This started as a sad morning, but I’m trying to change things.
I don’t want to burn to light other people’s way anymore. That fire is for me, but there’s barely any left by the time I realise that I am lost too.
It’s very hard to find metaphors and analogies for something that is still hurting, it comes out raw because I still feel sorry for myself. The fact is that it is never about those two or three times you see someone and realise your needs aren’t met or your feelings are not taken care of, it’s about everything that the person unlocks with their presence, it’s your whole universe enclosed in a fraction of a second. They don’t see it or they don’t allow you to show it, but you don’t stop being you.
It’s often through others that I reveal the emotions I have been brewing for another person. Something amazing happens, someone incredible steps into my face space and I feel suddenly drunk and joyful; nourished, I flourish into the best version of myself, I bloom into the other person so freely. I heal.
I walk home smiling like an idiot, and I want to tell everyone I know that I had a good day, but most of all, selfishly, I want to show how happy I can be, how bright I can shine, I want to share the light. I am the fire.
Then, something strange happens, like this morning. I realised two things.
The first is that I’ve given most of my fire away on my way home from the date, I channelled it into supporting others, I extinguished it by the time my head touched the pillow to sleep, and my idiotic smile faded into a night filled with restlessness and nightmares.
The second thing that added to my sadness was my ability to create and compare patterns, it’s a skill all humans have. Yesterday’s kisses and caresses, lovely talks and giggles, eye contact and intimacy, openness and vulnerability, mine and my date’s capacity to create a third dynamic, a new safe space to share but not to get enmeshed in, made me see why I’ve been hurting over someone else, or to which degree, how deep I’ve fallen… And the more I’ve tried to hide that from myself, the deeper I sank.
And all this is driving me insane, because I’m so fucking tired of not knowing my own boundaries, not feeling them until they’ve been broken. It is infuriating that my desires and pleasures are stained by my inability to say fuck you. Look, I know you’re struggling, but fuck you. Hey, I know that there’s good in you, but I can’t see it. Dear, I know you (Kinda? Probably? Maybe?) want me, but I can’t feel it.
All the thank yous and I understand yous and I felt likes instead of a metaphorical big fuck you, you’ve screwed up, what are YOU going to do about this before WE can even start thinking about a solution together?
Conor once told me that I often justify myself when I meet him with an issue and he wasn’t wrong, he then said one of the best things anyone has ever told me in any kind of relationship: “when you feel a certain way, just tell me, there is no need to back it up, it’s valuable the way it is.”
And way before any of these thoughts crossed my mind, there was a day when Hoss and I had a fight, we stood in the middle of the living room of a place we both grew to hate and our brains couldn’t fish for any more constructive words. “Fuck you,” I said all of a sudden, and he smiled even though he didn’t like it. Something true and not sugar-coated came out of my mouth for the first time in a very long time. Of course, it is not nice, of course, it is not my favourite way of solving issues, but fuck it felt good, and he knew what it meant.
We all grew so scared of saying what we really think, what we really feel; we started to use ethics as an excuse to hide and take less accountability over our own thoughts and actions, we are depriving ourselves and our friends and partners and family members from taking responsibility, from learning something new and important. We are depriving others of their right to fuck up and pull their shit together to become a better person, and we do it so well by filtering and diluting our words in what we think is sensitivity, empathy and love. In reality, all that is just fear: fear of rejection, fear of abandonment and whatever other linear and pigeonholed ways we have of defining our emotions.
Everyone has the right to work through their own shit… How are they supposed to do that if we take all the space with our fears and anxieties? They’re only going to see themselves in the form they know because we are not giving them the multifaceted feedback. As humans, we grow and evolve thanks to other humans around us, but what happens when all the people around us decide to hide? It becomes a dark forest, an invisible game in the universe, and someone (perhaps me) is stupid enough to show themselves.
The thing is, we can still say how we feel and that we think the person we like or love fucked up without being an asshole. And then, when the silence deposits itself like dust on the floor of a flat not taken care of, we start seeing people’s real colours… And that’s a gift we do to our future selves when we do everything in our power to let the objective truth prevail.
This started as a sad morning, but I’m changing things.