The Little Prince and the Fox

An image haunts me

A face 

A skull

A madness in those eyes

calling out

Or is it just my imagination?

Obsession

A hand taking hold of me 

 from unfathomable depths 

A darkness inside those eyes

And yet a light

so bright

and blinding

Windows into the soul

soft, clear blue

And behind them, shadows

hard and dark

Daggers that shine through 

A smile or a grimace

A glimpse of truth or

another lie

 in this game of dazzling 

mirrors

Reflections everywhere

 but no one there

to touch

Song: “Records” by Lilly Hiatt (slightly modified)

“

I’m 40, I feel 23

Got no husband thanks to me

I just wanna rock’n’roll

Scream out my lungs and bury the soul

I’m often lonely but I’m also free

It’s never how I thought it’d be 

But that record waited up for me

That record waited up for me

Six years ago, hope was nothing much 

Waking up to a stranger’s touch 

I gave up a lot just to be free

That record still hung on to me

I’m often lonely but I’m also free

It’s never how I thought it’d be 

But that record waited up for me

That record waited up for me

Looking out a window pane 

Wondering why I still feel the same

… 

… 

I saw that boy I loved so hard

He passed me in his pick-up truck 

Desire doesn’t know it’s wrong

So I came home and put the record on

I heard the backbeat 

I sank into the groove

And suddenly I wasn’t worried about him

I turned it up so loud 

That it buzzed my ears 

And that ok cuz I’m the only one here

I’m often lonely but I’m also free

It’s never how I thought it’d be 

But that record waited up for me

That record waited up for me

”

The first day of 2022 has been graced with gorgeous weather in this part of California: warm & sunny, and hardly any wind. 

I started this New Year alone last night, which was extremely sad for me. 

But today, also thanks to the wonderful weather, I’ve been able to transform some of that painful loneliness into more peaceful solitude. 

My coping mechanisms haven’t varied much: going completely offline with my cell-phone off to shut out the world and possible pain coming from it; getting out in nature; exercising intensely. 

Yes, I’m alone today, I’m spending the whole day — New Year’s Day, a holiday and the first day of the New Year — completely on my own. But while yesterday I ended up alone against my own choice & the originals plans, today I’m alone by my own choice and I’m doing some of the things I love the most and rediscovering the connection with nature (which automatically helps me feels less alone) as well as with myself in a healthier way. 

I’m almost seeing the glass half full again… almost!

—————————————————————

“Let everything happen to you: 

Beauty and terror. 

Just keep going. 

No feeling is final.”

[Rainer Maria Rilke]

There’s a saying in Italian, “Meglio soli che malaccompagnati”, which means, “We’re better off alone than in the wrong (or bad) company”. 

I agree with this saying.

But I’ve been so alone for so long, and I’ve been feeling so lonely for so long, that I’m beginning to think, “Better off dead than so alone/lonely”.

This morning I woke up happy. One factor is the sunshine, for sure, as well as having been able to get the right amount of satisfying exercise yesterday, on the first sunny day in weeks. 

But there’s also something deeper: I love New Year’s! I love the symbolism around shedding and leaving behind what we don’t need, being grateful for all we received and learned, and facing the oncoming year with hope. I’ve always enjoyed celebrating New Year’s and since my move to California, it has become even more important in a positive way because it feels like the turn of the year then ushers in my own personal “liberation” that occurred a couple weeks after New Year’s in January 2016.

Every year, I ask myself: what do I want to leave behind, and what do I want to bring along with me into the New Year? 

Last year, I spent New Year’s completely alone, for the first time, because of the pandemic: it was unexpectedly lovely, and that’s when I started to come into myself fully, eventually leading to my coming-out this summer and feeling so much more whole. 

This year, I feel it’s particularly important to ask myself, “what do I want to leave behind, and what do I want to bring along with me into the New Year?”, also because of my upcoming move to Colorado with its ensuing changes and possibly new opportunities.

So, what do I want to leave behind, and what do I want to bring along with me into the New Year?

In the call with my stress management counselor yesterday, we were talking about my feelings, my worries, my stressors, and my depression — the latter being something I have never experienced before in my life. And I suddenly realized (and said to my counselor) that there’s nothing I really need to change in my current situation: I have all I need to survive and could live like this for ever, or at least for a long time. But I’m not happy in my current situation. This isn’t new to me: I have been unhappy and changed my situation already several times in the past. The difference now is that I can only see my failures and the difficulties that lie ahead of me, instead of my achievements and the opportunities. Basically, I’m seeing the glass half empty, while in the past I’ve always been the kind of person who sees the glass half full: so in this sense, I don’t recognize myself. 

When I said this, the counselor asked me when the shift had occurred and why I thought it had happened. After some reflection, I realized this shift occurred mostly over the course of the past year (2021) and then I slowly listed the causes: the glass-ceiling that was made explicit to me at work at the end of 2019 (even before the pandemic was a “thing” here) and that caused so much anger and pain in me; the pandemic hitting hard in February 2020 with the ensuing lockdown, and then my own COVID-19 illness in March 2020; months of extreme isolation & loneliness for me, and an extremely long recovery from having had COVID-19; teaching from home throughout 2021, which was stressful (I’m grateful I had a safe job but I did it only for survival); and on top of all this, intermittently for two years, a weird, confusing but intense and somehow deep relationship with an “unavailable” person, that ultimately caused me a heartbreak. 

So, what am I leaving behind? I feel like I need to leave behind two years’  worth of burdens, shedding or turning two full years, not just one… 

I’m going to leave behind the actual places and people had caused me pain, to avoid becoming bitter. I’m going to leave behind a job that is relatively safe but not stable or good enough, and not gratifying enough. I’m going to leave behind an unhealthy relationship. But especially, I want to leave behind the glass-half-empty perspective on things that is not truly mine. 

And what do I want to bring along with me into the New Year and new State? This answer might need revisiting in a few weeks or months… 

For now, I want to bring along the lessons learned; the beautiful memories; my whole self as I’ve discovered it so clearly during this pandemic; the pain inasmuch as it heightens the joys; the parts of my job and professional connections that are good; gratitude; openness/open-mindedness. And especially, the hope of being able to regain my glass-half-full perspective on things.

Among the deluge of news on COVID, yesterday evening NPR had the following news-clip, which I found really interesting and worth sharing: “At overdose prevention sites, people can use illegal drugs under medical supervision”.

Recently, Arys has been struggling with an intensified bout of depression, with the mornings becoming increasingly hard. While they used to be an “early bird”, waking up early with no effort and actually full of energy and joy, now they struggle to drag themselves out of bed by 10am feeling tired, depleted of energy, overwhelmed by the day to come and/or lacking motivation. 

So it’s important to write down and remember and celebrate this one positive feeling, this morning, when they saw the reflection of their upper body in the short bathroom mirror: they saw “the boy” — really a boy’s torso. The strong and lean shoulders and arms, the slender, straight torso with no hips… if it weren’t for those small breasts, it would be a young, athletic boy’s body (probably just too slender to be a grown man’s). 

This image brought Arys so much joy that it made their day (at least for the moment), which is really important in this difficult, shaky phase. 

Taking a deep breath. This will probably be short, in terms of words, but it’s huge in terms of emotions. 

I just left my mother a voicemail coming out as non-binary/bi-gender and telling her that I’ve switched to “they” pronouns… This feels so terrifying..! 

My 70-year-old father is very ill, probably terminally (20% recovery/survival with the illness he has)…

Despite the holidays always being hard for me and this particular Christmas Day having been one of the roughest I’ve had in years, I can feel all the love & presence of my friends today, new and old. They are there, truly. What hurts for me during the holidays is that I cannot see them, be with them, or even talk to them, oftentimes, because most of them are busy with their families — which I realize is mostly loneliness due to social/cultural conditioning and clichés that surface more strongly during the holidays. But for so much of the time, they’re there for me. They really, really are, and I am so grateful for this, for them. 

I guess this is something I have built — we have built together…

And I know that the courage I found today for my coming-out with my mother is also thanks to all my wonderful friends whose love & support I feel so strongly: it is also thanks to them that I have been able to come into myself and feel comfortable & happy with who I am, and therefore have the courage to do the risky coming-out with my mother.

So, once again, thanks to all my friends!

I know that what I’ll be writing here now is coming through the distorted lens of depression, which has been exacerbated this past week or two by the time of year as well as some particular circumstances of my own. I also know that the solution lies, at least partly, in getting out of my head to stop the rumination, and that I can achieve this in several practical ways (exercising; doing practical things that have some immediate, concrete outcome; getting back into reading more and feeding my mind in general; maybe adjusting my dose of antidepressants). But in this moment, I need to write how I feel, to get it all off my chest, before I go plunge into the swimming pool, get into my body, and hopefully out of my head at least for a little bit. 

I feel like I’m constantly the outsider and haven’t built anything lasting of my own. 

I am extremely grateful for all the lovely friends and fun buddies that I have, and very thankful to them for including me in their activities, in some cases even for letting me be part of their family. It brings me a lot of joy and sense of belonging and even of being loved and useful. I guess it gives my life some “meaning”. 

However, none of these are my own family or my own group or a community that I have built: none of this is something I have built, something that will stay with me for the rest of my life, something of which I can feel proud. I’m just the “extra person”, the “addition”, someone they generously include.

Over the course of the past twenty years or so, I have built a few deep relationships and/or situations in which I wasn’t the outsider but very much an insider (apart from all the wonderful friendships that I still have scattered over a couple continents): three important romantic relationships; the groups of friends in college and grad school (especially the latter); two jobs where I actively built a group working together. But none of these have lasted. I walked away from each of the three romantic relationships and haven’t been able to build any more for over five years now. The friends groups from university came to a natural end just as life moved on. One job I quit when I moved to California (and I don’t regret that). The other job has placed a glass-ceiling in my way, which was a huge disappointment for me both professionally and personally, so I’ll have to walk away from that, too, eventually. 

In my current group of climbing buddies — as nice and fun as they are — I am and always will be the outsider because I was a later addition to a group of people who’ve known each other, and some even lived together, for years. 

A standard family with kids of my own isn’t, and has never been, on my “wish list”. 

Lasting, healthy romantic relationships seem to be outside of my skill set. 

And my career is completely uncertain to me now.

If building lasting family/romantic relationships and/or having steady careers are the measures of “success”, then I’m definitely a failure.

The holidays, especially the days around Christmas, have always been a nightmare to me. 

As a child growing up in my nuclear family, Christmas was stressful and painful for me for two reasons: on the one hand, my mother wanted to reiterate all the lavish “gift-opening ceremony” under the tree, etc. from her rich childhood, while my father couldn’t take it because of his own traumatic Christmas memories connected to poverty in his childhood, causing tensions and even fights between my parents which were very painful for me; on the other hand, I had to put up with unwrapping loads of gifts (which felt like such a waste to me, in the first place) that I didn’t like or want, that didn’t reflect me or my wishes at all, making me feel more and more misunderstood and unseen by my parents, which was of course also very painful, especially because I had to pretend, at least to a certain extent, that I liked them or I had to find very tactful ways of expressing my dislike… which is stressful for a child/teenager. 

Then, the more I grew up, the more Christmas became a boring, stressful and even constricting obligation that I had to fulfill with my nuclear family and then, eventually, even with my partner(s) at the time and their family… a real tour de force that felt like a nightmare.

The first really nice, enjoyable, even wonderful Christmas I had was my first Christmas here in California, in December 2016: I spent it almost completely on my own, enjoying a beautiful day out in the sunshine, walking and taking pictures at the beach, before seeing some friends for dinner, and then cat-sitting for other friends who were away traveling and were letting me stay in their beautiful house. It was such a liberating feeling that year! And also warm and lovely thanks to the relaxing cat-sitting in a gorgeous house and having some friends around me. 

But then, the holidays have gone back to being the most stressful time of year for me. Not as bad as when I was living in Europe, since the main source of stress and pain — visiting with my nuclear family — has been eliminated for a few years, at least for now. But it’s a time of year when my loneliness gets terribly exacerbated, especially since the pandemic. The holidays last year were particularly tough — but I’m sure they were so for many other people, too, unfortunately. 

This year Christmas is turning out to be very painful for me, too, though — to the point that, as I was driving home from the climbing gym this evening, I thought to myself, “I hate the holidays”! I have this impression that everyone I know has a family of their own or housemates with whom they live and with whom they can share this weekend celebrating and/or relaxing in one way or another that they enjoy, sharing the enjoyment — everyone I know except for me…

I think my feelings are even more exacerbated this year by a sort of “perfect storm”: there is the usual sense of “momentary loss of purpose or meaning” due to the semester ending made worse now by the uncertainty of next semester; on top of this, there’s my upcoming move to Colorado, with all the difficult emotions connected to that and with my mind dwelling on that most of the time now (even because of the semester having ended and thus not occupying my mental space as much); then, there’s this awful weather, super rainy (I know we need it, but it’s a drag!) and cold, which means I cannot get distracted by enjoying any outdoor activities; and finally, so many of the people at my beloved climbing gym seem to have left, as if there had been a sudden change of shift, so one of the places where I’m spending a lot of my free time is feeling less familiar and less friendly to me than it used to, which adds to all the rest of the loneliness and sadness. 

At the end of the day, I guess I just hate the sense of “obliged festivity” at this time of year and it hurts to not have anyone really close, living with me, with whom I can spend this downtime, this time off, in a way that we could truly enjoy together, sharing the enjoyment…