I have realized how much I have been policing my own life. Always on the lookout of boundaries being crossed, always on the look out to assert myself. because after all those are the things I have struggled with. The things I should always be aware of.
I have hardened. I know I have. Sometimes I catch myself on feeling so little in the moments that I used to feel so much in.
When I try to open, more often than not I find myself doing it for the sake of doing it. For the sake of self-improvement and mental health.
How ironic that the road to self improvement became the road where I got further disconnected from myself. Everything became about achievement in a new way. In a more subtle way. The way that is hard to catch and understand.
In some ways I have became cut off from my heart.
In the rare moments when I suddenly feel something in my chest when someone brings up his name, I catch myself feeling confused. I don’t know what to do with that sudden aliveness.
I guess I have been trying to ignore it. I have been trying to pretend it is not there because loving somebody for so long and so hard feels silly. Especially if the love has no place to go.
Sometimes I question my love. I question whether it is love at all or just a habit, an accumulation of thoughts about the situation that I am somehow addicted to.
But then I cannot explain that aliveness that I feel momentarily — before I change the topic and burry it from my mind’s awareness again.
It comes up though. It comes up in those quiet evenings with myself, when I open a blank page to write and I find myself at a loss of words.
I am at a loss of words because I have been silencing myself a lot. And even though writing about this is somewhat liberating — like I am moving towards being out in the open. A part of me shakes her head and says: “And what now? What do we do with those feelings and words?”.
I have been coming across some stuff around grief lately and how as a society we don’t know how to grieve, we don’t know how to fit it in our busy schedules and let alone allow ourselves to feel those feelings when the loss wasn’t by death.
As if other forms of loss somehow make it easier. As if not being able to reach someone, to talk to them suppose to be easy.
Always trapped in the timelines of all kinds.
…
We bonded over our past relationships. She asked me how long was mine. I smirked at the irony of what I was about to say. Barely a few months. Could you even call it a relationship? A lot of back and forth.
Hers was 3 months and it has been 9 since. She also struggled with the intensity of remaining feelings and the timeline that doesn’t seem to make sense.
What makes the timeline important and healing urgent is the layer of age.
The continuing lurking reminder of how old you are, of where you thought you should be, and where the society thinks you should be.
It is all arbitrary, of course. Time itself as a concept.
But sometimes when it has been very long, it starts to feel real.
And when you put it a number to it, it becomes a little terrifying.
…
8 years ago (I am shocked as I had to do a mental calculation in my head), I was sitting on the bed with one of my good friends. We spent evening playing video games and getting high. There was a moment of stillness and a weird feeling of sadness. I told him how I am still not over my ex and my struggle of getting over him.
To which he said: “I don’t think we ever get over someone, we just learn to live with those feelings”.
His response terrified me because what if he was right.
I did eventually got over that ex, or at least buried it in my mind deep enough that now my heart doesn’t twitch when his name is brought up.
And this whole process and realization of it is painful.
Because there are the very memories that you wish you never would forget are the ones that you need to forget.
And that is what I hate so much about letting go. The forgetting.
The unspoken agreement that you are working towards forgetting someone.
When all you want to do is remember.
…
For more articles on similar topics, visit Know Why publication on Medium. For Conscious Film Reviews and insights in video format, visit Know Why YouTube channel.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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