the disorientation of freedom

beyond words

Joan Mitchell, Land, 1989

It’s hard to accept the limits of language. I’m thinking of an old friend, B, whom I loved very much, though the crux of it isn’t loving him but liking him. We got along on every level. There’s a lot to say about it, but in the end there’s nothing relevant other than that I very, very much wanted to make the friendship work, and ultimately he didn’t. For a long time I just kept thinking: if I’d said the right thing, he would’ve understood, and we could’ve bridged the gap between us.

But that isn’t true. The reason I never sent a long, heartfelt email to B in an attempt to repair was because during our friendship, he at one point showed me a long, heartfelt email from someone else attempting to repair and told me: you know, I want to answer it so much, but I just don’t. My understanding of him was that he was conciliatory in spirit but avoidant in action: I’m very sure to this day that he thinks of the friendship exactly the way I do, and misses it exactly the way I do. And yet.

I don’t know if I’m referring to the limits of language or the limits of character. It’s difficult to accept that people have their own desires, judgments, and abilities, and saying I want to meet you in the middle is sometimes all you’re able to do. It does not guarantee they will meet you in the middle. It does not guarantee anything at all, except that you said it.

*
I made up with another friend recently, E. The reason we made up was that they were ready to make up. I bring this up because I texted both B and E at the same time last year: the friend I eventually reconciled with and the friend I didn’t. With both, I just reached out to say: I want to meet you in the middle.

I couldn’t have predicted the outcome. It seems just as plausible that I could’ve made up with B and not E, just as plausible I could’ve made up with both, just as plausible I never heard from either.

*

I have good instincts. There are many times in my life when I’ve met someone and knew instantly we would be close, even if they were reluctant or we had barely exchanged a word. It’s a nervous system thing: sometimes you just know. That knowing, I’ve found, is generally mutual, and there’s nothing more satisfying than when they eventually say: The truth is, I felt it too.

But feelings don’t always translate to actions. People are where they are, and they make progress at their own pace, and you can support them but you can’t force them. You have to give them their freedom, disorienting though it may be, sad as it may be.

*

I believe too much in words. That must be why we have the same exchange over and over again. I say something, you listen, we try, it repeats. But then we try to talk about something else, and it always comes back to this. And when we don’t talk, it always comes back to this.

Connection is what makes things hard. After all, with everyone else I have no trouble checking back in after six months or a year. C told me about running into an ex of mine from many years ago and how completely different he seems now. We agreed that sometimes you get frustrated by how little someone changes in one year, but over 10 years they often change radically. That’s a thought I find immensely comforting.

For other people, not you. For other people, life is long.

*
Life is long. When I fight with my friends, I know for the most part we’ll work it out. Heather: “Long-term relationships thrive when you can set aside your shame enough to take responsibility for the storm inside of you, and forgive the storms inside of the people you love the most. When two storms collide, it doesn’t have to be catastrophic. It can be miraculous and hopeful instead.”

Freedom is disorienting because there are no guarantees. I don’t know when someone will come back, or if. Half the time I don’t know what I’ll say, and when. Love persists even when language doesn’t.

how to trust yourself

closeness, freedom and fear

Henri Fantin-Latour, Roses in a Bowl, 1883

You have to trust people to know what’s right for them. Well you don’t but that’s beside the point. First you have to know what’s right for you. No way out of it—not your best friend, boyfriend, therapist, Claude. No way out of sitting down, sprawling out, consulting the feeling deep in your bones. Though the feeling deep in your bones is mostly a confused muddle that doesn’t tell you anything much. Tough luck! You meditate with no success, go to yoga class, walk all the way through Golden Gate Park to the ocean and call a Waymo back, slap a boy as he’s driving you home, take three grams of shrooms belly down on your bed, read Tolstoy, read Edith Wharton, try to read Shakespeare. Fights, frustration, silence, crying. Writing, coaching, matchmaking. It takes a while before you realize there’s no drug in the world that could free you from this mess. If someone Eternal Sunshine’d you you have no doubt that two weeks later your memories would freakishly flood back in.

You stop believing in talking about things. You no longer think that confession will save you; you no longer think anyone has insight to offer. When you tell someone something it’s just so you can see how they’ll react. There’s certain lines of analysis you do not want to go down. What made someone this way. Are they happy. What will they do. What do they fear. Are they capable of change. It’s not interesting to you because you are no longer interested in culpability or salvation. Everything that could be said you’ve already said to yourself. Even when you get mad you have a sense of humour about it. You are so far past disappointment you feel relief. You don’t find secrets erotic. It’s hard to even talk about beauty.

What’s at the very bottom of it all? What do you do when you stop thinking reason, language, virtue, or obsession can save you? You move onto other preoccupations, like pushups and martial arts. You are so sick of being bad at jiu jitsu. You have never been more enamored with the life of the body. It’s so hard to admit that this is all there is, slightly uneven dining table with the laptop, Google doc open, White Rabbit candle lit, wondering if anyone will ever understand. You can feel yourself, K says you seem more grounded. Your therapist says you’ve made quite a lot of progress, she’s impressed. You buy a second coat rack for the loft of your apartment. You don’t worry anymore about who likes you or dislikes you. You’re not insecure about your face or body. You’re not sorry you told the truth even though it didn’t go so well. Who are you? You’re someone who can live with other people’s mistakes. You’re someone who can live with your own mistakes. You can be mad at yourself. You can forgive yourself.

The girl on Tiktok says: "It’s you, babe. You’re what you’re after. You’re what you’re looking for. You’re the missing puzzle piece. You’re what you miss. You’re what you want to experience and have yet to experience.” Her voice sounds like the very beginning of crying, the welling of emotion in your throat. You don’t care if it’s cheesy. You can feel your questions, your longing, your irritation, your rage, and your love. It’s easy to do and it’s very simple. You know when you like someone and how much you like them. You know when you trust someone and how much you trust them. It used to scare you when people said extreme things to you and now it doesn’t. They should think a little harder about what part of their emotional experience you’re actually responsible for.

It used to scare you so much when someone was mad at you. Or didn’t think you were pretty or thought you were standoffish. You never trusted yourself, so you could never trust anyone else. You never felt yourself fully all the way down because you were scared of what you were going to find. You flinched at your shadow. You fawned, you placated people when you didn’t have to. You woke up in the middle of the night and ruminated. It was so hard to let go of all of that. It was what you knew about being a person.

You have to trust yourself to know what’s right for you. Mostly people are just trying their best. You have to love them, forgive them, let them get it wrong. You have to believe that you know what you’re doing. At this point, you know in your bones you’re past advice. You finally feel loved after all this time.

nothing will change your life more than saying what you actually want to say

happy new year

Bob Thompson, Untitled (The Miraculous Draught of Fishes), 1961.

My one goal of 2026, which has been my goal every year since 2020, is to be zen at all costs. As a formerly neurotic person I’ve come far on this front. I now have a reputation in my friend group as someone who is comfortable with sharing whatever deranged thought crosses her mind—I will wake up at 8:30 AM and send a loved one a three paragraph text about how I’m feeling paranoid. I can’t tell you how weird that feels to admit, as someone who used to be extremely focused on how everything was received. The reason I was obsessed with how someone received my message was because I cared so much about how I was perceived. I never, ever wanted to be misunderstood; if someone ignored my text it would make my heart sink. Rejection sensitivity is hard to shake.

I’ve always been afraid of telling and receiving the truth. I was constantly doing something wrong as a kid and getting yelled at, whether it was for fidgeting too much at my parents’ friend’s house, wearing a tank top, cutting piano practice short or secretly signing up for a Facebook account. It became easier to just do things my own way and not tell anyone. I remember my college boyfriend getting upset at me—you’re so evasive, he said, you don’t tell me things. What I couldn’t say: I’m afraid of you, I’m afraid of you judging me, I’m afraid that you’ll stop loving me. I couldn’t understand that telling saves.

It’s hard to tell the truth sometimes. It’s not advisable in every circumstance. I’ve done it and had it go very, very wrong. You’re never guaranteed a good reaction because the universe doesn’t exist to validate your choices and other people don’t exist to absolve you. Iris Murdoch: “Art and morals are… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Even the people who love me don’t exist solely to love me; they have their own hangups and priorities and self-concept, and they must do what they can live with. This was a bitter lesson that I learned this year, but there was also an extreme sweetness to it, because in learning it I also realized: Other people are real, but so am I, and I am whole as I am, flawed and selfish and imperfect as I am. When I realized this, it was like I had been granted full permission to exist for the very first time.

I know only too well that this feeling of completeness comes from being loved and noticed for a long period of time. Not perfectly loved, because there is no perfect love, but loved as Winnicott’s good enough mother loves her child. I learned that even as people fail me they can heal me. They can teach me how to tell, and telling saves. Last year I started saying calmly and then not so calmly, Please help me, I feel so incredibly alienated. I lost all the discipline and composure I had spent the past 10 years collecting like coins. I got angry, even though I hated getting angry, and I stayed angry for so long I stopped hating it. I let go of many things. I stopped feeling insecure, and I stopped feeling ashamed, and I stopped being scared that none of my dreams would come true and that I would be alone forever. I didn’t let go of these things consciously, it’s just that I literally couldn’t hold onto them and continue to persist under the existing circumstances. I couldn’t hold onto them and keep loving you, so I just let them crumble. I stopped pulling my punches.

I’ve always been afraid of my own destructiveness. The heat and intensity of my personality, what it can do when I hold it against another person for a long time. I knew when we met that I would change you. Imperceptibly at first and then one day you would look up and I’d be everywhere, in your hair and eyes and blood, and you would never be able to get me out. But I’ve let you change me too.

I don’t care if nobody ever loves me again if you keep loving me. I think that’s what helped me feel whole. I started realizing that if I couldn’t say everything that mattered to the people I’m closest to than I would never feel free. I know that it would be better for you if I was different in certain ways but I am only who I am. Before, I never felt the wholeness of my own soul. I was always running from my shadow, too brittle to integrate, flinching at evidence of my own flaws. I didn’t even know how scared I was. I don’t regret who I am anymore, no matter what it costs me.

I’ve started talking differently, writing differently. I never realized before how much I held back. Because sometimes I wanted to be polite and sometimes I wanted to be charming and sometimes I wanted to be standoffish, so I would try on different words and demeanors for different occasions. Always, always, always wanting everyone to love me. To approve of me, to think I’m so nice, so sweet, so fun. Though I’m not always all of those things and sometimes I’m not any of those things. I’ve learned since that my capacity for cruelty is my capacity for warmth. My capacity for darkness is my capacity for light.

In the fantasy book I’m reading, Ship of Magic, the god Sa teaches through his contradictions. One must plan for the future and anticipate the future without fearing the future. A priest should not presume to judge unless he can judge as Sa does; with absolute justice and absolute mercy. This year, there have been contradictions everywhere I look. How is that telling the truth can break my heart, but also liberate me? How is it that I feel so able to be ugly with you because I know you’ll love me no matter what, but your opinion of me is also the only one that matters? How is it that your volatility, your ambivalence and your opacity are so hard to bear, but they’ve also been so necessary to me, more than necessary? How is it that I want to do right by people, and yet I cause them so much harm? How is it that feeling the full depth of my shame is what frees me from it?

When I say I want to be zen at all costs, I don’t mean that I don’t plan to suffer. To be human is to feel pain. But how you stay with it is what makes all the difference. I can compromise on a lot of things, but I can’t change the shape of my soul. Not everything that is what I want is going to be what you want. But talking about it is where we find the overlap.

I never knew how to communicate before, even though I talked all the time. Saying words is one thing, locating the deepest thing that matters is another. The one simple trick of articulating the truest thing I feel has taken me a lifetime to master. No other ability feels as important.

I find myself asking for random things all the time now. Just because I want them, just because I’m curious, just to locate people. Sometimes people say yes and sometimes people say no. Some of the asks have changed my life, brought me closer to the people I now love. I am no longer afraid to risk joy. Sometimes it’s still scary to be perceived. I want to be liked and I want to be loved and I never want to upset anyone—control will always be my native language. It’s just that I know now there’s a different way to live. It feels much, much better.