You had two first names. Your hair was bold and a different colour often and facebook showed me which it was at various times. You always smiled, so large a smile, every time. Teeth and cheeks. You partied hard and you had many friends. So much love around you.

I did not know you. I did not know you when you lived and I did not know you when you died. I read about your death from mutual friends’ facebook posts and I actually gasped when I found out. You were the epitome of life and then you were gone. I clicked on your profile and after all the beautiful goodbyes from your friends – fuck, there were so many – I could see posts from you about your journey, embracing the possibility of death and then a link to a blog where you updated how you were feeling.

I read your blog, even though I did not know you, and I sobbed for hours reading your words, just as I sob writing these. It seemed so unfair for someone so beautifully vivacious to be taken so young. The world is not a fair place.

But what a world – that people like you existed. What a world, that people like you exist at all. What a world that is so unfair and unjust and cruel and sad, but still people like you exist in the face of that. What a world.

You were so brave and honest and your courage brought me to tears everytime I thought about you. You were so brave. I wish I had known you.

 

 

Self loathing is a seductive pastime. It feels like justice, dealt out from my own hands, to punish the one I know is useless and unworthy and rotten and wrong. It feels like power and it feels righteous. If only we garnered some sense of achievement in how fucked we can make ourselves feel.

Today I decided that this is the behavior of an oppressor. And I am no oppressor. I am a lover. Today I decided that what’s really powerful is standing up to oppressors even when they are strong and when they are loud. Especially then.

Today I decided I will no longer be on the side of the oppressor. I decided that I know that oppressors never win. I decided that I know that love wins. Always.

 

There’s a Halo ’round my head, 

Made of watercolor paint. 

Good intentions bled into bad behaviour. 

I’ve only got the colour red.
Red for passion,  lust and pain too,

Missing strokes and harsh lines; 

I’m struggling with a vision;

A vision of me with a vision of you. 
I want to trace hair and hips and hearts,

for lines to have meaning and truth.

But art is only deception,

I have to stop this before it starts. 

On a day when I felt confident and almost outside of myself, looking in, I visited the swimming pool across from my apartment building. I wanted to prolong and revel in the comfort I felt in my own skin as I’ve never spent much time feeling warm and contented there. It had never been a safe place for me to be unapologetically in my body, without hiding or squashing or shortening it. This day was different – I wore a bikini, dropped my towel and strode across the wet, warm floor and into the pool.

I was floating about, quietly, focusing on the sensations of the sun on my exposed skin and the weightlessness of my body. An elderly gentleman must have sensed my openness and approached me for a conversation.

Normally I’d be tentative and probably exchange pleasantries with a stranger before leaving, but on this occasion, I stayed. We chatted for hours. It was the most illuminating time I’ve spent with another person in my life.

He talked about his life and I listened intently and was curious about all of it. There wasn’t much talking on my part, apart from asking question after question. He divulged, openly, with no hesitation. He spoke of his early adulthood when he’d moved to India at 19 years old to “find the meaning of life”. I asked if he’d found it. He said he had. I raised my eyebrows and asked if he’d share it with me. I expected him to say something frustrating like “It’s not something you can simply share – you have to experience it”, or some other bullshit, but instead he shared with me things that challenged deeply held perspectives I had about my relationship with my own body and others’.

He talked about the absurd preoccupation we have with grooming our physical selves, often to the detriment of our spiritual selves. I’m not sure he used the word “soul”, but he referred to our physical selves as incredibly temporary and our spiritual selves as everlasting. I’m not a religious person and spirituality is something I am cynical of. I thought of matter and how it cannot be made, nor destroyed, only change form, in a way. Instead of immediately clouding my eyes to this conversation, I thought about his perspective and how it could fit within my own understanding of the world. At the very least, it was his truth and clearly something he’d investigated and lived with for 60 or so years.

He talked about our bodies as “bags of pus and dirt” and waxed lyrical about how we spend so many years and dollars trying to perfect what those “bags of pus and dirt” look like. It was confronting to hear someone reduce humans to a bag of pus and dirt, but I guess his point was that this is what we do all the time. We might be pretty incredibly made bags of pus and dirt, but what we’re made of is simple. He was passionate about it but he wasn’t condescending. He simply shared his perspective and he wasn’t at all concerned with what I thought of him while speaking it. I admired that.

After leaving the swimming pool, I walked across the road and felt hyper sensitive to the wind that made my skin prickle and the chlorine soaked hair that stuck to my cheeks. I got home and stood in front of my mirror. I thought about the efforts I made to change my body to fit it into a certain shape. On my face, I removed hair from my eyebrows and painted my face occasionally with eyeshadow and lipstick and blush. I had a slim body and I noticed the abdominal muscles and biceps and was pleased that my efforts in the gym resulted in this particular set of outcomes. Despite that moment, I rarely felt comfortable in my skin and reflected on how contented the old man was in his. Maybe it was his life experience or maybe it was his perspective or a combination of the two. Either way, his self-assurance was something I coveted.

I let my body fall away from my view and instead focused on my eyes. Those would be with me always – or at least the something ethereal that existed behind them – the thing that made me, me. I felt warmth and happiness when thinking about that intangible something. It was a good, beautiful something that I hadn’t neglected but had never praised myself for. I pledged then that I’d notice the everlasting something in myself and others tenfold more than the temporary from then on. I’m sure a contentedness must come from knowing that the vessel is less important than the heart inside.

Some people learn that in India and some at the swimming pool. What an adventure life is.

I haven’t gotten over him, because I don’t want to. Life seems better tortured, if it’s tortured by the possibility of him. 

What a fucking idiot I’ve become. 

How many possibilities for a respectful, loving, satisfying relationship have I turned away from in the past three years because they didn’t look, smell or feel like us? 

How did the push-pull between him and I become the mould that something new must fit or be cast away? 

And, most importantly, how do I fix my heart so it’s open to other shapes that aren’t him? 

I asked her to hold me
and she held me

I asked her to kiss me

and she kissed me

I asked her to love me

but she could not love me

I asked her to leave me

and she left me

They say that if you love a flower, you should not pick it up. That you should admire it from afar and let it be. They say that if you pick it up to keep it for your own, it will die.

I’m drawn to the stillness of him. The quiet contemplation, his being him. He exists and that’s all he asks for. What an attractive quality. I’m worried though, that if I touched him, he’d burn.

“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.”

I feel like I’d become a scar on his body. Behind his ear or in the crease between his groin and leg.

“Because if you pick it up, it dies and it ceases to be what you love.”

I don’t like the idea that my love for something – my selfish need for it to be mine –  could be the cause of death for something beautiful.

“So if you love a flower, let it be.”

I wish that someone felt like I’d cause them to burn. I wish that someone felt they needed it to keep from the cold. I wish that someone wanted to walk into that fire.

“Love is not about possession”.

I hope that when he sees the burn, he realises it’s been there all along.

“Love is about appreciation”.

If only the fire caused a mark and not a cancer. Maybe it’s best he doesn’t see it bubbling away under his skin.

There’s something so alluring about his perception of the world. It’s hopeful as well as cynical and maybe sometimes bitter, too. It’s the down part that makes the up part so beautiful to me; it makes it realistic. It makes the hopefulness intelligent and considered. It fills me with hope that the world can be good, if it can be good in his eyes.

He said he was let down by others often, like I am, and saw from a distance where others were going wrong. He thought to himself that he knew that they needed to work on themselves, instead of looking to blame others for the perceived slight against them.

I wondered then whether it was lonely in his world, viewing others in that way. I wondered if there was anyone he knew that had ever walked along beside him seeing others with open eyes like his. I wondered if he’d ever let someone in enough to walk alongside him. I wondered if I might be that person one day.

 

What I loved about you the most was that you made me laugh every single day. I just loved being around you. We were kids even when we grew up together into young adults. I loved how sweet and considerate you were and how much you made me a part of your life – every little aspect. Your Mum told me all the time about how you would say “She would love this”, “She said this today”, “I’ll get this for her”. It was obvious that I was in your thoughts all day long and I was very special to you. I don’t think you realise how special you were to me, or how special you always will be to me. Even though we’ve gone our separate ways, I’ll always be your precious and you’ll always be precious to me. We hurt each other but loved each other so very much and I don’t regret a thing.

What I loved about you the most was how romantic you were. I’ll never forget the Easter egg hunt you organized for me in my apartment one year (with 52 things you loved about me coupled with a delicious chocolate gift) or the fact that you flew across states every single weekend to be with me when I worked away for a few months. Those grand gestures aside, it was the little things everyday that warmed my heart and made me fall for you: the fact that you’d warm my side of the bed before I got in, how you’d make me delicious healthy meals for lunch and dinner and how you’d always touch me, somewhere, whenever we were close enough. It was imperative that you touch me because touch was one of the ways in which you showed your love and you had a lot of it to give. I felt adored by you and I couldn’t help but return that adoration in abundance. You taught me how to love as much as possible without being scared – it wasn’t until you that I realized that we should never hold back how much someone means to us.

What I loved about you the most was how you came back every day even when I thought you couldn’t possibly see anything in me to keep you interested. But you were interested – you wanted to get to know me, deeply and it shocked me. When we went to bed together, I couldn’t believe the connection we had immediately and I’m sure it was because you had gotten under my skin like I didn’t think was humanly possible. You opened me up like a flower. No moment with you, ever, was boring in any way. I couldn’t tell you how many hours were wrapped up in each other’s kiss or embrace and I wouldn’t want to quantify it. The number I’d come up with would never be enough.

What I loved about you the most was that you loved me, in a myriad of ways. I’m richer having been given a sliver of what you have in your heart.

 

Around the circle we’ve each got our own schema and our objects of rumination. This is how I see them all in my mind – I can’t remember all of their real names, but I know what they struggle with. I tell myself that’s OK because whilst I’m not listening for their name, I know what hurt is in their hearts. Isn’t that really listening? I push away the gnawing at the back of my skull that tells me that someone shouldn’t be defined by what burden they carry on their backs.

To my left there is Self Worth, Career, Family and then Friendships next to her. Then there’s Provider who often doesn’t show up and next to him there’s Identity and Confidence and Quiet. Finally there’s me, Relationships. We’re an interesting bunch and I’ve grown to like everyone’s company, even though I don’t think I’d have regular coffee dates with many in the group. I think I will miss them when I no longer have to see them every week.

We’re learning about unhelpful thoughts at the moment and how we can try to combat them by first acknowledging and then discrediting. It’s pretty helpful when you’re in the right frame of mind to look objectively at what’s going on in the head but it’s hard to distance yourself from your own brain.

When it comes time for me to share what thoughts I’ve been ruminating on, I don’t give them the hot thought. I think what’s really tumbling about up there for me is much too depressing to share with a group of people with mood disorders. So instead, I tell them I’ve been thinking that I’m unlovable. We learn that our hot thoughts are an interpretation of a feeling. The feeling I’m having is sadness and I’m feeling sadness because I think I’m unlovable. Yes, OK, this is a good perspective. I’m not sad because I am unlovable.

I divide the page just as Self Worth and Quiet are doing upon instruction from our facilitator. On the left: factual evidence against that thought. On the right: factual evidence for that thought. The five minutes are almost up. Self Worth hides his page so I can’t see his. Quiet is writing an essay. I’ve got one line and I don’t know how to dispute it.

I don’t believe in love.