Anthology of the Self - Entry VIII
Love is Lost (Lost is Love): A Mirror Long Needed
[CONTENT WARNING: Therapy Essay. If themes of Self-Love, Trauma, Disassociation, Depression, Anxiety and Dysmorphia may be triggering, please read no further.]
I keep harping on here about the want for love, yet I’m not convinced. I’m not convinced I’m actually a lover, a loving thing, a thing to be loved, a thing that spreads love like sweet jam on life’s toasty dryness. I want those I care about to feel love, but before them I cower. I want everyone to feel loved enough to escape the pestilential existence under the yoke of greed, yet I tremble, yet I crumble, yet I weep. I’m a rotting flower, a gorgeous thing perpetuating its own ugliness, speeding up my decay to evade being plucked. A beautiful thing convinced of its own ugliness, so utterly bound in its ugliness, in its corpus, that all other bodies vanish in the immensity of my own rot. Self-pitying to a fault, mentally self-aggrandizing to utter eclipse. The most bloated of meat clumps. I cannot love and it’s tearing me apart. I hike up boulders of twisted neurons, peel back the folds of scorched earth in my city of self, yet still the mountain extends. Another fire burns and burns again. One would think a fire rests under the very crust on which all of ‘I’ is built. A skillet cooks away and sautees all that ever was and since has been the fabric of continuity. A deliciously sauteed self with broiled away memories, charred chunks of ambition and strength, but perfectly juicy where it’s been cared for. What an overwhelming task it is to perfectly cook one’s steak. Inhumanly precise, regarding razor focus to remain delectably servable. One almost needs to stifle the tap from flowing in new experience, to bubble the mind in a purgatory of sweat, wrenched hearts and faded smiles. Self-love, stability under such turgidity and turbulence, chaotically reckless. Certain ideas can section off, micro-manage, apply language and mantras to frequent crossroads, but still edge cases will come. Life will go on and must be formatted, compacted and stored away. I hate this. I hate writing like this. I hate talking like a fucking machine, like I’m a meat cabinet by which sensory input simply must be entered and filed like paperwork, like unread books placed eternally on the shelf one uses for dust-ranching. I’m not a cabinet, not a burning steak, not a wilted flower. I am a human, a soul, in my young adult years with the world before me, with people physically there at every crossroad and gathering of beating hearts. I’m suffering by the very parameters I permit myself to be seen through. I can love imperfectly, can live imperfectly, and not make excuses tucked away with a keyboard as my only means of approach. I’m still scared, still want to be scared, because to be scared is easier to attempt love for the first time while everyone else has already came close enough to it to have an idea. I claim to truly love those I cannot be close to while neglecting those close to me that want to reciprocate it, want my attention and my presence. I deem them wrong, deem their love impossible, because they don’t know me, can’t see myself, can’t read my thoughts, can’t taste my dreams, view me through some lens of how I used to be. So I perform for them, play into it, because back then I was too stupid to be a coward. I can act closer to myself, even if it’s not the same person they fell in love with. If they cease to love me, that love was never genuine. But there are so few tendons of love that support my bed. I desperately reweave the same rotting webs rather than growing, tying new webs or acknowledging the speciality of those I hardly allow in. I’m sickly tripping over my own corpses of dead selves, my own perceived faults. I want to be myself so bad but am crippled. I keep thinking I’m over it but I’m so crippled by judgements. Indomitably so, no matter how much stoicism or self-love or strong character or intellectual competency I reinforce myself with. I simply can’t cope with the misconstrual of words, the wrong impression. So expert a wordsmith in ink, are we? But the tongue, the tongue is a traitor. She hates to obey. She, huh? She as in my tongue? I may detest my flesh, but it is my tongue piloted by my will. Again, I am stumbling over myself. There is no one to blame for this. It feels like there is no escape. There is, there is, there is! Why the fuck do you care so much? Why are you so fucking scared of the wrong impression? Of feeling mundane? You aren’t mundane, and even if you were, it would still be a lot better than just being a fucking absence that isolates itself more and more. You want to be a ghost so bad, to toss your flesh aside and your skin asunder, but here’s the fucking truth. You can’t. There is no starving yourself into freedom. There is no becoming a ghost. There is no life, no soul without body and flesh. Flesh… flesh… your weakness. Is it because it dies? Is it because you know you’re barrelling towards death that you keep excusing death to yourself, that you keep praising and romanticising and fetishizing what is the end to all love? Is it that you keep being forced to live by unwilled means, that there is life that ought to be done, that utterly exhausts you whenever you retake the wheel? Why can’t you just take the wins and live at the times you are unchained? Why is death, the reduction of physicality into utter inaccessibility, your only conceivable way of ensuring control? You want love to just fall in your hands but you have to work for it, ask for it, not cower beneath judgements and behind irony and masks. Make yourself utterly loving and you will become lovable. People aren’t as terrible as you think they are, no matter how much they wrong you and scare the ever-living fuck out of you. What the hell is love to you? People care about you deeply, care about your ideas and your input deeply. There is such a grand swirling cosmos of potential, anticipation and wonder around your character, embedded in the interpretations many have of the current you. The current ME. The current fucking ME. I am talking to myself through a fake fucking voice. I am the other I fear. I am the problem. There is no fucking judgements. Prove it to me, show them to me. There are no judgments. If there are, they are utterly, definitively fleeting. Love is not lost, and let me explain why. Love has always been there, it’s web keeping me safe from birth. I may have not always reciprocated it, not always taken the right approach to managing and sorting these instances of love, but such ought no longer dictate me. I am trying really hard right now to remain in the first person. I’m trying really hard not to disassociate. I love so badly to disassociate, to fantasize, to leave my body because of its politics and contingencies and vileness. But eyes, too, are flesh, the great perceivers and parsers of all the grand physicalities and tangible aesthetics. Ears upon which the grand orchestras of wind and soul mark their tunes, upon which stories and lives are passed. The Brain by which all is thought, voyaged, processed and known. The Tongue by which I declare myself and rhetorically make a case for my soul. My Nerves which have allowed me to feel the sun, the breeze, the touch of another, even if it never felt close enough. The hands by which I unfold my life and navigate delicious meals and manifest art. My flesh has served me so well in these sectors, even where it has wronged me in others, A ghost holds no pen, tells no tales, feels no breeze, makes no transformations and never evolves. To stagnate is to cease, to cease to be in the utterly inexhaustible language of the soul. Let me write until my fingers bleed and make use of this blessed flesh, my gifts of intellect and social standing and charisma and resilience. Let me own the progress I have made without becoming utterly obsessed with perfecting the untouchable, imperfectable agents and actions of any life lived. Life goes on, and it can no longer be a loveless life, because I have begun to understand this much: no one is utterly unloved. One can only not love themselves, and thus become willfully blind to all which directs itself unto them. To make a simulacrum, an other within the physicality, one isolates the soul and mind to a realm of their own. I suffer because I refuse to understand that it is not my body receiving all the praise, refuse to understand that they are talking to the same self I interpret myself favourably as. I am only unloved in belief, in not being able to understand the unconditional want those around me have to be close to me. By obsessing over the flesh and my body for so long, I have conditioned myself to center both my problems and my growths around it. Yet, utterly, this is a lie. A lie to protect myself from love. To protect myself from having to care about other people, to dedicate myself to those of whom I am full of so much uncertainty. My body does not burn at the stake so my mind can thrive, nor does my mind starve while my body fattens. I am singular, not a possessed corpse, not an aspiring ghost, not a tired thing. There is a thinking thing bloated with experience, art, emotions, ideas, soul, wants, skills, paths and love. And love. And love. I love myself. I love myself so much, not in an ego sense. Not in a purely mental sense. I love being a body that exists in space, regardless of the trouble it brings me. This is not the internet, you are not projecting yourself into a digital void begging for scraps. Dualism died with God, don’t let it be reborn to the wired fuckdome of E-void. Don’t be a dualist online, forget the body and the beauties it has brought you, even in great suffering. You have a life, a quaint minute life so utterly contained in the same five miles, the same few dozen souls, so fucking love that land and the people in it, even if they aren’t yet at the point where they can love you back. Yeah, I know it’s gonna be a lot fucking easier to ramble this out on a keyboard than it is to put in practice, but think about it this way. I’m giving you advice for once, the final boss, after so long trying to give good advice to other people. Listen, obsessing over yourself isn’t loving yourself. What it is is knowing what’s best for you and acting in that way to put yourself in the best position. Cowering, masking, hiding, these subtle forms of dishonesty and lowering, which I know you shun hypocritically, are not the means to approach life. Bending the knee isn’t either, maximizing who loves you through falsehoods. Just go out there and don’t stutter. Go out there and feel each word spoken to you and embrace it like a warm hug. Be unabashedly yourself, because if you can play anyone, that’s who. Sure, morph to adopt the most admirable traits, but never deny yourself that underlying fabric, establish that growth on a continuity. Feel yourself in your own body at all moments. Look around the room. Be hyper aware of your surroundings. You breathe in now, and out now. In again. Out again. Your skin is cool, your wrists ache a bit, but that’s okay. Let those fingers move and fill in those cracks where your tongue betrays you. Riggle that tongue around in your mouth. Own it. Own every word that crawls out of it, no matter how caustic, no matter how absurd. Own every word that you can stand behind, that you can speak on, that brings you closer to beauty. Language is the means by which we grow closer to one another, the means by which one can so eloquently make themself known. As such, never stumble, never trail off or stutter while there’s more to be said. Never cut off an essay before you’ve internalized all that you have to offer on the topic, before you’ve taken responsibility for all left unsaid, all that is needed to pass on those ideas which so wonderfully bubble away within those brain wrinkles. I love existing, regardless of how much hate I see, how much I am wronged, how much love seems to lack in certain corners, on certain days. Thus is the spice, the variety, and the chaotic glory that it is to be bodily, to be of soul, to be of mind, to be of heart. I love myself deeply. I love those around me just as deeply. And I hope, even if they won’t have me, even if their flesh scares me, even if their demeanor constricts me, that I can love everyone as deeply too. Now sleep well, dream great dreams, and wake up to another day. Another day where all that is lost can be a little more found, a little more understood, and a little closer to peace and harmony.