Notes from therapy
“Where does it go, when love dries up and forms into clouds and rains on someone else?”
Dea, Philadelphia, March 18th.
i. In January, I experienced Latin America for the first time and ate my way through Cartagena and Bogota. In February, I started going to therapy again.
ii. How do you know if someone has given up on you? If I didn’t know better, I would have answered: loud anger. Adulthood has taught me that rather, it is radio silence. The most painful state of being is slow nonexistence, realising after some time that someone has decided to forgo your presence in exchange for some peace of mind. Maybe you deserve an explanation, maybe you don’t. The second most painful state is not knowing where you lie on that spectrum.
iii. My therapist told me that I am thoughtful and compassionate, so I tried telling myself that if someone no longer wanted me in their lives, it would be their loss. Two weeks later, she told me not everything has to be a zero-sum game. On my way home, I wondered, why do I frame everything as a competition? And why do I always want to win?
iv. I am the furthest from a nonchalant personality.
If the version of myself a couple of years back would try to imitate someone else’s distant personality because I didn’t have confidence in my own perception of the world, these days I believe it is only right to allow myself to feel things in their entirety—which can make me terribly uncool in certain situations. But then I remember that being able to access our full range of human emotions does not come naturally to many others. I am one of the lucky ones, because having this ability means I will never regret being the person who initiates the first connection, who goes to show just a little bit more care. It is simply the right thing to do, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. I think that would be even harder to live with.
v. My housemate and I recently had many firsts. Our first housewarming. Our first time cooking for 10 people. Our first time getting on the 21 bus after our night class. Our first time binge-watching a K-drama together. Our first time quietly crying on the sofa next to one another because of said drama (refer to: episode 15 of Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha). My first time telling her about my biggest fear. I think that to build a friendship, you have to experience a lot of shared firsts, the exciting and the scary. I’m lucky to be able to look at the people I call friends and think, yeah, I want to go through my scary firsts with them.
vi. There is another thing I learned: you can do things out of love as a way to protect and the other person can still refuse. It is not your responsibility to protect their feelings. Why are we drawn to things we cannot protect? I recently killed my houseplant and I still can’t tell if it was because I didn’t water it as often as I should have or because I wasn’t giving it enough sunlight. This was the second plant that I’ve managed to kill here in Philadelphia. I could refrain from killing a third one but I could also just do the opposite and try again. Maybe protecting is a muscle that just needs to be trained enough times.
vii. My biggest fear is to be an angry person. In my third session, my therapist suggested that I may harbour unresolved resentment, which does not come from a place of jealousy or envy, but rather from a lack of knowledge. Remember not knowing? The second worst state to be in? Don’t I deserve to know and feel at ease? “Of course you do—but they also deserve to decide, on their own terms, when to tell you.”
viii. Also recently, I lost a friendship. This dawned on me when I was hosting an Instagram live and found myself thinking, “Huh, they’re not here to watch me.” What I only realised later was that what I lost along with that friendship, my other friends made up for. My housemates came through, watched the entire thing from start to finish, and quite literally filled a gaping hole I didn’t know I felt. They restored something I thought I had lost. Sometimes people walk out the door but that doesn’t mean you have to shrink the space they’d left behind—as much as possible, give time for others to arrive. How lucky would we be to experience many things more than once?
ix. To sustain a certain fondness and admiration for someone even when they no longer want anything to do with you is an odd form of grief, because it is not courageous. Mourning is courageous. Asking for time and distance is courageous. Wishing you said or did things differently is not. It is sadness that borders on regret.
x. What if we were put in this world to restore things in other people’s lives? Wouldn’t realising this make us a little more careful with how we choose to respond to others? Restoration is an art and I like that we can all be artists, in that sense. If someone were to come to me and point out a vacant space in my life and ask for permission to create in it, I think that would be the most romantic thing.
let's go, first book ♡
I really love your style of writing, every word is so potent- I would love to read your book if you ever write one x