My Dear,
I mean absolutely no offense, but I cannot keep worrying about you when I’m trying to pour all my energy into getting good with myself.
I’m over here trying to play, trying to heal.
Practicing self-care as a priority. Rolling the emotional waves of everyday mirror-gates while trying to break psychological trappings of a system which compels against everything that would help us embody radical, transformative change.
That requires focus. Discipline. Mental stamina. Moral and political acuity. The kind of honest self-awareness that finds ugly interesting and the duty to defend fantasy captivating.
It requires courage and confidence to say words as you mean them, with unbridled poetry, metaphor, grit and gravitas.
Shaking off capitalist trimmings urging, “Tone them down so they can sell!” to limit their resonance by an octave or two. That means while you’re striving to materialize truth in the face of power, most people hear it as strange and confounding.
It may sound like you’re speaking intoxicating rhythms, but to them you only ever speak theoretically, and often out of key.
We’ve produced grave misunderstandings by undermining the necessity of performance.
It means remembering to dance. To do the weird thing.
To experiment in order to explore, rest, and challenge the limits where vulnerability grips authenticity.
It means embracing creativity and daring to live like a lucid dream, where perhaps if you try to become conscious, to direct your life into the unknown with intentionality, you might be able to partake in the design of a collective narrative, tying yourself to the past and future through present action.
As an existentialist, it’s holding tight to the closest thing to god you’ll ever believe in.
It’s determination and encouragement – it’s not just okay to stay committed to your clearest path. You have to.
Integrity demands it.
And freedom calls us to practice.
It means getting bitterly familiar with the voices in your head and patiently listening to all of them until you recognize and discern their credibility based solely on what was said.
It’s compassionately wading through everything ever designed to hurt you, honoring the damage, and knowing you carry it with you as the methodology of your body, the purest record of every trial and error.
It’s digging for logical conclusions by embracing the possibility that the immediacy of clarity feels a lot like madness.
This is learning.
And learning requires repetition, so every alienating step that makes you higher feels dangerously, delicately close to the definition of insanity.
It feels like grinding.
It’s constant effort to practice new means for grounding.
It’s getting comfortable not knowing how to trust your own voice when the rest are so good at pretending their way to meaning by donning knock-off disguises.
It’s appreciating that the grinding gets smoother, and anticipating the cool sense of relief in those meeting moments when edges of reflections become sharper, their contents crisper. When realities finally connect.
It begins to make sense.
It’s also knowing, with the utmost humility, that no matter what, this is the most polished you’ve ever been.
Is that not just as sobering as it is gratifying?
It means finding ways to stay drunk and happy in the face of the abyss. To joyfully lap up slick tension and disturb galaxies of dissonance with their superficial aspirations that surround and seduce us by only ever going skin-deep.
It’s toasting before we oblige to drink our mostly-toxic and only-somewhat-viable-options. After all, we must still keep our souls minimally hydrated.
This means constant pep talks to keep doing what feels genuinely scary, not because it feels wrong, but because you know it risks different. And that’s precisely what gives it the chance to be right.
It’s knowing no one will choose what you should do for you.
Freedom demands it.
And yet entire generations simply won’t understand, believe, or even perceive it.
So every time you turn into your truth, or just slow down in an effort to hold steady, your faith proves itself much deeper than you had even imagined.
This fortifies you.
It’s petrifying.
I’m having conversations with myself to better understand the extent to which our freedom and demise are inextricably connected.
It’s a struggle to comprehend how to make sense of this in myself – no wonder we are capable of remaining distantly mysterious and distinctly legendary to each other.
Unfortunately, under these conditions, it’s easier for me to hurt you than hurt me, but it’s so easy for you to hurt me, too.
Under these conditions, it seems difficult for you to love me how I need, and it’s easier for me to love me than love you, too.
Such an embarrassing heartbreak to our existence is painful to admit. But there’s no room for shame if we’re simply being honest.
Lorde said self-care is a form of warfare, a revolutionary act.
To fight for us, I have to learn to care for me.
So I do.
And I will.
Not because I don’t want to love you, but because caring for me is something I can commit to and develop with dedicated expertise.
It can be known. That wisdom is felt.
Foregrounding a just vision of hopes and our ancestors’ wildest dreams, learning to care for and love each other by “becoming more intimate with myself and you” is a concrete experience of liberation we all deserve access to.
It’s spiritual.
It’s strategic.
We make liberation tangible when we feel intimate with love at every possible level. I’m healing to feel this ad nauseam. I hope you do, too.
If we’re going to work for something our entire lives, may love be what tires us out until we are finally able to find each other.
Hopefully,
Yours
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