Every Lost Song: If You Have Never Been Known

You're born with something missing. Eyes, maybe ears.
One half of your family blames the other. You become a problem. You become a situation. You're not objectified, you're treated like you need to be solved.
You're confused. This environment isn't natural to your brain's own wiring. You see people who seem to navigate it more smoothly. You're frightened, and feel inadequate.
You struggle to learn. You observe everyone and constantly think about what's going on. You try to interpret actions, discern intentions. You're irrationally determined on keeping your head above water, a dog with a bone. You're passionate and emotional and it clashes with your need to be logical in order to survive even daily situations, which seem utterly alien to you.
You come to love puzzles. They teach you about the world. You realize, painstakingly fitting piece to piece, that you can't know anything about a puzzle that moves itself.
You flare up internally, wanting to challenge that thought. You don't lift your head to meet anyone's eyes, but your own eyes harden. You will find a way. If you don't come to understand your surroundings, you resolve to put your feet where you choose to and force your body to take the necessary steps.
This only comes after years of tightly held panic, which always seems to escape its leash. You go through several diagnoses. You eventually reject them all. You need to not be afraid. You know that you won't be so broken looking when you aren't so anxious. You know that inside, you aren't what you look like.
No one else does.
You're labeled a million things: inadequate, irrational, unreliable, ungrateful, liar. All you wanted to do was hug those people but they didn't appear to want a hug if it came from someone with your exterior.
Those in close proximity to you, those who love you, call their expectations by your name instead. They blame the fact that you are not that person on everyone you choose. Arrangements among your family and friends grow toxic and strained. Eventually, people drift away from you. You close your eyes. You want to sleep.
You put on a mask just to make speaking to family and old friends easier. You smile through the tears you don't cry. You used to cry all the time. Your family knows you as a very emotional child. So everyone assumes you're happy when you smile.
You start to realize that you aren't known at all, and you don't know anyone. You want to break that silence. You go looking for people in the strangest of places. You turn to the rest of the world--maybe seeking validation at first, but definitely seeking understanding all along. You want to look someone in the eye. You want to fall in to step with someone else. You bridge gaps that seemed impassable. You start to heal.
Everyone from before firms their opposition against this new turn of events. More and more, you are not the person they call by your name. You start to take off your mask. You take a deep breath.
The water is cold, colder than you've imagined. Everyone you have seen are behind you, traps in hand. Those boxes look so familiar. You start to turn around.
Someone you know calls your name.
You hang undecided. You could be safe. Sad, yes, but safe.
There comes that voice again.
It thrills in your blood, that memory of belonging.
You will be in uncertain territory. You will be searching and unsure and the people who you spent your time around will drift away because you are not like them anymore. But you know where you belong and you will be actively pursuing it. You will feel loved and give love in return.
You keep moving forward.
You look back, and occasionally someone looks for you on the horizon. But you don't go back. You let yourself grieve, because you know that no level of malice dictated the conditions you lived in. You know you were loved, you just weren't known.
You want to open your eyes again, so you do that.
Eventually someone from the shore splashes out to join you. You laugh and hug and cry, and you're not really sure why, except that it feels so indescribably right.
No one knows if you're flying or falling. Sometimes, you do both. But you don't do it alone anymore.

Call me by Name: "... for those who are still looking"

A letter from anyone who has come through the other side to anyone who hasn't.
It is only cryptic because I cannot layer these words with the manner in which they were originally expressed. It is one of the clearest things I have ever written, but the language makes clarity difficult.

Beneath these layers built up by people who teach us what to be, something stirs sometimes. Some old remnant of what I am. If I hold on to them, I could share something with someone one day. If I let them go, I will revert to my nature.
I am not the vessel, as I'd once believed. I am the thing I thought I contained. TO realize it demands a closer, more immediate knowledge of its face and voice. To realize it makes me learn that I don't understand me on some vital level I have no name for. Why? Because you took it away. You took it away from all of us. And we protect these manufactured layers because removing them will make us alone.
It's no trouble to understand the words, but words are an instrument. Words are not the hands which play the instrument. Would you look up and see the player? I've been told that most would have no idea what they are looking at. Robbed of the clean mindset that allows information to impress itself on their hearts all at once, the outlook that makes few assumptions, they can't see something for what it is. They need to give it a name.
Call me by my name!
I despair of anyone ever learning my name, but what alarms me the most is that many can no longer learn their own.
This is the ugly truth that confinement has taught me. It isn't simply being denied motion or choice. It's being denied a sense of self, creating an impressionable creature who needs one manufactured for them.
What am I without the me that was manufactured?
Alone.
Call me by my name ...
If you realize that other people created a dependence in you, a need to be defined and directed externally, you can at least have the opportunity to try and let it go.
Your name is fundamentally altered, whether you retain enough resilience to withstand the pain inherent in breaking out or not. Your name is an impression of the force which makes you whole, the natural tendencies which temper it or amplify it and now. And now. Our names also say that we have been made once, not born, the way it should have been. Our names contain immense levels of pain, the result of barriers and struggles and manufactured inevitability. No one could call each other by name without being overwhelmed.
This is what humanity has done. Humanity has committed a crime worse than any other known creature ever has.
Call me by my name!
But don't. I don't wish this on you, even though my dearest dream is to watch people being set free.
Do you want to escape?
I'll warn you ... it's going to hurt.
What am I without my name?
Alone.