Hiding in Love 👥
Everywhere I have gone, love has followed me. Whether it is in another corner of the Earth, in conversation or in a fleeting shared smile—love has a habit of showing up everywhere for me.
Me: It has felt as though the world is always ending and the safest place for me to be is in love.
World-Shifter Me: You cannot use love as an escape, you must simply build the life and the world that you want to experience.
What’s good World-Shifters?
Love As a Coping Mechanism
All hands on the truth.
Love has been tantalising in its promise to make me forget that I am suffering life’s turbulent peaks and dips. I have been afraid to venture into the full spectrum of human experience, using the highs and lows of romantic relations to distract from this truth and that journey.
I know this largely because of the way I have used my storytelling abilities. One of the ways I’ve maintained my life being colourful enough to have over-the-top stories is by using my love life as the landscape.
Typically, I’d burst into whatever scenario with my usual sentence starter of —
“You won’t believe what happened. You won’t believe what this guy did!”
In this way, I’ve often used romantic partners or relations to define a particular era of my life, in the same way that people use a hairstyle or aesthetic to define a stage in theirs. Even when relations weren’t just used as a humorous tale, they remained the perfect distraction from this unshakeable feeling of not being fully met in my experience of life. Relationships have been my consolation for the world's hardness and confusion.
Romantic love was my preferred mode of transportation; I was somewhere else, doing something else, and so my hands were always full. I could excuse myself from being accountable and escape the responsibility of loving myself by getting someone else to do it. In romantic relations I found that I could step into an encounter and have myself admired, desired and witnessed in a way that I translated and mistook as being seen.
Truthfully, this feeling of being unknowable, of being completely unmet in this here human experience and talking into a void hasn’t subsided. But I have offered myself the possibility that maybe outsiders were meant to meet me this far, and I was meant to go the rest of the way. Possibly that is the adventure of life — being so deeply unknowable, possessing feelings which are excruciatingly incommunicable for as long as you are carrying a body which is a barrier to fully being anyone else’s. The adventure element lies in honouring this burden (sometimes turned magical) of belonging to yourself first.
There are Two Sides to It
Taking the Gems, Leaving the Lover
The grief from a relationship ending is one thing, but the grief of my life is entirely separate. I had been lunging at the concept of love and all other things outside of me in an attempt to escape from my responsibility to myself.
That’s not to say that all the love I’ve experienced over the years wasn’t real, it’s to say that at least to begin with they were subconsciously fuelled by an attempt to hatch my escape in someone else. Be it to quietly leave the burden of loving myself to them, or lose and distract myself in loving them. For this reason, I’m learning to replace a loved ones kindness onto me with my own onto myself. I’m learning how not to attach myself to romantic partners, to ‘amass my own sense of security’.
Admittedly, there are so many things I didn’t think I could become or embody, but under the weight of a lovers’ care I did – I have. I would even say I experienced a particular persons love as one experiences a miracle — wide-eyed and in a perpetual state of disbelief.
But…
Love for another sustained by ignoring your duty to yourself, doesn’t leave enough room for your becoming. My love for another looked a lot like a withdrawal of love from myself and my own possibility.
No matter how agonising it is, I have been pressing myself towards evolution. I am trying not to carry our love everywhere with me like my most prized possession. I’m trying to leave it at home sometimes. Nostalgia over what was has been threatening to eat away at everything that is present, everything that is possible.
With my coping mechanism being romantic love and having made it such a focal point of my existence, I am now discovering who I am when my love expands beyond the intimacy of two. How love can exist outside of romance, and how there is room for love everywhere. It doesn’t need to be contained and made precious for two. Love has never required a designated space. I know this because everywhere I have gone, love has followed me. Whether it is in another corner of the Earth, in conversation with a stranger or in a fleeting shared smile — love has a habit of showing up everywhere for me.
The love I have experienced has not left me and better yet, there is more to come. If I have loved that well, that large, then there is reason to believe that I can continue this. Sacred things were not lost with you, they were simply planted in your company.
Thank you.
At the Forefront of My Own Narrative
In choosing to do this differently, I often find myself gazing in the direction of something which has yet to arrive. Something which is brewing in the near future. To encourage it to come, I am working on something new. A different feeling, a different technique for living, a wholly different experience altogether.
I was urged to do this when thumbing through my mental catalogue of warm memories, thoughts and imagined futures, I found that I kept coming back to romance as the base, as the place where I envisioned all good things would take root from.
It unsettled me, forced me to wonder if I had any vision of living a life in colour where all that could be for me was not entangled with a subject of romance. Had I been telling myself that I have only been happy as long as I was in love or being sought after?
Put plainly, where do I begin and where do my lovers end?
This dependency on a lover to pedal your dreams signals to an innate feeling of hopelessness. It says — and with such unrelenting persistence — what hope do I have outside of a man?
And it is on that basis that I have decided that romantic love will no longer be all the goodness I am restricting myself to.
What a small role to occupy in my own life – it is my responsibility to reach further than that.
There is joy to be found without a witness to validate your brilliance. You are expected to live outside of being the subject of romantic desire. No one outside of you holds all the answers, solutions, respite or joy. All the possibilities of your life do not reside in a singular partner. Good, solid romantic love has offered me much, but I am here promising myself more. My wanting does not begin and end with having a lover. I want so much, I have wanted all my life.
Here is the time to quench…
I do not only wish to understand myself in proximity to others or in the context of being adjoined to another. I wish to understand who I am when I am alone. Without a representative, stood aside from a unit. Not who I am called on to be and therefore resolve to step into, but who I naturally present as when the only demands made of me are all my own and when the only interests and expectations I am to serve are mine.
Balancing a love for myself with a love for someone else has not been my forte. I have not had much practice at ordinary loves which don’t demand all of me, and so I have not been good at operating beyond extremes or finding equilibrium. While it translates beautifully in poetry, it is a thing which has very slowly been killing me.
I have been used to being needed and in return abandoning myself, largely because being needed looks so much like being loved. At some point, I had decided that if I was vital to someone’s survival — a functional tool — it was as if I was being loved and deeply cherished. However, there is an element of loss in positioning yourself as something vital in an attempt to gain and hold a person's affections. In the same way that there is one in perceiving your need in another person. You are walking to love on your knees… as if it would ever ask that of you, as if a marker of love is the endurance of pain.
No longer can someone come into your life and have you swayed by the possibility of being loved. You are no longer maintaining the narrative that to be met somewhat is better than not to be met at all, not when you have every opportunity to meet yourself, to be your own complete fill.
And better yet, you have a lifetime to perfect this craft.
In no longer attaching to anything that does not do the honest work of emboldening my spirit, my lifetime can be marked by self-liberation. Liberation at the expense of achieving a state of desirability which alienates me from myself, who I am and what I came here to do.
I repeat:
While it might take me all my life, all my life is what I have. I have a lifetime to perfect this craft.
Wishing you all the love and light this world has to offer,
Forever and always your
IamKia.K ♥
Thank you’s:
Loving others and giving them my whole being has burnt me out, but shown me I have the capacity to do that for myself. It might take a lifetime, and isn’t that a life well lived <3
I feel as though many people think they know that they use love as an unhealthy escapism but not truly grasp that they are hiding. Hiding from themselves no less, wearing it and afraid to “leave it at home.” Being able to occupy all of your life and still know that love will also fit around you and seek you out, and not the other way round is a beautiful thing.