#21 Asking for permission
who are you feeling for?
Hello everybody!
I’ve been falling off the past couple of weeks because I keep rehashing ideas or thinking something isn’t good enough (or fleshed out enough) for me to write, and as a consequence, for you to read. I think I’m adopting that annoying writer voice where I speak to you as a general you and I’m writing a column á la Carrie (minus the insufferable qualities or maybe just the problematic ones?) Can’t confirm, can’t deny. Today is Tuesday morning, 10:21, and I’m writing to you from London.
LONDON! I haven’t been here since I was fifteen and only then stopped by for three days, bought an Oxford hoodie, and took photos in front of the palace. 26-year-old me is currently avoiding the palace at all costs, isn’t the slightest bit interested in the trek to Oxford, and is a bit impatient with the fact that it takes ages to get through the city. Sprawling, gigantic, massive, a bit confusing, but everything in English(!) in a language I can understand(!) Something I’m definitely not used to. Living in the Netherlands has always been like flexing a mysterious third brain muscle that doesn’t fluently speak Dutch but also isn’t absolutely clueless.
I got here a week ago and even before that, spent a really intense weekend (in a good way but also overwhelming way) celebrating one of my friend’s upcoming wedding. It wasn’t the kind of bachelorette party filled with phallic paraphernalia or too much drinking. It was a weekend of celebrating female friendship, vulnerability, and community. I took a train to London the day after landing in Amsterdam and here I was, in a (did I already say sprawling? massive? gigantic?) city, ranking #3 in the biggest cities in the world. I think you can tell how wildly unprepared I was to be confronted with so much space. It’s not necessarily crowded, and buses are usually on time. But it’s definitely a change of scenery from the woods of Lithuania, bright Sun on our faces, barefoot on the grass. And it’s a far cry from Amsterdam, feeling quaint and walkable and small while we took a boat ride on a sunny May afternoon.
This is all to say, it’s been busy. Hella busy. And I tend to dive into these things headfirst, decide that I’ll process everything that’s been happening later. And for these kinds of things —beautiful weekends, celebrating friendship, taking in a new (fucking massive) city— it works quite well. Experiences and feelings are things I usually store in myself and try to be present for, ready to unfurl them over the carpet one night as I sit, music in the background, or while I cook something to eat, or while I’m showering. Unfurling happens gradually for me, and then I pinpoint the feelings behind it all, come back to it later.
This isn’t the case for “difficult” feelings. Or, more like, feelings I decide at some point are inconvenient to feel.
A couple of days ago, the friends I am house-sitting for got up around 5 a.m. for their early flight home —they’ll go to Venezuela, all sprawling hills and mountains and forest, all transparent water, hot sand and ancestry— and I am taking their place, for a little bit, in a London apartment building. I’ve ordered around 3 books and plan to buy a couple more, carry one of them at all times in case I need to wait for the bus or the tube or sit somewhere for a while. Except when I wake up on Saturday, my friends gone, I feel a sudden, sort of violent pang of loneliness. Hadn’t I been looking forward to this? Being on my own again in a new place, walking, thinking? Unfurling?
I was expecting things to unfurl a certain way in front of me on Saturday night. I get home after walking for a while and deciding to take the bus home instead. I just suddenly needed to be inside and sulk after walking through Camden Market and sitting at the top of Primrose Hill, the skyline wide and blue before me. The weather’s been amazing, except for maybe this morning. 10:39. It's fairly cold and I’m deciding what sweater to borrow from Bea’s closet.
Anyway. Saturday night: I decide to cook dinner at home and play A Cinderella Story (Hilary Duff’s version, obviously) and gave little me something comforting to sit with. It kind of worked but it also kind of didn’t.
I was a bit all over the place and felt the urge to cry, so I did. And then I noticed I wasn’t crying over a person or something not panning out like I thought it would, but more out of grief for not having let myself sit with my feelings back then. And I ask myself why, if they’re not going anywhere (the feelings), if they’re always making their way back, demanding to sit there with you, even when you think it’s not the right time or too much or inconvenient.
I notice my thing isn’t really repressing them for the sake of wishing them to pass, but more that I’ve been asking for permission to feel my feelings this whole time. That’s what I’m grieving. That’s what I’m tearing up about. Whenever I asked for advice, especially in my dating life, or shared something I wasn’t sure I had a “right” to feel too strongly about (whatever the fuck that means), what I was really asking for was permission.
Is this okay to feel? Is it a disproportionate reaction? Will you disapprove of me if I feel this way? How should I feel about it?
Little self-betrayals happen all the time. I’m aware of that. And we live in a world with people, friends we love, advice we ask, try to make things make sense. All these things are fine. It’s a relief to feel heard, even more special to feel understood, but it should never be up to someone else to give me permission to feel how I feel. I was looking for signals that I wasn’t too much or that I was right to feel a certain way, that I was allowed to. Like I needed to know it was okay, that it would be reasonable I feel a certain way. I think now it’s definitely possible in trying to understand things, I also over-intellectualize them, and sometimes you just have to sit there and feel it. Just be there, holding your own hand, instead.
Part of getting a little bit older has been noticing that self-gaslighting is also a huge thing (lol). Which is why feelings from half a year ago were resurfacing now, sitting on the couch in a foreign, big city and nothing but myself to look at and pick at. I made myself believe those feelings didn’t really mean as much as they did because I didn’t have the “proof” (permission) to feel them. It didn’t last that long, it didn’t go that far, they didn’t give me signs that they were going to stick it out for something deeper than it was. I rationalized it’s just how things work (or don’t work) and I wanted to be the cool girl, I wanted to be okay with everything, even if that meant being ghosted the second I flew to visit my mom or going from minute-long voice notes, sent back and forth like a game of telephone, to absolute silence.
It wasn’t that deep, I thought. It’s just a little blip, just a month, you’re somewhere else now, he owes you nothing. Be as cool as possible, don’t even think about it, be in the present instead, etc. And it did work for a little bit, to be reminded of how huge the world is, but not long enough to make it seem like it didn’t hurt my feelings. Or like it didn’t make my anxiety climb, climb, climb over me until I would reread parts of messages from only a week earlier, trying to convince myself I was overreacting, that even in the silence, everything would be fine.
Sitting on the couch on Saturday I grieved for the person who was trying so hard to be cool and unaffected and detached. I grieved for the person who didn’t really know how much she felt until she was met with absolute silence the second she left Amsterdam. I grieved for the person who asked her friends for advice and tried to rationalize that someone unreliable, chaotic, so busy, surely was just forgetting to reply (when I knew that wasn’t the whole story, but it would explain things, make me not feel disrespected). It was pretty brutal, how I boxed myself in and forced myself into the ghost of a cool detached girl who doesn’t really care. It wasn’t going to pan out well, but I tried anyway. I grieved her.
I felt tiny on Saturday and I played the movie and I ate my food and I went to bed.
Today I grab the world by the throat and I promise myself one thing: to never make my feelings too much or too big to feel, ever again. It’s too costly a self-betrayal. It makes me feel small. It makes me feel ignored by my own self. It makes my feelings feel up for discussion, for dissection, for approval. As if there’s a guidepost to where they should go, as if I could contain them and pretend they’re not there just because they exist. Self-betrayals like that lead to forced numbness in the name of practicality, but it sacrifices my sensitivity. And my sensitivity —the thing that my friends love me for, the thing that connects me to the rest of my life, to the world— is too big of a price to pay. I can’t hide from myself. (You can’t hide from yourself).
I think I’ve gone somewhere new with the want want thinking —if you like it you like it, if you want it you want it— to accepting I can just sit with the desire of wanting, be there with it, instead of jumping to all the ways it seems inconvenient too. Or convince myself I shouldn’t want at all, because I didn’t feel allowed to (in this case, reciprocity), or that I had permission to. I can just want what I want. Let the desire for it sit in my stomach and be there for it. Like everything else that’s not fed, it’ll pass.
And there I am, there it is, the world in my hands again.
