One word to describe yourself

Our little community of friends and family have a forum where we congregate, primarily so that organising events, bike-rides, picnics and cinema visits are easier. We post information and it’s available to everyone. There are also a few little things on the side which we do, one of them being surveys under the title ‘Getting to know you’. We all know each-other in real-life, however as is the trend online these days, people just seem to love surveys. As we do know each-other in real-life, I will actually do them.
One of the questions in our first survey that I complete last week was one word to describe yourself. Now in the past I may have chosen any number of words; charismatic, creative, minimalist, intense, conversationalist.
As a struggled to find the right word last week, I found myself gravitating more and more towards one single idea;

Guarded.

It’s not my creativity that I think about foremost anymore, not my delight in engaging dialogue, not my sense of art and style. What I thought of was my illness and the paranoia that is innevitable when I’m around other people, and my hesitance to share my expressions of emotion and intimacy when it comes to love.

What has happened to me these last few years? How my illness has changed me. I’ve learnt countless survival skills now, strategies to deal with situations that might threaten me or produce threatening atmospheres, ways to keep myself safe from ignorant and misunderstanding people. I’ve constructed a whole new persona to deal with these people, even those people on the forum that I know. This is a very different persona to the one I killed during my first episode of mania when I was 17. This persona is the shield with which I keep myself safe, and keep almost all of the elements of myself hidden away. I daren’t trust anyone, and those who I do choose to trust, I am always careful to measure out what is revealed and what stays hidden.

When it comes to romance, internally in the least I am only more and more romantic, but the paranoia has settled even here. Falling in love is not as simple as just getting along, if I’m to enter any kind of long-term relationship, then the illness has to be discussed, and while I trust my own expressive and conversational skills, I am always susptect of others. This leads to me essentially waiting for them to prove themselves to me, through a very complicated forum of evaluation.

Guarded indeed.
I never thought I would ever be like this. I’m not disappointed or aggitated, I’m always happy to be whomever I am, I’m just quite surprised. While I still maintain my intensity, it’s become very quiet, very secret, and kept behind closed doors until such time as I am comfortable enough to open it. There are a very select few people who I trust implicetly, comprising of Chibi-R, Jack, A_Spec and his sister Kate (currently in Scotland). Everyone else receives a scaled-back version of me to some degree through this constructed persona. I’m not being duplicitous, the construct isn’t a different person to who I really am, simply a scaled back one.

I dream of a wonderful soul who will be patient and curious enough to unravel me, who loves me to such a degree that they yearn to know me. I want to love that person without restraint and with absolute trust, perhaps an impossible ideal, nothing is set in stone and I am open to variance, but that remains the goal.

To have someone know your weaknesses, illnesses and imperfections, and still love you, and to do the same for someone else, is perhaps the greatest challenge in life.