#1: Cyrano de Bergerac & 2023
about the previous versions of me ft. flirting with possibility in 2023
That’s a wrap, bitch!
What a weird little fucking year. So confusing. I keep reaching versions of myself I know I’m becoming in such funny ways. I’ve been thinking about how good it’s been to let my mind wander and rest and do nothing for the past few days. It makes me feel so at peace. I haven’t got much energy lately, I think I’ve just been resting a bit restlessly — feeling like there’s all this movement just right around the corner, just right around the block — I'm sleeping in as much as I’m allowing myself, which is a lot. That's what the in-between years week is for.
I’ve been dreaming about a guy I was seeing a little while back the past few weeks. I notice a difference from last time I was feeling this way about someone. It’s my brain’s way to process everything, a connection I’d wished had gone on for longer. I think my brain is just trying to give me what I want: a memory his face, how I'd feel with him, and this time, I’m not devastated by it. Frustrated, yes, sad, maybe a bit of that too. But I’m not as wistful and as tragic as I’ve been before. I take that as a good sign.
Maybe I am learning the art of detachment, to just let go without asking for anything more. I struggled with that a lot last winter, and maybe this is a sign of how much I’ve grown. The person showing up today is so different from the person last year, struggling so much with accepting the reality of something she wished was different. I think I should maybe take a moment for that; to accept that in the daily ebbs and flows of the past years, I’ve been arriving at a version of myself I’ve always known existed — someone who’s trying to be softhearted and kind in ways that the world around her doesn’t always reward — in this case, with reciprocated feelings.
But it’s also not about the reward. I can easily see now, how loving myself was sometimes a selfish game. How I thought loving myself would inch me closer to the reward of a loving relationship, someone to rest my tired bones with, someone who’d remember my favorite breakfast and laugh with me, and forget about time in a bedroom with. But the truth is that we’re all deeply flawed, and I will always have some of those right here in my pocket. There will always be things about me I don’t exactly love; things that make me cringe a bit about myself or that I think I could be better at, things I think might look nicer if I just polished them up a bit, if I just healed them, if I just… you see what I mean?
Without even really knowing it, I’ve been trying to primp myself and become a perfect version of me that could be deserving of love. I was telling myself, in other words, that the me that exists today isn’t deserving of that love, not as long as there’s those pesky flaws and shadows cast along myself, those little things, habits, even bigger things that aren’t clean-cut and perfect-looking, so shiny they reflect on my perfect lover. Emotional unavailability disguised in impossible expectations. If I never met my own expectations of what being healed or beautiful meant, then how could I ever let someone really love me?
And yet, loving people is one of the easiest things I know how to do. It’s one of the things I think I was born to do out of any other singular thing. My heart lives outside of my body. I carry it everywhere and it’s always about to burst. I’m always all tragedy and drama when it’s close to ripping apart, and I have the gall to think no one is noticing it. It makes me laugh now, the ways that I’ve lied to myself about the weird exuberance I love with. As if it’s not in my eyes when I laugh or in the way I hug a friend hello. It’s something so big and massive and sensitive that maybe this is why I’ve held out from being loved properly for so long.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the modern dating plague of our days, our time’s ultimate challenge, that annoying little thing that people hate to love or love to hate, or just opt out of and then become evangelists of later, anyway; dating apps. And I do really think they’re a bit of a plague, but just because they’re this massive mirror we’ve held up to ourselves, just like we’ve done with any other piece of technology we’ve ever created. The reflection isn’t pretty.
We have the same problems we’ve been having since the dawn of time - a million manifestations of fear, a million ways in which we artfully hide from each other. Cyrano de Bergerac. Pride and Prejudice. Even Romeo & Juliet. Filled with artifice and drama and tragedy and yes, of course, pride. They’ve all been there for a very, very long time, and the mirror I’m looking at is only telling me the same story a million times over. There’s so much fear we have of having to focus on one person. The fake sense of protection that comes from thinking we have so many other choices - online, offline, it doesn't matter. The agony of curating a profile to get a sense of who we’re looking for, who we want to attract, a mix of the people we are and, let’s really say the truth: the people we hope other people think we’ll be. Everything is just a bit of a magnified mess.
But of course there’s the upside: meeting people I thought I’d never meet, hearing stories and feeling the hands of someone new, wanting to understand someone’s idiosyncrasies and little quirks and all those fun things we feel deprived of otherwise in the dating landscape of swipes, super likes, digital roses (thanks, Hinge) and thirsty 3 a.m. texts.
None of it is new, none of it exactly earth-shattering. I understand now with a bit ironic clarity, though, that putting myself out there in the digital world made me feel like I was doing everything I could in real life, too; the only way to date is on dating apps these days. Broadcasting my profile meant that I was closing myself off to anything that wasn’t online or funnelled through texts on a screen, prompted by images and short bios promising to entice anyone who seemed like a match. No artifice, no games.
Also makes me laugh, because with dating, there is always some sort of artifice, some sort of game. Not in the toxic, evil, mastermind kind (not always); you just can’t help it. We’re people. We want to look beautiful the morning after, and we want to say the right things, we want to be funny, we want to be witty. Clever. We want to prepare ourselves to be assessed as potential partners, leave a mark, be memorable. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Next year there won’t be anything wrong with it either, except this time I’ll flirt with possibility a bit more often. I’ll think to myself how anything can happen at any given time — at the bar, at the corner café, at the club in the middle of the dance floor, at the grocery store — and it’s not even being wilfully ignorant or sappy or delusional. It’s broadcasting myself, but more so to the possibility of being surprised. Let myself be surprised. And the flaws; well, they're there. Plain as day. Some of them won't budge, some of them might. I've loved and lost many a flawed person and never thought a thing of it. (Easier said than done to reflect that back to myself, we know).
It can be liberating to laugh at the little courtship dances we do around each other, instead of despairing at the seeming impossibility of love. It's a tale as old as time. I'm not that special; it always finds a way, even in the 20 layers of artifice of modern dating times. In the meantime, see ya on the dance floor.
Don’t forget to clink-clink, bitch.