I tend to get all needy at night, when the clothes come off and the makeup, halfway washed off, shows me a face that is red and puffy with no cheekbones and pimples and it seems somehow harder to love up close, here in this fluorescent bathroom mirror.
I am working on love a lot these days. A love for myself, from myself. A loop / a cycle spiralling towards myself / coming from the inside / going out / coming back in. A love letter unfinished but at least started. I want my love for myself to be predictable and unwavering. I want it to be so sturdy I could build a life on top of it. I want my love to be ferocious.
Cultivating a love like this is hard. Especially when you’ve spent so long in the other zone—the zone of “if I withhold love from myself that’s okay, it will motivate me / I still need to change so much / I just want other people to love me / that is more reliable than my own love.”
Saying things aloud again and again helps, even when the first three (hundred?) times feel fake. Right now it sounds like “I have an unwavering love for myself.” Every morning and every night, I say that. Soon, I might change it to “I have a ferocious love for myself,” but I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew.
But after I’ve washed my face, and when I sink into my bed, leaning against my stack of pillows, a yearning and a sadness (heavy around the eyes) lays itself on top of me.
There are no more things to do, no more ways to gain momentum out of this place, and so I stay.
I don’t know if it’s technology or the neediness that draws me to my phone, to the distractions, the glimpses of other lives, the potential for love. The dating apps: where I can find some confirmation of my self as good and desirable, when I, at midnight, can’t tell that to myself.
I suppose it’s also the whole being untethered thing, which is how I’ve come to understand my twenties. This decade / this place between families— the one you were born into and the one you will choose and create. The unchosen and the chosen. It’s barren sometimes, with late nights and no structure and no one to check in on you, no one you have dinner with every single night, who can tell when you’re off.
The twenties are a landscape with so little built in, with so much resting on you and how you use and fill your hours. It’s lonely and confusing, trying to find what you want to do and who you want to do it with. And maybe you haven’t found your group yet, maybe they don’t live here, or maybe they do and you haven’t found them yet.
But the ones you have found, they’re here, and that matters a lot. This is something else you’re working on. You used to just sit and wait for the perfect people, now you know that’s not how this whole thing goes. You’ve learned that giving these people in this town a chance is worth it, almost always. Going at it alone every day is too much.
I get into bed and it’s quiet and a little cold and I do not like my stomach and I want someone to hold me and kiss my earlobe and whisper how they can’t imagine their life without me. I want to be loved into sleep. And yet I know it is a yearning for escape, too. For both love and escape from the slow churning of the hours that, right now and also in the future, must be passed. At times these hours will be passed alone, at times with others. And right now, I’m in the alone time and all I want is to be with the others: the ones I don’t have yet / the ones who don’t have me yet.
And so I scroll and I swipe and I wonder if maybe that person could become my person. Probably not. But the potential is intoxicating enough. And then I feel a little better—buoyed by hope— and then I can fall asleep.
Thoughts / prompts:
How do you spend the time right before you go to sleep?
Who is one of your people that you’ve found already? Give them a call and thank them.
If your twenties are being untethered, what were your teens and what will be / are your thirties and forties and fifties?