ZUKARA

Every time I’m done writing a post, I think my thoughts have been poured into the world and I can rest for a bit, a few days or so. In a few hours, I begin to have new thoughts and feelings, oftentimes far removed from the last thoughts I’d written about. I wonder how Taylor Swift remembers all her songs, she has got nine albums with at least ten songs each on average, meaning she has a total of at least a hundred tracks, and I’m sure some of the melodies and lyrics overlap. I would be so confused, but then again I’m not musically inclined so what would I know. Taylor Swift is a genius if you asked me. No one has asked me but the good thing is I have complete autonomy over this space and I do say Taylor Swift is a genius.

Every time I leave a person behind, I leave a part of myself buried somewhere. I want to dress up as Zuko and Katara for next Halloween, I’m a little (hahahahah a little) neurotic so I make plans like this a year in advance. In contrast, yes my visa/passport applications are delayed because /I/ took a long time to get started and I will be leaving for my studies perhaps in March for the next semester. I have no complaints tbh, it will not be as cold if I arrive at that time so the sun-loving person in me is way okay with that. Anyway, as I was saying, I want to go as Zukara for Halloween. I would have told Lucas about this, because we watched a good part of The Last Airbender together (the animation of course). However, Lucas and I are not on talking terms at the moment and also, it would be weird to tell him: hey, when I’m in Canada, I’m gonna find a guy to be my Zuko. Weird weird. 

I have lost many parts of myself this way. I used to have a best friend who was the mathematical/engineering brain among the two of us, but now I do not know anything about her life. I used to have a best friend whose family would sing Hamilton when I came over. I no longer know about her either. I don’t begrudge anyone for this, anyway. Sometimes I think Joey would like me as a friend, and he wanted me as a friend, and I think I’m a great friend to have when all is said and done. I think he needs more female friends who know about mental health and feelings. I don’t think I could be friends with him though, we start by talking about SpaceX and I sometimes want to ask him about his car, but it takes me too much energy to navigate how to be friends with him. I want to reserve my space and energy and I suppose other people would want to do the same for themselves. 

Sometimes, if I could build a partner, I would want so many different parts of so many different people. I want someone who knows the human body the way a personal trainer like Jaysen might. I admire the way he encourages and advises the lululemon team when we are bouldering. I would like a person like Lucas who is very in tune with social justice and trying to level the playing field for everyone from all different backgrounds, and who is politically far-left. I enjoy the way Adam is in the know about music and pop culture, and how he occasionally just goes right back to teasing me about Taylor Swift. He also plays the piano, drums and bass guitar so yes, I do like my men to be musical geniuses. Sometimes when I break up, I forget who to talk to about all the things I used to talk to them about.

In the past two years, I have lost many people or drifted apart from them because they have said not-politically-correct things and I didn’t give them a chance. Moving forward, what I really want is not to be so black and white about it. I would like to have proper conversations about all the things I disagree with, and build proper boundaries, instead of just cutting shit out. This is going to be a much harder lesson in practice so I will need help to hold myself accountable for it. 

BOTH OF THESE THINGS CAN BE TRUE

The year is going to end soon. This past week has been a multitude of events and I need to sit and process all my feelings, from the past year, from my entire past life. I’m still sad about breaking up with Lucas. There are many tangents I think about when it comes to him. I worry I may have made the wrong choice, that he is as good as it gets and I was just too broken to recognize what true love is. I wonder what true love is and whether I had it with Lucas, I read articles about love and many of them basically emphasize that love is hard work. Perhaps I had it and I didn’t know how to work for it. I am confused by the world, so many people get married when so many people also don’t end up having happy marriages. Lucas and I both did not find the idea of marriage appealing, he thought it was archaic and I suppose so did I. Every day I grow to believe you can and probably do have multiple partners that fulfil very different needs and if you can’t marry all of them, you shouldn’t marry any of them. Yet, at the bottom of my idealist romantic heart, of course I want to get married. I am but a woman who has been conditioned by the world I grew up in. This year, I also finally healed a wound that was open for either 30 years if I take it to be about my father, or 4 years, if we take it to be about Joey. The way I thought I loved my dad was the way I thought I loved Joey. I didn’t love either of them. Thinking I loved them is just vilifying the word love, because I had a toxic relationship with each of them, craving their validation, and I don’t think it can or should be described as love. I actually had a text conversation with Jaysen a few minutes ago. Of course we are just coworkers who enjoy flirting with each other and who feel comfortable enough to speak about matters that we don’t necessarily talk about to anyone else on a daily basis: philosophies and theories are things that are more academic than they are accessible, but we acknowledge a fondness for and attraction to each other based on discourse. It’s funny how I only discovered this in my last week at lululemon, did I inherently know that if I had spoken deeply with Jaysen any sooner, I would have developed an attraction to him? In any case, he said I’ve come a long way from when I started with the company. I used to be awkward af on the floor, I would back up into an invisible shell and be practically useless, and so he said I’ve grown. My team leaders have also said the same thing at times, of course, but so has Lucas. After our breakup, Lucas said he had seen me grow from the time we first dated to the time I ended the relationship. That’s really all I hope for in life, perhaps if not always happiness, then growth as a person. I don’t have a tether in life right now, when I move I will not be tethered to my family’s values and religion, I will not have a romantic partner to lean on and buoy myself to safety, I will have nothing but myself, and this scares me. I’m sad about it, but I also know I have never left a certain comfort zone I’ve built for myself, and I want to grow out of this shell I’ve occupied for the last 30 years.