Over the course of 24 hours I have cycled through emotions on every imaginable part of a wave; sitting along the wave’s crest, sitting within its trough, tucking myself into its middle filled with contentment as I passed from Tuesday into Wednesday and soon into Thursday.
These words, like many of mine often do, are living in an inbox - I am writing an email to my future self, one to someone who maybe isn't as anxious as I am right now, someone who isn't as afraid to make mistakes, one who holds space, with an object permanence that inevitable things that will come up, crumbs will fall out of the end of the toaster and wait to be swept up after making breakfast in the morning, drips of coffee will spill on my skirt but be invisible even to the naked eye. There are things bigger and larger than this, but for right now, I am needing to remind myself that I will make mistakes, and that doesn't mean the people around me will leave, that I am undeserving of love and care. This is what I once thought.
This sounds as though it should be straightforward, the agreement we make as we first become aware of ourselves, that we will stumble, fall, miss our mouths when learning to use spoons, and we grieve that. We learn to cry out, unabashed in asking for help, and we move forward. As we get older, we may make larger mistakes when thinking we will be of help, the famous time I stole quarters so my brother could finish his map of the Quarters of the United States comes to mind, the time I went for dinner with friends and me, not emphasizing enough that the yogurt on the table was not vegan, saw my vegan friend lick the back of her spoon with glee, unaware. There are times we do the wrong thing because it feels right to us, the high of it being wrong taking over - drinking without our parents knowing, cancelling plans to go hang with another set of friends - we've all done things like this, and have, in some way, rectified our mistakes.
And then there are errors that will come over you and sit with you for a while, for how long, I can't be the one to say, as I have my own that I still sit with from time to time. Errors in my judgement and character, in my ability to trust the world around me, then failing to show up in the best way that I can. Anticipating needs instead of asking, thinking I am being the best I can when actually I am acting from a place of anxiety, of irrational thought and worry, I wonder how I could ever mistakes so grave. There will be things that are out of your control - people, places, circumstances, where you do act as you want to, with the best intentions, with all the love in the world, and things will still go wrong.
In reading Julietta Singh's The Breaks on my tube journeys this weekend, I felt a responsibility to talk to you in this way, to act with compassion and share about the complicated world at large. Sometimes blame will be due, toward yourself, toward someone else, but the way in which you hold that blame, or, rather, let it sit as a weighted blanket across your chest, is the thing to take notice of. As one who often sits with the pressure of the world at large on your shoulders, discernment is your friend, your ally, the key in living more wholly, with more love for yourself.
One of the skills you will learn over the course of your life is how to live presently, whether that be in a moment of needing to remind yourself of where reality lies, or in acknowledging the small things, the fruits of life that root you to where you need to be, with the people you love, who love you, the pure joy of doing the crossword in bed, in bringing fresh ingredients to a friend's house to cook a long meal, in working and collaborating with people who see the world in the most similar and wonderfully different ways to you. Presence is not merely a dance with poetry but a promise to live authentically, as a human, porous for new, nostalgic of what once was, but able to give themselves, including the people around them, their best chance. This comes with accepting that there is a world that wants me to call myself an anxious person coupled with a world that wants me to not when I am neither, humanness is feeling, is experience, is pleasure, is a commitment to your present life.
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I’m experimenting! And I’d love to know thought! I highly recommend Julietta’s book I mention throughout because her vulnerability in writing a letter to her 6 year old daughter about the world at large has done something for me in a similar way that Karl Ove Knausgaard did in his Seasons quartet. Singh’s work is more raw and honest, in my opinion, dealing with omnipresent racism, climate anxiety, and queerness. When I took a moment before starting work at my desk the other day to try and write, I was confronted with a heavy mind and wrote this in one sitting, so in a way, it exists in a singular moment, rather than being the way I feel all of the time. Writing this is an important reminder of the impermanence of feelings as someone who struggles with being so hard on themselves.
Love,
M