Some Personal News
It is wild, to watch while someone chooses not to be in love with you. They were right there with you on the edge, sharing smiles as the wind picks at your hair - but then they start to peel away. The endless lists of “we should go here”s turn into ignored invitations and un-followed-up “I'm busy”s. The soft, face-to-face hair strokes turn into a loose arm around the shoulder. The tender, thoughtful questions turn into a gap where the “how are you?” should be. The pots of honey delivered to the doorstep turn into weekends of silence.
All the while, you continue to fall and they, standing on the edge, get smaller and smaller, further and further from you. You're in mid air and the only thing you can do is become extremely good at convincing yourself that tiny things mean he is actually in the air too. The reply that comes in hours not days. The thing he said three weeks ago. The brief joke on WhatsApp. All of them are reasons to keep believing. Even when you watch him walking away you convince yourself he's taking a run up.
The last two months have been quite the year. Unprecedentedly long months that had no end; time flies when you're having fun and truly crawls when you're not. Working on and launching Mapping, trying to throw myself into it whilst also trying to grip tightly to the person who was fading away. In the end I ran out of steam for the launch; while in a big picture way my life is fulfilling, it is still hard to talk about joy when your hands are covered in gore, holding your broken heart.
Being single and self-employed, I feel keenly the fact that I “could go anywhere”. There is no permission I have to ask nor responsibilities to think of, I can just up and go. What stopped me was remembering that wherever I went my loneliness would go too; what was the point of being all alone somewhere else? And then I remembered that there are co-living spaces for digital nomads and something clicked.
So, long story short, I am going to Lisbon for three weeks at the end of April. As I joked to friends, “the breakdown is going well”. It is an out of character decision; I am a home bird and I love where I live and there are times where I have thought “do I want to travel or does the boy I'm infatuated with love to travel?”. But this is the sort of thing I never did in my twenties because I was with someone who didn't want to, and the rite of passage has weighed on me for some time.
Most of all, I want to get out of my life. Not run away from it, I know that I'm not doing that. But I want to step outside of it and pull at the edges, widening the frame. I wrote to you in January about having an excess of space, and this has the contradictory effect of making my world quite small and narrow - I am rich in time, which is too easily spent in over-thinking and feeling upset and making huge mountains out of bumps in the road. I want to broaden out, get a little more perspective to believe that things aren't hopeless because that person chose not to love me.
This decision has pushed the edges of my self-trust. I dithered over booking, getting into a flap about dates and flights when what was actually wrong was the waiting for permission to be granted. When I finally pressed the button I didn't feel a rush of empowerment but a rush of worry - what if I didn't like it, what if this wasn't really me, what about money? But you can feel the difference between a wrong decision and a stretchy decision. This wasn't regret, but over-protection. Underneath the worries was a hard kernel of knowing I would get there and love it, and while the surface is wobbly I just need to give that kernel the chance to take root, grow stronger and eventually crowd it all out.
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