The Shape of Absence
As I began understanding myself better, I realised that my understanding of the world is inverted. I understand almost everything through its absence rather than its presence.
If you ask me what kind of furniture you should buy for your house, my mind doesn't imagine the perfect piece of furniture. Instead, it imagines a house without any furniture and concludes that anything would be better than nothing. I don't picture what would look beautiful. I simply recognise that furniture ought to exist. My mind understands furniture through its absence, not its presence.
I didn't realise this until a few years ago, perhaps when I became disciplined enough to write down my thoughts. I discovered that I have no innate understanding of many things. Most of them involve making choices, setting boundaries, and experiencing love. What I do understand, in extraordinary depth, are hate, indifference, apathy, disgust, trauma, and personality disorders. I can take you to the depths of those emotions, and we can spend an entire night discussing them over whisky and a pack of cigarettes.
But talk to me about love, empathy, or warmth, and my brain has no ready-made template for understanding them. It has had to construct one from scratch, not from experience but from deprivation.
I believe it is important to be empathetic because I know what it feels like when no one shows you empathy. I treat people with kindness because people were not kind to me, and I know how deeply that hurts. I don't know what genuine warmth looks like, so I don't always know how to offer it. I only know that it matters because I have lived without it. I understand these things through the shape they left behind when they were missing.
I am good at reading people through their behaviour, the choices they make, the things they share, and the things they laugh at. I am so good at it that people often tell me I am reading their minds. But I am not. I simply have a profound understanding of fear, shame, rejection, resentment, and loneliness because those are the languages I grew up speaking. I recognise their absence and their presence with equal ease.
It is when someone begins to like me or wants my presence beside them that I have no idea what to do. I was never wanted as a child, so there is no reference in my mind for how to respond. My understanding ends where acceptance begins.
When someone wants me, my mind has nothing to draw upon. Thinking from a place of absence does not help either. You don't know what the right response is because there has never been one. Nobody wanted me, so I learned to live on my own, to accept insults as natural, and to make myself invisible.
The opposite isn't possible either because absence cannot teach you presence. You can infer that kindness exists because cruelty does. You can infer that love exists because hatred does. But inference is not experience. The natural antithesis would be accepting someone's affection with grace, yet I don't know how to do that. So I smile, tell myself it isn't real, and convince myself they must be mistaken. Eventually, they will come to hate me too. My mind searches for the familiar absence because that is the only language it trusts.
If I weren't so aware of my own mind, I would have sabotaged myself long ago. Instead, I remain stoic and have taught myself to accept compliments with grace, to accept other people's warmth with grace, simply because I know no other way. I practise these responses the way someone practises a foreign language. There is still no template in my mind. There is only repetition until it begins to resemble one.
If you are someone like me, then you know what it is like to have a mind that works this way. People call you humble, but you are not. You simply have no instinctive understanding of these emotions.
Give me hate, and I can dissect it to its very end. Give me rejection, and I can explain every contour of it. But talk to me about love, and I become a student all over again, trying to understand presence through a lifetime of absence.