On Friendship

What constitutes friendship for you? Does it arise from shared experiences? Shared interests? Shared history? Or is there just an indefinable magic at work when people 'click'?

I sometimes think becoming friends with someone can be likened to falling in love. There is an initial attraction. Something draws you to this new person and you find yourself wanting to know more about them, and to be where they are. You find them funny, intelligent, likeable and your face breaks into a natural smile when they sit next to you. How much like falling for someone does that sound? But you're not falling. You have a partner....or they do. You're too alike....or not alike enough. They're gay and you're straight....it could be anything, but for whatever reason, it's not about the potential for sex. It's about the potential for .... what? What IS it about?

This then begs the question - what can opposite orientation friends really ask of one another? What are the expectations in such a relationship and what are the boundaries? What does it mean to love someone, NOT your lover, as wholeheartedly as you do your friend?

On Compliments

Somebody told me I was a remarkable woman today. What makes ME remarkable? I am shallow....sometimes unkind....fickle....demanding...naive... and a harsh critic [particularly of myself!]. But remarkable? I don't think so.

But it made me feel so good that tears came to my eyes. To be told that I impress others, that I stand out in some way, was like having a spotlight shone on me....and it felt great. I want to believe that what I was told IS true.....but just at this moment I feel as though I just don't live up to that label.

One day I will have to realise that if I choose to only see myself through the eyes of other people that I must include the lovely things that are said of me in that constructed identity....not just the negative.

Time once more for a clean slate. But my tabula rasa has never really been completely clean....as there are all these dirty smudges left behind from all the words and images written before. Perhaps in time they won't matter anymore?

On Loneliness

There is a weird energy around me today....it feels like a kind of barrier. Not only am I keeping thoughts, feelings and emotions at bay, but I am holding some bad feelings in with me. What happened to me overnight for me to feel like this today? If I analyse what my body is telling me I can source a feeling of emptiness....a feeling of not belonging. I feel a lack, a sensation of having no home, and no tribe. Like I am the last of my kind....whatever 'my' kind is.....

I am clipped, almost angry with those I love because I fear the pain loving them could cause me. I feel so alone....

When I was a child, I could escape into the wilderness around me for hours at a time....live wholly in my nightmare, but, like a children's adventure/fantasy, tell myself the story of my own rescue before returning to the world. As an adult I must stay in the nightmare, each day putting forward a face of ignorance....staying complicit in my own pain. How I need an escape....a friend.....a place to feel at home.....

I need healing from whatever it is that causes me to do this. I know the symptoms I even know the relief....but I do not yet know the disease.

On Self Help

I bought another self help book today. This one is about making time to write....ironic really, considering that the time I spend reading it could be spent on writing one of my own.

But what could I write? What am I so good at, so knowledgeable about that I could pen a whole tome on it? Shopping? Been done. That's pretty much it, really..... Not that lack of anything interesting to say has deterred most other writers of self help books from doing so. But I can hardly talk, because I keep buying the darn things!

Poem Experiment 2

I perch on the edge
So close to the plummet,
yet
so far from the fall.
What holds me
in tremulous safety?
What defeats this urge
to stumble?

love.
Always love.

Such strength to be found
in such fragile bindings.

Poem Experiment 1

Sadness - deep, inconsolable
unending
constantly remembered
relived
re spun into cords
of binding sorrow -

a cloak of helpless shame
under which my happy self
suffocates and dies.

On Self

Life is a bitch. She is a Mean Girl and she seems to be out to get me. I have been unwell in the last week with a virus, but due to events and behaviours of people around me at the same time, I feel worse than ever. Why? Because I let the beliefs of others prescribe how I regard myself. And the general consensus seems to be that I am shit. At the moment, it seems that loving 'me' is purely a solitary sport, and one that I need some coaching in.

On The Theory Of Happiness

Happiness is much sought yet clearly never found, if all of the books on the subject sold in stores are any testament. People are clearly searching, hoping for that last ingredient to add to their lives but nothing they find, in books, or possessions, or pep talks from their parents seems to be that finishing touch. There is an aura of deep discontent hanging over the heads of almost everybody one meets....why? Why is it that simply being free - free to breathe, to learn, to feel is not enough for us?