The objective truth in our feelings

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.

Where did the time go?

I accidentally thought myself out of my mind and stumbled upon mindfulness. My true essence. Very present, but almost empty. I’m like a fisherman on a boat, fishing for thoughts from under the water, deciding what to keep and what to let go of.

The thoughts are not suppressed, they are water themselves, they take the shape of whatever I decide to see. I am not dissociating, I am very much here, and I am very much real, and yet, it doesn't matter if I am not.

I think that mindfulness is the absence of feedback loops. The brain(s) stops searching for similar information to compare and categorise memories with what’s happening in the given moment. That’s the majority of the buzz usually: the processing. I can hear its gear most of the time, but not this time.

To be in the moment, I have to let go of the past, and the past doesn’t really exist, it’s all just memories stored somewhere in the brain, a place to come back to when necessary, but better if consciously. So, when is it necessary? What if I allow for the new information to come in without comparing it with the pre-existing cognisance? What if I store it temporarily in some other part of my brain without processing and come back to it in a more conscious way when the time is right?

Since I am autistic, that information has to be handled actively and manually anyway, but does it have to be processed here and now? Does it go lost if it’s not processed immediately? ADHD also doesn’t make it easy to hold the memories for long enough, the thoughts feel like slippery fish too close to the board of the boat. Maybe the more physical and intuitive things can linger around, but words have to be filtered as soon as possible. I don’t know.

What if someone tells me “I like you”? Am I going to smile and blush? Or am I going to wonder why and ask about the specifics of their feelings towards me? Probably all of the above. Are my fucking emotions even necessary to be expressed? Probably not, but that would freak people out. Are any of the emotions I express spontaneous? Maybe. But why?
Sadness seems easier to engage in and reveal. Happiness takes much more effort. But that could be because of all the fucked up things that I went through since I was a child; repetitive abusive behaviour made happiness more difficult to feel and recognise, let alone understand and express openly. I guess I didn’t have many points of reference to build an archive in my brain.

I am building that archive in my adult life, but the preexisting factors already take a lot of space, it is just more work to dismantle something and repair what’s broken, rather than build from scratch.

In conclusion, what is mindfulness for me? It’s when I don’t have to express what’s in my mind in any shape or form. It’s all water. There is no past. There are no memories, therefore there is no time because my perception of time is dictated by how much space is occupied by my own memories. Mindfulness is the absence of time, it’s my own non-existence, it’s the death of ego, it’s my soul stretching across the universe, it’s my life without a purpose but not without meaning.

I care

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

Thirsty

I can feel you in my bones.

They vibrate slightly if I go quiet and suspend my breath. I want to stay like that, gasping for air with you filling the space in my mouth. My body is moving slowly but not cautiously, my hands are impatiently passing between your ears and collarbone, my arms surround your back and push you down against my body.

Your chest opens into mine and our ribs entwine. My bones stopped oscillating, and I forgot my name, I forgot my pain, I only remember why I am here. There is no other reason than pleasure. I am here to take all of it and leave just as much of it behind. I can’t stop.

I feel you crawling inside me, and it’s just the universe imploding on itself; my cunt is tight but there’s no resistance, it’s like there is infinite space in which you find your ways by just existing. My muscles cramp around the stillness of my bones. This energy is dragging me down, it’s tearing me apart, and it compresses my body into a small drop of sweat on your back.

“Nina...” I hear from faraway. There is a question awaiting for my response, and my answer is a serpentine yes, waving around my tongue, slipping into your ear. I’ll take whatever can fit, in every which way, I’ll raise my body temperature and let you melt onto me, drink you with every pore in my body.

I was so thirsty. So desperately, painfully, restlessly thirsty. I’d lick off the condensation from my window to see the world outside, but I would only grow colder and lonelier. I’d crawl in the grass and smear my face in morning dew but all I’d see would be the ground.
And then, I finally sat on my knees and spread my legs, spat on my fingers and found myself wet of all the water I’ve been collecting from all the wrong places.

All I needed to do was to invite you in.