Puzzle Glass

I lean in too hard.
It's a problem I've had from a young age, from the moments where I was first ostracized as a child.
The who and when, where and how, those are matters for my therapist now.
What remain are the side affects...
A yearning for connection when all I've known is disconnection.
I don't know how to connect, I wasn't taught how; you can't show how.
A diagnosis somewhere withheld, as it surely would have spelt a death sentence in my education, a spectrum I was never placed on, but I feel now that perhaps I belong.
Manic high, Manic low, perhaps I run along one  borderline or a spectrum of borderlines.
I lean into the idea of connection because it is warm, yet I cannot embrace it; as if born without arms, I cannot grasp the finer things.
I might as well be a grown child, perpetually inept, like a puzzle peice too broken to connect.
It's okay if nobody wants to solve me, I'm a glass puzzle of broken peices.
I fear connection because people bleed.
I fear it because I feel that need...and where there has been need there's been neglect.
I lean into the idea of connection because it is warm, but I cannot easily embrace it, because I have been scolded.
Now I fear the warmth for the scald.
I beg thee, explain to me, how do I best connect?
I don't know how.
I have but words; words upon words upon words... but I struggle if I am to casually converse.
Conversation is reckless;  words, writing... that is more orderly.
You get time to string together words, more than when you converse.
I am blind to my tone, blind to how I am perceived.
I'm broken in the fact there's friends for whom I lack an empathy.
Friends I cannot connect to anymore.
Family before which I stand invalid.
I'm healing, I'm happy, even if the day was just another setback, another let down; a casual, late night meltdown of me on me against me.
I have often scolded when I lean in, as I must surely exist only to be leaned on.
It's a matter of who and how perhaps, but that feels like another fine thing I can't grasp.
I'm not allowed to take time but it is expected of me to make time... yet here I am born without hands for the clock.
I only know to make a mess, to run.
I feel in extremes; the worst extreme is the apathy, and I feel her hopeless grip creeping back in.
My apathy is the scary thing, because I can act through it, because I have been praised for her.
I have been praised for being the weakest flavors of me...
It's okay, if nobody wants to know me, stars knows some days I feel as if I don't even know me.
I dissociate, forget me, live in the skin of apathy.
I have acted through her arms and received praise...
Who would really want to know me?
I run hot and cold, no middle ground; I am awkward in a crowd.
I am... one on one, perhaps taxing to be around.
I've never been allowed to be the center, or maybe I've never seen the center in good context.
I grew up the problem child, I dodged the center for the critical gaze.
Even onstage, I feel that old anxiety, as if I never outgrew that age.
I grew up feeling as if I needed to justify myself; I was always analyzed. My every move, every book, every word, analyzed but never in those eyes justified.
I grew up infantilized, and they wonder why I am a mess at best.
They wonder why I am inept.
I was never expected to find any real world sucess.
I am not expected to do the best, I never have been.
At work I'm little more than a has been, I failed there; tried and tried to train for assistant... but I can barely help myself.
Nobody tried to train me, to be fair, what remains is it's just another place I failed.
Just another place I couldn't grasp the finer things.

Yet where I couldn't grasp the finer things, I understand intimately, the important things.
I understand the power of being vulnerable, I exercise that because that which I say for myself is harder to turn against me.
I will own my vulnerability, I will wear my weakness as armor and let those who attack me for it speak to  their own character in doing so.
I find my power in being open and human, because everyone has somewhere a heart, a small scared thing.
Behind walls perhaps, maybe buried to be forgotten, but there is in all of us that scared human heart. Even if I fail, I reach for the scared heart... because the heart always knows, the heart always cries out.
Heart to heart I reach, maybe not in ways expected, but in this way I have near perfected.
This is the way I reach, through the shattered peices of puzzle glass.