26/01/2023

I am swimming in a sea of distraction and flirtations — only temporarily, as these things never last, as that is particularly human, giving and receiving attention being so incredibly volatile and fickle, and fluid like the ocean waves on the precipice of transforming into something else from the lapping back and forth, seconds away from crossing the boundary between land and water, remaining land and water, not either/or — belonging to neither, not any one thing like the beach or the ocean, or the tide for that matter (when is it ocean, when is it water, and when is it part of the tide?) — all words drawing boundaries that are not arbitrary but nonetheless make human minds question what is real. Tell me beaches are not real, should I make the case even though I do not believe it to be true? A case can be made for anything depending on what point in space and time you are standing.

I believe in the ocean, and the tide, and the beaches surrounding us even though I cannot define where one stops and the rest of the world begins. Just like I cannot define where I and another stop and start as the words I receive affect my psyche and my body — both at once in their rather intimate and ambiguous dance — producing consequences that ripple on throughout the day, having a part in so many decisions made, as the ocean does not breathe in isolation. If you put me in a sterile room with no windows and no door, welding a sheet of metal on top of the entrance from which I came — the most sterile cover I can think of in this moment — and I will surely lose my eyesight, and eventually my breath.

When a baby is born and locked inside a container, still fed and bathed, after three years they will lose their ability to develop vision. And that is why this morning while making coffee I thought of all the times I might have implied a person to be mindless, realizing that our bodies adapt to the environments around us. Bodies are smart, bodies survive, and it has its reasons for being the body that it is. And yet still I judge so many in black and white thinking as if the person who acts in ways that are different than I are defective. I thought of all the times others have told me I lack in common sense, and I thought of what defenses I might claim in response: “I never really had a mother, I was never taught…” And so I remind myself that there is a difference between acceptance, and tolerance, between compassion and polarity. If only I could remember this now as I walk the streets and shame others for whatever circumstances lead to their difference.

31/01/2023

I often feel intimidated by those who so clearly grew up in a space where they were nurtured; those who were shown how to make their bed and do their laundry — separating the whites from the blacks from the colours — thinking of the times when I threw all my dirty clothes into the chamber without segregation and the wide onlooking eyes staring back at me; that they must bring the water to a boil before they put in the pasta (and seasoning being equally as important); those who were raised on fresh vegetables rather than peas and corn from the frozen section of the grocery store. And I feel strongly with empathy, sympathy, as I think of all the ways a childhood like that might amount to a projection of worthlessness from others as their clothes lay spread out amongst their bedroom floor. It is only now that I know that I am looking at comfortable chaos.

I made the bed this morning, noticing how my hack job did not compare to the crisp edges of the duvet that was stretched out wrinkleless from when I arrived yesterday — embarrassed about my inability to present neatly. I suppose this is how my separate lines of thought converge: I am not “that kind of girl” I kept repeating as if personality types are like ice cream flavours, and thank god for the absurd thought so I can once again stand reminded of just how absurd thoughts can be. Nevertheless, I looked in the mirror at my wrinkled shirt as I live out of a suitcase, and felt acutely diminished next to the bleach-white walls and art deco furniture. I feel so loud in this room, demanding that you notice I am not from here, that I am not even close to being from anywhere near here. And this must explain why I feel so ashamed when I welcome a new lover into my bedroom — so ashamed that I wish I were dead rather than stand there naked against the backdrop of dust and bedside table clutter.

15/02/2023

I feel much more at ease today; a comfort in my own presence with the confidence that there is nothing to be figured out.

If only I could speak in poetry; I hear Dan now say, describe your surroundings. I feel nothing poetic about it. Though there is greater trust now that moods of silence are inevitable. They pass through and can elicit a feeling of drowning if you panic in its waters. And last night I dove into fresh water contained by four walls; underneath the surface, down at the bottom, I met the boy who has haunted my vision of love, only to have a conversation. He revealed to me his attempts to move forward had been unsuccessful, that fact only revealing itself earlier that day. I hugged him in empathy; I could see he was hurt. I spoke to ask him a question but he interrupted me. We hugged and consoled each other. We moved forward in love and a renewed sense of hope.

I woke up so naturally conceiving it to be a healing dream, not specifically in relation to this person, but the greater story he represents (romantic love). And I feel in my present battlefield, which now might just be an alpine meadow, that snakes in the grass reveal themselves for our own reconciliation. And is that to say that all is to be figured out, or is there anything to figure? No, it is to say: put the armour down. Open yourself up to love, in all its forms, rather than view the world with the assumption that everything is against you. Rather, it is all to serve you in rhythm and dance since you do not walk alone in individuality (in-divided-duality). You are a chess piece on a chessboard, just like everyone else—and there is an infinite number of moves, but the opponent who creates the dance is there for you, and you for them. Emotions roil to the surface in the ceremonial marriage of intuition and knowledge. They are an invitation for mind and body to unite, in humanness, so we can be who we are. I keep asking the question, what sets me apart? The only answer can be me.

23/03/23

I find myself feeling tender sadness. I realize that I want to love and support my family who have tried their best to love and support me, even if flawed. I recognize it as complicated since that is exactly what I tried to achieve with mother; to love her despite her condition. But that required much self-sacrifice, so I suppose the task might be… how to love without being completely self-sacrificial. And maybe that is the answer: Buddhism appeals to me because of its self-sacrificing quality. It seems from a Buddhist perspective, self-sacrificing is noble. And I tried really hard to be a conduit, a vehicle for love—pure love, deep love but I was left so sad and torn apart. There is something about self-sacrifice that my being romanticizes… but then I unconsciously compensate so selfishly, unable to cope with the slightest grasp of the hand. I feel safest around those who do not ask for much, as I confront all those before who demanded everything I could possibly give. I am a vehicle that must be given fuel, that is what it means to live in a body. But what is it about self-sacrifice that I find so noble? It is this idyllic concept of love; passionately committing to the well-being of others—turning the other into a human being—you cannot understand nor empathize with another person’s humanity if you do not experience, resonantly, your own. To acknowledge and accept that you cry in your depths and hate in rage. It is when my feelings come close enough to the surface, transmitting themselves to my material physicality, that I am experiencing my humanness.

Inside outside, inside outside, inside outside, over and over again.

The undercurrents create enough force that its effects rise and move the surface of glass, distorting and rippling through the air.

Law interacts with substance and motion is born—my motion is born from sensing, to feeling, to emotion, to words, to ideas, to reactions, maybe inaction—

back again, feeding forward, consuming, assuming,

in poetic associations

informing logical propositions

that result in truth and falsities

that result in a story

that becomes a life lived.

2023/04/07

I woke up this morning full of a giddy feeling. It irked me, as romantic excitement is a blunt blade. People do not normally shake me—as fascinating as each human may be, they are usually quite disappointing. I approach most people this way and it often serves me well. But it started yesterday when he asked me if he could take my picture. The trigger wouldn’t fire, which quite likely offers up a metaphor. Transient time, bending like water, the air not cool enough to freeze the passing moment. Time was not ready to stop, and my being that day unable to be memorialized, involuntary abstinence from the scrapbook function—but I respect the act of trying to create. Even if my face was only one single, ambiguous face, in a larger portrait series of strangers—I respect the act all the same.

We are here to create with the world; beautiful stories, the exaltation of romance in its various forms, and moments that instantiate meaning. I rarely meet another full of urgency to respect this endowment. I offered my own contribution to the chapter, bringing a book as an act in participatory listening. They were moved by the thought and took the book home with them. I never got to leave an inscription, only markings of my own isolated thoughts that have occurred reading the book in my loneliness. If I would have left an inscription to a stranger, it might have been something like: “in time, we will be revealed.” And there are few more potent gifts than revelation.

And then I felt prompted to reread passages from my notebook. A form was materializing; I have already been in the process of revealing, something… and that something was revealing itself to me. I am both a witness and a participant in the natural unfolding of things, a reminder to always pay attention.

Whether or not this was a situation to grasp and take hold of, it was nonetheless rain touching the ground. A reminder that not every person you touch is there to have, some act as borrowed clothes. What freedom we can sometimes give ourselves. Still, this does not render pursuit arbitrary, it only contextualizes brute force; drawing boundary lines between invitation and control.

I remind myself that it is depth that I offer, not perfect beauty. Sometimes I feel ashamed, that I am not wholly beautiful in my purely physical form, and so why should anyone desire me? But it is those who—consciously, unconsciously—seek depth that I can dance with. And just because I have let go of so much striving, being somebody that anybody could romanticise is another belief that I am trying to make extinct. Revealing, revealing.

2023/07/12

A lot to say this morning; much is going on. I am meeting myself in the mirror—this particular light revealing the skin of the past, and eyes with the look of hope in moving forward. “I can do this,” I keep saying to myself over and over. “This” does not refer to any immediate, compartmentalized task, per se, but instead it is a walking through a door, whereupon stepping through and looking back, the door does not only shut but vanishes altogether.

I feel so acutely aware that the ground beneath my feet burns. Fire: a symbol of death—-a clearing away as such—an event that never allows you to go back. The particles of what once was disperses, quite literally far and wide, and will never again return to the same form, the same place in space. I have never been here before, I will never be here again; this does not matter. My only fear is that I am starved and dehydrated, standing in the middle of the desert hallucinating.

To what do all these metaphors speak to, anyways? That despite my best efforts to “become who I am” (which is a tragic fucking lie), I am yet again oil from the bottle. I think I can finally be the thing-in-itself, but once again and forever more I am a vehicle for something else to emerge, a piece of me a part of this new thing separate from myself, and I move along.

I am dizzy from the somersaults, but I am getting used to the disorientation. But this is not a lament, I love and long to be alive. I am only describing what it feels like to try.

I myself burn with the fire beneath my feet.

2023/08/02

The geckos have come for their little morsels of food—leeching their tongues out to press against the stone countertop in search of life. I feel exactly like them; slinking about the dirt and ore chessboard on the hunt for a checkmate. Not such luck—not yet anyway. The only problem is I have never found what I am looking for so I am not sure I will know it when I see it. Hopefully, I fall to the floor when it comes—then I will know.
It isn’t even noon yet but the anxiety has already started. Anxiety: most certainly an indicator of stress, whether you accept seeing it or not. But maybe with a few more days under the heat of this sun, these tropical plants—banana trees, avocado trees, palms and vines and all the rest—I will begin to unfold. I will unfold just enough to breathe and then I will wind back up as I pack my bags and board a plane back to Canada where my family awaits news. They’ll want to know that I have accomplished so much in the last 13 months, and I will have very little to show except that I am full of love and I can string a few OK words together (better than before)—which will be met with resentment anyway.
That’s another thing: I have been full of guilt over my life. I guess because I haven’t worked the grind in years and I enjoy my life so much. I mean, I am in Hawaii for fuck sakes, with my tits and my twat out soaking up the magnificent sun as the toads sing my songs in the background. Why do I believe that in order to stand up so confident and straight in the face of another I must be suffering? It seems my suffering is the only thing that gives me any kind of legitimacy—which is such a load of ‘caca’ as Miller would put it.
When you begin to forge your own way, do others who have had no such luck resent you as much as you think they do? Or do you simply project your guilt for being happy? It is interesting though… this isn’t what I thought happiness would feel like. It is soft, it is in the insight, it is in the breath, the posture, the words, the responses, the coping. It is the ability not to blow the fuck up, it is taking it all in stride, it is giving and receiving love, it is talking to geckos as their tongues clean up your mess. It is truth for truth’s sake, and then the beauty that follows. It is not enlightenment, it is not unwavering euphoria, it is not hedonistic pleasure, and it is certainly not infinite comfort. You hear me? You can know happiness and still suffer and cry—in fact, happiness never was and never will be an exclusive thing. Marinate in that bubble bath and let it soften your bones.
Yes, it is really nice to feel myself in my loneliness again.

01/09/2023

Dad and I gave ourselves a lot to think about. It all started with Dad’s general lament about his golf friends. He expressed his observation of being alienated and left out, which admittedly hurt and confused him. He confessed he had no idea what was the matter, and it was this very lament that opened up our hour-long dialogue.

I wanted to help him all the while understanding full well that he and I do not speak the same language. I could tell he wanted to be validated, but I wanted to help. To me, when a person is confused or stuck on a problem, I do not believe it to be helpful to tell them what it is they would like to hear, or further, to blame. So, I started giving advice.

I tried to be supportive while offering a new perspective. I suggested he discard his hostile emotions and stories about his friends as that was not going to help his cause. I told him he should remain curious about what went on inside his own head because I was more and more believing that our thoughts shape and condition our environments. I suggested he might even put his ego aside and send his friends a non-specific apology since they were not exactly forthcoming.

In the end, through dialogue, my Dad expressed he felt like his friends did not respect him and in fact, looked down upon him. I told him I was hearing conflicting things: that he wanted his friends back, but that he also wanted to say to hell with them because they made him feel disrespected. I said he had to choose one. He said to hell with them.

Later on, we started talking about his new wife. He said he felt so lucky and undeserving of her. It hurt me. He went on to further say that he wanted to give love, and he wanted to receive love, and that she motivated him to try. I understood that on a surface level that was love in itself, but deep down that hurt me too. All these years of “fuck you” between him and me, and here he was expressing that he never could, and never wanted to do that to her. I had to allow his truth; I had to hear it.

Something shifted within me. I understood that much of my own advice to my father applied to me as well. I rhetorically asked him what his friendships might look like if he were to direct that same kind of love to other relationships outside of his wife. I felt stung by my own words, thinking about my ability to love some of my friends so well, but I found it difficult to do the same to others. I suppose all love cannot be so idyllic, so who are we when we are in relationships that are less than their idyllic form? All of a sudden I was giving us both a lesson in tolerance and I knew I needed it just as much as he did. I, more than he ever has, was still denying banality.

*

I titled my third journal (this journal): relationships in all their forms: a process of exaltation. I knew the task ahead of me, but the exactitude with which I saw my future back then still scares me. Because of my diaries, I am far more respectful of the fact that real change takes time, and it is not simply awareness of our own behaviours and complexes that produce change, but indeed the act of being changed. Last night, Dad kept saying: “I know, I know who I am,” when I would tell him it was precisely this ‘fuck you’ attitude that most certainly played a part in his own alienation; he failed to acknowledge he was currently sitting there in front of me telling me he was having issues with his friends, and he did not know what he was doing wrong. He kept expressing to me that he understood he had his own shortcomings and he was not perfect. But I had to remind him that others are not either. It is a proverbial problem for a reason; in relationship, there is certainly a difference between something that is fundamentally wrong and a natural symptom of imperfection. We know, intuitively, that it just works with some and not with others. But sometimes we find ourselves in compromising relationships that are good for us to keep around. Still, I understood my father when he said, “They just do not understand me,”—in fact, I wanted there to be a way to show him just how much I had been searching for others in whom I felt understood, how badly I wanted to be understood by him. I understood at that moment that we were both expecting the act of being understood by the other, but not giving it—that he wanted to be understood by his friends, but not understanding them back. That is what I meant by saying his hostile feelings were not doing him any good.

I have started to wonder what might change if I take some relationships to be like subjects in university or like a new job. Some situations put us out of our depth, and demand that we learn or fail. The fact that we feel frustrated and uncomfortable at first is not an indication of their wrongness but points to the fact that we have something to learn. When we try and stick it out until we reach the other side, we are often better for it.

Admittedly, it was uncomfortable for me to sit on the porch with my father after he was about six drinks deep (as he does every night just to sleep), after a lifelong struggle at the hands of both my parent’s addictions. But I left that conversation feeling like something important had just happened.

Dad said, “Thanks, that felt like a meditation.”
“You clearly have never meditated before,” I said.
”No,” he said, “but I imagine that is what it would feel like.”