Stop being so desperate for love. Like a broken bone, you have to let this want, this need, shift around inside you until it finds the right position to rest and mends itself.
But don’t clip its wings immediately. Let it bleed itself out gradually, slowly, so you can know what it feels like to be drained, to be gutted and turned inside out.
You have to fall apart before you can fall back together.
NASA recently discovered 75 new planets. So go on a search expedition for the 75 parts of yourself you’ve never seen before, no matter how ugly, bruised, or confusing they may be, because just like Saturn, they might end up yielding some beautiful rings. And you don’t need one to be placed on your finger by someone else to figure out what love feels like, because you can find it by discovering yourself first.
Write love poems to each of the 75 parts, even the parts you can’t stand. You don’t need another hero with a red cape to accomplish this; you just need this cape of darkness that you refuse to lift from yourself by clinging to love.
Several ancient legends consist of an old woman swallowing her own teeth in the midst of an uncontrollable urge or hunger because there was nothing else to eat. They rested there, in the soft lining of her stomach, for days and weeks and months, the enamel rotting slowly every second.
This thing inside you that’s sharp and needy and clawing, this thing inside you that can’t get out, that’s the same kind of thing as those teeth. So you need to let it out, otherwise it’ll rip you apart and skin you alive.
It’s called the fear that you might actually learn to like being alone, that maybe “alone” is okay, is good, is bearable after all. That love isn’t everything and everything isn’t love.
Fear, according to psychology, is one of the most important emotions because often people confuse their fear of an object, situation, or person for the fear of fear itself. So maybe you’re just afraid of being afraid of liking aloneness, and that’s why that “tooth,” that fear, keeps trying to dig you up inside and excavate all the darkest parts of yourself you won’t let anyone else see.
Then get rid of it. Open yourself up to the possibility that aloneness won’t tear you apart like the tooth, and let it out. No matter how hard it clenches its roots into the walls of your abdomen as it comes up.
Once the fear is gone, remind yourself that love doesn’t have to come from another person. What’s most important is that it comes, unconditionally, from you. You can’t always surround yourself with a circle of other people, potential partners or daters, like a ring of candles in a séance. Because they might just haunt you and leave you shaking in your boots. You need to learn to love yourself in a way that won’t compromise your own well-being, and always looking for another name to add to your Ouija board certainly won’t help. So let it spell out your name instead.
Aloneness doesn’t have to equate to loneliness.
Maybe they’re linguistically similar, but that’s all they have to be from now on.
↧
Being Okay with Aloneness
↧