I aim to go back to what I was in some ways while still retaining aspects of who I’ve evolved into. I was once like a spark of fire quick to blow away with the first strike of wind. Now that my stance is steady, I’d like to once more begin.

The past few years, I’d be lying if I said romance didn’t define my life, becoming the wind that often would fly me way off track. I thought about it, almost every minute of every day. Wondering about a man, missing that man, hating man, feeling jealous of that man. So obsessed was I with a man - his face, always changing - that I eluded love. The true meaning of love. And if I’d really understood what love was, I am realizing I wouldn’t have been so prone to flying this way and that. Real love is not turbulence, but nurturing and solid. Anything else is just your ego getting in the way of things, trying to satisfy insecurities and needs nothing else other than you can. Because real love is not about another. It’s about yourself first. Growing up means expanding your definition of what is love, and realizing it’s a conscious decision you make to bring out within yourself and give to others, no matter how hard it might be.

I also eluded me, although I’m closer to her than I’ve been since childhood, but I still have a long way to go. And that’s probably why I eluded love

You have been loved the entire time. You were just too focused on a man and the packaged, societal definition of what it should be to recognize it. But love is never about pink hearts, rings, sex, and not even about monogamy or marriage

Love is loyalty - not to his bed, but to the highest nature of yourself that you would act accordingly to him. It is loyalty to yourself, to stay true and focus on creating your life to be the magical adventure you always wanted it to be, while staying firm in your integrity and authenticity. Love is compassion and forgiveness, the recognition that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future, the realization you were born into a dark world, and learned dark ways to cope, so you’re bound to fall and mess up sometimes. But that’s ok, so long as you get up. Love is exposing all of you, despite the fears, and letting another expose all of them without running or judging. Love is allowing there to be spaces in your togetherness

Love, real love? It isn’t about him fulfilling needs and placing a band-aid on wounds you were too afraid to take care of yourself. The lover is not the toilet you take an emotional dump on, nor the punching bag you let take the blame for all your personal failings you’re too afraid to admit, for all the things your Dad did, what your sister said that pissed you off earlier

Love is learning to take care of that stuff by yourself, for yourself, because you love yourself. When you love you - when you commit to loving you, I should say, because we will  never 100% love ourselves all the time, but we can try - then you can love him. You are no longer selfish and needy because you meet all of your needs, and you’re giving yourself the attention and love you thought he could give you, but can’t ever.

Love involves him, but it involves you too, it involves your family, it involves your friends, it involves strangers across the world.

Expand. That’s what I’m learning to do now.

I write again to let the thoughts flow once more, to just flow.

Let’s begin.

It’s at that moment

I remember what its like to love you again

when you have been gone for seasons, forbidden, starving both my eyes and blood.

Our last act sees me fall into the wind of your open breath,

climbing manically the scale of your rising breasts

as they sit governing like proud moons

posing firm as if queen-hills or mountains or daughters of sky that know only to grow.

There I find myself

drifting over every perfection your body of dark ocean sets

closing both our hungry mouths with kisses that repeat over twists

of midnight, of uncanny weekdays and troubled sleep

until rain fills the windows with its quiet solitude.

I missed everything about you

those ineluctable convulsions that left your body laying dead to surrender

defeated by the sword of my love

turning you over to face every ugly side of me

in worlds that can only bleed into one another

like the hearts found in the base of wounded rivers.

I have stumbled back to you ashamed

after the injury of your absence led me further to disaster,

here I find a cot called refuge where this carnal language can spin like magic

on the glide of hot tongues that give pubic bodies

to the bareness of heaven

under skin that screams, thighs that part with the fondness of islands

whilst my tears fall between like the sweat that melts together our longing.

This is how we are to be in our last act

still unable to sit together and explore the repose that finds all good harmony,

cremating instead the hand that would never find that dreamy rapture,

that uniform that fits all kind lovers,

instead we wait dressed as polished coffins

whilst all that is ours wanes around a ferocious zeal into sleeves of black blindness.

So here we are once again, nothing but beasts adjoined by an obstinate lust

consummating at the speed of frightened hearts,

until the morning curtains are opened wide and we part, as estranged shoulders

hang laden with indelible doubt.

he has this amazing way of making me feel little, uncared of, like a huge burden, and he can't communicate openly and honestly for shit. "i'm busy" etc...that's what you said back then rather than really telling me whhat was going on, and if only you had, i'd never have met your sorry fucking ass. i regret ever trusting you. i hate you, fuck feeling nostalgic or guilt over you, i'm so over this. there are so many guys after me, why do i waste precious moments of my life on him? i don't want his friendship, i don't want him.

 does love ever last? do all men just want sex? will he always leave for the prettier girl? 

rationally i should be saying of course not, but my heart - my heart? its silence is louder.

i feel like saying yes to an arranged marriage after i graduate not for financial reasons, but because my heart has been broken, and i don't know if i can trust again, not after all these experiences. at least with an arranged marriage, there's companionship, and it won't hurt if his eyes wander,  he stops paying you attention, he's always at work and never listens to you, makes you feel like a burden, he says he's attracted to other girls and you feel lead on, sick to your core, he gets confused, he won't fully commit, he emotionally leaves after sex, you won't feel angry because you feel you weren't listened to and you felt disrespected and betrayed etc.... because you never were close to him in the first place, you never loved him, you were never vulnerable, so there's nothing to hurt.  just two lost empty souls getting by.

it's self-protection. and i could do with wealth. help my family, pay off the debts. i'm not ugly and i'm about to get a good degree, which is all that's needed, not my heart. it's easier. and he can lie, lie, lie to me how much he loves me and how beautiful i am while he cheats, and i can hide myself from the lies in the fancy house and travels and jewels and cheap flings, a slow death rather than the quick one that burns you whole while in love.

i understand why some girls grow up to be gold-digging, cold women now.

"I really do feel as though I was psychologically mutilated that night and that now I'm trying to put the pieces back together again. Through love, not hatred. And through my music. My strength has been to open again, to life, and my victory is the fact that, despite it all, I kept alive my vulnerability." - tori amos

"Many of our mothers were themselves sexually abused, either as children or as adults or both. These are women who learned to put up with whatever men dish out. They had to, and they've passed along that passivity and/or fear to their daughters. Because they were not able to heal from their own trauma, they often carry their damaged self-esteem, their addiction, and/or their mental illness into their roles as mother. But you have a chance to do things differently.... You can break the cycle."

"Girls find many different ways of expressing their feelings about their sexual abuse. Some girls find writing to be the best way to get it out. I know an eighteen-year-old who filled three journals with drawings and writings about her incest. She said that every time she wrote or drew some of her feelings, she felt she let go of pieces of the pain."

"In fact, the basic premise of this book is that the best way to heal from sexual abuse is to talk about it, and the bet time to talk is now, while you are still young. Adolescence through your mid-twenties is the time when you are most able to change and grow. This is a time of tremendous transformation and you can heal the scars of your abuse the more you talk about it- now. Sexual abuse leaves wounds, but wounds heal and if you can get to them now they won't have time to grow deep roots and cause you a lifelong suffering."

Triggers are not controllable. But by recognizing what they are and when and why they occur, you can consciously re-map your emotions. My client who was molested in the bath, for instance, made the choice to take back the experience of bathing. She bought herself bath oils and candles and plays soft, sweet music so she can relax into the soothing waters. It didn't work at once, of course, but now she really enjoys a hot bath and no longer associates it with her abuse."

"At this point we cannot count on the police or the courts to protect us from rape. And our culture doesn't help. There is more pornography available now than ever before, not to mention the general "porno-graphication" of young women. It is no surprise that the director of many Britney Spears videos is Gregory Dark, a well known hardcore pornographic movie director. "

"Often, before we can talk about the traumas that have happened to us, we have to find outlets for our feelings. Whether you realize it or not, you probably already have a number of such outlets. Maybe those long runs at the track are helping you get out your anger. Maybe singing those gorgeous and sad Gregorian chants have been giving you a channel for some deep pain; maybe drawing strong women will full bodies in drawing studio has been making your body feel healed. That's part of the genius of the body and mind. We are often self-healing without even realizing it. "

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/the-circumstantial-breakup/

Say wonderful. Means something which inspires delight, pleasure, and admiration. Say wonderful because it fits, like compatible and forever night conversation — every cliché come to life.

Say perfect. Means euphoria can be casual, locked between fingers on errands and commutes, wrapped wide and warm while you slept. Say perfect because every part of you fell so easily into place, as if by design.

Say intimate. Means a language of glances. Codenames and inside jokes. You were a connoisseur of the rougher parts, the acquired tastes, those subtle hints which others failed to appreciate. You drank it up, all of it, and it stained your lips.

Say opportunity. Means the doors finally opened, like you knew they would, like you hoped they would, and you felt a reflexive joy at their success. Smiled with pride. Your own opportunity followed. They smiled with pride. Two goons smiling at each other — sprinting across shared furniture.

A job.

A school.

A relocation.

Say distance. New York and New Mexico. Miami and Minneapolis. Paris. Something far — the distance as manageable as the opportunity was deniable. The first of many long talks. You want the best for them. You want the best. This is best. Mature. Correct. No infidelity. No ill will. No problem but the distance. So an amiable break then. Victims of circumstance. But the better for it. Only the best. A Circumstantial Breakup. And hey, you know, maybe a few years down the road?

Say unlikely. Split items into boxes and move to a room devoid of color. Wonder what you’re doing there. Your decorations cover only half the walls. This is an opportunity. Make spaghetti. Realize they took the colander. Use a fork. Verb alone from now on. No.

Say denial. Call them to talk about your unshared day. Try to remember the names of faces you’ve never seen — the cast of characters in a narrative to which you no longer belong. Smile with your voice; be happy for their success. You don’t need a Word file to keep track of their new friends. You have stories. Today on the train there was this bird and, oh, you say, I guess I didn’t realize how late it was there. Time zones. Skype. Dead air. You don’t say regret. But neither do they.

Say months it’s been now, months you tell your friends, the new friends, the ones with names your Someone has trouble recalling on the every-so-often phone conversations. You flash your friends a picture of a Boston Terrier puppy you saw at the park. That Someone loved Boston Terriers. So you texted them the picture, and they didn’t respond, not until two days later, when they asked if you’d seen the Banksy documentary. Should I resend it? you ask, Cause I think their phone is pretty bad, so sometimes they don’t get my texts.

Say confusion when they stop calling. Send a text asking for their new address, though, and your phone rings almost immediately, the voice on the other end muted but alarmed. They say you’re not coming here are you? and you say I was just gonna mail a birthday present. You feel inexplicably guilty. Overwhelmingly guilty. Sickly. Strange. They say they’ll be out of town for their birthday, visiting the parents of a name you have in a Word file somewhere. Your gut retreats. You smile and hope it carries in your voice. Oh, cool. They acknowledge how great their new lover is, and ask — so casually — if there is anyone special in your life at the moment.

Say yes. They stained your lips.

Say regret and let the color drain. Bind yourself to misery with a string of joyless f-cks. Close your eyes. Pretend. Pantomime what worked before. Feel the weight of your failures — let them anchor you. Sink. Drink. Smoke blow kiss fight die a little over and over until you’ve died a lot. Discover that ‘emotionally vacant’ is a look someone, lower-case, finds attractive. Date them. Say wonderful. Say compatible. Say perfect. Say intimate. Mean it as hard as you can. Fail. Feel the weight. Hate their colander. Hate having to retell your stories, the forever redundant night conversation — every cliché come to life. Suffer through this person who loves you, this kind, giving person, perfect on the page, this beautiful outfit that won’t ever fit. Wonder: how hollow is your commitment when a single call could change everything? Love swings for the fences; it doesn’t wait like a minor league pitcher for a call from the majors.

Say sorry and go it alone. Write words like these only better. Listen to old songs. Wish they would’ve slept with your best friend or, or something, something which allowed you to hate them. They never gave you a reason to hate them. Would that all your future relationships could end in hate. Blinding, final hate — fiery like Cortez and his ships. Permanent. Something so explosive it propels you forward. Means it’s too painful to look back. Means you never relive the first date stop the vacations together come on the way they’d wake up ten minutes before your alarm to kiss you to consciousness just stop.

Say acceptance. This is the prize you earned for your maturity, for letting the logic of opportunity win out over emotion:

A relationship without the protracted descent into resentment. A friend. Sweet memories. Freedom in your twenty-somethings. Self-aggrandizing what-ifs. New lips, with their own stain. Awkward hugs. Facebooks you don’t check. A job. A school. A relocation. All your old tricks made new. Tension again — tension over comfort — you never knew how much you’d been missing it. Forever middle couch cushions. Bridging the distance. Walking the streets. Collapsing in bed. Hoarding the sheets. This was what you chose, remember? This was what you chose.

Say opportunity.

If I had to do it all over again, I'd have majored in Poli Sci and Economics, with a minor in Psychology and English Literature. Sounds impossible, so maybe just the first two. I didn't take up Econ ultimately because I was afraid of math.

My biggest problem is self-confidence. That's why I'm taking much harder classes now, though.It's forcing me out of my comfort zone, and everybody's so smart, but I know at the end of the day it will make me stronger. Because sometimes some issues don't require therapy. They just require participation in real life. And it might be uncomfortable and freak you out, but you need to prove to yourself you can handle it, otherwise all the positive talk in the world won't be able to get you out of it.

And so I'm back posting publicly once more. By questioning my beliefs yet again, I ironically find myself slowly pulled back more or less towards the philosophy I lived by when I was younger..

Professor Bazian said to a student "I feel sorry for you because you're letting somebody else run your own life." when he told him the real reason he was taking his class. And at that moment, I froze, put down my pen I was using to take down notes, and just sat and stared. And listened. And so the real learning began, the kind that's not about copying down what the professor emphasizes, but the kind where you let each word into your heart. Where you tinker around with the idea in your head and you make connections, not for the sake of writing a great analytical essay, but for understanding yourself, others, the world around you. For the sake of opening your mind and losing judgment; for the sake of opening your heart up just a little more, and gaining compassion. For the sake of wisdom, not simply knowledge or validation, for her forgiveness for something that was not your fault, all those silly emotional issues that make us lose who we are.

I like Professor Bazian. He's funny and he's real, and I think he gets me. At first, I found him intimidating, but being the blabbermouth I tend to be in class discussions with professors, I feel a distant closeness. He's one of the many inspiring me to get back to center, to truth. I was living just to get by, like on default, cutting corners and lying without thinking. And so it's no wonder I forgot my essenvce.

Let's get back to what's important. Let's be free. Let's just speak freely.

Once again, as I did when I started this journal, I find myself in another therapist’s office deconstructing lies I unthinkingly swallowed from those with good intentions.

She says nothing; I simply speak, and for the first time in years, I hear my own voice. I shake when I hear it. I sweat a little, too. There is nothing more revealing, terrifying, and simultaneously healing as listening to yourself speak. I hear your opinions. I hear your thoughts, your revolutionary, scary, out of the box thoughts that give me goosebumps because they're so risky, so daring, so out there. And yet so true. I hear your anger. I hear fragments of your dreams. I hear you seethe with rage that you let everybody else get so loud. I hear you remind me I listened to you all the time 16. I hear your voice tremble before it bursts into tears as you explain to me I let other people's negative self-perceptions color my own. You tell me, I took on for them their own self-hatred, and in the process I forgot myself. I hear your pain, but I also hear your fiery strength. And that actually terrifies me more.

You frighten me with how wise you are. You're so different, you and your crazy ideas may make me a happier person, but it will lead me to a scary path filled with uncertainty. You'll make me tell truths that might isolate me. Because the reality is, most people don't want to be around a real person, for the same reason I don't want to be around you. People who are themselves invite others to be themselves; honest people reveal the truth in others, and not many want that. Brings up pain, reminds us of the front and wall we put up to hide from how hurt we've been. By committing to you, I will be myself, and I'm afraid that will ruin my life the way it did once before. This is real love we're talking about here. This is love, with all of it dangers and pain that could come up. And if I say yes to you, if I truly give you my all, I may never go back.

I stopped being open, I stopped talking, and so I stopped learning. I stopped growing in the way I wanted to. I stopped healing. Everywhere I go, people who once were so vulnerable and open close down, but maybe it is just me. I shut down.

Let's say all the shitty things and wipe them out. Let's be human, and let's be unafraid of being judged. I am not here for attention, for navel-gazing. I am here to learn myself again, so I can learn you. I'm here to love myself again, so I can love you. I am here for some honesty, because I've lied enough.

I trap myself in this self-created cage to protect myself from being caged. I create a web of lies to hide the fact I find it so hard to trust. I hurt the ones I love, they hurt me, we hurt each other. Everybody hurting, hurting, hurting. And I know how to solve it, I know how to communicate rationally, I know the psychological issues that make people project, assume, lie, deny, lack trust. But my heart ignores what my head knows.

And why would I want to love again? To repeat the same old patterns every time? To watch you, watch her? To watch you leave, as you always did?

You may have had different faces, but you were always the same man.

There, I gave voice to your pain.

It's not that I'm unhappy. I'm more peaceful, accepting my past and my actions in a way I didn't before. I accept I lived in London once, and I accepted what made me do so. I don't feel anger. Instead, I cherish the memories I had, because I suppose it's been long enough now that I can fully see how London shaped me for the better. Or how major depression at a young age inadvertently saved me from experiencing far worse at a later age, because it forced me to learn a couple of important life lessons early on.

How I can describe myself is like a phoenix getting ready to burst into flames. It's not a bad feeling, but sometimes the process feels bad. But then, realizing how much you hid from yourself does that. And there's a part of me that craves to burn again.

I thought Berkeley would add to me, but instead it's removing. Removing all the bullshit and fronts I've put up to hide the deep pain, the lies I bought, the false beliefs about my self lacking from low self-esteem, so I can remember the soul that was within, that needs no improvement. And now here, at this place I considered a symbol of everything I thought I'd ever wanted - the end so to speak - I go back to the beginning all over again.

Those things you were looking for were only to be found within yourself.

I'm going to work on making old posts public again these next few weeks. And I'm going to use this journal way more often now as a tool to hear myself out again, and to self-improve. I am very tired of repeating the same old patterns in my relationships and school. I refuse to break down again. And I refuse to let my character tarnish because of my issues. I am ashamed of some things I have done recently, but I'm not going to let them take me over.

0You know that feeling at the end of the day, when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away and, for maybe the first time that day, you see, with some clarity, the people you love and the ways you have, during that day, slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted out some mildly hurtful thing, projected, instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion? That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets?

I feel like that now: tired of the Me I've always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness.

My mind, my limited mind.

The story of my life is the story of the same basic mind readdressing the same problems in the same already discredited ways. First order of business: Feed the trap. Work the hours to feed the trap. Having fed the trap, shit, piss, preparing again to feed the trap. Because it is your trap, defend it at all costs.

Because we feel ourselves first and foremost as physical beings, the physical comes to dominate us: Beloved uncles die, parents are displaced, cousins go to war, children suffer misfortune, love becomes a trap. The deeper in you go, the more it hurts to get out. Disaster (sickness, death, loss) is guaranteed and in fact is already en route, and when it comes, it hurts and may even destroy us.

We fight this by making ourselves less vulnerable, mastering the physical, becoming richer, making bigger safety nets, safer cars, better medicines.

But it's nowhere near enough.



-- passage taken from a George Saunders May 2006 GQ article

i want to take up the drums again.

today i swore a lot, i moshed out in my bedroom to death metal, i was honest about something i usually wouldn't say anything about so as to not offend people, i watched a horror film and laughed through it all, and then i had some steak for the first time in my life. it was disgusting, but i tried it anyways because i've always wanted to. i did all this day today because i told myself i was perfect the way i was, and beautiful in my imperfection. i essentially did not listen to the voice in my head telling me what is feminine, masculine, good, bad, crude, etc...and it was fucking incredible. i headbanged the entire day away. i also didn't bother reading "the economist" i force myself to read sometimes just to keep informed because i'm "supposed" to. instead, i drew, and then i painted on my body. it was pretty scary and for a second i wondered if i'm fooling myself into liking what i study if i view mags like that as a bit of a burden to read, but then i realized i like what i study, but i'm feeling creatively unfulfilled.

being myself feels pretty good. i should try it more often.

]love is greater than power and money. authenticity and individuality is more important than bowing down to your parents.

i want to like, throw monkey shit at my neighbor's teenaged sons for blasting the shittiest music ever right now. jay z, go eff yourself.

love and peace

i'm out