This morning I looked at my reflection in a train window and thought
“I feel like myself today.”
My Mother keeps telling me that I look too thin, that she’s worried about me.
A friend told me the other day that he was surprised I’d had sex because something about me looked so innocent.
An ex once told me that he was astounded by how perfectly my insides and my physical form matched when we were in bed together and I couldn’t speak for 20 minutes because he had, in a single second, both refuted and invalidated a question/thought I’d been killing myself with for years, for the soul and body never fit together so perfectly, they never reveal each other’s truths in any eloquent or accurate form. They tell lies about each other and claim honesty while they other shouts in its own defence in the background. I think that was the day when I stopped trying to express gratitude in words and just kissed him instead.
I, like my favourite heroine, stare at myself in the mirror for hours, trying the connect the dots between the external and internal, until I break and become so repulsed by my own fucking vanity that I have to scowl or look away. I take myself out my self, look at her objectively, figuring out whether or not she is beautiful. Pretty. Aesthetically pleasing. I refuse my body the luxury of blinking and let the room dissolve around my face into black and seek reality in the momentary darkness - I am there if no where else.
I want who I am to be tattooed across my face but I couldn’t handle being told that it effectively already was.
What was he talking about when he said that? Did he mean me as I was then, messy hair, smudged eyeliner, scars and all? Me at my most composed? Or me as he had never seen me - as no one is ever allowed to see me - with a totally clean face? The version of myself you get when you take all agency out of the equation and are left simply with genetics - the crude combination of my ancestors before me.
See, when I say I felt like myself this morning, I mean that I felt like I looked like myself. I was not necessarily being any truer to myself than I am on any other day - it simply seemed that how I looked, for no real reason, was an accurate reflection of who I am. As if my clothes and hair told everyone the truth.
God, what vile, shameful vanity. How at odds with my ideal self all this shit is. How I hate myself when I turn off the censor in my head and hear
“I want to be so beautiful that it is undeniable, that I know it for sure, that Ibelieve it. That I feel it.”
or even worse -
“I want my external self to reflect the ugliest parts of my mind - I want to be covered from head to toe in scars and find my face gaunt and my bones rib cage prominent and the dark circles under my eyes prominent and every weakness spelled out across my skin.”
I want everyone to see through me, and I want to be completely unknown. I want to be invisible and exposed. I want to stop thinking about this shit.
And I think about other times when I feel completely myself - I’ll catch myself being completely overwhelmed by how stunning the sky is, or I’ll lose myself inside words, or I’ll spend a day completely alone and anonymous and get back in contact with who I want to be. And I like all that about myself.
And then I look at all this, and it is so, so, ugly.
(song - Another Year by Amanda Palmer)
A voice says
“what are you doing here alone?”
and an arm slips around my waist as if it has rights to my body before I even reply.
“I’m just waiting for a friend”
and I am, but I’m also not. I also want to stand outside in the cool, dark, air and drink it in and be alone, just for a minute, to remember what being alone feels like. You forget on nights like this.
He asks my name and tells me that I’m beautiful as I play with the jewelry my friend left with me. He tries to hold my hand and I try to avoid looking him in the eye so I don’t have to remember what he looks like the next day. He keeps touching me and I keep trying to move away before finally making an excuse about needing to find my friend and I grab her arm as she exits the bathroom, leading her in another direction quickly so I don’t have to see him again.
(I would have stayed with him if he’d acted like I had a choice)
Two weeks ago I let a boy pull me onto his lap and put his hands up my skirt. He kissed clumsily and was one month out of a relationship and my friends thought he was an asshole, but that made things better. I knew I wouldn’t want him for more than one night, so he was safe. We both just wanted someone to touch, someone to make us feel better. Wanted. I knew he wasn’t going to ask for my number or talk to me again or any of that bull shit. We barely even spoke. We stood outside and my teeth chattered each time he’d pull away, or I’d pull back. It wasn’t even that cold.
“I wish there was somewhere better we could go”
he said, which really meant
“I want to fuck you”
but there was nowhere better to go so we went back inside and he passed out on the couch while I played ‘spin the bottle’ with a room full of strangers.
(safe)
You see, two weeks before that I made the mistake of feeling something. He kissed well and we slept together three times and never fucked. I slipped out of my dress with ease in his presence. He touched the scars on my thighs and never mentioned them, even though there were new ones each time I saw him. He hugged me in the morning and spoke honestly about music and so many other things I can’t remember. And I felt. I wanted.
And he didn’t want me back.
He kissed another girl in front of me, and the next time I tried to kiss him he turned away. That night I cried to some poor man I’d never met before about how everything always turns to shit and how I’m so tired of trying and how I’m sick of every encounter with the opposite sex that means anything more than a one night stand or making out against the wall of a crowded club leaving me even more fucked up than I was before. He was sympathetic and sweet and stayed with me until I stopped crying but I was too drunk to remember the specifics.
(God, I’m only 19)
Last Thursday I hugged my friend (the one whose rings I held) as she cried in public for the first time in a decade over something that runs too deep to articulate in one night. She bought a pack of cigarettes in an act of quiet self destruction and I didn’t tell her that I’d cut myself in the bathroom. I didn’t tell her that I’d looked out at the city lights on the water and thought
“I would rather kill myself right now than go back to living like that”
in a state of the hyperbolic fear of depression.
But I’m not going to kill myself.
I’m going on a date on Monday with someone who asked for my number at work. I’m going to kiss another stranger I’ll do my best never to see again when I go out with friends on Tuesday. I’m going to run into the guy I wanted far too much for reasons I can’t even begin to understand at parties and I am going to look away.
I am going to look back on who I am today in five years and laugh.
You know that feeling where you look at your room and your clothes and your shelf full of books and feel like this identity that you’ve crafted for yourself is the biggest fucking facade imaginable? All the things I say about myself and associate with myself. Everything the people around me associate with ‘me’. In high school I was that girl who’s good at English, or that girl who sings or likes this band or that band or is a bit weird(/fucked up) or that girl who was a total loner in year 8 and oh my god d’you remember that time she hooked up with one of the ‘cool’ guys at that party? Who’d have guessed it?
Now I don’t know what people associate with me. You don’t have acquaintances in uni in the same way you have them at high school. Or it doesn’t seem like you do. And then I’ve got this fucking blog. Tumblr. If ever there were a place to carefully manufacture a very specific persona, the fragment of who you are that might make you seem like the best version or yourself, it would be tumblr. Every now and then I look at my tumblr and try to imagine looking at it from different perspectives. What would my mother think? What would my best friend from year 9 think? What would the person I’m doing my best not to have feelings for think? My ex-boyfriends? My primary school teacher?
And god dammit, I feel like a narcissist, but at the same time, I like to think the root cause of this is more than just vanity. It’s about trying to see myself through someone else’s eyes. To see through someone else’s eyes full stop. To get out of my own fucking skin and stupid, repetitive mind and think as someone else, feel as someone else. Which, really, is the same reason I read, drink, write, love, fuck, smoke weed, listen to music, play music, watch films, everything. It’s all about the craving to both some how absolutely know and permanently escape the self. Isn’t that what drives everyone, when you get right to the core of it? Aren’t we all just desperately trying to know/escape ourselves and leave the world a better place than we found it? And in that case, isn’t all this “identity” bull shit not even worth thinking about? Who I am has nothing to do with the fact that I play guitar or read Virginia Woolf or have managed to convince myself that kissing a stranger will somehow make me hate myself a little less. Absolutely nothing. Whether we know it or not, in spite of our infinitesimal differences, we’re all looking for the same things.
That much I know. And then I start drawing blanks. That’s where my knowledge and understanding ends. I don’t know what the next step is. You can’t force epiphanies and you can’t kill the ego by reading back on old journals and trying desperately to imagine reading them from someone else’s perspective. Just like you can’t stop having feelings for people just because you know it makes no sense and they don’t want you, and you can’t talk logic about how cutting yourself is a bad idea when you’re so sad you can barely move. Nor can you allow yourself to get too deep into this shit unless you’re in a positive state of mind. Right now I’m somewhere between nihilism, disassociation, and regular old self-disdain so I shouldn’t delve much further. I’ll go watch a film. I’ll get an early night. I’ll tell myself that the empty feeling (I am real, I am here, I am not simply a veneer of a person) will go away in a week or so. Everything will be a-okay.
I guess I just haven’t felt like I know myself in a very long time.
Seeing Bon Iver the other night made me want to remember how to write music and figure out how to write words better and more frequently and go back to taking hundreds of photos a month and hours of guitar a day and it made me want to forgive everyone who has ever wronged me and learn how to really and properly be okay with myself rather than walking on eggshells because I’m so afraid that I might suddenly crack and become someone I absolutely despise again and it made me want to do drugs for all the right reasons (to see what my mind and body are capable of and understand myself and the world a little better) rather than all the wrong reasons (to hurt myself and self destruct and forget that I exist and stop thinking).
I could also say that the onstage chemistry was incredible, Justin Vernon’s voice flawless, and the experience of sharing something so wonderful with 11,000 other people was an incomparable feeling of connection and unity, and the main reason I love live music so much. I could expand on all those things but the above paragraph is far more honest and even this is taking away from the sentiment.
I can’t wait until Radiohead.
Why is it that romantic love is valued so much more than platonic/’friendship’ love?
Don’t give me that “lol it’s biology” bull shit, either. Why are people “just friends” rather than friends? Why is romantic love automatically granted so much more weight and importance? Why do characters in films seem to so rarely have a circle as close friends AS WELL as a romantic interest? And if they do, why do are they automatically side lined the instant a potential lover comes into the picture?
I know we have instincts, desires, drives telling us to procreate and start a family, but it bothers me so much that society keeps sending out this message that finding love is the key to happiness. Fuck that shit. That’s something else I hate about all this “friend zoned” nonsense. So you have feelings for someone and they don’t return them. That sucks, I get it, I’ve been there (heaven forbid! It doesn’t only happen to men!). But didn’t you have feelings for this person because they were cool/interesting/into the same kinds of things as you are? Wouldn’t you be absolutely thrilled to have them as a friend if you weren’t attracted to them? Isn’t it ultimately better, considering that now you’re much more certain to keep them in your life and avoid hating them one day down the life? Kissing, sex, holding hands, the unique brand of intimacy romantic relationships grant us - they’re all really lovely. But the connections we form with friends over the years are too, and they involve far less risk and sacrifice. I can’t really imagine any boy/man meaning as much to me as my oldest, closest friend.
I don’t know. I’m tired and not articulating myself properly. Something along these lines is brewing in my head as a story of some description. Hopefully it’ll eventually surface and let me figure out what I’m trying to say.
I’ve started writing a fair bit again. Not crazy amounts like back when I’d be frustrated if I didn’t write two poems a week, but still a decent amount. It’s nice. I don’t really feel like myself when I can’t write.
It was easy.
I hope you realise that.
It was ridiculously easy, and painless, to do something that once terrified me.
Do you know how that feels?
To experience a transformation more tangible than any before it? To almost see it, to feel each step forward, backwards, sideways, for what it is?
But it’s summer, I guess.
(What?)
It’s summer. These things always happen in summer.
Three whole free months.
Three months where I have every right not to sit still, not to settle.
Not for more than a few days, anyway.
A few days.
What’s that, 72 hours?
72 hours to lie in wait in
paralysis in
pause in
stability in
stasis in
Hibernation.
(but it’s summer)
I don’t care, it’s just three days.
I can sleep for three days, right?
(i thought you said it was easy)
Oh, it is.
It is.
It is, in isolation.
That’s not life, though. Nothing exists in isolation.
(you learned that a long time ago)
But it still feels like an epiphany I’ve had within the hour, you know?
You know?
It’s like being alone in your own skin forever, or dying.
You start learning it at about eight years old but you never really stop and it’s still so hard to deal with sometimes.
(shh, we don’t say these things)
Well, why the fuck not?
All these things one simply doesn’t say?
(i don’t believe you)
I don’t believe me either
(i’m sorry)
So am I.
.
.
.
