What she used to say

Image: Pensive I by Karl Gray.

I am so fed up with what people say. Maybe they should start minding their own business. I write and expose myself on my blog, which very few people read not because I want anybody to empathize or tell me what to do. I don't want any advice, help, testimony, pity, or anything. I just want to write and leave it alone. People deal with pain and their own traumas in so many different ways. I write. 

As I walked in the park, I started thinking about Of Love and Lust by Reik. According to him, love releases us of psychical tension and sex releases us from our physical tension. It doesn't mean necessarily that you can find both in one person. That, to me, is exactly the problem. My mom used to say that what I wanted didn't exist. As I walked today, barely making it back to the coldness of the place where I work, I thought: was she right? The world is overpopulated. Life is complicated, at least to some of us. Is it possible that there's nobody compatible with me? Maybe. 

Next February it's going to be five years working at the same place. I remember her words, now that you have a job, don't go crazy on the life you have. I didn't listen to my mom. I did go crazy. I was, back then, in a deteriorating relationship and felt like breaking things off. Life hasn't been easy since then, but it's been better. Freedom has a price, but I do think I am happier now. At least, I am more satisfied. Yes, I've seen the dark side of men. I've been desired by the wrong ones. I've been involved with people who aren't compatible with me at all. But I've experienced passion, joy and pain. It's true I haven't found the one and I have less guarantees of having a lot of money and security in the future. I am also aging. But in these five years, I was able to develop myself. I look at the place where I live and I feel like I have finally found a corner on Earth that has some meaning to me. I started painting and teaching Portuguese. I started dancing tango and writing in English. All of these things could have been done before. True. But the other things that I seek weren't there for us. For both of us. So, I let him go his way and I started building mine from scratch. 

No one, no one knows what I went through. No one has the right to judge my choices or my pain. No one can tell me to be happy. As if happiness depended on making a choice. For some people it might be, but for me it's not. It has never been that way and that goes beyond being single or having a significant other in my life. To reduce my happiness to that is to oversimplify. 

My mom might have been right and not proud at all of all the things I did in these five years. I am not sure I am proud myself and yet I did show courage and for me that's plenty. Courage to walk away from the security of having all my bills paid and being taken care of. I walked away from the warm feeling of knowing where I was and whom I was with. It's frightening going home and facing an empty apartment, but it's worse not  to feel  good enough, not desired enough. Not loved enough. I don't have the beauty of the love I want or the professional life that I want. I have a lot of projects on hold. I do feel music and it's probably the only thing that keeps me going right now. I have given up on trying to make contact with my mom. I hope she forgives me for the choices I made, including the one that opted for moving to the United States. I am trying to let everything go. All the pain and anger and also the fear. I wonder who I am and why it seems like I've been struggling all my life. It doesn't matter that I don't have answers. I will keep on asking.