If you haven’t already gleaned, I love metaphors (and the word glean). I think primarily in analogy. I get a rush when I come up with a particularly apt comparison. It is through these analogies that I can express concepts I find impossible to articulate in excplicit description alone. Like my emotional dichotomy as an invulnerable over sharer.

Many people I meet for the first time are startled by how open I am with personal detail. It takes very little for me to recount erotic rendezvous or the complexities of my family dynamics to a perfect stranger. I’ve also been accused, many times, by friends for being closed off. They point out that while I am a welcome recipient of their personal dilemmas and secrets, I seldom reach out with my own crises or day-to-day woes. And tying the two together, close friends grumble over the fact they are only able to keep up with my life updates and mental state via my multiple channels of social media. It is not through our interpersonal communications but my public forums that they discover I have moved abroad, gotten a significant other, or am in the middle of a mental breakdown. I’m sure it can be somewhat hurtful to someone who considers me a close friend to learn that I’d rather let 960 (give or take depending on how annoying my social media presence is that week) people know I’m going through a hard time than reach out individually for support.

For a long while I was unable to explain this phenomenon. Both the why and distinction of who/what/where/when for offering up emotional vulnerability was lost on me. Or rather, it was a feeling I could recognize but not describe. Until I came up with the most sensational analogy: stripping. The way a stripper physically exposes themself mirrors my own emotional exposure. A stripper puts more of themself on open display than the average person would feel comfortable. But at least for someone who has been in the profession for some time, bearing all on an illuminated stage, twirling around for mobs of business men and bachelor parties is a performance job, not an embarrassing and vulnerable spectacle. It takes a particular person to feel confident in such a job, sure, but those who do may have the same attitude towards their work as an office employee or barista.

So that’s part one: my open book persona is my comfort zone when it is a performance. Certain phrases and stories roll off my tongue on first dates and in social gatherings of new people because they’re in my repertoire, and I know the dance when with a new audience. I have therapist consultations down to a T, and I can talk for the full 45 minutes uninterrupted enumerating my “traumas,” relationships, patterns, and qualities which have made me who I am. It is when someone goes off script that I shut down.

There is a strip club etiquette. Tip the dancers, don’t get too handsy, and no photos are a few consistent expectations for patrons. A reason why some of my male friends have expressed a dislike for strip clubs is because they know they’re being pandered to. The dancers pretend to like you, be attracted to you, want to dance with you so that you will tip them. Some patrons either don’t care, or get so lost in the fantasy that they don’t accept it’s not real. This is when they start to break the code. If you don’t understand or if you choose to ignore that these strippers giving you “special attention” is the same as the cashier at Trader Toe’s feigning delight at your frozen entree selection, then you disrupt the context that allows them to feel safe.

Asking me one-on-one “how I am” is emotionally the equivalent of you grabbing tit during a lap dance. (OBVIOUSLY people caring about my wellbeing and sexual assault are not equivalent; take the pussy hat off and give me a little leeway for the metaphor).

Even if there is a literal (clothing) shred of difference between a stripper being in costume or bearing all, that g-string is a boundary and a symbol of their autonomy. And in fact, a stripper could very well dance in the nude each night, but be highly conservative in their personal relationships. I take to instagram to chronicle my mental highs and lows, write a public blog, and trauma dump on groups of people I’ll never see again at the bar, but I am devastatingly unable to engage in an intimate or “real” manner. I have some regulars, as strippers do, who interact with my online confessionals even if we have no relationship in the “real world.” I appreciate the attention, but the second I get a DM of “are you okay?” I’m pissed. What made you think you have the right to ask me that? This isn’t what this relationship is. You think you know me because you watch me expose myself on a regular basis, but you do not.

The metaphor falls apart when you start to consider where to go from here. I should probably figure out how to ask for help or think about my emotions beyond the rehearsed narratives I’ve crafted. Strippers, however, should maintain their boundaries and we as a society should advocate for their safety #protectsexworkers. Uhhh yeah but back to ME. I actually just thought of another way to extend this metaphor. There is a trope that suppressed girls in conservative (often religious) households have a higher likelihood of rebellion, catapulting to the other extreme as soon as they have independence. So I am not just an emotional stripper, I am an emotional stripper who was raised as the pastor’s daughter. Y’all, I had to google “jobs at church” and then “can pastors have kids” to make that comparison. Apparently it depends? Lmk. I don’t trust google’s wack AI.

Anyways, the first time I went to a therapist I didn’t say a single word for the entire session. Or the second. And then I quit therapy. I didn’t really confide in anyone. Sometimes I would seek consolation from internet forums, but I’d always end up comforting someone else instead of sharing any of my own troubles. I’m not sure what the catalyst was, but in college, while I still couldn’t talk to therapists, I would fling trauma dipped one liners like a monkey with their shit at the zoo. And by senior year I was sharing personal details with strangers with reckless abandon.

I’ve gone through a few therapists by now and I really like the one I have currently (not the one I’ve written about in previous entries lol). We had a REVELATION yesterday, something I haven’t experienced in my years of therapy. I’m not going to tell you about it. Partly because it is scary and not in my emotional choreography repertoire. And partly because mayyyybeeee I should try talking to the people who are actually in my life, off the stage.