It’s hard.
But there is something different this time. I think I spent the majority of my life looking for a home, trying to fit it, craving to belong. This time it’s hard, but it’s also quick, it’s liquid, like water taking the space in between little rocks in a glass.
It’s easier to keep your shit together when everything around you is falling apart if you have your inner core strong and purposeful. It’s like coming back home after a hurricane, finding the place dusty, quite a few things broken, but the secret journal with the collection of your mental notes of sanity is hidden under the wooden panel of the floor.
I don’t think I’ve ever had an objective in my life until recently. I always had an inner strength, a passion that moved me forward, but I must have wasted so much of it by not knowing where I was going. I always thought that as long as I kept moving, something nice would happen, eventually, and it did, but a lot of those nice things were not the nice things I wanted. I learned from them, but I wasn’t in control of my life, with the excuse that I had to stay open and embrace whatever came my way.
I have a goal this time, and whatever happens in between are the different ways I am going to get there. I have never been committed to anything long term, I survived from little achievement to little achievement, and any time I achieved something big I didn’t even realise it because it was not something I consciously worked toward.
I don’t know what changed, how I changed it, and how active that evolution was. Perhaps something snapped in my brain, or maybe it was just me repeating myself to embrace my deepest and the most secret desires, perhaps it’s the influence from the people that shared a bit of the path with me, the nice words of encouragement, the kicks in the ass.
I so often said out loud that unjustified pain is a waste of energy, and yet so much of my pain wasn’t leading anywhere. It was an energy I didn’t know how to use. I would collect it and throw up words on a piece of paper, then refine them, then call it art and feel like an impostor. I was so tired of struggling and crying, and of people telling me that that was the path I’ve chosen because I decided to be an artist. Oh but it’s not something I’ve decided, it was just there, and I have no clue of who planted the seed in my mind and filled me with passion I could channel into literally everything. The decision I made was to stop the pain, and to embrace the light and see that I could still create. It’s in me, everything I need is in me.
So long, it took me so long to internalise that. It was pain with no justified gain.
I like myself. I love myself. I want to spend time with myself, and I’m here to talk, to fuck, to cry, to do whatever it takes to support myself. I don’t want to die, and I am tired of seeing that as one of the options to explore. I don’t want to think that I deserve to be happy; I want to take for granted that happiness is there for me regardless of how I approach life and how I choose to behave. It’s not this non-renewable energy, a well from which we all have to drink one at a time after queuing for the entirety of our life. Happiness is here, and so is everything else, at the same time, endlessly, we just need to breathe in.
The past few months have been so fucking tough. I imagine my life as a piece of paper with the events written on it, and all the struggling moments highlighted in red. They are so many, I wonder why I haven’t just scripted everything in red to begin with. But when I take a moment to observe, I see words and sentences, little snippets of laughter, mind blowing sex, satisfying work, days and days of writing with passion and commitment, late night mind fuck conversations, growing together, supporting each other; microdosing and walking in the woods for hours, wondering if the trees would talk to me if they could; learning to be more empathic and understanding, learning to be kind and patient with myself and others, getting to know myself better, opening up in desire rather than as a coping mechanism. I highlight all of that in green and I can barely see the reds, it’s all a matter of perspective.
I want to honour the difficulties I endured this year, especially in the past four months or so, because now I know what they mean and I assemble them myself to bright my way. For the first time I am in control, even when the events are adverse and unpredictable, because I trust myself.
It’s hard.
But this time I am not imagining if anyone would care if I died. This time I care. I really do.
myself by Janine Mizéra