August 4: Moving in

My alarm is set to go off any minute. I’ve been awake for half the night, shifting back and forth, counting the lines between the ceiling and my green bedroom walls repeating the course schedule in my head. Others may count sheep; I plan. My mind doesn’t allow a break from planning, and today, the most important day in my entire twenty-two years of life, is no exception.

Groaning to myself, I roll out of my bed. I take my time tucking the corners of my bedsheet against the headboard, because this is the last morning that this will be a part of my regular routine. After today, this bedroom is no longer my home.

My stomach is tied in a tight knot, and as I start my shower I pray that the anxiety I feel will lessen as the day goes on. All of my life has been a series of tasks in preparation for this day, my first day of law school.

The day the Philippine Law School Admission Test letter came I couldn’t have been more thrilled—and I received a lot of support and love from family and my best friend. I can’t deny that I was proud that all my hard work had finally paid off. I had once, for just a moment, considered living in Manila for law school. But seeing all the color drain from my parents' face at the suggestion, and the way they paced around the living room for nearly an hour, I told them I really hadn’t been serious about that.

I spent the last few years nervously anticipating this. I spent my college days studying, reading, and preparing for this as my peers and I were hanging out, drinking, and doing whatever else it is teenagers do to get themselves in trouble. I multitasked. I balanced having fun from studying. That wasn’t me when I was in high school. I was the high school girl who spent her nights studying cross-legged on her bed and always sitting on her study table. She has no social life. And that high school girl is the me now. I am not drinking for a year now and I'm basically a homebody for one year living with my parents again.

As I go outside and walk to the car packed up with my things, the butterflies in my stomach dance around, making me slightly relieved that I have a three-hour drive to make them disappear.

I have no idea what law school will be like but I already have an idea of what to expect, and, unexpectedly, the question that keeps dominating my thoughts is: Will I make any friends? And if I couldn't find a niche in a school, what were my chances here? I didn't relate well to people my age. Maybe the truth was that I didn't relate well to people, period. Even my family, who I was closer to than anyone else on the planet, was never in harmony with me, never on exactly the same page. Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain. But the cause didn't matter. All that mattered was the effect. And tomorrow would be just the beginning.

I wish I could say that the familiar scenery of my second home, Baguio, calmed me as we drove, or that a sense of adventure took hold of me with each sign that indicated we were getting closer and closer to Rex Hall. But really I was mostly in a daze of planning and obsessing. I’m not even sure what my family was really talking about, but I know my parents were trying to be reassuring for me.

It was to Baguio that I now exiled myself— an action that I took with great horror. It was beautiful, of course; I couldn't deny that. I already lived here for five years. And I'm going to spend another four years of my life here. Everything was green: the trees, their trunks covered with moss, their branches hanging with a canopy of it, the ground covered with ferns. Even the air filtered down greenly through the leaves. It was too green — an alien planet. Green like my bedroom walls at home.

An hour later, after listening to my parents warning me against the dangers of parties and men (and I'm now allowed to date since I graduated in college) —and using some language that’s rather uncomfortable for me to hear from them—they finally make their move to leave. In their usual style, no quick hug and no kiss, they exit the room.

Left alone, I think about their hasty exit for just a moment and then begin to unpack my bags. One of the best things about solo living is no one is going to hover. I'm left alone to unpack and get settled, a feat that would have been altogether impossible for my mother. It was nice to be alone, not to have to smile and look pleased; a relief to stare dejectedly out the window at the sheeting rain and let just a few tears escape. I wasn't in the mood to go on a real crying jag. I would save that for bedtime, when I would have to think about the coming morning.

Shortly, half my clothes are neatly folded and stored in one of the small dressers; the remainder are hung neatly in my closet. I cringe at the sheer amount of leather and animal print filling my bag. My mother probably sneaked it in secretly. Still, my curiosity does get the best of me and I find myself running my finger along a dress made of some sort of metal, and another that’s so thin it’s barely there at all.

Feeling the beginnings of exhaustion from the day, I lie across the bed. An unfamiliar loneliness is creeping its way into me already, and it doesn’t help that I have no roommate because my father get me the most expensive solo room here in this building. He is literally spending a lot of money for me and when I insist I could live in an apartment, he would reject my offer and he would tell me that he can pay for all of it and I don't need to worry and just study.

I gather my planner and textbooks, taking the time to write down my classes for the semester and my potential meetings for the gym, I plan on joining; I’m still undecided on that, but I read a few testimonials and want to check it out. I want to try to find a group of like-minded people I can talk to. I don’t expect to make a lot of friends, just enough that I can have someone to maybe eat a meal with every once in a while. I plan for a trip off SM tomorrow to get some more things for my dorm room. I don’t want to crowd my side of the room the way I did when I was in college, but I would like to add a few things of my own to make me feel more at home in the unfamiliar space. The fact that I don’t have a car here will make it a little difficult. The reason why my parents wanted me to live here is because it's walking distance to my school. I don't need to commute. And I could save more time.

Why couldn’t I be with my cousins in Manila? I suppose it could be a good thing, because I will have the room to myself amd no distraction while studying, but I don’t have a good feeling about any of this but I'm also feeling at home for an unknown reason. So far law school in Baguio is neither what I had dreamed of nor expected. But when I stroll around the city today, I'm getting to like this idea better. I'm here. And this familiar place is going to be my home now. Maybe, I could get used to it. And learn to love this decision.

I remind myself that it’s only been a few hours. Tomorrow will be better. It has to be.

Myself

I'm a determined folk that absolutely throw myself into whatever I do -- but getting me to commit to something is rarely an easy task. In fact, it's better not to even try to "get me" to do anything. 

I take pride in what I own, and have a strong drive for security. I hate to let others down once I've made a promise.

It's given that I spend money impulsively. ✌🏼💸

I have an internal struggle between my needs and my wants. I can lack focus and be indecisive as a result. My friends told me I'm so objective, simply because when I decide on one route, I am pulled in another direction at the same time. Something tugs at me, and I begin to question my stance. "But what if..." and "on the other hand..." are statements I can't help but make, and that might plague me. I am always aware of the opposing point of view and the other side of the coin. There is a conflict here between the head and the heart. My emotions tell me one thing and my mind tells me something else. The result is a see-saw effect: I can be emotional to the point of irrationality at one moment, and logical the next. How to blend the head and the heart is a constant struggle for me, usually because I have a tendency to resist blending them!

Because my ego and my mind are usually on the same page, I'm always in a position to think about what I want, and in many ways, this is an interruption of the will. I have a great drive to communicate with others. I invest a lot of pride in my intellectual capacities. I may not always listen as well as I speak, however! I might be too busy thinking about what to say next. But I am very curious and although I enjoy expressing myself, I usually don't dominate conversations completely.

As far as studying or learning goes, I am better off reading the material than listening to a teacher. It is very hard for me to passively listen and absorb information. 

My opinions are usually strong and my friends told me I'm an independent thinker. I tend to be proud of my opinions and thoughts, and might easily get a bruised ego if I'm not "heard", if my opinions are pushed aside or ignored, or if my opinions are criticized. I am expressive and possibly a very animated speaker. Friends say I'm also very witty and others enjoy my playful and sometimes mischievous sense of humor.

Family and friends always tell me I'm endowed with generosity and friendliness, in some ways I appear to be lucky in life. They say I attract good things with a positive frame of mind and a charitable disposition. Rarely entirely "down and out", I'm usually well-received, helpful, and well-informed.

I enjoy travel and have a special affection for foreign places and people. I'm generally not very competitive, and for the most part not combative either.

My parents told me I'm usually good-hearted, possessing strong morals and much faith in life and in people. I prefer to find the good in situations and in people. I don't have a lot of patience with those who break the rules, as I generally believe in order, equality, and the law. I usually make good on my promises, and the sincerity I exude can be trusted. Looking on the bright side is my forte--people can turn to me for a pleasing dose of faith and optimism.

I am quick to chuckle and can't resist any appeal to my sense of humor. I'm downright jolly. I may be less conspicuous, but my faith in life and willingness to find humor in life are nevertheless obvious.

There is a self-destructive side to me that should be managed by confronting my fears. I might worry about a friend betraying me, although others might find this person full of charm! Things like this are my flaws.

I'm not necessarily outgoing. When I feel comfortable, I do like being the center of attention. That is, I like being in the "spotlight" in the comfort of my own homes and with family and friends. I enjoy entertaining others, and often take on the role of comic. I do often feel the need to be organized. This inner mission to set things right, and generally like to oversee the goings-on in my little circle. 

I want to create and entertain. I can be rather lazy or inactive at times, and a little bossy too. Generally, though, I have a deep need to treat others fairly and justly. My bestfriend told me that I require lots and lots of love and care in order to function well in the world. When I feel slighted, I can be dramatic in my emotional displays. 😭😂 When my pride has been hurt, I was given to big scenes and sulking. This rarely happens in public, however. I'm far too concerned about my image to make splashy scenes outside the comfort of my own homes. In public, I prefer to take things in dignified ways. At home, however, I was given to big displays of emotional drama. These scenes generally don't last too long, however. People claim I'm often personally popular folk who is valued for my integrity and strong sense of justice. Generally, it is easy to reason with me. Appealing to my well-developed sense of fairness usually works well. 

They say I'm brave, knowing how to take risks and possessing the courage of my convictions. People say I'm honest, imposing, and sharp. I have a great sense of, and respect for, justice. I have organizational sense. I'm quite selective with friends but I'm not overly influenced by them. I have this taste for splendor.

My issues in life could be my changing and numerous affections. I'm emotionally demanding and proud. I'm brooding when attention is not forthcoming.

I love to chat, enjoy story-telling and writing/poetry, sometimes enjoy bending the truth according to my bestfriend, and he claimed I possess a sparkling wit! I am animated when I speak, and have a sense of humor that others appreciate simply because it's very imaginative. I may be especially adept at satire. People can usually read my mood by how much I'm talking. When nervous or excited, I talk up a storm. Moodiness is a characteristic, definitely, and an especially subjective nature makes me prone to hypersensitivity. It usually has to do with the fact that I take in so very much from my environment. This is also one of the reasons why I tend to be indecisive. I may swing between irrational and rational thoughts and feelings. It's pretty much something that takes place "upstairs" in the mind, although others are sure to see the struggle from time to time. They say I am always interesting, and usually funny. I have a tendency to misrepresent myself with what I say from time to time, but they say I'm a charming, if a little kooky, friend.

I always aim to enjoy the moment, the real world more often. True friends told me that I should watch for fibbing, gossip, but sensitivity to criticism, thin-skinned leaves me feeling vulnerable. If the other aspects allow, they say I can be a very good novelist with great imagination and observation.

I'm extremely observant and astute, always reading between the lines and looking for the real meaning behind things. They say I'm passionate 😂 in speech, excellent at strategy. I don't like to be put on the spot or pushed into talking or coming to a conclusion. Studies are similar--I need to work at my own steady pace. I can be quite one-track minded at times, not very happy with multi-tasking, and often quite fixed in my opinions. Sensual stimuli is more relevant to me than abstract concepts. I fully enjoy literature and learning. My parents told me to strive to be erudite. I can be provocative in speech or communications, often challenging and contradicting, and seeing the flaws of a situation.

My bestfriend told me I have a polished manner in love, which sometimes makes me appear insincere or superficial. I'm a gentle lover who hates to be offended. I'm threatened by bad manners and direct or abrasive expression of feelings. I'm not only preferring to choose the middle road, I seek the middle ground in my relationships. I have idealized images of my relationships, even to the point where the relationship becomes bigger than life, taking on a life of its own. I can become quietly resentful if I feel I'm being taken advantage of -- and I make it easy for more aggressive types to bully me around. 

They say I'm big-hearted, generous, altruistic, devoted, warm-hearted, lovable, and sweet-tempered. I'm drawn toward the Arts, music, song. I like gatherings, parties. I may have big emotional highs. I may crave and may want a peaceful life in love.

I'm hard or reserved at times, and doesn't always know how to express my emotions. I may be frightened of showing my love, and this can lead to disappointments, break-ups, lack of satisfaction. I have doubts, can be suspicious, worries too much, possibly jealous but more likely insecure. I will learn how to be happy in love, to be at ease with myself and to control my jealousy or gain more assurance and sense of self-worth in my life, possibly thanks to a mature person, who will help me learn to trust.

I'm independent in love. I can tire and bore quickly and I can be scared of losing my liberty. Traditional marriage may not be for me. I'm a secret romantic, although a little detached or unpredictable. I more likely to break something off than live untruly. I like art, anything new. I'd love to get along with--and accept--people from all walks of life as friends. I can readily see through insincerity in others. In relationships, tolerance is the most important "ingredient" to me. My bestfriend told me that I might usually be quite capable of maintaining relationships that require a great deal of freedom and tolerance, such as long-distance romances or set-ups in which partners are unable to see each other consistently which I never been one. Friends told me that my style in love can be somewhat free and breezy, and possibly noncommittal. Lol. That's why, they know not to let me meet their dear guy friends to me or I get my friends to warn them when they try to "reto" me to their guy friends. This is me in college. I don't know who I'm going to be in law school. I might be different. Maybe. I'm allowed now to date because I finished my college degree. But, the problem is I really don't know how. I never been in a date. That official dinner or movie date that I want to experience with a special person is still not happening. In the future, I can see that I quite naturally accepts the idea that my partner might need some personal space and freedom. And that's just me. I'm not clingy.

I like everything beautiful, the Arts, balance, and harmony. I like entertainment and have a loving nature. I love nature.

I'm one of those productive and busy people that are goal-oriented, practical people. Although I can be a little scattered at times, simply because I'm doing so many things at any given time, I get things done--quite well! I have a knack for handling a wide variety of tasks at once, and a tendency to take on perhaps too much at the same time. I'm not particularly aggressive by nature. Although I can be a little hard-nosed and critical at times, I rarely resort to pushing others around. Still, an annoyed me can be difficult to be around! Arouse my anger and I turn into complaining, over-critical nags. Generally, I don't make myself a nuisance, so this stage is unlikely to last for very long. It is a sensitive position, however. It doesn't take much to make me nervous.

I'm quite protective about my "system" for getting things done. Although rather humble in a general life sense, I can be quite particular about my methods--how I organize and accomplish my goals, mostly with work. Mine is a nervous. Although I have a staying power, I can be restless and I'm not given to sticking with the same projects for too long. I derive plenty of energy and life force from the things I do--my study, my work, hobbies, and any kind of projects I take on. An idle me is a sorry sight, indeed. Fidgety, nervous, worried...all of these things are a sure sign that I have either too little to do, or far too much on my plates. There is a perfectionist at the heart of mine. I'll be the first to deny this, but it's there! I worry when I'm not producing anything, and I worry about whether what I've produced will measure up. 

So much of my energy goes into my studying and working life. I can be indirect and very private. Rich dreams and fantasies.

I struggle with asserting myself in direct, natural ways in, but with time and experience (and perhaps some hard work), I believe that I'll likely to learn to work with this energy rather than allow it to work against me. I'm making sure I watch for a tendency to feel defeated before I've given something a real shot. I know I'm extraordinarily resourceful, and I can handle many things on my own or in uniquely creative ways.

Though I may have a great deal of energy and drive, I lack confidence or the desire to put myself and my interests first. Positively I can be very unselfish, working more on behalf of others than for myself. I deny my own desires and needs too much, however, and I'm likely to secretly become very angry, which can sabotage my finest efforts.

There is a touch of the incurable romantic in my nature. My daydreaming and fantasizing world is rich and precious to me. I also bring imagination, although I can take a bit of time to feel comfortable and to warm up to a new person in my life. Overcoming a vague and persistent feeling of guilt or doom can go a long way towards a healthier, happier approach to the pursuit of my desires.

I have a tendency to impose my will upon others, which can cause severe problems for myself when they react in self-defense. I have a hair-trigger temper and may even resort to unpleasant acts when upset. Learning to react to unpleasant circumstances with my intellect rather than my emotions comes with a really lot of maturity in my part.

It is all too easy for me to find something negative about a situation. I avoid issuing ultimatums when I meet an obstacle. Instead, I find a way to convince others to work with me of their own free will. Ordinary life often seems drab and uninteresting to me and I must have something that stirs my imagination, some vision or ideal or dream to motivate me. I have a strong urge to act out my fantasies or to live my dream, and I will DO things that others only talk about or dream about. Artistic creation, drama, or other areas in which I can express myself imaginatively are excellent for me

I do not easily tolerate a dominating attitude in others. I have a healthy respect for power and authority, but only if it is handled fairly.

In fact, some people told me that they are intimidated by me, and I don't understand why this is so. When I want something (or someone!) I'm very determined. For me, it can be "all or nothing". When I'm finished with something, I leave it behind me and there is no going back. I honestly don't always take rejection well. I fear betrayal and abandonment. Ironic, right?

Self-consciousness can be my problem. I must learn to develop self-confidence. I'm bothered by that "me-first" attitude in others, but I must learn that "me-first" is sometimes necessary, in moderation. My life can be difficult and cramped. I may have problems with being open, without self-consciousness. I may accept solitude rather than look for solutions.

I always get over-excited at the start of a task that interests me. At times, my debonair personality can give others a banal impression. I'm independent, enjoying even dubious distractions. I'm an idealist, easily disappointed by those using power plays to advance.

So, if I'm going to describe myself more: she likes and believes in justice. She is an optimist and is generous. Family life is very important to her. She likes comfort, well-being at home. She knows how to entertain in style and above all with pleasure; her own house in the future is always open unlike her parents who prefer to live privately. She takes one-to-one relationships very seriously, perhaps partnering up later in life or choosing not to. Partnership may not be fruitful or may be felt to be a burden. She fights to improve her daily life, she is persevering. She is always changing, somewhat unstable. She is ready to innovate, to change everything. She enjoys studying, is open to anything new, accepting and recognizing her errors, always developing in a positive sense. She usually likes travel, discovery, and meeting new people and knows how to appreciate them. After working all her life to obtain her objectives and finally having reached that goal, she wants to retire in peace and quiet and to enjoy a retirement full of contemplation, with few tasks, close to nature. 

She is myself.

Better Love Stories

We don’t particularly notice it day-to-day, but the stories our culture presents us with concerning love and relationships – via films, songs, novels and adverts – have a major subterranean influence on how we think and feel. They shape our sense of what is normal and hence of what is troublingly abnormal; they seed certain hopes and expectations and foster particular opportunities for disappointment, indignation or alarm.

It’s pretty much a given that any society will tell itself stories about love. The question at any point is how helpful the predominant ones might be, whether they might be geared to assisting people to make a better go of love, or – inadvertently – may be making it harder to cope well with the realities of coupledom.

There are seemingly far too many bad love stories out there – by which one means stories that do not give us a correct map of love, that leave us unprepared to deal adequately with the tensions of relationships. In moments of acute distress, our grief is too often complicated by a sense that things have become, for us alone, unusually and perversely difficult. Not only are we suffering, but it seems that our suffering has no equivalent in the lives of other more or less sane people.

As we have seen, our attitudes to our own love lives are in large part formed by the tradition of the Romantic love story (which nowadays is advanced not only in books but also in video, music and advertising). The narrative arts of the Romantic love story have unwittingly constructed a devilish template of expectations of what relationships are supposed to be like – in the light of which our own love lives often look grievously and deeply unsatisfying. We break up or feel ourselves cursed in significant part because we are exposed to the wrong stories.

If this ‘wrong’ kind is to be termed Romantic, then the right kind – of which there are so few – might, as we’ve seen, be deemed Classical. Here would be some of the differences:

The Plot

In the archetypal Romantic story, the drama hinges entirely on how a couple get together: the ‘love story’ is no such thing, it is merely the account of how love begins. All sorts of obstacles are placed in the way of love’s birth, and the interest lies in watching their steady overcoming: there might be misunderstandings, bad luck, prejudice, war, a rival, a fear of intimacy, or – most poignantly – shyness … But in the end, after tribulations, the right people will eventually get into couples. Love begins – and the story must end.

But in the Classical story, that wiser, less immediately seductive genre, the real problem isn’t finding a partner, it is tolerating them, and being tolerated, over time. It knows that the start of relationships is not the high point that Romantic culture assumes; it is merely the first step of a far longer, more ambivalent and yet quietly far more heroic journey – on which it directs its intelligence and scrutiny.

Work

In the Romantic story, the characters may have jobs, but on the whole they have little impact on their psyches. Work goes on somewhere else. What one does for a living is not thought relevant to an understanding of love.

But in the Classical story, we see that work is in fact a huge part of life, with an overwhelming role in shaping our relationships. Whatever our emotional dispositions, it is the stress of work that ends up generating a sizeable share of the trouble lovers will have with each other.

Children

In the Romantic story, children are incidental, sweet symbols of mutual love, or naughty in an endearing way. They rarely cry, take up little time and are generally wise, exhibiting a native, unschooled intelligence.

In the Classical story, we see that relationships are fundamentally oriented towards the having and raising of children – and at the same time, that children place the couple under unbearable strains. They can kill the passion that made them possible. Life moves from the sublime to the quotidian. There are toys in the living room, pieces of chicken under the table, and no time to talk. Everyone is always tired. This too is love.

Practicalities

In the Romantic story, we have only a hazy idea of who does the housework. It is not seen as relevant to a relationship. Domesticity is a corrupting force and people who care a lot about it are likely to be unhappy in their relationships. We are unlikely to learn a great deal concerning a couple’s thinking on homework or television for the under-fours.

In the Classical story, relationships are understood to be institutions, not just emotions. Part of their rationale is to enable two people to function as a joint economic unit for the education of the next generation. This is in no way banal. There are opportunities for genuine heroism. Especially around laundry.

Sex

In the Romantic story, sex and love are shown to belong together. The high point of love is intercourse. Adultery, in the Romantic view, is therefore fatal: if you were with the right person, you could never be unfaithful.

The Classical story knows that long-term love may not set up the best preconditions for sex. The Classical attitude sees love and sex as distinct and at times divergent themes in life. And therefore sexual problems do not in themselves indicate that a relationship is, overall, a disaster …

Compatibility

The Romantic story cares about the harmony (or lack of it) between the souls of the protagonists. It believes that the fundamental challenge of Romantic life is to find someone who completely understands us and with whom there need never be any more secrets. It believes that love is finding your other half, your spiritual twin. Love is not about training or education; it is an instinct, a feeling – and is generally mysterious in its workings.

The Classical story accepts that no one ever fully understands anyone else; that there must be secrets, that there will be loneliness, that there must be compromise. It believes that we have to learn how to sustain good relationships, that love is not just a chance endowment of nature, that love is a skill, not a feeling.

We will know that we are finally ready for love when we have stopped telling ourselves the wrong stories and when some of the following requirements are in place:

When we have given up on perfection. When we recognize that we are a flawed species and that whomever one got together with would be radically imperfect in a host of deeply serious ways. One must conclusively kill the idea that things would be ideal with any creature in this galaxy. There can only ever be a ‘good-enough’ relationship. For this realization to sink in, it helps to have had a number of relationships before settling down, not in order to have the chance to locate ‘the right person’, but so that one can have ample opportunity to discover at first hand, in many different contexts, the truth that everyone (even the most initially exciting prospect) really is a bit wrong close up.

When we despair of being understood. Love starts with the experience of being understood in a deeply supportive and uncommon way. They understand the lonely parts of you; they grasp who you truly are. This will not continue. There will always be lar tracts of one’s psyche that remain incomprehensible to anyone else. We shouldn’t blame our lovers for a dereliction of duty in failing to interpret and grasp our internal workings. They were not tragically inept. They simply couldn’t understand who we were and what we needed – which is entirely normal. No one properly understands, and can therefore fully sympathize with, anyone else.

When we realize we are crazy. This is deeply counter-intuitive. We seem so normal and mostly so good. It’s the others … But maturity is founded on an active sense of one’s folly. One is out of control for long periods, one has failed to master one’s past, one makes unhelpful ‘transferences’, one is permanently anxious. One is, at best, a loveable idiot. If we are not regularly and very deeply embarrassed about who we are, it can only be because we have a dangerous capacity for selective memory.

When we are happy to be taught and calm about teaching. We are ready for love when we accept that, in certain very significant areas, our partners will be wiser, more reasonable and more mature than we are. We should want to learn from them. We should bear having things pointed out to us. We should, at key points, see them as the teacher and ourselves as pupils. At the same time, we should be ready to take on the task of teaching them certain things and, like good teachers, not shout, lose our tempers or expect them simply to know. Relationships should be recognized as involving a process of mutual education.

When we realize we’re not compatible. The Romantic view of love stresses that the ‘right’ person means someone who shares our tastes, interests and general attitudes to life. This might be true in the short term. But, over an extended period of time, the relevance of this fades dramatically, because differences inevitably emerge. The person who is truly best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste, but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently and wisely; the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate difference that is the true marker of the ‘right’ person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us. We have learned to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations fostered by a misleading philosophy. By its standards, our own relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation or divorce so often appears to be inevitable. They shouldn’t. We merely need to change our ideologies: to tell ourselves more accurate stories about the progress of relationships; we need to have to hand ideas, narratives, concepts and jokes that normalize our troubles and show us an intelligent and helpful path through them.

Endings

For most of the history of humanity, it was accepted that conjugal life couldn’t possibly suit everyone. Perhaps one was too taken up with work, one had no interest in children, one needed a lot of time on one’s own, one got tetchy around large groups, one liked to express oneself sexually outside of a loving union – in short, one knew that the best sides of oneself did not emerge from being in a family or couple. And that was fine.

St Hilda of Whitby was one of the most powerful and accomplished women in the early history of England. She was a very senior administrator, running large agricultural enterprises; she was a management consultant to kings and princes. She was a leading educationalist. And she did all this while being noted for her good temper. She was also unmarried. It’s not that because she was a nun she wasn’t allowed to get married and so had to make the best of her work opportunities without a supportive home life. The line of thought ran the other way round. She was able to have a stellar career and achieve so much for the community because she was free of the demands of relationships and domestic life. Being a nun meant she lived in an efficient collective household – she would be supplied with meals, laundry and heating without having to organise everything for herself.

It was an approach to certain kinds of work – intellectual, administrative and cultural – that persisted for many centuries. In 1900, academia in the UK was still almost entirely a career for the unmarried, who lived in colleges, ate communal meals, had their laundry done for them by a university – and were betrothed to their work. If they wanted to wolf down their supper in eight minutes and then work through till one in the morning, no one would complain. The professors got a lot done.

The view was just that certain kinds of jobs will require such effort and continuous devotion and loom so large in the imagination that we really shouldn’t try to combine them with the duties of a relationship, a family and the management of a home. To do them properly, we should live in very well-organized communes (like a monastery or a college), we should be single and we should socialize mainly with people who are involved in the same kind of work, because they will understand us and know how to offer us targeted help.

But Romanticism gradually made all these celibate choices seem strange. It pathologized the decision to remain single – and thereby ensured a lot of unhappy relationships that were now entered into by people who were not particularly suited to living in a couple but could not see viable alternatives outside of one. Romanticism made the idea of being close to one special other person in a long-term sexual union the very summit of life’s meaning, and subtly discredited alternatives, like devotion to scholarship, science, art, politics or religion – or a life simply spent having sex with a variety of people, with long-term affection being sought from friends instead.

Nowadays, anyone who lives alone and manifests no longing to be in a relationship is almost automatically (though more or less secretly) viewed as both pitiable and deeply troubled. It’s simply not thought possible to be at once alone and normal.

This sets us up for collective catastrophe, for it means that a huge number of people who have no innate wish to live with anyone else, and are at heart deeply ill-suited to doing so, are every year press-ganged and shamed into conjugal life, with disastrous results for all involved. So it is essential for the happiness of couples and the single that one regularly rehearse the very many good reasons why it must be OKAY to spend one’s life without anyone. Only once singlehood has completely equal prestige with its alternative can we ensure that people will be free in their choices and hence join couples for the right reasons: because they love another person, rather than because they are terrified of remaining single.

Those among us who chose to stay single should not be thought un-Romantic. Indeed, we may be among the most Romantic of all, which is precisely why we find the idea of raising a family with someone we love especially unappetizing, because we’re aware of what domesticity can do to passion. It’s in the end the fervent Romantics who should be especially careful of ending up in mediocre relationships: relationships best suit the kind of people who don’t expect too much from them.

Though it is a sign of some maturity to know how to love and live alongside someone, it may be a sign of even greater maturity to recognize that this is perhaps something one isn’t, in the end, psychologically really capable of – as a good portion of us simply aren’t. Retiring oneself voluntarily, in order to save others (and oneself) from the consequences of one’s inner emotional turmoil, may be the true sign of a great and kindly soul.

The most logical response to really liking someone could fairly be to choose not to live with them – because it is almost impossible to cohabit and not eventually succumb to a degree of scratchy familiarity, contempt and ingratitude. The properly respectful response to love may be to admire, praise, nurture – and then walk away.

All this isn’t to say that being alone is without problems. There are of course drawbacks to both states, being single and being in a couple: loneliness in the one; suffocation, anger and frustration in the other. We will probably be at times rather miserable whatever our relationship status – which is ultimately an argument for neither rushing too fast out of a couple, nor for feeling that one must at all costs try to belong to one.

There’s an additional, related point concerning how long relationships should go on for. One of the big assumptions of our times is that if love is real, it must by definition prove to be eternal. We invariably and naturally equate genuine relationships with lifelong relationships. And therefore it seems almost impossible for us to interpret the ending of a union after only a limited period – a few weeks, or five or ten years, or anything short of our or the partner’s death-date – as something other than a problem, a failure and an emotional catastrophe that is someone’s fault, probably our own. There are people desperate that they have failed because their relationships have lasted only thirty-two years. We appear fundamentally unable to trust that a relationship could be at once sincere, meaningful and important – and yet at the same time fairly and guiltlessly limited in its duration.

There are, of course, a few very good reasons for our collective valorization of the lifelong love story. A great many of the pleasures and virtues of relationships do only reveal themselves over time, once trust has been established and loyalty fully demonstrated. When two people know it is forever, they will work harder than at anything else in their lives; there is no option to avoid some necessary but unpleasant issues; they will do their utmost to understand the mysteries of the other’s psyche; they will show reserves of tenderness and vulnerability they wouldn’t ever otherwise have accessed. They will learn to apologize and reach a modesty about their own shortcomings. They will grow up. And in the meantime, day-to-day, they will sample the modest but genuine pleasures of cozy Sunday mornings together and shared walks in country parks. Not least, children always benefit. But it’s because the charms of the long-term are so clear in our collective imaginations that we should acknowledge the danger of cruelly and normatively suppressing all the legitimate claims of short-term love, an arrangement which deserves to be interpreted not merely as a pathologically stunted or interrupted version of a long-term union, but as a state with distinctive virtues of its own, one that we might rationally choose from the outset, knowing from the start that it would be better for both parties if there was a termination point more or less in view.

So much can go right with short-term love:

When two people know they don’t own one another, they are extremely careful to earn each other’s respect on a daily basis. Knowing someone could leave us at any time isn’t only grounds for insecurity, it’s a constant catalyst for tender appreciation.

When it isn’t forever, we can let differences lie. If the journey is to be long, absolute alignment can feel key. But when the time is short, we are readier to surrender our entrenched positions, to be unthreatened by novelties and dissonances. The distinctive things they have in their fridge and the peculiar things they like to watch and listen to aren’t affronts to our values, they are unthreatening invitations to expand our personalities.

Very few of us come out well from being closely observed, twenty-four hours a day, in a limited space. These may simply not be the preconditions for getting the best out of some of us. Our interesting and generous sides may need, in order to emerge, our own bedroom and bathroom, quite a few hours to ourselves, some space to read and think and a series of mealtimes alone staring rather blankly out of the window without having to explain how we feel. It’s not a sign of evil, just what we require to be the best version of ourselves.

What makes people difficult and dooms relationships is almost never the people involved. It’s what we are trying to do with them. Inviting someone to marry you is really not a very kind thing to do to someone you love, because it’s going to drag the beloved into a range of really rather unpleasant and challenging things: doing the accounts with you, meeting your family regularly, seeing you exhausted and bleary-eyed after work, keeping the living room tidy, bringing up a child. To really love someone – that is, to wish the best for someone – might more fairly mean foregrounding your best qualities for a few ecstatic months, then mutually and tenderly parting at check-in.

Long-term relationships reward some qualities – especially the administrative ones –but obscure others, for example, those related to skills at having interesting speculative conversations about ethics or psychology late into the night. It should be no insult to determine that some people simply won’t be able to shine in the conditions of long-term love, and that it is very kindly playing up to their strengths to leave them long before we ever need to try to arrange a cutlery drawer with them.

We should beware of succumbing to the debilitating feeling that because it didn’t last forever, it can have been nothing at all. In other areas of life, we know that ‘going on for ever’ isn’t the ideal (even when something is very good). We don’t necessarily think we have to stay in the same house all our lives, though we might really like one we are in; we’re not betraying it or destroying it when we recognize that for a range of reasons it would be wisest to go elsewhere.

We need to have an account of love which allows that a relationship can end without anyone having viciously or pathologically killed it prematurely, for only against such a backdrop can we reduce the debilitating quantity of bitterness, guilt and blame otherwise in circulation. How we see the endings of love depends to a critical extent on what our societies tell us is ‘normal’. If it was meant to last forever, every ending would by necessity have to be described as a horrifying failure. But if we allow imaginative space for short-term love, then an ending may signal a deeper loyalty, not to the setting up of a home and domestic routines, but to transitory pleasures; we’ll walk away with a fair and generous sense of all that has been preserved and enhanced by the relationship not being forced to last forever.

Crushes

You are introduced to someone. They look nice and you have a brief chat. But already, partly because of their beautiful fashion sense and a lilt in their accent, you have reached an overwhelming conclusion. Or, you sit down in the carriage, and there, diagonally opposite you, is someone you cannot stop looking at for the rest of a journey across miles of darkening countryside. You know nothing concrete about them. You are going only by what their appearance suggests. You note that they have slipped a finger into a book, that their nails are bitten raw, that they have a thin leather strap around their left wrist and that they are squinting a touch short-sightedly at the map above the door. And that is enough to convince you. Another day, coming out of the supermarket, amidst a throng of people, you catch sight of a face for no longer than eight seconds and yet, here too, you feel the same overwhelming certainty – and, subsequently, a bittersweet sadness at their disappearance in the anonymous crowd.

Crushes: they happen to some people often and to almost everyone sometimes. Airports, jeepneys, trains, streets, schools – the dynamics of modern life are forever throwing us into fleeting contact with strangers, from among whom we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but, more powerfully, the solution to our lives. This phenomenon – the crush – goes to the heart of the modern understanding of love. It could seem like a small incident, essentially comic and occasionally farcical. It may look like a minor planet in the constellation of love, but it is in fact the underlying secret central sun around which our notions of the Romantic revolve.

A crush represents in pure and perfect form the dynamics of the Romantic philosophy: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery – and boundless hope.

The crush reveals how willing we are to allow details to suggest a whole. We allow the arch of someone’s eyebrow to suggest a personality. We take the way a person puts more weight on their right leg as they stand listening to a colleague as an indication of a witty independence of mind. Or their way of lowering their head seems proof of a complex shyness and sensitivity. From only a few cues, you anticipate years of happiness, buoyed by profound mutual sympathy. They will fully grasp that you love your mother even though you don’t get on well with her; that you are hard-working, even though you appear to be distracted; that you are hurt rather than angry. The parts of your character that confuse and puzzle others will at last find a soothing, wise, complex soulmate. In elaborating a whole personality from a few small – but hugely evocative – details, we are doing for the inner character of a person what our eyes naturally do with the sketch of a face.

HENRI MATISSE, La Pompadour, 1951

We don’t see this as a picture of someone who has no nostrils, eight strands of hair and no eyelashes. Without even noticing that we are doing it, we fill in the missing parts. Our brains are primed to take tiny visual hints and construct entire figures from them – and we do the same when it comes to character. We are – much more than we give ourselves credit for – inveterate artists of elaboration. We have evolved to be ready to make quick decisions about people (to trust or withhold, to fight or embrace, to share or deny) on the basis of very limited evidence – the way someone looks at us, how they stand, a twitch of the lips, a slight movement of the shoulder – and we bring this ingenious but fateful talent to situations of love as much as to those of danger.

The cynical voice wants to declare that these enthusiastic imaginings at the school or on the jeep, in the street or in the supermarket, are just delusional; that we simply project a false, completely imaginary idea of identity onto an innocent stranger. But this is too sweeping. We may be right. The wry posture may really belong to someone with a great line in skepticism; the head tilter may be unusually generous to the foibles of others. The error of the crush is subtler; it lies in how easily we move from spotting a range of genuinely fine traits of character to settling on a recklessly naive romantic conclusion: that the other across the train aisle or pavement constitutes a complete answer to our inner emotional needs.

The primary error of the crush lies in overlooking a central fact about people in general, not merely this or that example, but the species as a whole: that everyone has something very substantially wrong with them once their characters are fully known, something so wrong as to make an eventual mockery of the unlimited rapture unleashed by the crush. We can’t yet know what the problems will be, but we can and should be certain that they are there, lurking somewhere behind the facade, waiting for time to unfurl them.

How can one be so sure? Because the facts of life have deformed all of our natures. No one among us has come through unscathed. There is too much to fear: mortality, loss, dependency, abandonment, ruin, humiliation, subjection. We are, all of us, desperately fragile, ill-equipped to meet with the challenges to our mental integrity: we lack courage, preparation, confidence, intelligence. We don’t have the right role models, we were (necessarily) imperfectly parented, we fight rather than explain, we nag rather than teach, we fret instead of analyzing our worries, we have a precarious sense of security, we can’t understand either ourselves or others well enough, we don’t have an appetite for the truth and suffer a fatal weakness for flattering denials. The chances of a perfectly good human emerging from the perilous facts of life are non-existent. Our fears and our frailties play themselves out in a thousand ways; they can make us defensive or aggressive, grandiose or hesitant, clingy or avoidant – but we can be sure that they will make everyone much less than perfect and, at moments, extremely hard to live with.

We don’t have to know someone in any way before knowing this about them. Naturally, their particular way of being flawed (very annoying) will not be visually apparent and may be concealed for quite long periods. If we only encounter another person in a fairly limited range of situations (a train journey, rather than when they are trying to get a toddler into a car seat; a class at school, rather than 87 minutes into a shopping trip with their elderly father), we may, for a very long time indeed (especially if we are left alone to convert our enthusiasm into an obsession because they don’t call us back or are playing it with distance), have the pleasure of believing we have landed upon an angel.

Maturity doesn’t suggest we give up on crushes. Merely that we definitively give up on the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of relationships and marriage has been based for the past 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can solve all our needs and satisfy our yearnings. We need to swap the Romantic view for the tragic awareness, which states that every human can be guaranteed to frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. This is a truth chiselled indelibly into the script of life. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is therefore merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for, rather than an occasion on which to hope miraculously to escape from grief.

We should enjoy our crushes. A crush teaches us about qualities we admire and need to have more of in our lives. The person on the train or jeepney really does have an extremely beguiling air of self-deprecation in their eyes. The person glimpsed by the school staircase does promise to be a gentle and excellent parent. But these characters will, just as importantly, also be sure to ruin our lives in key ways, as all those we love will.

Politeness and Secrets

For years, I felt burdened with thoughts, feelings and opinions that didn’t seem to make much sense to anyone else. I sometimes wondered if I was going mad. There were people I didn’t like, but everyone else seemed to think they were terrific and so I held my tongue. I got anxious and uncomfortable on social occasions when everyone else seemed happy and relaxed. There were things I would have quite liked to try in bed, but they felt shameful and I would not have dared to mention them even to my best friend. I learned to keep secrets in order to be liked.

Then, finally, I'm still waiting to meet a very special person. What made that future person so special was that, at long last, I no longer had to dissemble around them. I could admit to important truths. I could confess, and be rewarded for sharing, my deepest self. It was a favorite game in those early months. I will push myself to go as far as I could go. The deeper the secret, the better. No area of the self seemed beyond investigation, no secret too shocking or explicit. I could explain that I found a mutual acquaintance arrogant, narcissistic and mean. Or that I thought some supposed ‘masterpiece’ of a book very boring. I could explain that I liked pulling hair during sex when I finally get myself into it in the future or maybe introducing me into something new and find myself that I might always have this excitement by ropes. Love seemed to be born out of this new possibility for honesty. What had previously been taboo gave way to exhilarating intimacy.

The relief of honesty is at the heart of the feeling of being in love. A sense of mutual conspiracy underlies the touch of pity that every new couple feels for the rest of humanity. But this sharing of secrets sets up in our minds – and in our collective culture – a powerful and potentially problematic ideal: that if two people love one another, then they must always tell each other the truth about everything.

Then, inevitably, there came a moment of crisis. Perhaps hypothetically speaking I was in a restaurant, sitting with my lover, the special person who had joined me in my innermost convictions about everything. And now with characteristic confidence and trust – in the spirit of having no more secrets – I mentioned that I was a little turned on by the fascinating character reading a book in a corner table on their own. But, on this occasion, there was no conspiratorial smile and no shy but decisive agreement. There was no eager leaning forward, no whispered corroboration. Just a slightly pained, quizzical look from the partner, the trusted recipient of every secret to date. And now, we come up against a fundamental conflict within the modern understanding of love. Keeping secrets can seem like a betrayal of the relationship. At the same time, the complete truth eventually appears to place the union in mortal danger.

The idea of honesty is sublime. It presents a deeply moving vision of how two people can be together and it is a constant presence in the early months. But there is a problem: we keep wanting to make this same demand as the relationship goes on. And yet, in order to be kind, and in order to sustain the relationship, it ultimately becomes necessary to keep a great many thoughts out of sight.

We are perhaps too conscious of the bad reasons for hiding something; we haven’t paid enough attention to the noble reasons why, from time to time, true loyalty may lead one to say very much less than the whole truth. We are so impressed by honesty, we have forgotten the virtues of politeness, this word defined not as a cynical withholding of important information for the sake of harm, but as a dedication to not rubbing someone up against all the true, hurtful aspects of one’s nature.

It is ultimately no great sign of kindness to insist on showing someone one’s entire self at all times. Repression, a certain degree of restraint and a dedication to editing one’s pronouncements, belongs to love as much as a capacity for explicit confession. The person who cannot tolerate secrets, who in the name of ‘being honest’, shares information so wounding it cannot be forgotten, is no friend of love. Just as no parent tells a child the whole truth, so we should accept the ongoing need to edit our full reality.

And if one suspects (and one should, rather regularly, if the relationship is a good one) that one’s partner might be lying too (about what they are thinking about, about how they judge one’s work, about where they were last night …), it is perhaps best not to take up arms and lay into them like a sharp relentless inquisitor, however intensely one yearns to do just that. It may be kinder, wiser and perhaps more in the true spirit of love, to pretend one simply didn’t notice.

We should learn from the art of diplomacy, the discipline of not necessarily always spelling out what one thinks and not doing what one wants, in the service of greater, more strategic ends. We should keep in mind the contradictory, sentimental and hormonal forces which constantly pull us in a hundred crazed and inconclusive directions. To honor every one of these would be to annul any chance of leading a coherent life. We will never make progress the larger projects if we can’t stand to be, at least some of the time, inwardly dissatisfied and outwardly inauthentic – if only in relation to such passing sensations as the desire to give away one’s children or end one’s union or have sex with a stranger. It is assigning too great a weight to all our feelings to let them always be the lodestars by which our lives must be guided. We are chaotic chemical propositions in dire need of basic principles to which we can adhere during our brief rational spells. We should feel grateful for the fact that our external circumstances are sometimes out of line with what we experience in our hearts. It is probably a sign that we are on the right track.

On expectations and pessimism

Our lives are powerfully affected by a special quirk of the human mind to which we rarely pay much attention. We are creatures deeply marked by our expectations. We go around with mental pictures, lodged in our brains, of how things are supposed to go. But expectations have an enormous impact on how we respond to what happens to us. They are always framing the way we interpret the events in our lives. It’s according to the tenor of our expectations that we will deem moments in our lives to be either enchanting or (more likely) profoundly mediocre and unfair.

What drives us to fury are affronts to our expectations. There are plenty of things that don’t turn out as we’d like but don’t make us livid either. When a problem has been factored into our expectations, calm is never endangered. We may be sad, but we aren’t screaming.

Unfortunately, our expectations are never higher, and therefore more troubling, than they are in love. There are reckless ideas circulating in our societies about what sharing a life with another person might be like. Of course, we see relationship difficulties around us all the time; there’s a high frequency of splitting, separation and divorce, and our own past experience is bound to be pretty mixed. But we have a remarkable capacity to discount this information. We retain highly ambitious ideas of what relationships are meant to be and what they will (eventually) be like for us – even if we have in fact never seen such relationships in action anywhere near us.

We’ll be lucky; we can just feel it intuitively. Eventually, we’ll find that creature we know exists: the ‘right person’; we’ll understand each other very well, we’ll like doing everything together, and we’ll experience deep mutual devotion and loyalty. They will, at last, be on our side.

Our expectations might go like this: a decent partner should easily, intuitively, understand what I’m concerned about. I shouldn’t have to explain things at length to them. If I’ve had a difficult day, I shouldn’t have to say that I’m worn out and need a bit of space. They should be able to tell how I’m feeling. They shouldn’t oppose me: if I point out that one of our acquaintances is a bit stuck up, they shouldn’t start defending them. They’re meant to be constantly supportive. When I feel bad about myself, they should shore me up and remind me of my strengths. A decent partner won’t make too many demands. They won’t be constantly requesting that I do things to help them out, or dragging me off to do something I don’t like. We’ll always like the same things. I tend to have pretty good taste in films, food and household routines: they’ll understand and sympathize with them at once.

Strangely, even when we’ve had pretty disappointing experiences, we don’t lose faith in our expectations. Hope reliably triumphs over experience. It’s always very tempting to console ourselves with an apparently very reasonable thought: the reason it didn’t work out this time was not that the expectations were too high, but that we directed them onto the wrong person. We weren’t compatible enough. So rather than adjust our ideas of what relationships are meant to be like, we shift our hopes to a new target on whom we can direct our recklessly elevated hopes.

At times, in relationships, it can be almost impossible to believe that the problem lies with relationships in general, for the issues are so clearly focused in on the particular person we happen to be with – their tendency not to listen to us, to be too cold, to be cloyingly present … But this isn’t the problem of love, we believe. It wouldn’t be like this with another person, the one we saw at school. They looked nice and we had a brief chat about the theme of the keynote instructor. Partly because of the slope of their neck and a lilt in their accent, we reached an overwhelming conclusion: with them it would be easier. There could be a better life waiting round the corner.

What we say to our partners is often quite grotesque. We turn to someone we’ve left everything to in our will and agreed to share our income with for the rest of our lives – and tell them the very worst things we can think of: things we’d never dream of saying to anyone else. To pretty much everyone else, we are reliably civil. We’re always very nice to the people in the sandwich shop; we talk through problems reasonably with colleagues; we’re pretty much always in a good mood around friends. But then again, without anything uncivil being meant by this, we have very few expectations in these areas.

No one can disappoint and upset us as much as the person we’re in a relationship with – for of no one do we have higher hopes. It’s because we are so dangerously optimistic that we call them a cunt, a shithead or a weakling. The intensity of the disappointment and frustration is dependent on the prior massive investment of hope. It’s one of the odder gifts of love.

So a solution to our distress and agitation lies in a curious area: with a philosophy of pessimism. It’s an odd and unappealing thought. Pessimism sounds very unattractive. It’s associated with failure; it’s usually what gets in the way of better things. But when it comes to relationships, expectations are the enemies of love.

A more moderate, more reasonable, set of expectations around relationships would include the idea that it is normal and largely unavoidable that people do not understand one another very well in a couple. Each person’s character and mind is hugely complex and convoluted. It’s hard to grasp exactly why someone acts as they do. And, by extension, we’d be assuming from the start that no partner is going to have a complete, reliable or terribly accurate understanding of us. There will be the occasional things they get absolutely right, a few areas where they really grasp what’s going on in us; that’s what makes the early days so charming. But these will be exceptions, rather than standard. As a relationship developed, we then wouldn’t get hurt when our partner made some wildly inaccurate assumptions about our needs or preferences. We’d have been assuming that this would be coming along pretty soon – just as we don’t take it remotely amiss if an acquaintance recommends a film we detest: we know they couldn’t know. It doesn’t bother us at all. Our expectations are set at a reasonable level.

In a wiser world than our own, we would regularly remind ourselves of the various reasons why people simply cannot live up to the expectations that have come to be linked to romantic relationships:

One is dealing with another person.

Much that will matter to us cannot possibly be in sync with another person. Why should another human being get tired at the same time as you, want to eat the same things, like the same songs, have the same aesthetic preferences, the same attitude to money or the same idea about Christmas? For babies, there is a long and strange set of discoveries about the real separate existence of the mother. At first it seems to the child that the mother is perfectly aligned with it. But gradually there’s a realization that the mother is someone else: that she might be sad when the child is feeling jolly. Or tired when the child is ready to jump up and down on the bed for ten minutes. We have similarly basic discoveries to make of our partners. They are not extensions of us.

The early stages of love give a misleading image of what a relationship can be like.

The experience of adult love starts with the joyful discovery of some amazing congruencies. It’s wonderful to discover someone who finds the same jokes hilarious, who feels the same way as you about cozy jumpers or the music you love, someone who is really able to see why you feel as you do about your father, or who deeply appreciates your confidence around form-filling or your knowledge of wine. There’s a seductive hope that the wonderful fit between the two of you are the first intimation of a general fusion of souls.

Love is the discovery of harmony in some very specific areas – but to continue with this expectation is to doom hope to a slow death. Every relationship will necessarily involve the discovery of a huge number of areas of divergence. It will feel as if you are growing apart and that the precious unity you knew during the weekend in Paris is being destroyed. But what is happening should really be seen under a much less alarming description: disagreement is what happens when love succeeds and you get to know someone close up across the full range of their life.

Any upbringing will be imperfect in important ways. The atmosphere at home might have been too strict or too lax, too focused on money or not adequately on top of the finances. It might have been emotionally smothering or a bit distant and detached. Family life might have been relentlessly gregarious or limited by lack of confidence. Getting from being a baby to a reasonably functional adult is never a flawless process. We are all, in diverse ways, damaged and insane. The child might have learned to keep its true thoughts and feelings very much to itself and to tread very carefully around fragile parents; and in later life, this person may still be rather secretive and cagey in their own relationships. The characteristic was acquired to deal with a childhood situation, but such patterns get deeply embedded and keep on going. Our adaptations to the troubles of our past make us all maddening prospects in the present.

The error we’re always tempted to make is to see defects as special to our own partner. We get to know the irritating and disappointing sides of one particular person – and draw the conclusion that we’ve been especially unlucky. We’ve become involved with someone who seems lovely on the surface but has revealed themselves strangely disturbed and defective. What a curse! What a problem to correct! We therefore look around for a new partner with whom we can finally have what we always knew was promised to us: a problem-free relationship. Our romantic impulses are continually renewed. We blame everything but our hopes.

And yet, the reasons why other people are disappointing are universal. The problems may take on a local character, but everyone would have them to a significant extent. We don’t need to know the specific eccentricities we would find in a prospective partner. But you can be sure there will be some – and that they will, at times, be pretty serious. The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.

Hello, schadenfreudefreude

I randomly had the urge to write after spending a shit ton of my time on Netflix,Viu, YouTube, Pinterest, books, and BTS. So here I am, allow me to introduce myself.

As the name of my new blog suggests, schadenfreudefreude - it comes from the word schadenfreude which means enjoyment obtained from the trouble of others. It came out like that because it's the first word that came to my mind. People love to gossip and talk about other people so why not shade them? Anyways... Hi~yaaaa, I'm Lianne. 22 years old from the Philippines.

Since this is a ~new~ blog, I feel like I need to give you a rundown of my interests and what I do so you more or less know what to expect here. 

I feel like I need to start with the fact that I have been blogging in a legit way since 2016 but I owned a Tumblr blog way back 2015. Since I was in college, yes. I was 19 years old when my blog in Tumblr came to be *rip*. I had to delete all my embarrassing entries about my crushes who ignored me then and my rejected era of unrequited love - there was too much embarrassment that I decided to delete the whole thing not too long ago. Well, we all get to that phase of why did I even do that, right? Last year 2018 in the month of December, I taken down my wordpress blog for 2 years that I gained lots of readers or traffic just because I want to start a new content or new life. I also taken down all of my social media accounts to clean my name in the internet.

I'm not working since I graduated. My parents never really demanded me to work because they want me to be focused on my goal which is to study in law school. They don't want me to be distracted because I should gain my momentum. Because the moment I started earning money, I would lose the interest in studying again. So, I followed my parents and I think it's a right decision because I really did focus on myself since I graduated. I recovered. I reset. I changed my bad habits and now I'm okay and well-prepared. I'm honestly living that one year grand vacation. I'm preparing for law school this year. I recently took a PhiLSAT test last month and I hope I'll pass the test. The results will come this next day, May 3, so I'm really anxious.  

I live with my parents. If that's interesting.

I love traveling. I don't have a boyfriend. I never dated anyone. I never had that legit dinner date or legit movie date like most people do.

As the former paragraph suggests, I am happily in a relationship with myself. I am a dog parent to a ShiChi dog.

I am obsessed with animals. I pretend I am Snow White. 

I love food. I'd marry food if it were possible. I'm not drinking alcohol for 12 months now. Yes, one year of not drinking any alcohol and I'm proud of myself for this detox. I honestly don't crave it anymore. I don't want to put myself in that state of drinking night out because it's not healthy. And the withdrawal symptoms I've experienced is seriously horrible. I don't want to feel those withdrawal symptoms ever again because it's real and it's hard. I was like blessed to have my family who can understand what I'm going through. And this past year since I graduated college, I learned to love myself little by little and also with the help of BTS. Lol.

I am a nerd. I love to study. I recently finished my college degree in Communication and I am waiting for law school this year.

 I spend a lot of time online on Youtube, Google News, and Twitter.

I'm a fan girl. I'm the biggest fan of BTS. And I'm head over heels to Jeon Jungkook. I love music. My music is very eclectic. I could go indie to pop to rnb to kpop to rock to blues to country to classical to jazz to opm. It all depends on my mood. I also love writing and reading. I love drawing and sketching. I also love painting. I was a dancer when I was in elementary and high school but I never dance now. I'm not a singer. I suck at singing. I just sing because I want to sing but I don't have a good voice :))

Most people described my life boring because I don't do dates. And I also don't flirt. They would joke me I'm a nun in a monastery. But I think there is nothing wrong for waiting for that right person for you. I mean it's not being entitled that you feel you are beautiful so you don't entertain any guys. Most people misunderstand that. It's just how I protect my heart. You see, I'm quite sensitive to heartbreaks. I feel way too much so I became like a hard rock as time goes by. I'm afraid of being left because when I was 13 my ex boyfriend left me. I know I'm still a child trying to adult. But, that created some trauma to me. It makes me learned a lesson that relationships should be earned. I'm not swayed to what people say that it's not in the length so I should say yes to this guy. I think guys should earn the love and respect. And we should make sure if they deserve our love and respect. Cheaters are really on trend these days. I hate cheaters. I hate guys who are irresponsible. I hate guys who can't man up. I've experienced a lot of these heartbreaking things from my friends. They would kiss and tell. They would not commit to being the father of the child they made. They would cheat. They would share their private sex videos or pictures to other people when they broke up. It really sucks. I don't want that to happen to me. And mostly guys don't mind pleasing girls in the way that the girl wants. Mostly, they think of themselves. We all have our own mental health problems but I think it's our responsibility to create self-awareness to our actions and take little steps to change it. Because I'm not stupid not to observe that husbands these days changed their behavior and who they are after they married the girl. I'm not stupid enough to ignore these RED FLAGS that shouldn't be ignored. I don't want that to happen to me. I'm sick of it. I don't actually mind not getting married. I would rather choose to live independently than being with someone who would change after I get married to him then he will treat me like trash. I've seen from the experiences from other people too much in my life. So, this is getting too deep. Lol. Anyways.

Yeah, so I am back to square one - and I cannot wait to upload new entries out of boredom and personal entertainment. Let's get it.

Infinity

A human body is bigger than it looks. Advances in science and technology have shown that, really, a physical body is a universe in itself. Each of us is made up of roughly a hundred trillion cells. In each of those cells is roughly that same number again of atoms. That is a lot of separate components. Our brains alone have a hundred billion brain cells, give or take a few billion.

Yet most of the time we do not feel the near-infinite nature of our physical selves. We simplify by thinking about ourselves in larger pieces. Arms, legs, feet, hands, torso, head. Flesh, bones.

A similar thing happens with our minds. In order to cope with living they simplify themselves. They concentrate on one thing at a time. But depression is a kind of quantum physics of thought and emotion. It reveals what is normally hidden. It unravels you, and everything you have known. It turns out that we are not only made of the universe, of "star-stuff" to borrow Carl Sagan's phrase, but we are as vast and complicated as it too. The evolutionary psychologists might be right. We humans might have evolved too far. The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe's worth of darkness.

Two Different Worlds

I was going to the same Catholic private school of our small rural town since I was four years old until I turned sixteen . We always celebrated annually the feast day of our school's patron saint, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, every 16th day of July. I was born in Cabanatuan, a city near San Jose City, Nueva Ecija, Philippines, where we are residing. San Jose is a beautiful place, with a river, hills, plains, and even an annual onion festival known as Tanduyong Festival. San Josenians hold a cultural show by conducting dance ritual at the streets showing the way of life of the folklore here by planting onions. I spent a happy childhood here, and I was just an ordinary girl. I would look up in the sky full of fluffy clouds or night sky and dreams the dreams of a girl. I used to imagine that I was a Disney Princess, saving and helping the world.

My story begins with something that happened to me when I was ten years old and going to the Catholic private school of our small town. My heart stopped. Maybe, I was maybe nine or ten. Looking back, that's when I began to worry about what other people thought of me and started seeing myself through their eyes. I stopped looking up at the clouds in the day. I stopped looking up at the stars at night. I stopped daydreaming. I stopped being a princess. I tried to please everyone. Some days I lack self-believe and I started letting other people made me into something they wanted me to be. Soon, I began to shut out my own voice and started to listen to the voice of others. I was ten when I learned what my parents' job is. I'm not aware before I was ten because they never really brought it up. My father is a licensed medical technologist, licensed nurse, licensed physician, and licensed surgeon. He passed all of the board exams. He also studied and graduated from his Masterals three years ago. He was the chief of a public hospital. He was workinh for the government for 36 years. And he will retire in his 60, four years from now. And my mother is a registered nurse. I was in my fourth grade when I found out all about this and my point of view changed since then. No one called out my name, and neither did I. My heart stopped and my eyes closed shut. So, like this, I, we, all lost our names and identity. We became like ghosts.

All sorts of sights and smell come back to me, rise up from within me, to touch me with an ache and a blissful shudder, dark streets and bright streets, houses and churches, only one or two famous fast food restaurants, no malls or no high buildings, people's faces, rooms full of warm and homey comforts, rooms full of secrets and of deep fear of ghosts, haunted by Philippine mythology and ghost stories. There is the scent of warm, closed spaces, of dogs, goats, cows and carabaos, of household remedies, carabao's milk and dried fruit. Two different worlds intermingled there; from two opposite poles came the day and the night.

One world was the parental home, but actually it was even narrower, in truth it contained only my parents. On the whole I knew this world well: its name was Father and Mother, it was love and strict rules, education and example. What belonged to this world was gently shining radiance, clarity, and cleanliness; quiet, friendly conversation, washed hands, clean clothes, good behavior. Morning hymns like Cinderella were felt there, Christmas and New Year celebrated. In that world of straight lines and paths leading into the future, there was duty and obligation, bad conscience and confessions, short-term goals and long-term goals, forgiveness and good resolutions, love and respect, wisdom and Biblical proverbs, competence and confidence. You had to keep to this world for your life to be pure, beautiful, and harmonious.

Meanwhile, the other world was there already, right in the middle of our house and completely different: it smelled different, spoke differently, promised and demanded entirely different things. There were serving girls, tradesmen and squattered people in this second world, and ghost stories and scandalous rumors, a richly colored flood of monstrous, tempting, frightening, mysterious things like the slaughterhouse, public market, and the prison, alcoholics and bickering women, cows giving birth and horses with broken legs, homeless dogs and no one to take care of them, and stories of burglaries, murders, kidnaps, suicides. All these beautiful, horrible, wild, cruel things existed all around in the next street over, in the house next door. Policemen and beggars ran around, drunks beat their wives, victim-blaming in cases of rape or sexual assault, people were objectified and bullied, old women could cast a spell on you and make you sick, bands of robbers; this powerful second world welled up everywhere, its scent was everywhere, except in rooms where Mother and Father were. And that was good. How wonderful that here, in our home, there was peace and calm and order, duty and conscience, mercy and love, and how wonderful that all the rest existed too, everything loud and shrill, dark and violent, from which you could escape to Mother in a single bound.

The strangest thing is how these two different worlds touched each other, how close to each other they were! For example, when I was eleven years old, our maid Ate Eddiebell, when she sat with her freshly washed hands resting on the apron she had smoothed down on her lap, ironing our clothes in my room and joining her bright voice to the song in the radio. I always see my scrawl ugly but our maid inspired me to own a notebook and I started improving my penmanship by imitating her handwriting. I got the willpower that I can do anything I want if I work into it. She taught me what music is. She would write song lyrics in her notebook and I find it fascinating. Then, she sings and we both sing the songs in her notebook. Every night, she would tell me stories about her life in Bacolod. I admired how she always smile and she influenced me so much to love dancing, painting, and writing. She was a dancer and she shared to me their hard routine exercises or her love life. She had that warm feeling that my parents never made me felt. She has this life so alien to me. The next moment, in the kitchen or my room, when she told me the story of the little man with no head, or fought with the neighbor women at the butcher shop, she was someone else and part of the other world, and was shrouded in mystery. That's how it was with everyone, most of all myself. Of course, I was part of the bright and true world. I was my parents' child but wherever I turned my eye or ear the other world was always there, and I lived in the other world too, even though it often felt like I didn't belong there, in the spooky realm of fear and bad conscience. At times I even liked the forbidden world best, and often my return to the light, as good and necessary it might be, felt almost like a turn toward something less beautiful, less exciting, more desolate and dreary. And then one day, our maid go back to her home and she never came back to our home. I'm thankful for the light, stories and the truth she shared to me in just a short amount of time.

Sometimes I knew that my goal in life was to turn into someone like my father and my mother: so bright and pure, so superior and harmonious. But it was a long, long way to that goal, and along that way you had to sit quietly in school and study and take tests and pass exams, and all the while the path ran right past the other, darker world, or through it, and it was by no means impossible to stay in it, drown in it. There were stories of lost boys and girls, prodigal sons or daughters, and this had happened to, and I read them avidly. The return to the father, to what was good, was always such a magnificent liberation in these stories. I was perfectly aware that this was the only right and good and desirable outcome; but still, the part of the story that took place among the lost and evil souls was always much more exciting, and, if it were only possible to admit it, it was sometimes actually rather a shame that a lost soul had to repent and be found again. But that was something you didn't say, and didn't even think. It was just there, somehow, as a hunch or possibility buried deep, deep down in your feelings. When I imagined the devil, I could see him perfectly well on the street down the hill, in disguise or not, or at the fair, or in a pub or bar, but never with us in home.

I had one sanctuary, and that was writing, justice, and music. There was a small voice in me when I was seventeen years old that said, "Wake up, girl, and listen to yourself!" But it took me a long time to hear music, writing and law calling my name.

Even after making a decision to shift my course to Communications from Pharmacy, there were hurdles. Most people doubted my capabilities and they thought I am hopeless or I made bad decisions in life. Sometimes, I just wanted to quit.

I think I was very lucky that I didn't give it all up.

I'm sure that I, and we, will keep stumbling and falling. I am still an ordinary twenty-two year old girl. If there's anything I have achieved, it was only possible because I had my groupmates, batchmates, mentors, teachers, instructors, and friends by my side, and because of the love and support of my family.

Like most people, I made many mistakes in my life.

I have many flaws and I have fears. I have anxieties but I am going to embrace myself as hard as I can, and I'm starting to love myself, little by little.

This is what youth and adolescence feels like

There are beautiful, wonderful, tender memories from childhood I could put in this story; my childhood loves and my pleasant life in gentle, loving surroundings filled with light. But I am interested here only in the steps I have taken in my life to arrive at myself. I will leave in the glowing distance all the lovely oases, blessed isles, and paradises whose magic I experienced; I have no desire to set foot in them again.

And so, for as long as I stay with my girlhood years, I will speak of only the things that felt new, that pushed me onward, broke me loose.

Then came the years when I had to recognize once again the primal attraction within me, one that had to cower and hide in the permitted world of light. Like everyone else, I too experienced my slowly awakening sexual feelings as an enemy and a destroyer, as something forbidden, as temptation and sin. The great mystery of puberty, which I was desperately curious to solve and which gave rise to dreams, lust, and fear, did not fit at all in the sheltered bliss of my peaceful childhood world. So I did what everyone does: I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious life was lived in the familiar space of what was allowed, and denied the world rising like a new dawn to me. At the same time though, my life was lived in dreams, urges, longings of subterranean kind across which my consciousness built ever more anxious and fearful bridges as the childhood world within me fell apart. Like almost all parents, mine did nothing to help the life forces awakening within me, which were never spoken about when I turned thirteen and I got the first guy who courted me and I ghosted because I'm so afraid and innocent and then while I was one of the cheerleaders of the cheerleading squad, there's this musician volleyball player Senior Captain guy who became my first boyfriend for six months and broke up with me in Yahoo Messenger because we were in a long distance relationship and I'm not fulfilling the girlfriend duties enough or maybe he found someone else in Manila. After that, I only involved myself to feel attraction through having crushes and I never had a boyfriend after that year and in my college years. My mother strictly taught me when I was fourteen to only give it to the man I'll marry in the future; my future husband should be the first one to get it. And until now, I still obeyed it and I'm still choosing to wait for the right time and the right person. My parents only tried, endlessly and untiringly, to help me in my hopeless efforts to deny reality and stay in a child's world that grew more and more false and unreal everyday. I do not know if parents can do anything else, and I am not criticizing mine in particular. It was up to me to finish growing up and find my own way; I did it badly, like most well-raised children.

Everyone passes through these difficulties. For the average person, this is the moment when the demands of his life come into the starkest conflict with his environment, when he has to fight the hardest to make his way farther along his path. Many people experience the death and rebirth that is the destiny of us all only this once, as childhood rots from within and slowly disintegrates, as everything we have grown to love abandons us, and we suddenly feel the solitude and deathly cold of the universe around us. And very many people remain stuck at this hurdle their whole life long, desperately hanging on to the irretrievable past and clinging to the dream of a paradise lost, the worst and most deadly of all dreams.

The sensations and mental images with which the end of childhood proclaimed itself in me are not worth telling here. The important thing was that the dark world, the other world, was back. At the same time, the other world outside me was gaining more and more power over me, too.

When vacation was over before college, I went to Baguio. Both my parents came with me and entrusted me with all possible care to a condominium dormitory. They would have frozen with horror had they known the kind of life they were letting me wander into.

The question was still whether I would, with time, turn into a good daughter and useful citizen, or whether my nature was pushing me onto other paths. My last attempt to be happy under the shadow of the parental house and its spirit had lasted a long time, for a while it had almost succeeded, but now it had finally and completely failed.

The strangest emptiness and isolation I had come to feel for the first time the summer before my sophomore year in college (and oh, how well I got to know it later; this emptiness, this thin air!) did not pass away quickly. I found it oddly easy to leave home, I was a little ashamed of not being sadder, in fact; my mother expressed her worries, but I couldn't. I was amazed at myself. I had always been a sensitive child who expressed her feelings; a good girl, when it came down to it. Now I had completely changed. I acted with total indifference toward the outside world and spent days at a time attending only to myself, listening to the dark, underground currents rushing and roaring inside me. I had shot up very quickly in the past six months and looked miserable, skinny, and immature. Everything girly boyishly lovable about me disappeared; I was well aware that it was impossible to love me as I was, and I did not love myself either. I missed myself who loves writing much of the time and there I was memorizing the periodic table and formulas, solving Physics and Chemistry problems for my pre-med course.

So, when I shifted to Communications from Pharmacy in the next semester, I was neither liked nor respected because I was a new face in the Humanities department. They would say hi to me and asked me if I'm Chinese or Korean. I have no friends at all. No one knows me. Boys teased me and then left me alone, having decided I was a weird, distant, unpleasant sort. I took pleasure in this identity and even exaggerated it, grumbling my way into a solitude that looked like a feminst superiority and contempt on the outside while secretly I suffered constant fits of depression and despair. At school I got by for a while on what I had already studied back home, the class was a bit behind me where we had been because I love writing and journalism when I was in high school because I was the news editor of our school paper in my senior year and I was part of the editorial staff for 4 years in high school, and I got into the habit of viewing the other students my age with a certain contempt, as children. It went on like that for a year. Nothing changed on my first few visits home, and I was always glad to go back to school.

Then it was early November of year 2014. Whatever the weather, I would take little intellectual walks, which often gave me a kind of pleasure that was full of melancholy, scorn for the world, and contempt for myself as well. That was how I felt one evening as I strolled through the city of Baguio in the damp, misty twilight. The wide avenue of public park was completely deserted, and inviting; as I walked down the lane, thickly covered with fallen leaves with a dark, voluptous desire. It smelled wet and bitter; distant trees loomed up eerily out of the mist, tall and shadowy.

I stopped at the end of the road, not knowing what to do next. I stared down at the dark vegetal mass and greedily breathed in the wet smell of death and decay, which something inside me responded to and welcomed. Oh, how insipid the taste of life was!

Someone approached down a side path, his coat billowing in the wind. I wanted to keep walking, but he called my name.

"Hello, Lianne. Huy, Lianne!"

He came up to me. It was Lance, the first guy I seriously liked when we were living in my first condominium dormitory when I was first year in college. He is now a physicist and he studied in UP Baguio. I confessed to him that I like him when I was 16 and we were both cool about it and we are good friends after that. I always enjoyed seeing him and had nothing against him except that he always treated me like a baby.

"And what brings you here?" he called out affably, in the tone that bigger kids liked to take when condescended to talk one of us. "Writing a poem, I bet."

"Never occured to me," I snapped back.

He laughed out loud and walked next to me, chatting. I had completely forgotten what that felt like.

"Don't think I wouldn't understand Lianne. I know how it is, when you're taking a walk like this in the evening mist, with 6PM thoughts, you want to write poems, I know. Poems about dying nature, of course, and the lost youth it's a symbol of."

"I'm not that sentimental. How dare you!" I defended myself.

"Alright, nevermind. Alam mo kapag ganito ang weather it's good to find a nice quiet place with a glass of wine or something along those lines. Sama ka saken? Come with me. I happen to be all alone. Or ayaw mo? Ayaw kita mapariwala if may plano ka maging good model student."

Soon we were sitting in a small pub at the edge of the city, drinking a dubious wine and clinking out our glasses together. I didn't like it very much at first, but still it was something new. Soon though, not used to drinking wine, I started talking my head off. It was as though a window had opened inside me, and the world was shining in; how long, how terribly long it had been since I'd said anything I really felt! I started to give my imagination a free rein, and before I knew it I was telling Lance the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible.

Lance listened with delight. Finally, someone to whom I have something to give! Someone who could make deep talks with me. He clapped me on my shoulder, he called me a deep one fellow and my heart swelled with pleasure: I could finally let myself go, indulge in the need to talk and communicate that had been pent up so long, and feel acknowledged by someone older than me, like I was worth something. When he called me brilliant and smart, what he said sank into my soul like sweet, strong wine. The world shone in new colors, thoughts came to me from a hundred mischievous sources, wit and fire blazed up within me. We talked about our teachers, our schools, our classmates, and it seemed to me we understood each other splendidly. We talked about the Greeks, paganism, and Lance insisted on turning the conversation into confessions of amorous adventures. Here I had nothing to contribute. I had not had any adventures, not worth telling. And what I had felt, built up by my imagination, burned within me but the wine did not free it or enable me to talk about it. Lance knew a lot more about girls than I did, and I listened passionately to his fairy-tale stories. What I learned was unbelievable: things I had never thought possible entered ordinary reality and seemed obvious, normal. These girls in his stories have already acquired quite a store of an experience. Among other things, that girls always want nothing but chivalry and attention, which is fine as far as that goes but not the real thing. You could get farther with women. They were much more reasonable.

I remember the night very clearly. When the two of us started home late, past the dully burning gas lamps in the cool wet night, I was drunk for the first time. It did not feel pleasant. It was excruciating. But still, there was something about it: sweet excitement, rebellion, spirited life. Lance took good care of me, even while gripping about what a total beginner I was, and he brought me home, half carrying me, and managed to smuggle us into the dorm through an open hall elevator.

But after a short dead sleep, I woke up to a headache, sobriety, and terrible sadness. I sat up in bed, still wearing my shirt from the day before, with my other clothes and shoes lying around the floor and stinking of smoke and vomit. Between headache, nausea, and unspeakable thirst, an image rose up in my soul that I had not seen for a long time: I saw my parents' house, my hometown, Father and Mother, my siblings, the garden; I saw my quiet, comfortable bedroom, the school, and the market square, all of it flooded with bright light, radiant, all of it wonderful, godly, and pure, and I now knew everything, had still belonged to me the day before, just a few hours ago, had been waiting for my return, but now, only in this moment, it had sunk forever under the waves, was cursed, was no longer mine. It had thrown me out and now looked upon me with disgust! Everything I had so profoundly loved, everything back to the most distant, golden garden of my childhood that my parents had given me, every bless, every Christmas, every bright, pious Sunday mornings at home, every flower in the garden, it was all laid to waste, I had trampled it under my feet. So that's how I looked in the inside! I, who went around despising the world, proud in spirit. I was a pig, like scum, drunk and filthy, disgusting and low, a wild animal taken unawares and overpowered by hideous urges. I, who had come from the garden where everything was purity and radiance and blessed tenderness, who have loved poetry and Bach music, now looked like that inside. I could still hear my laugh ringing in my ears, drunk and out of control, bursting out in idiotic stops and starts and it filled me with rage and disgust. That was me!

Despite everything, it was almost pleasurable to suffer these torments. I had crept around blind and numb for so long, my heart cowering poor and miserable in the corner, that even this self-hatred, this horror, this whole horrible feeling in my soul was welcome! At least I felt something! The embers still flickered with some kind of fire, a heart still beat in there! I was confused to feel something like liberation and springtime in the middle of all my misery.

Meanwhile, to the other side, things went downhill with me in a hurry. My first binge was soon only a first to many. There are a lot of drinking and running wild went on as I meet more friends who asked me to go out. I once belonged to the dark world. At the same time I felt miserable. I was living in a self-destructive riot. I can still recall how tears came to my eyes once when I left a bar on Sunday afternoon and saw children playing in the street, bright and happy, with freshly combed hair, in their Sunday clothes. And the whole time that I was entertaining and often shocking my friends with my monstrous cynicism at the dirty tables of cramped pubs between puddles of beer, in my heart of hearts I still respected what they were mocking. On the inside I kneeled in tears before my soul, before my past and my parents, before God.

I never felt truly one with my companions. I was still lonely when I was with them, and that's why I suffered so. And I never went along with my buddies to see boys. I was alone and full of burning longing for love. A hopeless longing even while I talked like a hardened libertine. No more was more fragile, more full of shame, than I was. I was anxiously ashamed of the warm, shy moods I so often felt, the tender thoughts of love and care that so often came over me.

I cannot summarize in brief about what I learned from my adolescence stage. The most important thing I learned from it was another step on the path to myself. I'm now young adult. I was an unusual young woman around twenty-two years old, precarious in a hundred ways but very far behind and helpless in hundred ways. When I compared myself to the other people my age, I sometimes felt young and full of curiosity. There were times when people see me gifted and creative. They admire how I write and how I sketch and paint. During college, I was eaten up with worries and self-hatred about how hopelessly isolated I was from other people, how cut off from life. They are all dating but I'm closed.

After college, I lived again at my hometown with my family. This new environment gave me courage and taught me to keep my self-respect. The way people always found something valuable in my words, my dreams, my thoughts and imaginings, always took them seriously and discussed them in earnest, became exemplary for me.

I like music because it's outside morality. I can't keep comparing myself to other people. I sometimes feel like I don't belong, I blame myself for following a different path than most other people. I have to unlearn that and I did. Stare into the fire, look at the clouds, and when ideas and intuitions came to me and the voices of my soul start to speak, I trust them and I don't worry about anything.