Black, white. Good, bad. Close, far. Yes, no. Me, you. One day, perusing a poem on settling things into their own boxes, I've seen how easy it can be to navigate life when everything is tidily stowed away into the shelves of our minds, into properly categorized and coordinated boxes in our heads. Categories help us find our place in this world, by simple process of elimination, maybe.
In your boxes I find pieces of my own, in my boxes you find pieces of Yours, but, in your boxes I am defined by your pieces, in mine you are defined by mine.
Each piece in combination feeds into another perspective: but what of us that live in between unsung spaces?
Perhaps, we embroider ourselves into poetry.
I will read
You will write words That ring like bells Inside your bones.
I will read
You will unpin them
From your ears and Into the pages in front of you. We will become embroidered
My words, your threads
My being your pen.
There is nothing more terrifying than the prospect of meeting your hypotheticals in the flesh. Understanding we are but one follicle of an entire surface of a head that houses our dearest and greatest, we might realize that regardless of how that strand of hair grew to be: straight, curly, or wavy rough, harsh or dry, or oily, gay, trans, or cis or bi, proud or timid or rude or kind an overachiever or obsessive-compulsive… what matters, in the end, is what produced it. What process - and a lifelong one at thatgave birth to such complex creation. And why that matters, in my humble opinion -
is precisely this:
Because it will do it again.
We might not be there to see it.
Might not be our potential strand of uber-complex hair to overthink and be self-conscious about.
But, it will happen again, another machine crumbling and tumbling its gears to complete the same process. The produce just as complex, just as quirky, just as overthought, just as impactful as its seemingly hypothetical siblings. Our parallel universes seem impossible to reach into, but really,
we are all parallels of each other.
re: this wound
This is it. The root of your wound.
Having to prove to your loved ones that they love you, too.
In a way, the wound expresses itself as a mirror of the emotions and beliefs it encompasses.
It is not that you are convinced you do not deserve love, or cannot be loved. It’s that for so long in your life, you were shown you were not loved, by people who were… “supposed” to love you.
Your father. Your brother. Your sister. Sometimes, and maybe most importantly, your mother.
The people you loved convinced you, somehow, that they do actually truly love you. Their words resounding gongs inside your ears, their actions clawing into your anxieties.
Your instinct to push them away? Your gut telling you you will prove them wrong?
“They will see”? “They don’t know me like I do”?
“They don’t understand.”
“I cannot be loved”.
No, my love. And I am so sorry it took me so long to see. You were disappointed by love.
You were betrayed by the very people who should have taught you better, who should have proven you wrong, every day.
You were so deeply hurt, so deeply broken and disappointed, so utterly alone, you simply had yourself to blame.
“Kur t’thojnë dy njerëz je pi, mbaju për muri.”
Oh, love.
Expectations to be loved are only so very natural. Are only so very human. Are so very not selfish. My love, no one chooses to be brought into this world, so one would expect - into our first outbreaks of our consciousness - that whoever did bring us here loves us.
As we have come.
Perhaps there was some sort of catalog in some state of other-life, but yet again, that is the due expectation.
To be loved, as we are.
Why it matters to be a certain way or the other is irrelevant.
It matters above all to spend even the briefest, shortest breath in existence believing you are unloved. Not being shown love, by our first teachers of life first and foremost, then having the torch carried by our built consciousness.
The metaphorical kick while you’re down.
The vicious cycle.
So your Love grew very powerful.
You’ve learned the ins and outs of the empty shell you’ve crafted inside of you, and you have filled every crevice of it with light. And when your contraptions fail, as they do time after time, revealing your wounded self, you make haste to fix the lack of It. You could not possibly bear the lack of It within you. It would only prove them right, wouldn’t it?
So your Love is very powerful, bulletproof, almost fool-proof. Your walls are the warmest, loveliest, loneliest.
They are most beautiful and sincere and admirable and lovable and sad. They are every bit painful as they are healing. But that, my love, is not the kind of balance to build life over. That is the kind of balance that hangs on a thread.
A thread of hope. Yes. You’ve plenty of that, too.
You, my life, are a warrior. You are a warrior in every-which-way a warrior could be described.
You would not - not ever - be caught and surrendered to the hands of fate.
No, fate brought you to this world. You are uncertain if you are forever grateful or indebted to it, but you cannot fathom being seen as weak in its hands.
Your thread of hope, a multiple-floored foundation and a string of hair and a flying carpet and a highway to disappointment. Hope you can hold onto that you will forever keep this loving machine going, forever and always, whatever the cost.
So you love, passionately, truly, sometimes deeply enough that it slips inside the cracks of this contraption.
You love, so pure and powerful, and then you forget, but then, sometimes you are reminded…
You are not loved. By them, by her, by him, by whomever had no pure intention to love this sacred space you let them inside of.
It is sacred. You spent all your life building it. You spend all of your energy fueling it so they can see how worthy of it you deem them to be, show them how loved they are for who they are. Truly, deeply, sincerely.
How little they tend to think of it. How little.
How small it seems to be, to behave as though it is not our responsibility to create it, share it.
How small it is to use it. How pitiful it is to take it for granted. How sad it is to not have known how to see it for what it is.
Love is not pain.
Love, you are free. And as scary as it is to be thrown into the pool and be expected to swim, you, my love, are a child of the universe. You were born knowing how to. So, swim.
Let live and love, and come share your findings with me.
What is it that love is to you?
Stop building pedestals that prove another’s worth you see.
How do you need to be loved?
You love, and that is enough.
Do not be denied love.
Do not deny yourself, love.
Do not deny yourself love.
You love, and that is enough.
My latest revelation has been that I am terrific at translating my feelings.
I am a master of flexing to an incredible extent exactly what I must feel at any moment in time, as seems to fit the situation.
I don’t want my feelings to be any cause of inconvenience. Internally, I am dying.
Being highly empathic has this sort of downslope to it.
As deeply connected you can feel with someone you also feel their thoughts, the sincerity and honesty with which they exist or interact with you, the depth of their love or shallowness of it.
You feel it all: Their intent to harm, Their mindlessness, Their indifference to your being.
You feel their negligence and incapability for growth,
The sheer strength with which they fight against it.
You feel their passion and potential and you feel their path of growth as if it were some sort of braille etched into their being.
You feel the softness of their eyes
Or the brashness of the cold abyss they reflect.
Or fearfully attempting to push you without the strength to do so.
So you push against them until they cave,
And you feel when they will.
You feel when patience is needed
And when it isn’t. You feel intent.
You feel intent as if it were a scent:
It either bewitches you, Bewilders you, Repulses you, Befuddles you, or Perplexes you. You feel it.
You feel the strength of their heart
Pulling you warmly in or harshly keeping you out; But you do not choose to trust or believe it.
Such is the curse of the benefit of the doubt.
To be alone again.
To aim for the rest of the world is a lonely place to be. It’s one of those recurring phases of mine: games were the rest of the world for me, so today, I create these experiences. Now, on the other side of the “rest of the world”, I had never felt lonelier.
Though I was always lonely; no matter what, where, how or who.
This had nothing to do with anything other than I didn’t know how to read myself.
Curiosity is the lens through which I view the world, and which allows me to fall in love with it over and over, and all the creatures that inhabit it… except for me. I could not, for the life of me, turn this lens towards myself, assuming instead that I know me well enough to also know that I am not worth knowing. Others, people, creatures, were redeemable and as for me - I could very well be an afterthought. I applied patterns onto how I behaved with myself which I could never apply onto others - out of respect
and love for their human nature, clearly with no respect and love for mine.
I suffered when I felt this coming from those I loved the most - who, ironically enough, I chose somehow, thus perpetuating this pattern in my life.
They were the coin to yet another round of confirming and re-affirming this belief in my little arcade experience of identity creation.
Well, here’s to starting over learning truths, new and refreshed.
I do believe that no matter what, being alive in this moment means at some point in the future, my body will feed the soil of some earth and the cycle of existence of things will continue.
My awareness, if I can somehow enrich this body with whatever energy it will transform into, I will invest in continuously becoming - this beautiful process of change, adapting, evolving.
We feel ourselves evolve on a daily basis and yet, we can easily succumb to comfort. Because we can, and at the end of the day, if that’s what we truly want, we should.
But fear is a powerful reminder that our essence remains unchallenged.
It’s a powerful tool to help us decide where we want our boats to turn to, in this merciless ocean of being.
This love causes so much grief
It just sits with me, in silence,
Like a sad little neglected child
Like it doesn’t want to be seen
Like it is ashamed of itself for existing
Because it has nowhere to go
It knows where it needs to be
Who it exists for
But instead it has to sit next to me.
What do I do with it sitting next to me?
Why do I not know what to do with you, Love?
Such a painful but necessary realization.
The Story of the Lone Wolf Cub
It was all alone, all alone, all alone.
Mother absent-minded, Father absent-bodied.
Home was absurdly clean and quiet.
The lone wolf cub grew.
Clean and quiet and absent, too.
It was strong and powerful, the lone wolf.
But it shriveled away, in loneliness engulfed.
Then, it was just a-lone.
And the end of it all began.
How quaint.
HOME,
Is where you cry real, salty tears, curled in the bathtub under a hot shower, on a rainy, cold Saturday evening.
To be frank,
I merely imagined
A simple thing:
Sticking a note
On the door to my room
That reminds me and my body
I am home.
This is home.
Now let me poop.
This is my new home.
I am so exhausted.
Of running, of moving, of losing, of grieving, of suffering, of balancing, of controlling, of simplifying, of explaining, of over-thinking, of simply-not-arriving.
Being in motion is the natural state of who I am. I am fluid by nature. Yet, even water must make its bed. I simply had to make the decision to stay. Somewhere, anywhere, here.
Here is where my bed lies.
And I lay in it.
Some days, I feel a lost sense of direction,
But unlike never before,
This time I don’t fear the Ocean.
I feel myself at the tip of my ship’s helm.
I am aware of the dangers of the night
And the unpredictable storms.
I feel exhausted by this fight with the sea,
But I know I am hardened enough at this point to survive it.
I’ve had my fair share of storms.
I’ve washed ashore enough times
To know how to rebuild a broken ship.
I don’t feel stranded. I feel this is a willful journey.
I feel I knew this one I must do.
I remember so clearly the feeling of home behind my shoulders.
I remember so well how my every bone begged me to return,
My feet touch the land of home again.
But my home became poison to me.
The air toxic to my lungs,
The food toxic to my guts,
The people toxic to my being.
The soil sunk me deep in itself
And sought to swallow me whole.
So I had to set sail.
Not to find a better or different home
- I don’t believe in such destinationsbut rather to know what I want.
To understand where I end,
And where the rest of the world begins.
To learn where I want my northern star to point to.
To learn where my northern star is.
To learn to read the night’s sky and let it direct my sail
Give meaning to my journey.
Perhaps, then,
The wind against my skin wouldn’t feel as heavy, at days.
The salt of the sea on my ruffled hair and Clogged pores would not feel
So irritating.
Stories.
Our stories come to life as we tell them to ourselves. To me, narratives are the connection of scattered neurons, a constellation of elements which result in a belief that can shape who, how, or what we are.
That we are not enough, not worthy or capable of being loved are not just words. They are a code - pulled from deep within our psyche - which shows us how we function on our day-to-day.
I need to heal. Before I heal,
I need to feel.
To feel.
I have always been a very sensitive creature.
My internal world so powerfully flowing that sometimes I feel myself about to burst through the seams.
My body is just a thin veil of what separates my oceans of feeling and being:
The Inside and The Outside
The Fullness and The Lack of Things.
The Tiny and The Insurmountable.
The Fleeting and The Undefeated.
I find that over the years I have grown terrified of my feelings.
So terrified, in fact, that I have built incredibly intricate systems to channel them; Minimize them into Gentleness; Rationalize them into Reason;
I’ve put up dams to block and transmute and redirect
and translate to what was Necessary.
. I don’t know what it would be like . To come undone . And let the waters wash me clean. . . . . . . Only through countless paths of creation, they’ve exploded out of this Mountain of Being. Making their river bed, Seeking to chart the path Into my Ocean of Truth.
I turn 30 next year.
I feel old, or perhaps, a better way to say it, I feel my exact age, perhaps for the first time in forever.
I’m not 28. I’m 28 and 5 and 13 and 22 and 35 and 82 and 54.
I feel many aspects within me, built over years of observing what I was exposed to, perhaps.
Perhaps, people - whom I adored, loved, hated, feared, looked up to - became commanders of my being, armies of cells in my process of becoming.
And, they are all at an impasse.
They all conflict with each other, and their orders create a cacophony of chaos, sending my body into episodes of its own.
Begin World War |Me|.
I am terrified at the thought of what this could be doing to me, the physical, present me, especially projected into the future.
I am in pain;
Aching of all the hurt experienced forever
Condensed into one single, black-hole of a feeling.
That’s where all my light goes to escape, if only I can’t keep myself far enough from it.
It really fucking hurts, to realize all your life you felt like shit and were powerless to do anything about it.
Worse yet is when you let it happen because you think it’s what you deserve. Because you were shown this, consistently, and you believed it, and created a universe which kept it confined for you to trap yourself in it. Because you didn’t know better.
I can’t quite begin to describe the level of shame that comes with these realizations.
My Commanders all disagree on how they feel about it.
At least, they have to all agree on one thing: pain.
What they don’t agree on yet, is what they should do with it.
So you have them directing me on all fronts: controlling, learning, observing, exploring, dissecting, demanding, accepting, depressing, fearing… all of them wish to do, none of them wish to feel.
Moral of the story is,
Feeling pain is counter-intuitive,
Yet the only way out is through.
My condition had but a simple name: heartbreak.
Choosing to love endlessly does not equal protection from heartbreak;
Does not constitute belonging.
Does not equal being loved.
Does not equal no pain.
Each of us a slave to our insecurities, each with our common goods and evils, not every one of us understands well enough to not wish to hurt or to know how to love or have any sort of instinct or desire to protect the other.
Love does not protect us from people who do not know how to love us.
Neither does love change us nor teach us what we do not wish to learn.
Love might unlock people, surely, but it does not unlock them to us, Or for us, or even by us, Really, we are not entitled to anyone’s love. It merely is a catalyst.
I was angry and frustrated because I didn’t wish to admit that love
- in all its might and passion and deepest depth I could forgive and push through hell with itWas not enough. It simply was not enough; Love is not meant to cure Contempt. They lay on opposite sides of the same spectrum. . . .
My heart broke like the Pangea, But Love is the ocean in between. It will never not be whole.
What matters is what we choose.
I chose pain until heartbreak reminded me I am human. So this who you see today, is healing.
Fear is not Love.
Love I know very well.
Love I taste with both my lips.
Love terrifies me, truly,
True love is terrifying.
To both have and to lose
To first have then to lose
To never have, and never lose.
A hopeless romantic’s poetic nightmare.
. Fear, I have romanticized to the point of exaltation.
It had free reigns over my being,
A compass in my journey of reluctantly choosing
To make yet another step in unknown directions.
. It paved the way:
Like a radar
Its pulses directed my heart
Towards what felt like greener pastures.
Fear pointed to where the next challenge was
Fear was where adventure and adrenaline flowed
Running on dopamine snacks.
Fear led me at the top of the mountain
Convinced me the most exciting ones were probably not volcanoes… but I could tell from across my meadow.
Fear took my hand and ensured me
It knows where it can feed my curiosity.
Somewhere coupled with my low sense of worth
It somehow convinced me that by conquering, surviving, understanding its object
Somehow, Somehow, I would be more.
Somehow,
My worth in this world would increase
And my existence perhaps
Would be worthwhile.
Fear showed me that love
- this sheer force of an emotioncan conquer all. It can breakthrough;
The only one to intoxicate us to this extent
Where we’d believe it could
Multiply, pacify, purify
If only we’d have an infinite supply
Of it to give.
If only it didn’t cost us in return.
If only Fear was a fruitful investment.
Fear follows me into uncharted territory
I can grow through
But not always thrive in.
As right as it were
About some realities
Fear has no place in Love.
I wonder what it would look like if I didn’t choose it.
It starts within~ ~as with anything.
Contempt.
I don’t understand this feeling well enough
But I’ve sure tried to cure it, With Love.
Fear simply showed me the way Into the volcano.
I know what being loved feels like.
I just don’t know what it looks like. . . . Time will tell the rest of that story.
Have you ever had this unrelenting feeling like something is coming?
What am I expecting to happen?
There is a tinge of anxious anticipation in my bones that I can’t quite put my finger on what could be causing it. My mind is a running mill, it obsesses and churns and whenever I present something to break the cycle it pushes it aside saying:
“NO, it’s not this!”
Then what the fuck is it?
My body is slightly tense - my jaw slightly more clenched than usual. My mood a slight bit depressed. My sleep a slight bit shallow. My dreams a tinge bit disturbing. My legs fidgety with nowhere to go.
My mind just .u-n-e-a-s-y.
What do you want?
WHAT do you want?
What DO you want?
What do YOU want?
What do you WANT?
I want to maintain a state of flow.
In life, at work, breathing.
I want to fully unlock my dams and just flow.
From my beginning to my end, I don’t wish to feel any borders.
I wish to deliberately feel.
I wish to flow into the depths of my oceans and feel the wind crop the tip of the waves off And turn them into clouds. Then condense myself
Into a single drop of rainwater, splashing back into the soil of all that needs to be fed.
I don’t mind.
I don’t mind.
I don’t mind.
To be completely honest, I don’t believe I have ever felt more in pain than recent times.
It isn’t enough to say it hurts - it isn’t enough or really, it isn’t something I can really write about. But I feel it. I am angrier. I am aware of how ashamed of my feelings I am, and how ashamed of my loss of integrity I am. At least, that’s what it feels like.
It feels like somehow, giving myself up for the sake of keeping this idea of “peace” was reasonable enough to lose myself entirely in the process over the years.
Like somehow, I was feeling sorry for the people around me,
In some way then, attempting to minimize myself, as if to say:
“Sorry, so sorry you have to deal with this! Here, let me get everything out of the way for you! Let me remove myself from this equation and make life easy for you! So sorry!”
So fucking sorry you have to “put up with my shit”, in other words.
What in the world is this shit I feel so appalled by, I ask myself today?
Truly, I wish to understand why I carry double my weight in shame and guilt,
When it’s clear - so clear to me now - that I was taught all the wrong narratives.
It sounds simple, and I suppose in a way it is.
I must admit I almost feel sorry for myself thinking back on my youth and my upbringing - almost.
Almost wish I could go back and tell 10-year-old me I’m not weird or broken, I am simply lonely,
Because I do not feel loved,
But I am lovable. I was a weird kid, but lovably so.
I’d tell her that I wished to be in her presence, and didn’t feel like her speaking her mind was not welcome.
I’d tell her that yes, she is young,
That yes, she is still learning,
That yes, she has yet plenty of mistakes to make and bones and hearts to break, But every second she spends there next to me is valuable.
That she is worth my listening ear.
That she is worth my time.
If for no other reason than for being human, A creature which craves connection, meaningful and deep,
And perhaps, most importantly, for this meaning to come from being seen in one’s context.
But she was surrounded by people who crafted this context for her,
And didn’t wish to see or admit past their faults. They wished to excuse and be excusedsomething she also perfected in doing. She learned to survive and thrived establishing her worth in the world by fully surrendering to its will, by somehow partnering with the forces that be to find and make her worth.
So once the doors to the rest of the world opened, she went off to create - among other thingsHerself.
I wish I could go back and tell her she doesn’t need to prove herself to be worthy of love.
I wish I could tell her that she truly was enough, and was surrendering herself to people who couldn’t see it.
Because, I’d tell her, you truly don’t believe you deserve it.
Because, I’d tell her, you weren’t shown what I am telling you right now.
You are lovable, you are worth it all, you are enough as you are, your existence is welcomed, keep becoming.
Just keep becoming, more every day. More of you is better for this world - we need all the Human we can get.
Your life is precious.
You deserve to thrive in this world you were brought into.
You are not a curse to this world. We are cursed by our stories.
I am happy to exist, I am happy you passed the torch to a future me, and I will pass mine to a future self.
You are lovable. And so very loved, love.
I am sorry it took me so long to connect the chasm of Us.
We are not broken.
These are terrifying narratives we do not need to give to this world.
This world does not need more of them.
The world needs all of us to become better every day, one step at a time.
There are better feelings to be felt and held onto.
We will slowly learn to feel them all.
Love is not pain.
Love is not fear.
Love does not breed anxiety.
Love does not feel unsafe.
Love should not be unattainable.
Love is not singular.
Love need not be deserved.
Love begins within.
Love is the light of our inner sun.
Love is no cure to no ailment.
Love cannot heal cracks, it reveals them.
True connection heals. True connection is born in vulnerability.
Love is a language,
It is a tool with which we translate our inner world
Into the realms of reality.
Let it not fall into deaf ears.
Let it not be abused.
And if it is used, let it be so to transmute it.
Let it not blend in the cacophony of insincerity with which it is reflected.
Just like anything else in the world, it is frequency.
Let it not be nullified or drowned in the noise of its opposite spectrums.
Recognize when it feels muted.
Recognize that it is true power and potential invested.
Find, instead, your amplifiers. Find, instead, your listeners.
Find, instead, your muses, and your recorders, and your broadcasters. Listen to your frequency.
Find, instead of that which suffocates it,
That which creates the atmosphere to suck it out of its vacuum.
