listen: summer 2022
Sometimes I struggle to write here or anywhere and I like to think I'm writing a letter to someone I care about.
How are you feeling? How have you been? What's the weather like where you are? Have you seen any good movies? What's life like right now?
I'm moving a lot, getting to feel more comfortable in my brain and body these days, asking for what I need and want, learning to trust myself and where I'm at. All the good growth shit.
I guess where I'm at is thinking a lot about two things that keep going through my mind and which popped in kind of unbidden in the past few weeks, they feel related to me:
shame is a liar and it wants you alone
it makes me sad that so many people (myself included) have trouble absorbing care and love and that they're extremely worthy of those things
Whatever's going on for you, it's going to be easier if you tell people and it's going to feel better if you don't carry whatever it is alone. I didn't believe this for most of my life, I was raised to believe that you couldn't really trust people and that you had to always figure out things yourself and most importantly, you couldn't show when you were struggling. God forbid you show people your belly like a puppy, god forbid you act soft and vulnerable in front of others. Because yeah, there's a risk you'll get hurt if you do that—but there's an absolute certainty that you'll miss out on the benefits of being loved and known and held if you don't try.
I was talking about these ideas with my friend yesterday and I realized as I was talking that it almost becomes easier to risk being disappointed when you're risking in general. It's like, in a regular steady diet of risk where you're actually discovering that the people around you care about you and love you, the occasional disappointment doesn't hit as hard or in the same crushing way. You have this emotional safety net of all the good shit you've let in beforehand. It's surprising and may seem strange but one thing won't end you because it's just that: one thing in a sea of so many other safe buoys.
I'm trying to talk to myself like I'm my friends, I'm trying to remind myself that love and care are things I'm extremely worthy of too, not something I have to earn or work for—just something I need and want and deserve. I think that's the job with the people we love and it pays us nothing but it also pays us everything. Everything else is secondary.