To Anyone Who Feels Lost:

Excerpt from my Diary.

Life moves on without us. Time goes on, whether we’re spending it wisely or not.

Istock photos by Baona

There is a neutrality to the way of nature — it blooms and grows and dies without our help. Sometimes love is so swift in its transformations, in its growth, that if we don’t pay attention, we could miss it. Charging head down a path that’s leading us further from where we want to be.

Love — be it romantic, self, or otherwise — is rascally. You could lose yourself in a few careless weeks, with chunks of yourself falling off as the sun rises and sets. You can’t go on cruise control, ignoring the shifts, starts and stops that the cultivation of love requires. You must be focused, diligent, present; otherwise, it can slip away not all at once but slowly, until you wake up disoriented, empty, and confused.

This is how love breaks. Not everything at once, but little by little, until it all comes together in one loud smash. It takes us by surprise when it finally screams at us, giving us just enough time to alter our direction.

You can fall out of love with your partner this way. You can fall out of love with yourself this way. You can fall out of love with your life this way. With your friends. With your family. With your routines. With your passion. With your work. Time has a tendency of passing quickly; it never seems too late until it does. No matter what shape love takes, it's a racing train that may leave you behind, breathless, bewildered, and uncertain if you don't cling onto it or don't keep an eye on yourself.

We can’t let days speed past without giving them thought, because this is the way we become lost. This is how we run in circles, because we haven’t stopped long enough to find a direction. Our life can run away with or without us attached to it and, while it seems we are the driver and conductor of whatever exists in our lives, anyone with life experience knows this isn’t the truth.

I don’t know, Every time I try to publish a new article lately, I feel the need to share a song I’m currently listening to. Perhaps I’m in love with every one of you.

You see, I do this thing when life gets difficult where I abandon myself. Like I shed the part of myself that needs cultivation and go into survival mode, go into Safe Mode with limited capability, limited access. I lose belief and trust in myself. I react, and harshly, irritatingly, like any request put upon me is too much. I dream of places I could escape to where my name and identity could change easily, where I could find a way to live with the chaos in my mind by becoming someone new. I know wherever you go, there you are, but I’m very good at reinvention. I can convince myself I am anew. I am scarily good at fleeing the scene of a life I can no longer be bothered to tolerate.

And so, the abandonment of myself becomes the abandonment of everything in my life, including the love and the good and the light. Some may call it depression, but it feels more self-inflicted than that. I become almost comfortable cloaked in negativity, in sadness, in my harsh reactive thoughts to others, in being the one who was wronged over and over again. To stop loving myself is to come home to what I remember, what I know, what feels familiar. To cave into myself — introspective and self-analyzed and caught in the purgatory between thinking and doing — is the safest I ever feel. There’s a perverse joy I experience when I don’t allow myself to be loved by anyone, even myself, even when I’m surrounded by people who dare to love me.

My motivation to acknowledge this is not pride. It's purification, to get rid of this so I don't have to carry the weight of my own self-inflicted suffering, to stop the emotional acrobatics I perform to keep myself small, unwanted, and miserable. It feels safe, cosy, and effortless to put on a cosy robe when I'm by myself and solely associated with the self I detest.

This is to convey that I am aware of how quickly love may fade and how easy it is to lose sight of a life that is there in front of you. Because, you can live without living. You can love without feeling. You can feel without letting the feeling hit you deep. It may seem like contradictions, but anyone who has been drowning in plain sight understands the way opposites can still be true at the same time.

I get lost inside my own mind when I can’t escape from it, when I don’t distract myself from myself. Sometimes I think I should just be “normal” and let my life follow in the flow of others, to stop swimming against a tide that offers no tangible reward for doing so. I think, in general, I’m wondering why I do all the things I do, why my story keeps climaxing at the same point.

Now Playing - I’ll Scream (All the Words) by Deyaz feat. Jessie Reyez.

That’s right. I couldn’t help it.

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There’s this tweet, it goes, “It’s the worst time to be an adult.” Fam, that might be the realest thing I’ve seen all week. Being over 20 hasn't been the "no fucks given" experience I was promised. In truth, the more fucks you don’t give, the nastier the counterfucks. It’s like makeup sex but you are barely in control—not at all. This is why you shouldn’t set up night stands with your exes. The truth is they have learned some new moves, and they are now out to humiliate you. You’re welcome.

For months, I have been introspective and have questioned everything, coming up with explanations that are illogical and far off from my own intuition and direction. Sometimes it seems like life is slipping away from me, little by little. It feels like it's about to collapse and break into bits. I suppose I forget that I like to rise from the ashes of my own doing when I'm in it. I may actually enjoy seeing things burn in my life and have a purifying effect.

So, I recommit to myself and to love. I find a steady footing again, even if it’s a few rungs lower on the ladder than I remember. I start to climb, again, because to stop climbing is the way to die without dying. I look for love again in unlikely places, in smaller moments, and I remember all the things I forgot while I was someone else for a while, inhabiting my body but not acknowledging my soul. I reach for the things I remember bring me joy and hold them up to the light to see their purity. Is this still good for me? Have I outgrown this? And I stay gentle with myself, because that’s the only way. In a world that wants hardness, I will continue to fray my edges, to remember to keep them soft and smooth out of necessity and out of strength.

I will use my time to do what I love, because all time does is pass.

And, however many times a love — for myself, for another, for others, for anything — fragments and cracks, I will find a way back to whole. The whole may look different, come formed in a package I don’t recognize, but I will know when it’s whole based on the familiar grooves. The pieces will fit together, somehow, eventually. This is how it goes. It’s the space between knowing it’s happening and waiting for it to happen where the mind can run away, a train off tracks, dangerously close to burning up in a way that might take too long to come back from. That is the tricky space. That is the expanse to take great care with.

The show must go on.

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