ihateyou-imeanit

[ihateyou-imeanit]

[ihateyou-imeanit]

big news day

[ihateyou-imeanit]

Amy Winehouse by Valerie Phillips

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To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, tr. Richard Howard

[ihateyou-imeanit]

Recently I’ve started to think that comfort zones are a privilege, and privileged people get to stay in them, being comfy cosy and sleeping easily.

I think this way because life for me seems to be a constant test of my comfort; work, presentations, events, interviews, driving, trains, public speaking, analysing numbers and data.

It must be the reason I can’t sleep, I feel prickly and hot and tense and uncomfy. The goal posts of my discomfort are always changing and yet I never feel better about it. I never feel like I’m growing. I’m stagnant and numb, and somehow perpetually anxious.

I wish I was a person with only joyful, comfortable things in my calendar. I wish I could climb into bed rather than crawl, and sleep deeply rather than waking up from hourly nightmares in which all my teeth have fallen out.

Have I failed? Is it too late to change my life?

[ihateyou-imeanit]

Near Ramallah, Palestine.

1992.

📷 Esaias BAITEL.

[ihateyou-imeanit]

I cried more in 2023 than I have in my whole adult life. I’d been worried about 2023 since 2013 and I’m glad to see the back of it. I feel as though I spent most of it in survival mode. I literally imagine myself in the foetal position when I think about it. I missed out on things, I beat myself up, I blamed myself, I grieved, I felt immense physical pain, and I was lost and overwhelmed and heartbroken.

Still, I have things - I have people - to be thankful for. My cherished ones are generally healthy and happy and that means everything. I even feel bad and guilty for hating 2023 so deeply when, in real terms, we’re coming out of it relatively unscathed. I know how it feels to leave a year with an empty seat at the table. That’s probably why a new year fills me with angst rather than opportunity. It breaks my heart to know people are feeling that way.

Instagram and social media are telling me to change my life in every single way but also to stay exactly the same. Sometimes the pressure to not feel any pressure is worse. I want to change my life but am I wrong for that? As an overthinker, I’m prone to consulting the internet to see how I should live my life.

I don’t care. In 2024 I’m going to stop doing that. The Big Scary Year is gone and I am going to force myself into believing that a better life is possible for me. (Even typing that feels scary - like I’m tempting fate. Let’s not go there.)

I want a new job, I want to discover my purpose (both grand and small), I want to find a routine that serves me rather than exhausts me, to nurture things I have neglected, see more of life and worry less, to find who I am and then protect her.

I have spent ten years convinced that life is for other people.

I want to feel free and happy and adventurous and inquisitive and full of big fat exciting love for everything and everyone.

[ihateyou-imeanit]

whyyyyy do I ever hope for good?

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I’m glad the rain is coming down hard. It’s the way I feel inside. 

Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume I: 1940-1956 — Aurelia Schober Plath, 26th November 1950

[ihateyou-imeanit]

A few weeks before my dad died, he’d booked a ten-day trip to Spain to travel and celebrate New Year with his best friend. I remember thinking that ten days seemed like a long time to be apart, especially over Christmas. I was 20 and had spent long stretches of time at university, popping home every now and then. It had been at least five years since I’d spent NYE with my parents, and yet it felt strange to know we’d welcome 2014 in different time zones.

It seems almost unbelievable now, ten years later, to have been worried about ten days.

My dad was simple; he liked a lot of things, and loved a special few. He loved his family, his peace, his red wine, and daffodils. People used to laugh at his love for one of the cheapest and most common flowers.

February appears and every supermarket, petrol station and corner shop has baskets full of £1 daffodils tied together with elastic bands.

But isn’t that the beauty of them? A flower that withstands frost and snow, that grows resiliently and widely along motorways and hillsides, carpeting fields and blooming in pots outside homes and schools; a vow that good will come, that better days are promised.

When the evenings are cold and dark, and when December 12th arrives, I remind myself of the daffodils to come. An oath that those little pearls of sunshine will return, and I’ll see them everywhere I go. I’ll see him everywhere I go.

Ten years is a long time, but daffodils have been known to survive for over a century. I’ll see him again.

[ihateyou-imeanit]

Not for a while, it turns out

when does it get better?

[ihateyou-imeanit]

I’m at breaking point hehe haha

[ihateyou-imeanit]

Everything breaks my heart

[ihateyou-imeanit]

I saw a TikTok earlier about a girl who’d lost her mum, and their little inside reference had always been pineapples. She was missing her mum so much, and she spoke to someone who told her, if you’re feeling alone and you need to know she’s there, ask your mum to send you a sign, something only you’d understand.

She asked her mum to send her a pineapple sign, and that evening, she bumped into a neighbour in the hall who was giving away a suitcase decorated in lots of multi-coloured pineapples.

So I asked my dad to send me a sign - I wanted to see daffodils, since they’re his favourite flower, and I got a daffodil tattooed on my wrist after he died. Considering it’s September, I knew it’d be unlikely.

But this evening I was watching married at first sight UK, feeling a little bit sad, and in episode two, Roz (the florist) is being interviewed next a big vase full of bright yellow daffodils.

It made me so emotional to think my dad is there. It’ll be ten years since he passed soon, and I’ve struggled so much this whole year to accept how long it has been. How young I was when he died. How much and how often I’ve needed him.

I know it might be a coincidence - I’m sure a lot of logical people would tell me it is. But it felt very precious to me.

I miss you dad. I think of you every day.

[ihateyou-imeanit]

Replaying every single person’s words to myself: it will happen, it will happen, it will happen.

[ihateyou-imeanit]

when does it get better?

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“The whole point is that time passes. That things fade. He is already hard to remember. Look, I used to cry because I thought I’d forget. Then I knew that was ridiculous and cried because I remembered. But the truth is that one is the same as the other. Remembering and forgetting are the same bloody thing. He is not alive any more. That’s all there is to know. There is no purpose to any of it. The point is there is no point.”

— Janice Galloway, The Trick is to Keep Breathing