#knowmelea

I detest LA. The smell when the air hits is so distinct and familiar – similar to something you once ate that made you violently ill. It’s an involuntary reaction on a cellular level that I have to this place. And I say ‘this place’ because I am in LA right now; in a corporate hotel near enough to the airport to enviously hear the planes taking off.

Sure. Maybe I’m scarred. It is, after all, where someone I cared deeply for came and lost himself. At least that’s how I saw things from Pennsylvania. It was also where I spent the brokest summer of my life right after college; where I dinged my rental car and had my heart broken (again); where I’ve always felt lonely.

It’s a tough place to find your niche – your people. Not a place for wanderers. Not a place for ones without an agenda. And even after having spent so much time here, I can never figure out where the fuck I am in relation to any other place I’ve been.

LA is just not my scene. And I’ve tried. I stayed in an Airbnb in Venice for a week that almost made me entertain the idea of a West Coast life. I will admit that I think the ramen is better here than in New York. And being near the ocean is...being near the ocean. Epic and indulgent.  

I came out for a work trip in the middle of the week. We had just spent the previous weekend in Philadelphia for the Thanksgiving holiday and to attend the wedding of someone my boyfriend had gone to summer camp with. Two nights in my own bed later and it was off to the LA. I left on a Wednesday and he was to come out that Thursday morning. The annoying thing was... as soon as a I took off in a car to head for the airport I started to miss him. And as I navigated my way from LAX the short distance to the hotel I was burdened with a longing that he were just out here already.

We spend so much time together in a way I feel off balance without him. It’s an odd effect that generally only lasts the first day or so of being apart. But it creeps up in the side of my mind, like I forgot something but I’m not sure what.

My first instinct is to really not like that, to not like that feeling of being a part of a whole. Because I’ve always advocated for completing yourself; of belonging to no one but yourself. And it’s hard for me to understand how you can participate in a partnership without sacrificing some deep and sacred part of yourself. And it’s disorienting to understand how I could be a person who really would prefer to  spend most of her time with one single individual.

For so long I had this fear of the ‘shared identity’ – of being in a relationship where the ‘girlfriend’ version of myself was not exactly aligned with the just-plain-old-me version of myself. I feared there was an expected way to act as a girlfriend and an expected way treat another person as a girlfriend. That all of a sudden because you were in this committed thing you had certain expectations placed on you, and that The Relationship required the fulfillment of some specific curriculum in order to be successful.  

I feared having someone out there in the world on whom my behavior reflected, who was associated with me and everything that came with it. And that once the cat-and-mouse chase of early infatuation wore thin, it would be revealed I was just a flesh and blood human being, maybe nothing dramatically special at the end of the day.

I guess in large part this fear boiled down to inexperience. I only knew how to be an individual, of how to blatantly disregard what anyone thought of me. I didn’t want a shared identity where I was viewed as a reflection or extension of anyone. 

My tarot card readers really dug into my relationships – past and present – during my last reading. It had been almost three years since I had last seen them, and needless to say a lot was different. I went into the session with the intention to talk about work, and careers, and my future, since that’s what had been on my mind. But the conversation eventually turned towards relationships. I got them up to speed and introduced them to key information regarding my current boyfriend.

They are… unorthodox, to say the least, when it comes to relationships. Although, I find their point of view to be true to the authentic nature of human beings. They believe soul mates are those who come into your life for a certain period of time because on a cosmic level you have been drawn to each other. Sometimes that connection lasts a lifetime, sometimes it doesn’t. They believe ‘marriage’ is an identity that carries with it it’s own expectations and demands – separate and apart from any of the couples who enter into it – and for that reason to be wary of rushing into one. And they believe that relationships should serve, at the end of the day, the two individuals in them.

That is to say… your relationship should help you develop as an individual, should assist you on your personal aims, should enhance you as a person first and foremost. The primary purpose of a partnership is to further elevate the participants. Period.

Being yourself in a relationship and accepting the other person for who they are are really your only options. I realize this now. There is no changing another person, not even if in your heart you believe it’s for the better. And there’s no changing yourself, there’s no performing a version of yourself you think you should be.

I’ve begun to understand that the thing I’ve feared most – feeding this third and invisible entity called The Relationship – isn’t the gold standard of modern dating. Being in a healthy, committed relationship doesn’t mean sacrificing parts of yourself to satisfy some unnamed whole. It’s about honoring the relationship by being exactly who you are. Of expecting your relationship to be the primary place where you can be yourself. Where who you are is embraced and respected and fulfilled and encouraged. 

She was changed after Cuba. 

Something about the lack of cell reception allowed her own vibration to increase. It warmed her and rose to a dull hum in her ears–that and the constant sound of LOUD! 

Damn, Cuba was loud. Music everywhere; scratchy love songs blaring from 1952 Chevrolets; Cubaton on mindless repeat in every restaurant; Spanish classics blurted from an ancient trumpet by a leathery man with round cheeks. Sound followed you with every footstep and mixed in the heavy breeze of the Gulf with the constant weight of diesel and dust. 

It was dizzying. It was…intoxicating. 

Small pleasures; dollar Cristal beers full with amber, not thin and heartless like their cheap American counterparts. A five dollar bottle of Havana Club to swing around your newfound group of friends. (The girls always mixed it with Coke, which was sweeter there.) Thick tobacco on the tongue of a cat call: 

“Ah! Que linda…” 

You met deep brown eyes in mutual acknowledgement. Yes, I am woman, you are man, and in the natural order of things we would…

It was all so palpably out in the open. No need to hide your small, swelling frame. This is not the place for modesty. You, here, on rapturous display and in full force. You must give everything it is that you’ve got because the world around is unforgiving. And tomorrow is a distant place. 

(“Americans, you pay for your expensive healthcare and schooling out of pocket, yes. But here in Cuba, we pay for these things with our lives.” She had been told not to talk of politics, but she could always listen.) 

Nothing made sense but night. 

The days were long and night came suddenly. Hit you hard. The moon is out –now you find a place to dance. Warmed with rum she roamed the streets, fumbling through Spanish like someone trying to see in the dark; feeling for familiar words, stubbing a toe trying to conjugate a verb in past tense. No, she was bound to speak only in the present. 

Metaphoric. 

But on the lips of others–oh the delicious intercourse of oral expression! Like a Spanish she had never heard before–soft, round words sagging with sweat. She heard it for days after returning, that Spanish was everywhere. Coming from the mouths of Asian undergrads, and Middle Eastern deli clerks, and WASPY stroller pushers. She responded to a waiter in kind, and he looked puzzled and continued in English. 

Of course the Spanish hadn’t followed her back to Brooklyn. She was hearing things. Her ear had momentarily been trained to a different tune, a deeper tune, and had to now readjust to the harsh, nasal assertions of New York.

And maybe it all only felt like paradise because she left; could leave. Unlike so many there. (For even Utopia darkens when one is confined.) Having settled back into her normal life she had to ask herself, had Cuba even happened? If not for the sunburnt skin and stream of photos she’d have thought not. 

It felt so distant, so far away, so unimaginable now. Like… the other thing. She had forgotten all about it. It too felt unreal. Like some distant time in an unfamiliar place. But unlike Cuba, she had absolutely no desire to return.  

Sometimes to move on you have to actually move. Move through space. Move across the earth. Move physically elsewhere. Move your body, make it sweat, make it taste new things and new people and the saltwater of the various seas. 

I usually get really emotional around my period.  I live with my boyfriend and I seem to take it out on him. Example: I get paranoid that he’s doing things behind my back, I get extremely jealous and I’m quick to assume things that have been proven to be false. I become the complete opposite of who I regularly am. I was wondering if you’re familiar with extreme PMS and if you have any advice on how to handle it? You’re one of the women I look up to & I would love to hear your advice on this situation. – Anonymous

Dear Red Wedding,

Yikes. That sounds like one bloody beast you’re dealing with. A real “Carrie at prom” situation. A very scary shark week. Okay, okay… but in truth, no, I have never suffered from PMS when it came to that time of the month. Nausea, yes. But never scathing rage.

However, I also never seemed to require a particular time of month to go full-on raging bitch. So, there are bits and pieces I can work with here. Let’s see…

Have I, perhaps almost certainly drunk, lost my total shit at someone, likely someone near and dear to me, who was probably my boyfriend, to the point that fingers were poised ready to dial 9-1-1 because there was fear I might wake the neighbours? I mean, maybe.

Have I, likely alone on a night I was feeling particularly slighted, sat in dark silence boiling beneath my skin, convincing myself how a certain significant other was the source of not only all of my pain and unhappiness but the misfortune of millions of other people, when all he had done to prompt such outrage was reply too curtly to a text? Okay yes.

And in these and (unfortunately) many other instances, after the anger has been flung and hits its’ mark like a searing dagger, what follows isn’t any form of satisfaction. As you know, the feeling of hurting someone you care about is simply awful. Saying something mean, having misguided feelings of mistrust, taking out personal hormone fluctuations on the closest thing to sustain the blow… all of that stuff truly sucks. Plus, it leaves you feeling like a real slug.

I don’t have a PMS issue, but I may have a general anger issue.

I feel angry often. I’ve realised this about myself – and I hate it. But, I’ve found ways to work around it and maybe these ways will help you too. Buddha said, “Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” I heard this quote in high school and I can’t tell you how many times I have said, “Release the hot coal, release the hot coal, Nomi,” to myself when standing on the verge of rath. Your PMS, while a very real and chemical thing happening in your body, is like your hot coal. It is your unsubstantiated emotional ball that overtime you will learn to… simply let go of.

Our entire reality is shaped by the chemical reactions and synapses that happen inside our brains. And although most of the world around us seems like real shit at the moment, lucky for us in 2017 we have a very established research base around neuroscience and neuropsychology. Read the book The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. This book will be your brain bible. It will detail for you exactly what the cast of hormones in your brain are doing to you and when and why. Knowledge is power, little lady. And once we know our enemies by name they become a lot less scary. Yours are named estrogen, progestogen and testosterone.

However, I have trouble believing these feelings you have appear from thin air the moment the red river starts to run. Jealousy? Mistrust? Are these feelings you may experience in your non-menstruating part of life as well? Are they feelings perhaps suppressed or ignored during non-menstruating parts of life? Or are you, I dunno, not allowing yourself to be a multi-dimensional human being who sometimes, yes, gets pissed, and yes, has fears about losing her boyfriend?

You say you get “emotional” around your period, but baby you are emotional.

You are a dynamic, ALIVE human being who has depth and soul. As women, we’ve been taught our range of emotion, and quickness to move from one to another, is irrational and immature. But that agility, that freedom and fierceness is what makes us mysterious and magnificent. Shallow waters are calm and still. The ocean is a force.

While we don’t want to hurt the people in our lives, certainly not the ones we love and care about the most, we can’t expect ourselves to not FEEL things. We just need to understand what it is that we’re feeling, why we’re feeling it, and how those feelings ultimately relate to the most important relationship of all – the one we have with ourselves.

Healer and author Don Miguel Ruiz offers that everything we feel and experience has a root in either fear or love. Jealousy and mistrust come from the fear part of you. Now, while these emotions may seem to surge during certain parts of your cycle, they have a life inside of you before that time of the month. I would examine under a very thick lens your feelings about your boyfriend, and how you truly feel about yourself in your relationship.

Ultimately in this situation a gyno or psychiatrist will be the best of judge of whether meds, birth control or hormone therapy would be suited to help quell Aunt Flo. Lots of women experience what you’re describing and many times they are thankful for modern medicine to achieve what meditation simply cannot. So make an appointment to talk to someone who can best evaluate on a more medical level what your options are.

Also, I would also consider not living with your boyfriend. Because roommates are damn annoying whether you’re screwing them or not. Cheers.

I moved to Hawaii a little over two years ago. While I love it here, I can’t help but feel trapped. I’m in my early twenties and I feel like with the expense of living here, I’m not able to travel as much as I’d like. I also feel like I haven’t planted roots here and it’s very unsettling. I don’t think this is for me and think there are other places I need to let shape me but I don’t want to feel like I’m giving up… what’s your advice? – Anonymous

Dear Not-So-Sunny,

Okay, so I can only feel but so sorry for you… Hawaii?! I hope you typed that from under a palm tree with a frozen coconut mojito melting by your side. I guess that’s the issue, huh? Life in Hawaii is expected to be nothing but perfect, isn’t it? But how fitting that you are feeling this way – in a tropical haven that is sunny one moment and then suddenly pouring down rain.

I can certainly relate to you beach bum. From one “lucky girl” to another, I understand when things aren’t always as sunny as they seem on the surface. I understand how difficult it is to navigate a situation that everyone is telling you is so perfect, when ultimately you feel unfulfilled. Sometimes a girl needs more than a three-story loft and Louboutins.

Sometimes she needs purpose. Most times she needs meaning.

It sounds like you may have moved to Hawaii with an image in your head of what your life should be like. The Pinterest board in your mind was pinned with little notions you’ve picked up while attempting to piece together the moodboard of your life, and, much like most Pinterest creations, it didn’t turn out to look like the picture.

This is another place where I can say, girl, I feel you. I moved from Pittsburgh to Philly for college with a grand idea of how my life would be, booked it straight to LA after graduation with another pretty little picture tucked in my pocket, and split for NY after only a summer, and… well can you guess how I’ve felt the entire time? Pretty “unsettled” as you put it. None of those places have felt truly like home. And now even home doesn’t feel like a place I can stay for too long.

But in our twenties should we be comfortable? Should we feel settled?

Darling, to that I would say hell-fucking-no. If you find yourself someplace in the world where you are so warm and cosy and comfortable and settled then you’re on the fast track to dying because baby once you feel settled you stop growing. Once you are settled your trajectory moves in the opposite direction of forward. You recede, you slow, you stop. Discomfort is something we welcome in our twenties. Discomfort is our frenemy. Discomfort is like going to the gym, and cutting carbs, and flossing – not fun but necessary for growth and health.

Our twenties are our time of knighthood and exploration. Would it be cheesy for me to say focus not on the destination but the journey? Ah – but journey is what you desire! You want to travel and currently feel “trapped.” Trapped in the same place you feel unsettled for not building roots…

You’ve got yourself caught in a grass skirt of contradictions here. What it sounds like to me is it wouldn’t really matter where in the world you found yourself. These feelings would follow you to the edge of the earth. You are living your life while constantly comparing it to a life you feel you should be living. You are setting yourself up for disappointment, and you are missing all the good stuff.

Fulfilment comes by doing things that are… fulfilling.

What are you doing for work there? Is it a job you feel passionate about? Are there people you work with who inspire you? What are your hobbies? Are you dedicating time to nourishing the creative parts of yourself? Who are the people you surround yourself with? What do they do that they are passionate about? Are they awesome people who are enthusiastic about life or are they listless twenty-something-year-olds scrolling endlessly on social media feeds while complaining about not feeling connected to the world around them? What communities are you involved in? How much giving back have you done in your two years? Volunteering? How have you invested in this community that you want to invest in you?

Think about it like this: Places aren’t going to shape you, you are going to shape places. Navigate this place with the purpose to spin gold where you walk. We often view life as something that happens to us and to which we simply react. Shut that thinking down. Live this life with the vision of how you can move the world around you. A place, a job, a city isn’t going to change your life – you are going to change your life.

And changing your life is as simple and profound as changing your state of mind. Boom.

The most curious thing of all was that X always seemed to write when feeling contrary. 

This bothered her. If there were things to cement in space and time - the space being the white space here, the time being the future of course, when she would look back on the words of her past to read herself like a book - should they not be all the wonderful, marvelous, butterfly-fluttering things she felt about herself some of the times, mostly during the Spring? 

“Perhaps, ah, perhaps I shouldn’t write in winter,” she thought. In winter writing became a thing to produce a bit of heat from kinetic energy. Typing, madly, furiously! to generate some warmth. Everything had to come out, for survival, of course! 

But winter writing always made her a bit blue. She couldn’t shake the feeling of her worst enemy bearing down her back, following on her heels, that large shadow of a beast: Boredom. The sky was darkening a bit around her and she knew it was him, Boredom sneaking in around the edges of her life. 

At least heartbreak was something to dig into. Anger too, anger was fun to play with, see where it would stick, how you could shake it, use it, save a bit of it for a rainy day when you really needed to SHOUT AT THAT CAR THAT SPLASHED YOU, GOD DAMNIT! 

Boredom simply made you mush. Boxed mashed potato mush. Manila folder colored flakes, just add water and…mush! 

*In truth, X loved mashed potatoes. So we’ll need to find another metaphor for this part of story, loves. 

In anycase the big, sexy city of New York was simply there, outside of her window, the backdrop to her story but the story was what? What type of story was she in? She couldn’t tell anymore. Graphic novel, definitely not. For a while it felt like something you’d find taking up a full shelf in the Young Adult section. A series where, like, each cover is a different color and shows only part of the girl’s body, you know? Like her mouth, but she’s wearing a different outfit on each. But at 25 she couldn’t be starring in a YA novel, she gave herself more credit than that. 

There was a week it felt like a romance. The silly little thing took herself to sun drenched beaches with a boy around Christmas time. The holidays and tequila certainly warm one’s heart. Oh, and it would have been the total trashy romance type, a cover of all abs and cleavage. A shard of moonlight illuminating sweaty bodies entangled in the sand. Lots of words like “throbbing” and “swollen” and “gaze” and “yearning.” Potentially even the phrase: “Obeying an instinct she hadn’t known she possessed.” Or better yet: “Love’s sweet lava flowed.” 

In any case here we are back in snowy New York, and the only things flowing are slush down the street, people out of the subway, and piss down the telephone poles. 

So maybe she was in a satire. The world certainly had become something worthy of a good humorous critique. So unbelievable was what was taking place life itself seemed a satire - an absurd mockery of something deranged and unhinged from reality. But in this world would she be writer or subject? Because if she were the subject of a satire that would mean it was she who was the mockery. And with satire generally being a dark genre - a sad, sad mockery she would be. 

No, no that was all wrong. The youngest of six children, X evolved with skin thick enough to bear the brunt of a joke or two, but she took herself a bit too seriously to be trapped in the pages of a satire. Plus, while healthily modest, she [simply] couldn’t see an entire book being filled with a critique of her. 

Truly, the way she viewed her life was through the lilt of poetry. Words cradling all love and fear and hopes in their sinewy formations; stringy and tough and dependable are words. She could always place her dreams there. 

I suppose first X would need to determine two things: Was she writing her own story or was it being written about her? Was she to be featured in first, second or third person? If it weren’t to be in first, who then would be writing it? If she truly wanted the novel of her life to feel as fabulous as she desired, she would first need to find a suitable author.