November 4 2024 Word Vomit Extravaganza
It’s weird how I haven’t been writing when I feel like things are going well. As if the only parts of life I want to look back on and read about are the ones where I felt like I was doomed. Realistically, once I’m old and my brain is deteriorating I want to be able to look back and read about all the good things that were happening and all the good feelings I was feeling. Instead I might be looking back when i’m old and i’ll be able to think of all the long gaps between dates as the times I was too busy enjoying my life instead of when it used to be the times I was so sad I could hardly peel myself off of something into an upright position. Then I’m struggling to write something I believe anyone can actually relate to, because honestly that’s become a larger reason of why I write, and that makes me feel a little ashamed. I write for people to read my writing, to share in my emotions, to help me feel a little more connected when I have spent so many years of feeling so deeply disconnected. How over the years the people I was romantically involved with left me feeling as though I had to write letters to explain myself, to apologize, to tell them I cared about them. I had to do it on paper in fear of not being taken seriously, for not being allowed to freely express all my thoughts before being interrupted or disagreed with. To stop and gather all my thoughts and feelings to avoid painfully word-vomiting them all over the place, usually after a night of heavy drinking and months of feeling some kind of resentment. I’m beginning to think that should have been my first sign that none of these people were right for me. How all of the people that are important to me or I am building connections with don’t make me feel this way. Or when they do, I talk about it, and they reassure me, listen to me, and love me, still. Even when I sometimes drink a little too much and word vomit anyways, it’s no longer met with anger or me feeling less that adequate to be part of this human experience. That it’s okay, that I’m actually quite normal and for the first time in my life I’m navigating the world with actually knowing what I want from it. The needs and wants have always been normal I was just looking for them in the wrong places for so many years it became what felt normal. I’ve spent so much time trying to find a quick fix to things and move forward that the way I’ve started to slow down makes me feel like I’m walking through Jello sometimes, the minutes move (sometimes painfully) slow, but I’m learning, and I’m long-term-fixing so I don’t have to stay stuck in this cycle. Learning to be less critical of myself, to normalize myself in a way that I can live realistically the way that I want to, a way that feels good. Like the other day, I was so tired shopping at Costco and when I went to leave I realized I had forgotten my receipt, I abandoned my cart and jogged back to my register, chicken bake stashed under my arm half eaten. Instead of being annoyed with myself I laughed at myself. I laughed the same way the woman who was standing there holding my receipt laughed too. I don’t know why that moment felt good, but it did. Feeling that way made me feel like an entirely different person that i was just a few months ago. Even if my writing has morphed into something more public even if still personal, I have to remind myself that it’s something I need to do, something that makes me function in the way I want to be living in my day to day. It’s not just for a blog post, it’s not even just for connecting with other people even though that’s what it seems to have shifted into (and the amount of joy that part brings me is actually unmatched but…)Every morning pages is a little reset, to tether me back to the earth, to myself. To continue teaching myself how to identify all the things that are working, so I can clear out all the ones that are not, to make space for good parts I still have yet to meet.
Back in February I read the book Little Weirds by Jenny Slate. I read it weeks after a break up that left me feeling so shattered. It shattered me in so many different layers that it’s hard to pin point which parts were actually caused from the relationship and which parts were part of me, my past, and my healing I had been putting on the back burner for a number of years. To force myself to face myself and the parts I needed to work on. Little Weirds talked so much about heartbreak and feeling rejected and how impossible it can feel to fit into a world where it has, time and time again, convinced you how unloveable you are by being too much. It talked about learning to fall in love with all the quirky parts of yourself and your life and the world around you. There were parts of that book that I was reading that felt as though the author had somehow pulled those thoughts directly out of my own brain and put them onto paper. To connect with her thoughts and writing style of a total stranger made me feel both comforted and as though I’m just a carbon copy of half the people on the planet, but I didn’t really care. Little Weirds made me feel something that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It inspire me to write my morning pages in a way that was more playful, less for the human gaze but more for myself and my small little heart. To play instead of continually analyze my behavior and the things that I thought were wrong with me. So incredibly inspired by her opening pages confessing her love to a croissant. This has stuck with me in a way that is so brilliant it’s actually difficult for me to articulate, to fall in love with the mundane parts of my life and appreciate all these little moments that aren’t forever. at one point in time I wasn’t afraid to die, I didn’t feel as though I had much to lose and I knew it was a natural part of the way the world went. I held little to no regard for my own safety or my future in that sense, and now I have shifted into this life where I am actually startled at the feeling of what I now have to lose. Like how someday I might be old and not be able to eat a perfectly baked croissant for breakfast shatters my heart in a way that I never even knew was possible.
Fast forward to September, my therapist broke up with me. Those weren’t her words but that’s what it felt like. She got a job offer she couldn’t refuse, and that made it impossible for her to continue on as my therapist. This woman saved my life, or maybe taught me how to save my own. Towards the end of our last session we began talking about referrals to new therapists she thought would be a good fit for me. Before she told me my options she said, “Hear me out..” She told me she didn’t think I needed to be in therapy currently. My reaction was to laugh at her, which surprised both of us a little. I said, “are you kidding me? I feel like an insane person every time I’m in this room.” She had to remind me of all the work we’ve done, how the first time I sat down in this same exact chair I told her about how insignificant my life felt and how alone and tiny I felt in this big world. How I have shed so many layers of myself and morphed into a million different people in this room. How I had cried more in front of her than anyone else in the world. How I learned how I wanted to keep living my life in a way I didn’t know was possible, all in a little chair in a little office with an insanely kind and brilliant woman. She had helped me put a million little bandaids on my heart in an attempt to keep it all together long enough to find a real way to repair it. My heart had gone from this tiny piece of bruised and rotting fruit surrounded by flies and picked up and put down so many times to a little rose of Jericho, do you know what those are? Those weird little bundles of dormant leaves and roots that can exist like that for years before being exposed to some water and blooming into a wonderfully beautiful and resilient little plant. The plant of resurrection. Is that a weird way to describe it? Maybe, but that’s the only thing I can think of to describe what it feels like.
Fast forward to last week, I picked up Jenny Slates new book Life Form. It feels like we’re catching up. Ten months ago I was resonating with all of her pain and heartbreak and learning to exist as myself in a world where I had felt continually rejected. This new book is about her falling in love, genuinely and realistically. The good parts and the messy parts. It’s normalizing so many things that make us all feel a little crazy. How loving someone and being loved the right way can change your entire brain chemistry in so many ways you wouldn’t even believe it’s possible. How teaching yourself to unlearn all of these painful feelings from past relationships with people, romantic or platonic, that had set you up for future failures. How simple life can feel when all the right people are sticking around and you’re distancing yourself from the ones who don’t make you feel like you’re walking on clouds. How for the first time in my entire life I don’t feel like I have to put myself all out on the table, I don’t have to tell someone all the things I love about them in order to convince them to stick around. Jenny Slate said it in a way that will again stick with me forever, I’m now playing the long game. I have time, I can save some of these feelings and thoughts I have for all these people worth loving because I will still get to tell things to when we’re old, because they will still be there.
I was looking through some of my pages to see what I was feeling in the time that I was reading Little Weirds. Instead I found a page from November 1st 2023, almost exactly a year ago. I’m talking about love, I was struggling in a relationship that wasn’t right for me, how all my needs seemed to be too much, how I was trying to change someone who didn’t want to change. I held so much blame, working on dimming parts of myself I had deemed “unloveable” as if I was forgetting that sharing all of those parts of ourselves is the quickest way to weed out the people who are no good for me. Not that these were bad people in any way, but they weren’t the right fit. How all I really wanted was to be “allowed” to be too much. I guess by allowed I mean comfortable with myself in a sense to do it with zero remorse. Isn’t love some wild and insane concept that maybe should be too much? I’d rather too much than too little. I want to be in my little untidy brain head over heels in love as an insane person and have some equally as insane person that gets to love me back. All of those parts that I once titled unloveable become the exact reasons someone wants to love me. To be able to air out all my grievances and to be met with some understanding instead of someone telling me how bat shit crazy I sound. To let someone convince me that my needs for affection, honesty, clear boundaries, or some healthy habits in a state of healing is damaging or too large of an ask is what really seems insane. To feel sad about how much of my youth was wasted on men and relationships that were emotionally damaging used to be the only lens I could see them through, and now all of those parts seem worth it, it’s cause dme to project the work I needed onto myself, to respect myself for what I need and what I want from not only a partner but the whole world, and most importantly what I need to show up for myself. To be able to sit and not hate the person that I have to stare back at in the mirror every single day for the rest of my life. For so long all I wanted was to get married and have kids, I wanted a family and to create a space that I felt like I belonged, to be a priority to someone, to not have to change all these “too much parts” of myself but to be accepted and wanted for all the parts that I am. I substituted relationships with men who made me continually feel less that, at what cost? To desperately try and fill a gap I had felt my entire life. Now entering my 30’s and meeting the people I’m supposed to be surrounded by and falling in love with all of them makes me feel as though it doesn’t even matter how long it took to get here, that all of that confusion and sad desperation pushed me to get to exactly where I needed and wanted to be. My gaps are closing and my heart still feels fragile, but it feels revamped. And best of all? I like myself, I like being around myself and sitting and doing whatever I want, and I no longer care if I get married or have kids the same way I used to.
In these ten months between Little Weirds and Life Form I feel like that gap was filled with a lot of life. A lot of pain and sadness and laughing and crying and joking and learning and loving. How reading Life Form feels like her and I are catching up on all of these things that have happened over those ten months. It’s again as if she is pulling thoughts from my brain and printing them onto a piece of paper to help me understand myself better. I know that sounds conceited but it’s really how I feel when I read her books. (Minus the being pregnant and married part) it gives me a little hope in love and slowing my life down. Convincing me that I am a very normal person with very normal needs. Reminding myself how far I have come, and that the possibilities that life still holds that are unknown to me, are equally as beautiful as they are terrifying. I want to be ready to welcome each and every one with open arms. How instead of settling I want to forever be growing and shifting, I used to think it was bad to want to “change” to change myself or the people around me. Now I’m just wanting to expand, I’m wanting to take up space, I’m wanting people I care about to want to grow and expand and take up space, and intertwine with me. I’m learning to ask for what I want, to politely tell people what I need, and to understand that their reactions don’t invalidate me. To feel as though it’s okay to love me, in a way that isn’t self absorbed or vain. like a few weeks ago I watched someone in a grocery store walk right by a woman who’s wheelchair cart had gotten stuck on one of those dairy section refrigerator doors, he didn’t even stop to ask if she needed help, when very clearly she did. So I crossed over to where she was and asked if she needed help. How it took a few tries but we got the cart maneuvered away from the door and she laughed. How then I spend the next five minutes or so helping her find the exact coffee creamer her son had requested on her grocery list. Do you all even know how many flavors of coffee creamer there are now? I’m not kidding, stop and take a look next time if you don’t. It’s insane, any dessert you could ever want can now be added to your coffee in a liquid form. Sweet & Creamy was the flavor, and finally I FOUND IT! We cheered and she told me how kind and smart I was, it made my heart flutter a little bit and we talked a bit and parted ways. It also hurt my heart that this simple human interaction should have been out of basic human decency, but for some I guess it isn’t. ANYWAYS. That’s it, that’s the kind of life I want to live, I want to slow down and help people find their coffee creamers and get butterflies when someone is kind to me that doesn’t have to be. I want to be kind and love people and I think it’s only fair that I finally make space for people who give me all of those feelings in return. That’s it.