I Exist In The Wrong Direction - by Oluwatobi Kolawole

The toilet seat felt like the first honest thing all day.I sat there longer than necessary. The cab ride home had already taken something from me - not the traffic, not the distance, but the thought I kept turning over and couldn't crack open. A concept from today's session that I stared at directly and still couldn't see. Like trying to read something written on water.I pressed two fingers to my temple. The jelly inside was running its own meeting without me.I half believe it's the sleep. I half believe it's something else entirely.The terrain I'm crossing right now has no signposts I recognise. I chose this - the studying, the transitioning, the becoming something more than what I already am - and some days that choice sits fine. Other days, I arrive home, and the toilet seat is the most I can manage.The frustration is physical. It sits in the chest as something swallowed wrong, and it gnaws there, patient and unhurried, while I try to think my way past it.Jane told me something today, not in words exactly.We were talking, and midway through, I caught it in her eyes. Not fear of me. Something closer to fear of what she might want. She kept reaching toward the conversation and then pulling back, like a person checking the temperature of water they're not sure they should enter.She is the kind of person who learned early that wanting things leads directly to losing them. Innocence that life kept hitting until it learned to brace. Now she carries trepidation the way some people carry keys, reflexively, always at hand, always ready.I ran my hands through the thought, and my heart stayed quiet.Too quiet for what she needed. Too quiet to locate what was expected of me and decide whether to offer it.Expectations have always been the specific thing I don't know how to hold.When someone places them in my hands, I look at them briefly, then set them down. Not from cruelty. Something more like self-preservation, though I've never been able to explain it convincingly enough for the explanation to matter to anyone waiting on the other side.The pedestal arrives without my asking. Perceptions form. And then the person who was projected onto you and the actual you begin to exist in the same room, and people spend the whole conversation looking for the one they came to see.In my presence, an absence is observed. I know this. I've watched it happen across enough tables to stop being surprised by it.What I still haven't resolved is whether the absence is a failure or just the accurate shape of me.I think about Cornell. I think about Marianne more.The particular ache of being someone whose emotional abyss only makes sense to people who already know where to look. Connell moved through rooms the way I move through rooms, legible on the surface, the real thing happening somewhere inside where the casual observer never thinks to check. Marianne was the cost of being fully visible and the relief of it, simultaneously, in the same body.I hold both of them like a question I've been asking for a long time.If you've read the book and found them attractive, not just physically but in the way their minds work, then there is a version of me you might recognise. But that recognition requires more than a glance. It requires the particular patience most people spend on other things.Nobody knows this about me. I haven't found the right way to say it that doesn't sound like I'm asking to be understood.Maybe that's where the answer lives. Not in the mundane announcing of myself that already feels redundant, not in the justifying of my amoral stance to many things, but in the slow work of becoming knowable to the people worth being visible to.The toilet seat is cold now.I should sleep. --- Author's NoteAfter Hephzibah asked me the who hurt me question today, the answer I splurted out made me know that everything in me has been responding for almost a decade now, and it's so clear that there is a me that others see, and a me that only people who came close could understand.Some days, I envy her. Hers is a simple existence.I read Normal People once and didn't recover properly.Sally Rooney wrote about two people who are most themselves in rooms nobody else is in, and most lose themselves the moment the world requires a performance. Cornell and Marianne don't fail each other because they don't care. They fail each other because being fully seen is the thing they want most and the thing that terrifies them equally.I recognised something that I didn't have a vocabulary for before.If you've met them already, some of what follows will feel familiar. If you haven't, the novel is worth the discomfort it costs you.

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