Notes on Noticing

I don't know if you've noticed, but...

Photo by Gary Yost on Unsplash

When you look at a flower, what do you see? The color of its leaves and petals? Its general shape? Maybe you notice its texture, or how the light does or does not filter through its petals. Not everyone notices the same things. When you change your perspective, look at the flower from another angle, or watch it as it is moved by the wind, do you notice anything different from what you saw before? A perfume from its bloom, perhaps, as it grazes your hand and gives you a new sensory experience of this flower’s existence to notice?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been quiet for awhile. Because, frankly, I noticed, that I needed to say less in order to get back to noticing more.

I always noticed a lot as a kid. I was deeply observational. Often a bit too much. And I was very much of the impulsive mind-to-mouth set, in that I felt compelled to say everything I noticed or saw or experienced—aloud, and often as soon as I saw it. The way a bug was crawling on that flower, or a dog was sitting on the stoop like a man. The way the Altoid tin had a funny pipe in it. The way the adults got mad and loud and physical when they said they were just having fun. The way spankings felt different from slaps or punches or a wine rack coming down on your head. How a knife to the throat can feel just as threatening a pair of your uncle’s dirty underwear being stuffed in your mouth while someone else holds you down, laughing. I noticed it all, and got in trouble for bringing it all to other people’s attention, all the time. Even when noticing these things is what made me such a good writer, actor, and friend. Except when what you notice holds a mirror to the face of a person who doesn’t want to look. Then what you notice feels like violence to them—so they inflict violence right back.

So I stopped noticing. Forced myself into silence, tried to close my eyes to the things that struck me, in one way or another. I shut myself down to the world, because the way that I interacted with the world often brought me danger and pain from the people who allegedly loved me the most.

It may come as a shock to you, but when you try to repress one of your super powers, when you try to live by the unhealthy, maladaptive rules of others, you go mad. You lose yourself. And I noticed that it was causing me a world of pain.

For years now, I have spent time in talk therapy doing my best to reclaim myself. To see little (and big) Alicia as I was, not how the voices in my head told me I was perceived and received. I noticed a shift in myself mentally, but the ability to move forward did not. The desire for that courage was there, but the physical responses of a child harmed by merely existing so often got in the way of marrying action and intention into some sort of healing return to the self.

And I noticed that I needed to do that in silence for awhile. I needed to write it all down, and maybe not share it with anyone but my therapist, or those in my real life who love and care for me. Or sometimes with no one at all. I’m a compulsive over-sharer, an anxious, raw nerve desperate to be understood, which is really just me subconsciously thinking I have the ability to control how anyone could ever see or understand or interact with me. That I could find the right words to make someone stop hurting me or themselves.

My therapist and I recently started EMDR. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a mental health treatment technique for people with PTSD and C-PTSD (something I was diagnosed with several years ago). There are plenty of studies that show it is effective for other things, such as mood disorders and addiction. And as someone who once carried a bipolar 2 diagnosis and comes from a family of addicts (and definitely feels like she has some addictive tendencies), I feel confident in saying that I can see how it would. So long as you’re ready for it.

EMDR can bring up a lot of Big Feelings, repressed memories, and just generally throw a person into an emotionally triggered tizzy. Go on Reddit and you’ll read stories of months-long panic attacks from people who were not ready. So far, that has not been my experience, but I also believe the work and progress I have made in my physical and mental health over the past year and a half made it possible for me to handle it all. Because even though it has brought some repressed memories and Big Feelings to the fore, it has not shaken me to my core. Because I have spent the last year and a half digging into feeling my feelings, learning what they mean, internalizing the language I need to honestly express myself, and understanding how they’re connected to the maladaptive messaging I received from the people in my life who were also hurting and did not have the language for these things. I’m a more confident, more secure person. I can have the hard conversations and feel the big feelings and I don’t fall apart. I feel loved by the people in my life, and secure enough in that love to lean on them if need be, to not feel like a burden.

A shift in perspective, a new look from a different angle. The shape of my life isn’t changing, per se, but my understanding of the whole of it is. I’ve noticed a sea change, and in order to keep its forward momentum, I’ve had to step away from this newsletter for a beat. Keep my thoughts closer, let them exist without an audience or a feedback loop or an instant reaction. Sometimes you have to notice and let things go; other times they need to stay with you for awhile. It’s all in service of the bigger picture, a beautiful concoction of the micro and the macro, the immediate and the delayed—all the things that make being alive the poetic act that it is.

I have spent these past few months noticing all the ways in which I abandoned myself, in moments big and small, throughout my life. The pieces of myself I gave away in service of noticing—and trying to be—less didn’t disappear, they were just scared to come back, scared of how I might hurt them again, using my strengths as a cudgel to prove that, actually, they’re weaknesses and you’re the worst person in the world. I can’t believe you didn’t notice.

You know what I’ve noticed? My view of the world is just as valid as others’. A stronger version of myself is rising up from the ashes of the sad girl drag I used to wear.

And you’ll notice she’s taking fucking notes.