Pages

Saturday 18 April 2015

When You Grow Up

I keep hoping that I will wake up one day and Time, memories and emotion will all make sense to me. Like everything right now is the preamble to the final exam and all this--this experience, is just a great way to study. I'm a little older than I was (haha, birthdays, man) and so many parts of me woke up the other day, and ran out onto the front lawn and quoting Scrooge, "I AM NOT THE MAN I WAS". And I'm not and I am all at the same time. 

I wrote this last year:
"I saw something on Tumblr that was along the lines of, "Locate your feelings. Don't analyse. Locate. Are they in your stomach, leg?" It reminded me of an article I'd read (what could've been) weeks or months ago about theories on where certain emotions stem from. 
I think all the hours of making/admiring art, crying into poetry and trying to understand everything about Sofia Coppola films means that I had come to spending a lot of my time trying to analyse feelings. Beat them until they confessed their motives, until they revealed every intention they'd ever had, until I could kick them in the shins and make them leave my bones so I could be self-aware. 
And I guess that's why I'd also grown so disinterested in Instagram and Tumblr and Twitter and, eventually, blogging. It felt like I was beginning to spend a lot of my time watching myself and my thoughts and my feelings instead of just being assured by the fact that all those things are there and that I'm alive in the most exciting time to be a person and that my friends are great, my relationship is wonderful and I have all these beautiful things to look forward to. Journaling and photo-taking just felt like abuse of these moments of 'Strange Magic' I so desperately wanted to keep so that I could look back on an aesthetically pleasing life.
I started a diary then. I was just going to write down a play by play of the things that happened that had some sort of long-lasting impact on me. Be it, Katy calling me 'my boy' with a huge grin the one Monday or when I got invited to a house party by ex-boyfriend (and spent an hour wondering if I was lying to Lilita when I said that I wouldn't go) or how I scribbled Donald Glover's open letter (to himself? The world? His future? Me?) on my bedroom wall. I was just going to have to locate feelings.
I want to look back and enjoy or cringe at these moments once again for what they were. Not the grey balls of putty I would mash and twist and wring out to be whatever I needed them to be."

I was reading through all my old blog posts and journals and the aforementioned diary and it excites me how much things have changed. I know that's a weird sentiment considering the things that have changed are friendships I treasured above almost everything else, a beautiful letter I never look twice at anymore and self-love breaks from people I didn't need. But I also know that if all the things I thought were so, so good can change then all the things that are so, so bad, right now, can change too.

I'm almost happy to reread about the boyfriends and nights-out that are more light finger prints on glass doors as opposed to the gaping photo-frame-shaped patches of yellow on what is now a dusty, brown wall. 

It makes things, you know, easier to clean.

14 comments:

  1. <3 <3 <3 this is so overwhelmingly relatable <3 <3 thank you

    Claire
    www.augustlikethemonth.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yay, I'm glad it makes more sense than to just me.

      Delete
  2. i love you and your writing so much. you just get it, i swear xxo

    thisisfrom-matilda.blogspot.co.uk

    ReplyDelete
  3. Your writing style >
    *snaps fingers*

    xo
    lipstickvillain.com

    ReplyDelete
  4. this is such an amazing open letter,

    http://secret-hipster.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  5. You write SO beautifully. x

    http://britishmermaid.blogspot.co.uk/

    ReplyDelete
  6. This blog is so rad! Honest writing and effortless use of language... It's like... sipping a strawberry milkshake...

    http://www.allzuri.blogspot.com/?m=1

    ReplyDelete

We can also talk about the overweight, grey cat I'm gonna name Atticus one day or how you're feeling.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...