And other vulnerable feelings we should embrace

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, how everyone around me seems afraid to acknowledge they maybe, possibly, might actually care about someone. It’s especially bad in the dating scene in the states, where it seems more common to completely disregard someone you like than to tell them how you feel.

Which is so messed up. Liking someone, falling in love with someone, is beautiful. It’s cool as hell, and about the greatest gift you can give to one another.

The opposite, though, can be an absolute nightmare, especially if you’re prone to overthinking like I am. Oh no, she touched my arm. Does she like me? What does that mean? Wow, he’s sitting really close to me. Our legs keep brushing against each other. Is it love?

It’s ambiguous, and avoidant, and ruled by fear, and it’s dumb. I’m guilty of it too. Even as I write this, I find myself afraid of love.

It shouldn’t have to be this way. When did it start? At times it feels like I have more questions than answers, but let’s explore this complex feeling together through the extremely vulnerable and terrifyingly zoomed-in lens of my own life.

Ambiguity is the Death of Safety

I think we’ve all liked someone at one point or another but had no damn clue how they felt in return. It keeps you up at night and changes the filter on everything you feel throughout the day. There’s a gnawing nervousness in the back of your head, chattering away, consuming your brain from its neurons all the way to your spine.

Ambiguity can be a miserable feeling. Not knowing where you stand with someone is almost certain to cause distance. It easily leaves you feeling unsure, nervous, and unable to trust them or be yourself.

That’s because your survival instinct is kicking in to protect you. It’s scary. It feels like a threat.

Recently, I had a good friend of mine–a platonic friend, stated often and explicitly–confess to me she’d maybe not quite been totally honest about her sexuality. A fib, she’d called it. A little, innocent lie. One that opened the door to her being attracted to my gender, a door that I’d previously thought was firmly, and permanently, shut.

But she threw it open, embarrassed and nervous at first, deflecting and laughing as we sat in the bar together. It was an altogether romantic moment except that I had no fucking clue what was going on or how to react.

“So, how about this water we’re having,” she said to break the tension with a nervous laugh.

Charming. Absolutely charming. But I fumbled it, so deeply caught off guard. I was stuck in my head wrestling through a million different possibilities branching out before me while I tried to consider my next words.

We both took a drink of whiskey and laughed to ourselves under our breath, our eyes brushing past one another in fear of lingering or exposing any emotion.

So, wait, I thought. Does that mean she likes me? Or is at least attracted to me? Is that what she’s saying by confessing this lie to me? Why else would she do that, especially considering we have an otherwise close friendship and have confided in each other about a whole host of other deeply personal topics?

I don’t know. I have only a vague hint of intuition whispering in the back of my head, “you’ve felt this feeling before.” So I didn’t sleep last night–instead I stayed up thinking the night over, and over, turning it around in my head until I was so dizzy with thought I finally fell asleep as the morning light crept in my window.

Before she’d told me this, I knew where I stood: we were a close friendship–besties, so to speak–and there was nothing else to it. Sure we’d dance together and sometimes I’d feel her hand linger on my lower back, or we’d flirt and joke about delicate, intimate topics, but I always assumed it was playful banter. I pushed those moments aside in my head because I was absolutely fucking certain she didn’t feel that way towards me. She couldn’t, after all. She didn’t like my gender.

Except, wait. What?

So this little fib, and the subsequent admission to this little fib, has completely thrown me off balance. It’s unearthed feelings I firmly buried out of self preservation and mutual understanding. Nevermind the instant and electrifying connection I felt. Nevermind how she abandoned her previous dance partner for me, pursued me throughout the night, and made me feel wanted in a way I’d been longing to feel in my own melancholy, unfulfilled life. When we got coffee, it was platonic. When we’d dance, it was as friends. When we’d text little nothings about life in the early morning and late evening, it was just a nice, much-needed friendship that helped us both get through the day.

But, was it? I don’t know anymore. I can’t be sure. 

And then, I’ve never seen someone get out of my car so fast at the end of the night. After the drinks were done, and the flirting subsided, and the serious conversations about love and longing a recent memory, I pulled up behind her car and was wrenched from my spiraling train of thought.

“So, bye!” She said, flinging herself from my car. I laughed it off.

“I’m still going to get out and give you a hug,” I said with a smile. And I did. I held on for a moment too long before I felt the momentum of her body urging me to let her go, let her get in her car and forget she’d ever told me anything.

But I can’t forget. 

Because, and this is hard: I really fucking like her. I’ve always really liked her. From the moment I met her. For every moment since. When she travels, for example, I notice her absence, disproportionately so for how long I’ve known her. 

When my brother invites me out to a party he’s throwing, my first thought is, “I should invite her.”

Meanwhile, the words she tells me in confidence break my heart–she’s lonely, we both are. Both awkwardly and beautifully similar, dancing around a topic as though it were forbidden.

It surprised me to know she felt the same as I've been feeling, because she’s easily the coolest person I’ve ever known. She’s delightfully social, amazingly charismatic. No wonder my heart beats quicker when she’s near me.

So this is me publicly admitting that I like her. That I’d always choose her, if given the chance.

And also that she doesn’t know I feel this way. Just like I don’t know, really, how she feels about me. I don’t know if it’s attraction, or if she lingers in each moment with me the same I do with her, playing them over in her mind as she lays down for bed at the end of a long day. 

I wonder if her memories of me help keep her warm, give her hope when she feels alone or like this life is full of suffering.

That’s why ambiguity is so hard, and so terrifying.

If I confess all this to her, and I’m wrong about her intentions in telling me about this little fib, I might hurt our friendship. I might make things weird. I might fumble it all and watch her slip terribly, painfully through my fingers, destined to become another stranger of a life that could’ve been but isn’t.

Maybe that’s how she feels, too. I don’t know.

The lesson is that I think we all need to be a bit braver in this life. We only have one try, and when I lay down on my deathbed and stare up at that sterile white ceiling, I don’t want for even one second to wonder, “what if I’d told her how I felt?”

It makes me want to cry.

We all need love. It’s the best thing we have in this life. It keeps the pain away, keeps us going when we swear we lack the strength, gives us a reason to wake up in the morning. There are other things that can simulate a similar feeling, but there’s nothing quite like love. Maybe that’s why so much of music is about love and loss.

What future am I creating if I refuse to tell her how I feel? Or she refuses to tell me how she feels? What hope is there in that?

I can’t accept it–shouldn’t accept it. You shouldn’t, either. And yet, I can’t seem to find the words. I can write here, share these thoughts with you and encourage you to be brave where I wasn’t, but I’ve yet to overcome this, myself.

In fact, I’ve succeeded in avoiding it so greatly that I’ve been pursuing basically everyone except her because I’m so attached to our friendship I don’t want to ruin it. And all I can do for now is hope I’m not hurting her in the process.

That’s dumb. I’m being dumb. From the outside, I hope you see that too.

So while I work on myself, while I finish laying the stitches that will hopefully hold closed my old wounds, and while I exorcise the remaining demons from the darkest reaches of my heart, go out into the world and be better than me.

There is a beauty in vulnerability, perhaps precisely because it’s hard.

Go display that beauty. And, if you’d be so kind, please drag me along with you. Because it’s cool to like people, cool to admit how deeply we each feel about things and each other, and someday I think we can both be that cool, if only with a little help from our friends.