Firstly: hi, the world is a heavy place to be right now. I wish I had the right words to say. I don’t. I can only take in so much while continuing to move forward, and that makes me feel like shit, honestly. There is so much grief for the lives that are lost; the lives that are still to be taken. In moments like this, I think: “Who am I to still have the privilege of my daily routine? Who am I to still have hope of another day, another chance, of having enough time to heal and grow and change?” To live when so many are dying feels gratuitous. Free Palestine.
Big Feels on Love and an Ancient Hurt:
It was my birthday at the end of October (it always is, teehee). I was lucky enough to visit my friend in Austin, TX. I was unlucky enough to get a horrible illness on the flight over. My throat felt like knives, my chest broke out in a rash. My friend is a Taurus (albeit a reluctant one), which is only to say that she knows what it is that one needs to make the body feel better. Within ten minutes of being in her home, I was in the bath. She buys her epsom salts in bulk (I thought to myself, “Now this is an adult”) and had a candle at the ready. When I padded my way back out into her kitchen – now clean and my muscles less angry – she had a tall glass of electrolytes at the ready. We leaned into the slow and the steady. We let ourselves be grounded.
It’s been a long year, which, if you’re a big feeler who’s been along for the ride, will come as no surprise. Last year I called my birthday “the reset.” I didn’t know how true that was. It was shortly after the reset that I told my partner of seven years, “I have nothing left to give, if you want to save us, the time is now.” He told me to give him three months (aren’t I worthy of urgency? Isn’t my love worth trying to keep?). Of course, we were done by then. We were done well before. It still took me until March to say it out loud, to string it together as a full sentence. We still decided to run out our rental lease and live in the same place until the end of June; a practical, agonizing, but ultimately restorative choice.
My therapist says there would have been no fixing the relationship anyways. We were two traumatized people traumatizing each other. She also says, “But that’s why I’m not a marriage counselor – I just tell everyone to get divorced.”
The rest of the year has been consistent in its chaos. I’ve had big shifts and big scares in every major category: health, money, family, friends, home, love.
I’m thirty-three this year and, as my dad said, “That’s when Jesus died. This is all the time he had.” My dad is never more tender than when he is talking about the son of god.
The Jesus year is a funny thing. I don’t know how much I’ve thought about it, but I guess I do feel a resurrection coming. Of course, before the resurrection is the necessary death. This year has been a process of taking everything apart, lining it up in a row, measuring and prodding and testing to see what can be kept and what must be left behind. I invite all my precious parts (the relationships, false narratives, old hurts, and baby hopes) that make up the discipleship of myself, to a last supper. I know that some will betray me, and I invite them anyways. I hold them close enough so they can lean in, kiss me on the cheek.
I don’t want to be this person anymore, the one who must hold so tightly to the people she loves; the one who must hold so tightly to her life to live it.
I had a thought lately about the narrative of my life. It came after reading my grandparents love letters. It came after attending my friend’s wedding where her and her partner wrote vows in private, away from each other, only to find that they had each started their promises the same way, “There are no words, there is no language, for how much I love love love you.” The thought: Oh, mine is not a love story.
I held onto my marriage so long because I hoped it would turn into a love story.
I tell my friend this revelation over birthday dinner. She asks, “So, what is the narrative?” I know it right away (we could probably each answer this question for ourselves, if we only ask): “I think the narrative is about getting more free.” I mean, it’s a worthy narrative, but it can feel lonely mid-process.
It’s just that I’ve been desperate for love for a long, long time. My therapist says only desperate people date desperate people. So I’m banned from dating for a hot second while I swallow that one.
There are tarot card readers at the restaurant. We go and ask our little questions. My tarot card reader asks me what I want to know about. I feel guilty asking it after my epiphany over dinner, but I ask anyways: Love. She tells me there is so much energy here. She tells me I need to do some housekeeping. She tells me it’s time to be selfish and wild. She says to be so careful if I don’t want kids because I’m very fertile (lol). She tells me love will only happen when it is linked to my freedom.
One of the cards she pulled when I asked about love showed a crow who had blindfolded herself. She said this was about knowing the choice I had to make but choosing to blind myself instead so I could be absolved from making it.
I do want to choose myself in this thirty-third year. I keep thinking of my therapist looking at me with a mix of empathy, confusion, and urgency, saying, “You have to be yourself.”
I do want to be myself. I wish it didn’t feel like such tricky business. I have more to learn and more to heal when it comes to my heart. It all feels linked to my family, especially. I traded one dysfunctional relationship for another. I don’t want to make that trade again.
I was born into the role of comfort. It is difficult to detangle my self worth from the care that I give to others. The lore of my life begins that I was born as a solace to my mother after my brother was stillborn exactly a year prior. My mother would tell me about her grief, the horror of having to deliver a baby she knew was dead, how she asked the doctor how soon she could try to get pregnant again (he said, give it three months), “but then came you.”
My adolescence is complicated, riddled with magic and trauma: the good walks alongside the bad. When I decided to show up not as a comfort, but as my own self—to put it in less poetic terms: when I came out as bisexual to a devoutly evangelical family—I was told that I may as well be dead. I only wanted to be fully alive with the ones I love.
Love is conditional and flimsy. Love is what is given when you sacrifice yourself on a cross of your own making.
I think of the Julia Jacklin lyrics, “I had your back/ more than I had mine/ I want you to feel good/ all of the time.”
On my last night in Austin, I dreamt of one of my oldest friends, my first love. I woke, ripped from my slumber, and wrote down the feeling that lingered, “I wish you couldn’t so easily do without me because I can’t so easily do without you.”
God, is that an ancient hurt for me. Fucking hell does that pain haunt me. I don’t understand how a customer can walk into the library…and I love them (a blink, a breath); but a mother or a husband or a new partner can’t love me. How can the ones I feel so big about seem to feel so little for me?
And still I show up and tell them I love them. I know people say not to do this (you teach people how to treat you!), but I will probably die doing this (when I said I loved them I meant I see them, so I even see why they cannot love me. Father forgive them, they know not what they do, etc).
My old friend is not the keeper of this hurt. It was there before we bonded, silly and sixteen, over a shared level of chaos.
I am awake after my dream of her and this big feeling, and I see that someone has texted me. I am very protective of my sleep, so I try not to check texts in the middle of the night. This time I do. It’s her. Six messages, the last two sent at the same time I woke with a gasp. An apology for missing my birthday. Strange. It is so strange how we are bound to certain people in this life.
I feel soft and superstitious because, well, it was weird timing! What the hell!
We have been reconnecting this year. It’s been a delicate and mirrored process. We are both ending long and complicated relationships. It’s been both a relief to share the immensity of this experience and also a tricky business of tiptoeing around old patterns and triggers; of trying not to compare our processes.
As I read her texts, I am reminded of the walk around a lake I took with my Austin friend earlier in the week. She was showing me where the water used to come up to when an older man crossed our path, “I’ve never seen it this low. It will take two good hurricanes to fill this up.”
We are two good hurricanes, this old friend and I. We were born in the eye of the storm in the middle of nowhere, and the winds have picked up again.
She is sorry, for the birthday and for other things. I don’t want her to be sorry. I feel stupid for having feelings, for being witnessed as having feelings. I do feel strong-armed by the dream and this timing to be honest, so I am (reluctantly). I tell her the thing I wrote down in my notes app: “I wish you couldn’t so easily do without me because I can’t so easily do without you.”
She replies, “I don’t easily do without you, because you’re always there. I wanna be that for you.”
Oh.
She says, “I said it in your wedding speech and I’ve said it so many times thereafter—but you deserve so so so much love.”
It feels like family. It feels like a good way to practice making amends with someone I feel really big about.
Lora Mathis in their most recent Substack wrote, “If there is a way to live through, and amongst, hopelessness—we are finding it.”
Let’s be good hurricanes. Let’s ground into the eye of our storm. Let’s remember every friend and sister and cousin (and cousin’s wife <3) and first love and coworker and tree and parasocial relationship that bolsters us as we prepare for our resurrection.
Let’s take great care. There is love out there, but first there is freedom.
Amen (or whatever).
Talk soon,
Natahna
The Recommends: The song Snow Angel by Renee Rapp. Oof.
It was an honour to explore Austin with you! 💜 And I love hearing your thoughts and then reading them
I'm so intrigued by the way our timelines intersect and mirror each other. My birthday is at the end of October and I turned 33 and thought "huh, this is how old Jesus was." Even though I'm more spiritual than religious these days, that still came to mind. I, too, believe this next year for me will be a resurrection of sorts.
I left my marriage of 8 years back in April and have been figuring out life since then. Also using tarot and poetry and honest friends to help guide me and remind me who I am in all of this. And the rest of the year was very traumatic as well with accidents and deaths and trying to figure life out again. Going to weddings and feeling the joy mixed with thoughts of, "Well now I don't have that kind of love. It didn't last like we promised."
I find it so interesting to find someone born under the same stars as me who is experiencing the same kind of life shifts at the same time. There's something to be said about astrology and magic and how maybe humans aren't so different from each other after all.
Sending you deep breaths for wherever you are today and whatever you're facing. Let's find ourselves resurrecting this year! 💗💗