A Good-Bye Letter Long Overdue

I'm finding pieces of my happiness that you wrecked. Maybe it wasn't all you, but I'm tired of blaming myself for loving you too much and too poorly. Each day, I feel a little bit happier. I have more weeks where good days outnumber bad ones. There was a long time when I really felt cursed for what happened between us, as if nothing would ever be good again. I'm sure you thought that I would only be upset for a week or two and then I would move on. I did a very good job of acting that way, being sure to laugh loudly when you walked by and of course going out every weekend with groups of my friends, refusing to make eye contact with you, for fear that you would catch a glimpse of the sadness concealed by an excess of dark makeup.



It took me six months to stop having nightmares.

For nights on end, I would wake up in the middle of the night, suffocated and distressed. My tiny L-shaped single, with its empty walls and floors covered in fleeces and towels, provided me no comfort. Your face, your name, every good thing that we'd ever had constantly bounced around my mind. I barely survived on coffee and the presence of my friends, which would only last until graduation.

It's been about two years since we last spoke. Fall has crept up on me again, to remind me of death and change and sadness. There is nothing joyful about fall. Each celebration is funereal; more like a celebration of the life that once was than the cruel winter to come. (And I'm sure this winter will be cruel to make up for the pathetic one last year.) I rarely think about you, and I worry about you every once in a while too. I want you to be able to feel love more than you ever have before. I want you to grow up to be successful, so you can take care of your mother and outshine your father.

I'm different because of you. Even if we met each other again three years from now, I could never love you. And it has nothing to do with how we parted ways the last time. I am just a different person, and I'm not capable of having the friendship that we once had anymore. Anything else would seem forced. I want to preserve what happy memories I have.

I took sort of detour in discussing my happiness; it is hard for me not to reminisce about being younger and having happiness that I didn't have to work at.

I cannot escape the feeling of death that comes with fall. It is when my grandmother died, when Hunter died, and when a number of other bad things have happened to the people I've cared about. But today, I was walking to a dining hall here, listening to an awful song, having just spoken to a professor about a bad grade, and I realized that I was smiling, all on my own.

This shouldn't be a big deal, but it happens to me so infrequently. I think I'm almost done paying my dues to the universe for anything bad that I've done to you. I am starting not to blame everything on your born-again Christianity. Every day, I love you less, but appreciate our friendship more. I am happy without you. It really is possible. There was a point when I never thought it would be. I am at the point where I will stop writing about you. I've printed you in Times New Roman often enough; our time is almost through.

Closure isn't something that comes all at once; I think that I was wise not to force it upon myself. I have met people who have let me come to terms with the effect you've had on my psyche. They have watched me deconstruct and rebuild different love affairs in my head in order to compensate for missing you.

I don't need you to weigh on my conscience anymore. I don't need to remember your warmth or feeling small and safe with you in order to be comforted. It's taken a long time for me to get here. And I will probably still think of you on cold days, or when I listen to particular songs, but this part of my life is done. A finished book. The curtain closing at the end of a play. You will still be in my mind when I think of Groton and the unique situation of my adolescence. However, you will no longer have power over my emotions, and I will no longer torture myself by forcing you into the role of the villain in my emotional breakdowns.

Wherever you may be, I want you to stay safe. I want you to find a way to conquer your past, and feel emotions like I know you are capable of. Be happy. Be strong. And I will try to do the same. 

Misery

I made up a best friend all in my head.
He was Latino with giant puppy eyes that reflected the sort of hope that only a boy from the ghetto who grew up taking care of his mother can have. There's something about being raised without a real father that makes a man want to be the best he can be.  I made up a best friend all in my head and I gave him a name and a mop of black curls that framed his face when he was young, and as he got older, the curls slowly receded until he cut his hair every two weeks and tried to grow a beard. I invented a smell for him, that still brings tears to my eyes when I smell it on a strange boy who couldn't possibly understand the beauty of fiction. I gave him stubble on his face that prickled when I hugged him and when we pressed our child-faces together. Love love love.

I invented a world where he loved me. I invented a world where we were inseparable. On my bad days, I would turn to this marvelous fantasy and he would wrap me in his arms that got less pudgy and more muscular as I got darker and more self-involved. I heard everything going on in his head because I'd made him up, yet somehow I'd managed to obscure his screaming, and ignore his pain, just so I could be loved by a fictional character. We shared each thought. We shared our childhood until White noise drowned out a voice I should have heard, calling me to be the protector he'd raised me to be.

Teetering on the cusp of adulthood, we held hands, anticipating a leap of faith into the world of grown-ups. We never have to change. What will you do without each other in college? The answer was never important. The question, never significant.

My imaginary friend clawed his way out of my brain before I could formulate words, any attempt to answer the big question that plagued our relationship when we finally realized that not everything lasted forever. People died. Love was temporary. We both were scared, but he ran first. He scratched and scraped at the weak tendrils of optimism that held me together. He took with him my love and scrambled my brain. He revealed the monstrous fears that I concealed and he let go of my hand before I was ready to be on my own.

My imaginary friend is dead. I have killed our memories together and it's almost as if I'd never thought him up. Sometimes I try to recall specific times when we were together. I try to think of conversations that we had. I want to remember the feeling of being completely engulfed in the arms of someone else and leaving your heart in someone else's hands.

I can never be protected again. My little Latino boy is grown up and has left my head. Only on days like this, where the wind chill forces me to wrap handmade scarves tight around my neck, or on days when orange leaves bring back warm fall memories, when tears creep on the edge of my eyelids ready to spill forth, I think of him. I look back and I understood why he ran. He left a shell of a person who was once happy behind because he could no longer stand to see this wraithlike thing absorb a girl once full of life. I was growing into oblivion, and he couldn't stop me. Even if he'd held on tighter, I would have pulled him into death eventually.

I'm shaking.

I'm asking you what's wrong.

What's wrong?

Please.

I want to fix this.

I want.
I want.

Just talk to me.
Why can't we talk about this?

Please...
I want to talk to you.
I want.

Please be happy.
Please.

I want.
I want you to be happy.

Fear

I'm not a writer. Don't call me that, I hate it. I tiptoe around feelings and emotions and brush them under the rug in exchange for facts and logic. Give me a comforting fairy tale, talk of heaven and I'm likely to run to cold-hard facts, the only thing I trust. I've been fucked over by emotions too many times to count and now I'm getting older. But you're only eighteen, I hear it over and over again. But if I'm only eighteen, why does each morning feel harder. Why do I feel so burdened if it's only eighteen why do I feel like the important days of my life are almost over. I think life is monotonous now? What about the future? Will I be tied down to some wealthy boy I don't love, with a few hated children running around reminding me of a youth I've lost or a boy I should have loved better? Eighteen is too young to think about this. Eighteen is too young to think about marriage. Eighteen is too young to decide what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.


I'm afraid of commitment. I say it myself; other people say it too (about me and about themselves). What a load of crap though. It's so easy for me to maintain that façade in front of people who don't understand what commitment means and it's not just deciding that some man or woman is your whole world. Commitment is sacrifice, and there should be no sacrifice in choosing one person over all the others, it should be intuitive and organic. I've committed my entire life to my future career. I want to run away. I want to travel the world. I want to drop out of New England and learn that the United States is not the epicenter of the universe. Being a doctor is something I could love. Perhaps I can give life to someone who needs another chance. Maybe I'll save someone and they'll fall in love, and have a happily ever after. Or maybe I'll just be a source of inspiration for someone younger than me, who knows me, and knows the good things I have accomplished, ignorant of the nights of violent depression and isolation.

Once I heard someone say that your career won't get up one morning and say it doesn't love you anymore. How depressing. The girl who consumed Disney movies and literature from the time she could open her eyes for more than a mother's teat does not want to believe that. Love is real. Love is very real. And I try and I try to feel it properly and to feel like I'm not the only one who loves blindly and madly. My friends claim that they love too, but it's hard to trust their words. I can't believe them. Loving feels so isolating; it's easier for me to believe they are ignorant of that isolation. I am dumb when it comes to love. It terrifies me, and drives me to self-destruct because I feel like I'm in a straitjacket, unable to express a damned thing except fear. Fear takes over all the time and maybe it's a symptom of something else, but symptom or not, I am constantly imprisoned by it.

I want a job that I love because I don't think anyone will ever be able to love me properly. It's my biggest fear. The feminist part of me who parades around touting misandry and female empowerment is genuine, no doubt about it, but a part of it is fueled by this fear that I will never be loved. And I realize that this fear stems from a white-supremacist patriarchal society that tells me that I am too dark, my hair is too wild, my temper is too hot. I will forever be an angry black girl. My accomplishments will forever be obscured by the idea that I only got where I am because of affirmative action or some kind of imagined privilege. My accomplishments are zeroed by society. My looks are insignificant to most. It's hard to believe that people who are attracted to me don't see me as some sort of "exotic" mixed girl with a wild island-girl sensuality. I am alone. I am different, and I don't mean to make a big deal out of something that isn't but this is a big deal. Every interaction I have with the world is influenced by a preconceived notion of me and there are only a few boxes that I can even fit into. But I don't fit into any box, I am not either one type of person or another.

I am a summation. I am equal parts prep-school girl who loves to dress up and girl who cries for hours about a sad Doctor Who episode. I am equal parts a feminist and anti-racist as I am someone who has fallen in love with white men (despite them upholding a power structure I despise). I feel like other people don't look at me holistically. Something is always missing. I present a different person to each of the people I know, and I worry that in doing this I will further obscure who I really am. To some people, I am entirely misanthropic, always seeing a problem with society or individual people. To others I am a casket of lost loves, haunted by wraiths of regret. I can be an academic just as well as a girl who enjoys getting dressed up and feeling like nothing matters except feeling good and being beautiful. Everyone looks at the world so myopically and so filled with arrogance and unwillingness to change.

Is it normal to be so young and already so disillusioned? I cannot go a single day without fighting and I am getting tired of constantly being at war with myself and with others. I try to choose my battles, but there are some things that I can't afford not to fight against. It's strange, but it's almost easier to fight than to live knowing that I have allowed others to continue perpetuating injustice and ignorance. But I am exhausted. I am tired of struggling, although oddly enough, fighting and struggling prevents me from succumbing to some of the worse symptoms of depression. (Some might argue the worst symptom of depression.)

Perhaps I am destined to be a warrior on the small scale of my existence. Perhaps this is the greater purpose that I desperately seek. Maybe I am not meant to be loved or to really love others. I ought to be content with a life of relative selflessness, and perhaps dedicate myself to being a little bit better at perfecting that selflessness. Wouldn't it be better to avoid hedonism and dedicate the entirety of my being to fixing other people and the world or at the very least trying? Is this more noble than trying to find a boy to love or satisfying my base desires for money and power and control?

I want to shut my brain off. I want to stop thinking all the time. I want to be able to be entirely present. People are beginning to notice how absent I am from life. When I roll over, unable to look into his eyes for fear that I will become too involved in moments that can only be temporary,  when I stare off into the distance mid-sentence trying to hold onto a single instant and keep it close to me forever or when I ignore and neglect my academic commitments, it's my way of avoiding the present moment because I fear the temporary far more than I fear permanence. It's not commitment to anything that I am truly terrified of, but the idea that I will commit to something that will go away.  This may be a person or success or really anything that I give myself to entirely. I want to be less empty. I want to be here, now, with everyone I know but I can't do that. So I want to find meaning by picking off pieces of myself, and giving them to those who need something from me. I want to ignore my desires and give and give until I'm essentially dead. It's the stuff of suicidal dreams without physical death.

How do I eliminate fear? It's a question I ask myself almost constantly. I want to be less scared of existing and less scared of being happy. I may settle for a life of selflessness and giving until I am nothing, but what I really want is to feel free to be totally hedonistic and throw myself at all kinds of pleasures. Being intelligent is a prison. Being black is a prison. Being beautiful is a prison. I am eternally held captive by something.

This is why I want to die. I want to die in order to be free. Don't worry, I haven't worked up enough selfishness to let myself be truly pursuant of the freedom that comes with death. I am not done with this world. I am not done fixing everyone and fixing everything. Injustice still exists. Sadness still exists. Feeling needed keeps me alive. A shock to the heart. A quick jolt of reality. I'm a masochistic child, kept alive by the same anguish that places me on edge and very nearly pushes me over. I might feel alone in my head, but that doesn't mean I am not needed. And I say it again and again until I believe it. I am needed. I may not be loved, I may not be wanted, but I cannot yet die. 

Monotony

Every day starts the same for me. I am primarily exhausted, and rarely want to attend class. My body aches from either sleeping on my arm or not getting enough sleep or some combination of the two. I attend as many classes as I can, do my homework, go to my job, hang out with my friends, text some other friends, do some more homework and go to bed. I hate living this way. It is in my nature to crave spontaneity and each day becomes more boring than the next. The weekends provide a brief unsatisfying escape from my every day life. Brief and meaningless. I may get drunk, destroy my body or find myself in someone else's bed, but this is ultimately unsatisfying in the long run.


This semester has been difficult for me. When I went off my medication at the beginning of the semester, I struggled with a lot of things. I had a lot of academic problems and emotional problems. I could actually almost hear another version of myself: the anxious and depressed version, screaming at me through almost every social interaction. I doubted myself a lot and didn't trust in my ability to make sound emotional decisions. I hated everything about myself and found myself very close to actually inflicting pain upon myself a number of times. A number of external factors led to me feeling even more out of control; I've always had problems with wanting to control all aspects of my life and knowing that I couldn't be in charge of everyone's feelings and reactions to me sent me deeper into a psychological rut.

Another thing that exacerbated my problems was everyone's insistence that I was "normal". I know it seems like the sort of thing that would be comforting, but it really wasn't. I was hearing voices, in my head, telling me to slice my skin open, or chug half a bottle of rum or to burn my room to the ground. That isn't normal. My voices told me I was worthless, meaningless, a blip on the space time continuum. I could never be loved. I would never love again. I was vile, disgusting and an abomination. I'm sorry, but I know that isn't normal, and my friends' insistence that I was fine drove me even closer to actually hurting myself. Luckily, by the will of some higher power, or just as a result of my general destiny, I managed to make it out of the three weeks of hell without doing anything remarkably stupid.

Those few weeks were terrible on my body and on my mind, but I found a twisted pleasure in the novelty. Fighting against myself brought me something new to do. I found fulfillment in the struggle of survival and in the battle against my mind. If I could find the will not to hurt myself, I felt like I was better. This control over willpower extended to food, and I would go hours upon hours without eating anything substantial. I ate just enough to prevent my stomach from growling and drawing attention to what I was doing. In a sense I felt like this would give me control over the people around me. They would think I was alright, when I really was not.

Now that I've stopped participating in odd deceptions of this kind, I find myself without any kind of challenge. I have never been good at dealing with boredom (or disappointment for that matter). I want to break out of this monotony and be a different person, or experience something different from just classes, school and relationships that leave me emotionally unsatisfied and psychologically drained. I want to be better. I don't want to hear negative voices and I don't want to focus on negative thoughts. How do I combine my need to break out of monotony with my desire to be a happier person? This is something that I suppose I will continue to figure out on my path to freeing myself from depression. It is a difficult thing to do, especially feeling as isolated as I do now.

Other people saying they are here for me is really quite different from the reality of the situation, which is that people are mainly there for themselves. They exist in my world only for whatever life they can suck out of me to boost their self-esteem or for whatever other purposes I might serve. I need to focus on fighting monotony on my own, without relying on other people for suport or falling into depressive habits. I am ill. My brain is at war with itself, but at least I am at the point where I think that I can be better, and I will be patient with myself for this not happening instantaneously. 

Body Image - Some Thoughts

I have not always loved myself.
Even now, I am slowly shedding the negativity of self-loathing that is so deeply entrenched in women. There was always something wrong with me.  From the time I was a child, the idea that I needed to control my appearance to fit convention was pounded into me by a mother with only good intentions. Black and mixed girls (and maybe some white ones, I can't speak for them), can all directly relate to the hair-struggle, which is the first manifestation of this that we become aware of.

Combs yanked through beautiful knots.
SIT STILL.
STOP CRYING.
JUST TEN MORE MINUTES.
CALM DOWN.
IT DOES NOT HURT THAT BADLY.

I am probably one of the lucky few who was never hit while getting my hair combed, but I know some of my sisters cannot say the same. From the time we are children, we are taught that what we are born with is wild and unruly. What our bodies and hair look like are wrong and need to be tamed. It starts with our hair, but as we get older, we learn that we mustn't wear too-short shorts, we must try not to look fat, but we can't look too skinny. Fix it, fix everything. Your body is not perfect. You are not right. We are bombarded with these types of messages from our youth. The media is not all to blame.

When we are younger we are not really sure how long lasting these effects will be. We do not understand how early we are being abused and how harmful these messages about body negativity will be. It influences everything, from our interactions with others to our interactions and perceptions of ourselves. We begin to enter the world of adulthood, not with our heads held high, but with our eyes towards the ground and our confidence lowered.

Although, women face the majority of these problems, men are not immune to them. A few young men attempt to understand what women go through, in well intended attempts to "fix" women, they say things like "Embrace your natural beauty! Girls who wear makeup are gross and I like girls better without makeup on!" Another common one is, "I think all women are beautiful. You should love yourselves. I don't know why women have such low self-esteem." Nice. Thank you so much! You have fixed us all you benevolent penis-owner (Note: not trans-erasure, just making a point about the people who do this). Good intentions do not erase the negative effects the male gender has on self-perception however, and these teenage boys attempts to enlighten the silly girls with poor self-esteem does more harm than good in the long run. It makes girls who do like makeup feel bad about themselves and telling a girl she is beautiful might not change the way she feels about herself because it really needs to come from within.

It has taken me a long time to accept my physical appearance. I used to care a lot about whether or not men found me attractive. I tried to get rid of everything I thought was ugly - fat, curly hair, glasses, body hair - just to name a few things. I developed an obsession with comparing myself to other women who were better, more desirable and more beautiful than I. Whether these women were photoshopped celebrities or friends who were always involved with some boy or another, I used their looks as a weapon against myself. I felt threatened and in trying to eliminate that threat through changing myself, I ended up causing myself a lot of emotional damage.

Somewhere along the line of being rejected by various men (Perhaps boy #5 or someone along those lines) I began to realize how hurtful my self-image was, especially as a reaction to being rejected by men. I was at a point where I could hardly look in the mirror without finding some small feature to obsess over or something to put myself down about. I stopped caring about whether men found me attractive, because no matter what I did to myself, it didn't really seem to convince them that I was beautiful. I tried very hard to conform to what I thought was perfect for a long time.

I wouldn't eat for as many days at a time as I could handle because I felt like I didn't deserve food, and I would feel guilty every time I caved and ended up consuming "too much". So, rejected by myself and a large number of boys, I started to become angry. This anger was projected inwards at first, but then I began to get angry with the world. This tied in nicely with my religious crisis, where I stopped believing that I needed to attribute everything to a higher power or a deeper purpose. People seemed to be so shallow and empty, obsessed with worthless physical appearances. They didn't understand that physical beauty for short lived and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. They didn't understand that everything was insignificant and all we have was ourselves. I blamed my world and the people around me for the way I viewed myself. Although I was not necessarily incorrect in where I directed my blame and anger, blaming people and being angry wasn't going to solve any of my problems.

I hated men. I hated myself. I hated my friends who were so critical of themselves and others. I didn't want to think of myself as ugly, and I made a conscious decision to change my self-perception. I started to really feel what it was like to be inside my body. I felt what it was like to breathe, to speak, to hug someone, to touch someone else or to feel desire. It wasn't disgusting. It wasn't painful to be myself. I realized that the body that I had was adequate for my purpose in life and I had no reason to be upset. Was there any reason for me to be stressed about a little bit of fat? Was there any reason to hate my hair the way it came out of my head? This was one of the few times in my life that I turned my anger into something positive. I changed the way I viewed myself. I changed the way I presented myself.

I started by dressing for myself, without caring about whether or not I would run into the boy I liked on a day that I was less-than-perfect. Then I looked at my body, and I looked at the parts of it that I hated. I have really crooked teeth. A solution would be getting braces, but I didn't want them, so I forced myself to acknowledge and embrace the fact that my teeth are crooked and will probably be coffee stained for the rest of my life. I looked at my nose, which seems to have evolved from a mixture of my genetics and is not predominantly "black" or "white". It's awkwardly shaped and has a freckle on the tip that draws attention to it. There's nothing I can really do about my nose however, so on days when the freckle is particularly annoying, I cover it up with makeup, and other times I do nothing and just try to kill my obsessive thoughts. I used to hate my lips. I thought they were too big for my face. I got over that insecurity by forcing myself to wear lipstick of bright, obnoxious colors. I needed to draw attention the perceived flaw and "flaunt" it to help myself come to terms with its presence. After a few times, I began to like the way my lips looked. I started not to care about them being awkward or not fitting my face because if I wanted to highlight my lips, I could do it if I damn well pleased. I could love my flaws.

I hated that my upper body was disproportionally larger than my legs, which still managed to be so thick I had to spend ten minutes putting on jeans. I hated that my butt was flat and so obviously not inherited from my mother. I began to spend a lot of time naked. I spent a lot of time looking at my breasts, that were not perfectly perky and my butt that wasn't the round "black girl booty" I wanted. I spent so much time looking and analyzing and trying to think of good reasons to hate myself, that after a while, I didn't want to hate myself anymore. I didn't want to be ashamed of stretch marks on my thighs just below my butt. I didn't want to hate the fact that I didn't have perfect breasts or a perfectly proportioned body. Self-loathing was tiring me out, and the more I forced myself to stare into the mirror, I began to come to terms with myself, one piece of my body at a time.

I stopped comparing myself to girls who were "prettier" than I was. I no longer cared about the stereotypical New England girl athlete's body and face. I couldn't be a skinny blond field hockey or lacrosse player even if I wanted to. And the more I forced myself to acknowledge my nakedness and own my nakeness, the less I wanted to be someone else. My view on men changed as well. Why would I want to be with someone who made me feel insecure about my flaws? Why did I care about the juvenile boys I was surrounded by who would frequently talk about how "ugly" or "fat" other girls were?

It isn't my job to change the shallowness of men around me. Half the time, I don't think they notice how hurtful it is to say things like "I'm not attracted to black girls" or "I only like blonds" in my presence or in the presence of any other girl for that matter. Sometimes I think they justify their behavior by saying, "Well, I'm insecure too." The point is, their thoughts stopped mattering to me. Their critique of other women, as annoying as it was, stopped becoming relevant. The only opinion about my body that I care about is my own.

My mother is still critical. I don't think she can help it. She really does want the best for me. But she will comment on my shorts being too short, my shirts being too wrinkled, or my clothing choices being too manly. (I do tend to shop in men's sections more than the perfect child would, I suppose.) This was the most difficult criticism for me to overcome, and for most girls I think this is the case. In general, we have the idea that our mothers were perfect. My mother specifically, also accomplished something that I never will; she was married at 19. She successfully found the love of her life when she was only a year older than I am, and although I don't particularly have the desire to get married, it certainly adds to the feelings of inadequacy that are only compounded by any criticism, no matter how small and regardless of the intent. I don't know exactly how I overcame my mother's criticism. I think I stopped trying to acquiesce to her wishes of what kind of child she wanted me to be. And in putting up a fight for so long, against her and against myself, I eventually came to terms with the fact that she will never be completely happy with how I look and how I present myself.

I envy my sister sometimes for being the perfect girl in that regard. She is smart, independent and manages to have successful relationships with men. She can relate to my mother on that level, which is something that I have never been able to do. Acknowledging my envy, and the fact that I will never be exactly who my mother wants me to be was liberating and played a huge role in developing a better self-image.

I am surrounded by beautiful women. I'm not going to spin you that crap about how "everyone is equally beautiful" as a method of "solving" women's problems with self-esteem. I'm being honest. From my roommate, to friends I haven't seen since graduating from Groton, to girls I've had a couple classes with, I have been absolutely blessed to be surrounded by women who radiate independence, intelligence and incredible beauty. A few nights ago, I was surprised to find out how many of these women, who in a sense I look up to in various regards, struggle with their self-perception.

I remember feeling that way, but due to egocentricity, I suppose I forgot that not everybody has come to the point in their life where they decide to love themselves. It has to be conscious. It has to be something that you invest yourself in. What I find most distressing, is the vast number of women and girls who feel inadequate about their looks. I want to help, and I want to change it, but there's really no way I can impose myself on other peoples' lives without seeming rude. I suppose all I can do is acknowledge that I went through the same struggles, and talk about how I overcame them and - also due to some egoism - hope that I inspire women and girls to talk to each other about their problems with their self-image or spend some time with their bodies, exploring their flaws and learning to love them.

The (Modern) Wasteland

I'm reading the Wasteland, and watching mysterious oil patches from the dining hall coffee machines float around the top of my cup. I smell like him, warm and distinct from the typical decaying-coffee scent that usually sits in my clothing. My nerves are bad tonight. I love Eliot. I love the Wasteland. In the moment, nothing seems more powerful than my love of his words and I am completely caught up in the meter. So elegant. So intelligent.




I can't imagine a world without poetry - and it doesn't have to be as impressive as the Wasteland for it to grab my attention. I am the bibliophile stereotype: I live for coffee in one hand, pen stuck behind my ear cradling beautiful, worn-through spines in my hands, clinging desperately to each page like a childhood dream. I move with journal in tow, ready to write down lines, words, names or emotions that catch my attention. Anything is beautiful, it doesn't have to be big, just possess something that reels me in and makes my mind cease its monotony.

There is an inexplicable link between humans and poetry that has more to do with the way words sound than the sense they make. I'll prove it to you. Pick up a book of Plath's poems (or Google one, I'm not picky) and choose a long one. Don't listen to a single word, just listen to the sounds. You can hear her loneliness and desolation before you even begin to examine her word choice, often filled with jarring metaphor and incredibly dark imagery. Some may claim that Plath is not accessible, and apply this claim to other poets. A response to that argument, from an intellectual snob, would be "Poetry isn't meant to be accessible".

That's incorrect (as well as offensive and elitist). The beautiful thing is that poetry is accessible on multiple levels, something that popular culture needs to be reminded of. Is someone who understands every classical allusion in the Wasteland any better than someone who likes the way the words sound? Absolutely not. There are layers of understanding available in a well-crafted poem and it isn't necessary to have a half-million dollar education to access that.

Perhaps a method of reducing my generation's apathy, so widely griped about by our parents and grandparents, would be educating them about the range of human emotions that exist now and always have existed. We want to know that we are not alone, we don't want little pills or terrified parents who one day we will finally succeed in some form of suicide or another. Art, poetry and beauty are lost, not because our generation is inadequate, but because the one before us was. They poison us with media, forcing us into categories: nerd, jock, popular, anti-social and in choosing one form of expression, we are forced to suppress all of the others. We are not taught that we are not alone and never have been. Sure, we're told this time and time again, word-for-word. "Don't worry. You are not alone." Can you be any less creative than that? Is there any less potent way to convey those emotions? Poetry and writing and language all evolved out of nothing.

Humans had nothing, yet created language as a form of expression that is rapidly being dulled by older generations, while being blamed on those of us attached to our cellphones or glued to a computer screen, as if the world's problems all started with us hitting thirteen. Bluntly, most of our parents just fucked up, and maybe that was a result of their parents fucking up. We are not taught how to love. We are not taught how to feel through words. As a generation, our connections to each other are being lost. My generation is trying desperately to regain what humanity has lost and it's reflected in our psychological problems and our desperation to make sense of everything.

I wonder what the world would be like if I could love people as well as literature. If people made half as much sense as books or poems, I would be twice as happy. However all the people I know are liars and childish and possessed by hedonism.

 Most of us cannot really feel anyways, and we cannot really love anyone but ourselves because we have been conditioned to believe we are alone and always will be. Who needs the trouble of loving someone else when we hear about statistics, and divorce rates and unhappiness. Rather than thinking about love as a way to transcend these things, we see love as the cause, and close ourselves off to emotions that are inherently human and remain taut and bubbling beneath the surface of hot skin, frustrating us, causing anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, desperation for sex in hopes that it forces us to feel.

It is easy to blame this resultant apathy, depression or bad timing as excuses for why we must cling to self-love over anything else, but the problem stems so much deeper. Losing our ability to connect with others and understand that generations before us have felt pain and happiness and lust and warmth leaves us craving loneliness because we do not understand that there are other options. People who are most aware of the love that exists in poetry and literature are harder on ourselves because we believe in love, and we know it can exist, yet we feel pressure to deny its existence because of how unattainable it seems in our society.

I wonder if what I speak about is something that only I perceive. I have not had the most fulfilling interactions with men over my eighteen years. Some summarizing phrases might be "disappointing" or  "absolutely off-putting to men as a gender". This gives me a negative bias: I tend to regard most men as cruel, emotionally frigid and untrustworthy. In my defense, no one has proved me wrong. At the same time, I wonder if my view of the world is so negative because of my specific interactions or because of something deeper, like having high, unrealistic expectations due to my exposure to literature and poetry.  I expect romance and feelings to be something beautiful and transcendental and have found that reality works nothing like I imagined as a child. I understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction, but I find it difficult to believe that every love story is not based in something very real and something very  attainable. I am conflicted.

My depression does not help this continuous internal conflict. I want to be happy and believe that people can be close in a way deeper than friendship. I have a lot to fight with before I can regain even a part of my childish optimism about love. I want to believe in something that may or may not exist anymore, but I am wary of being vulnerable and open because I know how easy it is for me to get ripped apart by turning people into concepts and loving my caricatures of them more than the actual person. I know that I can be dangerous and destructive. I know how hard I am to love. If I regain any childishness again, it will be tainted by these ideas, no matter what I do. I cannot deny my past entirely; ignoring problems only makes them surface again in am much more hurtful way. All of us, especially the women who possess a secret desire for romance need to find a way to reclaim our belief in fairy tales. People get by believing in a lot more harmful myths, if modern love is indeed a myth.

We may be young, externally apathetic and internally damaged by our society, but we can find it within ourselves to repossess one of the few things that defines us as human and separates us from other forms of life. I'll say it now: I believe in love. I believe in happiness. Nothing can take this away from you, unless you let it.