I Need You to Know Transcript
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Tim Manley - I Need You to Know
It was spring night in 2008, and I'm lying underneath the covers next to my best friend, Ben. This had become normal for the past few months that we slept next to each other with this one-foot space between us. We were pioneers of a new masculinity, comfortable expressing our platonic care for each other. No concern for homophobic social norms. I was totally in love with him. [audience laughter] Not like a friend love, but a love like when I felt alone, I thought about Ben and it made everything okay. I decided that tonight was the night I was going to tell him.
He's lying next to me, but he's facing the other way. So, all I can see is the streetlight on the curve of his shoulder. I start to say something, but the words stop in my throat. So, I reach out my hand, but no matter how much I will it, I can't move my hand closer to him. I can feel the words inside of me. They're like physical objects that are all piled up and pressing against me, but I can't say them and my body is immobile.
In the morning, go to bed, wake up, Ben makes us some granola and yogurt. I sit at the kitchen table silently. And underneath the table, I'm massaging my own hands because when I woke up, I had these weird tender nodules on my palm and in between my fingers, these red bumps that hurt when I pressed them, but I kept pressing them. When I went home, I had to lie down on my bed because my legs hurt so bad. When I lied down, I looked at them, my legs were all swollen and they had these red splotches on them, and on my thighs were those bumps again.
My roommate came in and she said that the bumps were my emotions trapped inside of me. [audience laughter] If I could just learn how to say the things that were stuck inside of me, my body would show that. My rheumatologist felt otherwise. [audience laughter] She felt around a lot of my arms. She cut out a big chunk of my leg and she-- Not a big, a little piece of my leg, I should clarify. It wasn't that crazy. And she explained that the skin tells you a lot about what's going on beneath it, that it's like the communicator between the inside of your body and the outside world.
She also told me that I had this rare thing called cutaneous polyarteritis nodosa, right, totally. [audience laughter] Seen the BuzzFeed article about it. [audience laughter] It's an inflammation of the blood vessels, but only in the skin. She said that I was actually very lucky that it was only in the skin, because if it moved to my internal organs, which sometimes it did, it was often fatal. And I asked her, “How often does that happen?” She replied very casually, “There's not enough research.” I'm like, “All right. Well.” She gave me a prescription for a medication that's usually used to treat gout in the elderly.
On my way home, I passed by the drugstore, and for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to go in and get it filled. Instead, I went home and I worked for a long time on an email to Ben, which, of course, I couldn't send when I was done. All the words seemed cliché, all the sentences started with, “I feel like,” that's a lot. I needed instead like more-- Like an email wasn't right. So, what I did then, I opened up the drawer next to my bed, and I took out a black pen and I wrote on my hand, Ben. And the ink shimmered for like a heartbeat and then it dried and. I continued to write a message to him. I wrote, “Ben, when I feel stuck, or when I feel frozen by my fears and by my doubts, I think of your face and you're telling me, yes.”
I took a photo of it with the camera on my laptop, but I couldn't email him the picture because it felt like it'd be too vulnerable. It wasn't just Ben that I had these things inside of me that I needed to say to them. There was also my brothers and my sisters and my mother and my father and my stepmother, there were so many people in my life who I had so many things to say to. And so, I decided that I would write a message to someone in my life every night on my hand, and I took a photo of it every night and I started a blog called I Need you'd to Know How Much I Love You. I didn't tell anyone about it.
Every night, I'd write on my hand and I'd post the photo. And in the morning, I'd wake up with phrases tattooed on my face backwards, and they'd become righted in the bathroom mirror like, “I don't know, but,” or “I wish I could,” or “You are so.” I was taking those things that were trapped inside of me and I was communicating them to the outside. As I started to do this. I did it for like-- Well, as I did it for months, the stuff on my arms and my legs totally cleared up. I was also exercising more and eating better and drinking more water. I started wearing these knee-high anti-embolism compression stockings that grandmas wear. But it was definitely all about letting the feelings out. [audience laughter]
And so, once my body looked good, I knew I could call Ben. I called him from the window of my bedroom and I told him, “Ben, I have this idea about me and you. It comes to me the way that ideas for drawings come to me. Me and you swapping T-shirts. Me and you holding hands. Me and you, like brothers.” And he said to me, “Tim, I think you know.” I did know, and it felt so good. And he said, “I think you know that I'm only attracted to women.” And that's how I was so sad in a way, because I knew I just lost the thing that made me feel less alone. But also, my body felt so good, because I'd learned how to take this stuff that was inside of me and I put it outside of me. And in the process, I transformed who I was on the outside and the inside. And then, that night, I wrote on my hand, “Ben, thank you for helping me become the person I wished I could be.” Thank you.