Falling in Love With Emotional Nakedness
“love is built
from the hands,
from the ache between ribs,
fingers burning their identity into my stomach.
love is built, grown,
swallowing sweetness like sunshine
the base of my throat is rich with your construction.”
It has become easier to be both strong and courageous lately. Something about the way I have cared for my roots this year, deep in my soul, has sewn me back up and made me fall deeply in love with myself once again.
I remember when that was not the case – when I loathed the body I was trapped in, when I hated the way my mind calculated and understood the world, when I didn't understand why I was drowning. I was disjointed and shattered, and I attracted disjointed and shattered people. Rupi Kaur has a line in her poem Home about feeling like fresh meat, gutted like a cantaloupe, her insides scraped clean by the fingers of a man who stripped her of everything she loved about herself. I remember reading that line and feeling the bile rise in my throat – I knew exactly what she meant, and my stomach turned over with bitter remembering. A terrible year and a terrifyingly abusive relationship when I was fifteen had left me feeling hollowed out, gutted, scraped violently bare.
Bare. That word has so much opportunity for beauty, but it had only ever shown me its ugliness. I felt bare in the absolute worst sense of the word. I found a passage that I wrote in my journal from that terrible year that dragged me straight back into what it felt like to be so gut-wrenchingly gutted, bare, terrified, afraid.
The deep thudding of your dripping black heart twists its rhythm into my blood-stained fingers, swollen with your ashy breath. My skin screams, 'do not touch me', but you do not listen. My temples have never known this kind of silence. The bright yellow tint from the streetlight reflects itself onto the shadowed pavement and I catch myself holding that moment in my hands, waiting for the wind to take it from me. When will this be over? I don't feel anything anymore.
Is this what love is supposed to feel like?
I hit my lowest low that year. Recovering from the shame and grief that came with that kind of emotional and physical abuse sapped every ounce of energy from me – I even lost my ability to speak. I didn’t speak to anyone for many, many days. I just slept. I went to school in the same pair of gray sweatpants and gray hoodie every day, dragged myself through seven hours of being alive until I could slump myself back into bed. I cried and cried, for hours, every day, until one day, I just stopped. I went from feeling everything to feeling nothing.
Gutted
like
a cantaloupe.
The hollowness nearly killed me.
Nearly.
I eventually taught myself how to put my hands on my hips and determinedly look up at the glimmer of sky at the top of the hundred-foot-hole that I had buried my mind into. I put one foot in front of the other and aimed for progress, not perfection. I leaned into loving myself, hard, because if I didn’t, I knew I wouldn’t make it out alive. I found strength in the stillness. My favorite color shifted from gray to yellow, and the scared, trembling girl who couldn’t open her mouth to save her own life finally stumbled out into the sunlight.
This year, I hit different kinds of lows. Heartbreak knocked the wind out of my chest for several months. I was terrified that I would fall back into the pit that I just described, terrified that I’d slip back into a shell of myself.
But I surprised myself – I didn’t slip.
I felt bare, but this time, it wasn’t because I felt violated and stripped of who I was. I felt bare because suddenly, everyone could feel the deep heaviness in my energy – everyone could see how hard of a time I was having. This kind of heartbreak had made me, to put it simply, deeply, deeply sad. However, instead of being invasive and upsetting, this kind of bare felt authentic. Sad, but authentic. Better than before. Better than I was expecting.
This time around, I chose to accept that grief would be the most important tool towards my own emotional recovery, instead of shoving down the sadness until I felt nothing at all. I had to feel sad in order to feel better. Feeling bare no longer felt ugly or intrusive. Bare felt naked– it felt vulnerable, a little scary, but beautiful. I didn’t know that feeling beautiful in emotional nakedness was possible before this year.
Everyone knew I was hurting, but no one turned their backs in disgust or embarrassment like I was afraid they would - and this was the difference between the two experiences. The people I knew in high school also could see that I was hurting, but they took advantage of that. Took advantage of me.
This new, different kind of sadness was received in a totally different way. I was hugged a little deeper and loved a little harder, by many people, all at once. And day by day, I fell back in love with my mind and body. I did the best I could with what I knew, and slowly, a little bit every day, I started to feel so incredibly full in my sense of self that I could look at the world without anxiety or fear.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds – I think that’s bullshit. You have to get up on your own and start to heal them yourself. Waiting around for the universe to magically fix you won’t do anything. It does take time to get up and shake off the hurt, but you have to determinedly do it yourself. Always work on yourself patiently, gently, kindly, and compassionately, but do it firmly and actively.
I’ve learned how to love deeply again - how to care about someone while taking care of yourself, how to feel beautifully bare with somebody else. How incredibly wonderful it is to watch the acceptance that follows emotional nakedness; the willingness to understand before seeking to be understood from the people you love. Loving someone who makes you feel completely safe in the exposed, raw feeling of being alive is spectacular. You can fall in love with your nakedness, and it will take your breath away with sweet familiarity.