Mastering Myself #1

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing at all lately, which I actually think is more or less alright. I write so often to relieve myself of these huge all encompassing feelings, and maybe since I haven’t written anything in a while it means that I haven’t been feeling so much of those heavy things. I always seem to think that when theres a considerable lapse in this habit. I don’t even know if it’s true. It’s probably not. But thinking that does make things a bit easier.

Regardless, the times I have done some sitting and writing, I’ve been sitting and writing about how I’m feeling instead of any particular thing or place or person or whatever. I think that’s interesting because I’m always harping over something specific. In the entire history of myself, I’ve always been strung up over at least one random thing, but I’ve started to interrogate my plain state of being more so lately. At least I think. Sure, I am strung up over someone, and some place, and a few things, but I’ve also just been thinking about being lonely, and in love, and lost. Just things that are bigger, more abstract, and seem to want to stick with me for a while.

In a way it is kind of relieving to get caught up in things that feel larger. I’m finding a lot of comfort in unraveling the big things that make me trip over everything little. I’ve been thinking the most about love though, which is interesting. Or maybe I mean it’s quite helpful. I convinced myself from a very young age, probably as a side-effect of such shameful and sticky trauma, that I was put on this earth to be loved just, so greatly. I never really connected my fascination or intense need to feel loved with the things I went through when I was younger until I fell on top of it in something I wrote a few years ago. I was discussing the loneliness of not being loved the way you want to be. The way it seems like everyone else is. Love that isn’t shockingly painful, or distant, or conditional, or occasional, or missing all together.

I always thought my reason for being, after so many shitty, hard, agonizing loves, was to experience a big and kind one. A love that was soft, and nice, and tender, and patient, and would never run out no matter how small and stupid and unlovable I felt. But the best thing I could have ever run-into while pouring over my writings about the large abstractness of my feelings is realizing that I’m not here to be loved at all.

I could die a tens of years from now and the people in my life could move not one inch closer to loving me and that would be more than okay, because I simply no longer believe I’m here to be loved by other people. The truth is, sometimes I’m a little hard to love. I’m difficult to know and tough to really see. I used to get so wound up over why this is. How some are seemingly meant to fill stadiums with lovers who’s screams of adoration would tatter the eardrums of anyone who happened to intercept their one mile radius. Why I am meant for a fragmented admission of not love or affection but merely content whispered beneath a breath so quiet, if my fan was whirring just a decibel too loud I’d miss it.

But I’ve never had a problem with content. Or a whisper. I used to write pages upon pages about being grateful for feeling just okay, or being grateful for the the solitude of quiet. Perhaps I’d prefer a content whisper over a wailing love. I think that really I am the one meant to wail. Sometimes I’m convinced that the only continuous love I will experience in my life is the love that I give to someone else, and maybe that’s the true remedy to heal what was shattered by hostile affection. I’ll always have something to love really hard. Whether it be the people I care most about in my little life or all the other things I get to see and feel.

I didn’t always used to think this way. I actually used to get really embarrassed about loving things so strongly, especially when it was unrequited. But how lucky am I to love things so hopelessly. How lucky am I to love things so intensely, no matter what. How lucky am I to love something once, and then again, and once more after that. And never having lost an ounce of it between loves.

Sometimes I’m sat by a body of water, or in front of a piece at the museum, or listening to someone singing on a stage and recoil in a bit of sheepish humiliation when I notice that my body has started to lean forward, my eyes have gone wide in a trance, and tears are welling up in it’s corners — completely overcome by emotion. I would snap out of it and chastise myself, “Calm down…Whats wrong with me?” But that… That’s love. Thats boatloads of it. I’m just walking around the city all day oozing with it, ready to dole out a piece for anyone or anything willing to take it. And I hope I’m always this way, just absolutely tripping over how much of it I have. Because now I realize that I’ve got more than enough to give in this life, and what’s leftover is more than enough to last me several lifetimes over.