There are people in almost every life who love us without conditions, who trust us more than they trust themselves, and who would defend us in any room they were standing in. They accept us completely and have never once asked us to be different. And a great many people cannot feel connected to a single one of them, and carry a great deal of guilt about it, because what kind of person receives that and feels nothing at all? The fault is assumed to be inward, some coldness, some defect of the heart, something missing that other people have.
That defect gets looked for, sometimes for years, and it is never found. Then one day the question turns over and becomes a different question. Not why can this love not be felt, but what exactly is being loved. That is a much less flattering question and it has a much clearer answer. If what they know of somebody is a covering, then their love, however genuine, is landing on the covering.
It does not reach further because there is no way further in. They are not failing at anything and they are not loving carelessly. The wall was built by the person standing behind it, over many years, and then they stood there feeling unreached and blaming themselves for the coldness of the stones. Nobody was ever given a route past it, because no route was made.
How the coverings get made
No child decides to become false. It happens in the most ordinary way imaginable. Something honest is said and the room goes strange. An enthusiasm is shown and somebody laughs at it. A question is asked and the answer, kindly enough, is not to ask questions like that. None of these are cruel events, and most of them are forgotten by everybody in the room except the child.
But the child learns. She learns which parts of her cause trouble and she puts them away, not permanently, just for now, just for this room and these particular people. Then she does it in the next room, and the next, and after enough rooms the putting away stops being an act she performs and becomes a shape she simply has. This is not weakness at all. It is intelligence, and it is what any sensible creature does in an environment it needs to be accepted by.
The trouble comes much later, when she is forty, and capable, and surrounded by people who are genuinely fond of her, and cannot work out why none of it lands anywhere. By then the covering has been in place so long that removing it is not a matter of taking something off. There is nothing underneath that anybody has seen, including her.
Why being loved can feel like nothing
This is one of the more painful things a person can discover, and one of the least discussed, because it sounds ungrateful in every possible phrasing. Here is somebody offering real affection, freely, at some cost to themselves. And it goes through like light through a window. It can be seen perfectly well. It simply cannot be felt, and no amount of reminding oneself how fortunate one is changes that by a degree.
What becomes clear eventually is that being loved for a covering is not a lesser version of being loved. It is a different thing entirely, and the heart knows the difference immediately, even while the mind is arguing that this ought to be enough. Some part of us keeps honest accounts. It knows exactly what has been shown and what has not, and it will not credit affection to an account that was never opened.
So the more somebody is loved for the covering, the lonelier they become, which is the exact opposite of what should happen and makes no sense at all to anybody watching from outside. It also makes them look ungrateful, which adds a layer of shame to a situation that was already difficult enough. And the shame produces more hiding, which produces more of the same loneliness, and the whole thing tightens quietly over a decade.
Not everybody has earned the inside
None of this means the answer is to open oneself to everybody. Not everybody deserves to know us in depth, and there is nothing dishonest about keeping most of ourselves for the few. Vulnerabilities can be in front of everyone in a sense and still only visible to a person willing to actually look, and there is no obligation to make them easier to find.
The problem is not having coverings. The problem is when there is no longer anybody at all who sees underneath them, and when a person has grown so used to that state that it no longer registers as a loss. That is a slow thing and it does not announce itself. Nobody wakes up one morning entirely hidden. They simply run out of people who ever knew, one at a time, over twenty years, and each individual loss is small enough to absorb.
And then something worse can happen, which is that a person begins to forget themselves. Not dramatically, and not all at once. They simply stop consulting a part of them that nobody ever asks about, and disuse does what disuse always does. By the time somebody finally asks, there is no ready answer, and they are not sure there ever was one.
There is no method for removing a covering that has been on for thirty years, and anybody claiming to have one should be distrusted. What can be seen in people who begin to come out is much smaller than a method. Every so often, with one person, they say the truer thing instead of the smoother thing, and afterwards they feel exposed and slightly foolish and also more present than they have felt all week. It is not a solution. It is the only thing anybody has found that does anything at all.
