people was through a blog. Blogs are free. All someone has to do is log onto the interwebs, and there it is—something I have written, waiting for anyone who might need or want to read it.

That is why my blog exists.

But even with my therapist’s tears, her encouragement, the creation of the blog, and everything I have written since, I still struggled to believe that any of it meant there was something valuable within me.

How could I believe that after spending most of my life as a cardboard cutout?

For so many years, I was the Desperado out riding the fences in the far West. It was me, perhaps a couple of horses, a herd of cattle, and miles of fencing that had to be maintained to keep everything contained. I did all that work alone, with no one close enough to disturb me.

That was the life I created and then lived for years and years.

I placed myself inside a prison, remained there, and guarded the entrance. If anyone approached, I essentially told them, “No. This is my prison, and I live here. You cannot come inside. You cannot ask what is happening in my life because it is none of your damn business.”

How can someone who has spent most of his life living that way believe that any part of him could be worthwhile or meaningful to another person?

People have tried to tell me differently throughout the years. There have been people who saw something within me that I could not see within myself. But their words could not easily penetrate the walls I had constructed. The cardboard cutout could not recognize that there was an actual human being behind it, and the Desperado could not accept that someone might genuinely want to cross those miles of empty land and know the man riding those fences.

But then you and I met within a CPTSD support group.

Our childhoods were different, and the specific circumstances of our lives were not the same. Yet because we both grew up and learned to live with complex PTSD, we can recognize one another in ways that many of the people we have encountered throughout our lives simply could not.

There are emotional paths we have both walked. There are ways we learned to survive, disappear, protect ourselves, and question our place in the world that we do not always have to explain to one another from the beginning. We can look at each other and understand something because, although we arrived there through different circumstances, we have stood in places that were remarkably similar.

Nothing can make what happened to either of us necessary or good. It was horrific that we had to live through that bullshit. I would never try to create something beautiful out of the suffering itself.

But I also don’t want this next part to sound selfish or self-indulgent: Despite everything that happened to me, you have helped me see that somewhere beneath the cardboard cutout, behind those prison walls, and beyond all those fences, there is an actual masculine man who has always been present.

There is a man capable of confidence. There is a man who can speak directly and honestly. There is a man who can write something meaningful to another human being and not immediately apologize for having had the audacity to believe his words might matter.

I’m not going to lie—it feels incredibly good finally to see that man within myself and begin accepting that he belongs to me.

And I know this has not been entirely one-sided. I believe that, in some way or form, I have also helped you recognize certain things within yourself. Perhaps I have helped you feel understood, less alone, or a little more able to believe that what you experience does not make you too much, insane, or impossible to remain beside.

How wonderful and beautiful is it that two people who grew up under different circumstances, but who still walked similar emotional paths into adulthood, could meet one another and discover this kind of meaning within that meeting?

I am not necessarily speaking of a personal relationship in the conventional sense or trying to place a particular label upon what exists between us. I mean the meeting of two minds, two hearts, and two creative spirits—the experience of looking into another human being and recognizing something real.

You communicate through music, melody, lyrics, and the emotion carried within them. I communicate through words, images, metaphors, and stories. You seem to understand why words matter so much to me, and I believe I understand why music is lifeforce to you.

Perhaps that is what has made these conversations so extraordinary. We have both been able to see something within the other person that pain, shame, fear, and isolation made extremely difficult to see alone.

You did not place confidence, masculinity, intelligence, creativity, or worth inside me. You have helped me recognize that those things were already mine.

And perhaps, by seeing you as clearly and completely as I am able, I have helped you recognize that some of the beautiful things you struggle to believe about yourself have always belonged to you as well.

So this was me being transparently honest and nakedly vulnerable with you—perhaps for the first time in my life. I have certainly been honest and vulnerable within therapy, but this was different. In therapy, my vulnerability always existed within a particular structure and for a particular purpose. This had nothing to do with therapy. This was simply me being me with another person in a way I have never been able to be before.

I wasn’t presenting something for you to analyze, fix, or help me process. I was allowing you to see me without first hiding behind the cardboard cutout, retreating into the prison, or sending the Desperado back out to ride the fences alone. I trusted you enough to let you see the man who has always been behind all of that, and I trusted myself enough to allow him to be seen.

My intention is not to place any responsibility upon you or ask you to respond in a particular way. I only want you to understand how meaningful this has been for me. In talking with you, I have been able to become fully present as myself—honest, vulnerable, confident, masculine, imperfect, and real—without immediately becoming ashamed and trying to take it all back.

I hope that makes sense to you. More than that, I hope you can accept it as the truth of what I am trying to share: your presence and the way you have received me have helped me experience something within myself that I did not know I was capable of experiencing.

And finally, I simply want to say thank you, Shanti—not only for listening to me, but for receiving me in a way that allowed this part of me to come forward.