This post is dedicated to my dear friend Uma.
A prelude:
I have been writing this piece since February of this year, writing a few lines at a time, then giant blocks of text, deleting those blocks, and then stringing them back together in a way that ended up looking like what it is now. It is still a little incoherent, but in all honesty, I don’t want to work on this piece further than I have already. If I did, I don’t think you would be reading this right now. Take that as you will.
Here are a list of things I haven’t experienced until this past year (in no particular order):
- I’ve never stood on a frozen lake until last february
- I’ve never gone longer than a month without writing in my journal
- I’ve never made tiramisu at home. This is my favorite dessert
I’ve realized I can't hide from the infinite varying degrees of the human mind behind pretty little phrases forever.
March 14, 2024
Thursday
It’s the day before I leave for spring break. I always get a weird sense of nostalgia for the few days leading up to leaving for break. Time sort of falls into a limbo.
The moon woke as I fell asleep that night.
Being so aware about everything is such a blessing. Dealing with overthinking and being totally aware of it is genuinely a weird feeling. It’s everything in one—isolation to overstimulation. Arguing with my own thoughts is tiresome. I’m always the bad villain in completely made up scenarios and that makes me believe that I’m the bad person in real life. It’s important to understand that we all have two voices: the logical and the illogical. It’s up to our entirety to listen to the right one.
I took my most influential class my senior year of high school, AP Literature. The discussions we had in that class will continue to follow me throughout my life and I am truly grateful for my teacher and the interconnectedness I had with my classmates-turned-friends. We read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse that December, and we focused on the philosophy of love during the week we read the book. I found my old thoughts on the philosophy of love:
I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. Is it a feeling? Is it a choice? How do you know what love truly is?
Anybody you really invest yourself into will bring you a different kind of love. Likewise, a different kind of love will bring out a different part of yourself. If you're going to decide to love someone, you also maintain an understanding that at the end of the day, this could end. If it does end, don’t take it as a problem as long as you got what you were supposed to from that experience—as long as you learn what you needed to learn from that person.
My understanding of love is that it is an experience. Humans always adapt, but you will never get over someone if you're not honest with yourself and how you feel. A lot of times we're dealing with heartbreak and we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves we're feeling better. We tell ourselves we're okay; we put up this front believing that if we fake it long enough, we will make it. But the pain that you are harboring is either going to come out all at once when you least wanted it to or you're going to break and it's going to be terrible. You will be put to a point where you can not even act anymore; you'll be so broken because you've been hiding it in you for so long. You'll find yourself not being able to trust people anymore because you're harboring this hurt.
Two and a half years later, I am a sophomore in college. There is a lot that I am still learning.
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February 2024
Thursday
Whatever we do affects everything and everyone—even in the tiniest way—whether we realize it or not.
Some people are clumsy with your emotions in a way that in some moments, feels unforgivable.
There has been a lot going on in my head about wanting to leave where I am. Is it not what I imagined it to be?
With every night that first month after coming back from winter break, I felt like an unripe summer peach that had fallen on the hot dirt. I was left to ripen on the ground, but never ended up becoming fully ripe. What was wrong with me?
I pick up on emotional cues quite well, but am I caring too little?
I’ve actually never been one to think that, ever. I always seem to be the person who thinks too much and too deeply about everything. Could lead to overthinking, in many ways.
There are all kinds of things I remember about before. I wish I could live them again.
I was thinking about how silly and stupid I am, and here I was, laughing about everything happening to me.
It is in fact, not what I imagined it to be. Why can’t I adapt?
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February 2024
Friday
Being close to someone uncovers spots you didn’t even know you had and it’ll dawn on you, at some point, that this complete intimate self you want to share with them is just one big sore spot over one very fragile child riddled with insecurities. And this whole time, you are doing the exact same thing to them.
Hurting them over and over without intention—in ignorance—which feels worse somehow. The closer you get to one another, the more capable you are of this absolute annihilation. And it happens in almost every case of severe vulnerability. It changes people.
This isn’t a sore spot for me. It’s a patch of necrotic tissue, and I look at it with fascination and recall how the colors and textures have shifted as my curious finger starts pushing into my body and I think, unconvincingly, to myself: ”this is still a part of me.” And the patch is running, and my eyes are running, and I take a breath and let my sleeve down and sigh, relieved that it isn’t painful. It doesn’t hurt me.
Full lives are defined by these pains. And to avoid any of these pains from happening—because it hurts really bad— you sort of measure things, maybe subconsciously, maybe not, keeping a tally, logging how much you put in versus how much you get back.
Meanwhile, perception matters. You’ve got the people you both are inside your heads and what you can accurately decode of yourselves. Then it’s your analysis of their selves and vice versa plus what you interpret their interpretation of you to be and vice versa. In the midst of all this, your selfhood—your internal world—it’s always changing. And the only way they’ll know and be able to keep up with it is if you explain it to them. Communication. If they wanted to, they would. Maybe. Or maybe they just don’t know what you’re talking about and you have to tell them. For sure it's way easier said than done, but, try.
I struggle with this a lot. It should be a constant act of renewal and not just scheduling one conversation. It’s something that isn’t just done over and over again, but needs to live at the heart of your connection with each other.
That which cannot be taught but must be learned. If I learned anything, it’s that the only way to behave respectfully in love is to feel as though you don’t need it. Or at least that your selfhood wouldn’t be destroyed without its influence. I believe that sincerely.
In my time here, I have thought about and made peace with what my life looked like when it was just me. What mattered in that supposed absence of meaning, what was still important when no one was looking.
In not wanting to rock the boat a little or learn how to communicate, I was hiding so many parts of myself, some that I hadn’t even come to terms with in me, which is totally an unsustainable way to live. What you want will always catch up with you.
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June 2024
I had gotten incredibly lucky to be able to accept an internship offer in a beautiful city, close to home, and in an industry that I want to work for in the future. It’s been the most rewarding experience so far, and I am so, so grateful to be in the vicinity of successful people who treat me with respect and who believe in me.
However, in the middle of all this career-focused, future-oriented, forthcoming impediments, I think I forget the crucial question of my life: how do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to ensure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be?
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my body. Until it’s every breath I breathe.
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March 2024
Saturday
I’ve begun to recognize my annoyance in the amount I give versus the amount I get back. It’s a multifaceted frustration and one that’s been plaguing me for a long time.
I see the value in any amount of closeness. I think any sort of intensity you feel for anyone is worthy of your attention. Goodness needs to be cultivated and even what you want—to an extent—needs to be cultivated.
Each time a new connection is made, a new shape is made to hold the matrix of life you have inside of you. I really think that a relationship cannot be understood from outside of it.
In this spirit, more than anything, it seems like curiosity is the absolute soul of a relationship. We can’t learn everything there is to know about by ourselves and to be known by someone and have that given back to you is an incredible honor. And no, they can’t know everything, but even the commitment to learning about someone else, how to handle them, their innocent dysregulations, their dark stuff, their fears, what you can see in them that they can’t see in themselves, that’s what this is I think. It’s very difficult to know all of these things about someone else and treat them in any way but gently.
Sometimes, I feel completely ashamed at my lack of self knowledge, all the times I could have been compassionate, all the times I could have turned my palms up but didn’t. It couldn’t have been different from what it was, but still frustrating in retrospect.
I don’t know if people will like this but I truly feel that if that condition of mutual curiosity is met, there are very few things that someone could do that are unforgivable. And if I can’t have this, I simply don’t want it.
So here, I present to you, love: an always changing, untallied, uncompetitive exchange of power, with the ultimate aim being to support one another in recreating the euphoria of childhood and curiosity.
Similar to how Bell Hooks talks about love as a commitment to another person’s spiritual growth, to act well in love isn’t to simply accept the other person as they are, but to coax their selfhood out of them.
For now, you have a whole day ahead of you. They make you laugh across the table just for the sound of it. You say “hey, look at that.” And they look. Later, you watch a movie that one of you loved as a child. It doesn’t matter which: two children, going home, your green room, warm, the bowl of fruit, the night, in sleep their mind so open it says “okay, I’m going now. I’m going. It’s not far. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
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In order to be able to lay bare the most personal and fragile parts of yourself for another person to inspect, judge and ultimately accept, you have to do this yourself first. And become content with the reality that you might be the only one to ever do that, to ever love you. Once I was able to say I loved myself, I accepted myself and I had mapped the topology of my interior to the best of my ability, making room for footnotes of the new additions that come along with age and experience, I felt okay with letting other people in. In fact, I welcomed it. And that’s the beautiful thing about love, I’ve found it constantly blurs or explodes whatever constraints or categorizations I put upon it. I’ve had fulfilling and meaningful loving relationships with people over and over again.
Some of this could change tomorrow or I could meet a person that acts as an endless prism, further separating it into component parts that I had never known of or experienced before. It’s terrifyingly complex and simple, it eludes complete articulation and understanding.
I loved more deeply than I even knew was possible. And most importantly, I loved myself more deeply than I ever had.
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