EMBRACE THE VOID!

EMBRACE THE VOID!

loneliness is an old friend of mine. i used to walk round and round during playtime. even when i had friends, talk to myself, write scripts and novels that would never get to be anywhere but in my head. vampires and dog detectives and dogs in heaven. dogs everywhere, to be honest. and my teachers would write “Léa, a very smart and sensitive pupil but constantly on the moon. Head in the clouds.” here i was, loneliness in my bones, carrying secrets in my lunchbox. i remember too much and not enough about my childhood and i guess it doesn’t matter. but to me, loneliness started there. unspoken sadness too. and above all, violence. violence as the leading force of my childhood days. and with violence, came silence

Anne Shirley & Diana Barry from Anne with an E / seven by Taylor Swift

unlike many friends and people i got to speak to, i didn’t show any sign of depression early in life. i was a shy, somehow peculiar kid. but i was joyful, hopeful, smiling as i walked, happy to go to school; i was safer there and i guess to be liked by adults quite easily was nice, felt warm. to me proper sadness started when i was fifteen. high school was nothing i was prepared for. home was a war zone. it always had been. but now, i wasn’t really liked by adults. and i was even less liked by people my age. i was just…strange? sometimes in a decently cool way. but never in the way that made people like you. i was a mess of bleached hair and black clothes and clumsily disguised shyness. i figured it was easier to be no one else at all. a shell where everyone could project whatever they wanted. unkindness or indifference. antipathy or idleness. all i wanted was to survive those three years.

Gather Me, Glory Edim

and then, i was seventeen. i wanted to be good. i wanted to do good. i would walk for miles on end, nothing but water to get me through cities. i lost weight. enough for people to notice my eyes. nothing had changed and yet, everything had. i bought into it. i was going to be myself. finally. but a better, new version of myself. one that people could like and love. i spent the next year walking and writing. poems every day. and when my life fell apart, when people i loved made me realise there was no such thing as a perfect reality, only a very typical human nature of wanting to have the upper hand, be loved, be wanted, be on top. when my life fell apart, i kept on walking and writing. and made a friend out of loneliness. i figured that loneliness and i, we were bonded for life. i pictured loneliness as a real entity that sat next to me on my favoured bench. that followed me on my walks. watched other people talk in bars, and parks, right there with me. loneliness became my very own best friend before my best friend left.

yours truly, my last day of high school

with my best friend, we used to sit on the stairs in front of a small castle. God, that was my favourite place on Earth. still is. i came back since then. rain or shine, as they say. i would travel for a total of six hours sometimes in a single day, just so i could be there. my best friend has moved. her family too. i don’t think she ever comes back to this place and reminisce. but it didn’t matter to me when i went back the first time. none of the times after that. this was our spot. and i still love it the way i did when i was seventeen. ten years in, i still love this place like the very first night. with wonder and a sense of innocence. i will never be sixteen with my best friend again. but somehow, i get to keep this place. and i get to keep loneliness next to me.

my best friend at the time, taking a picture of me while i was taking a picture (yes it’s a milkshake case for my iPod)

our spot

eventually, Edward Hopper became my favourite artist. strange character, very taciturn and quite sexist. but i love his paintings in a way i have never loved anything before or after. his art depicts loneliness and the space it holds in a way i could never dream to achieve in mine. loneliness is a character in most of his paintings. the main character. i loved that. loneliness in cities. in bright sunny mornings. in empty streets. on boats. loneliness everywhere. i felt a kind of relief. other people saw it too. writers, artists, they had written about it, created with loneliness next to them, as well. loneliness was not just my best friend. it was a timeless entity that belonged to everyone and morphed to fit us.

Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning (1950)

when i was twenty one, that was the worst of it. i barely remember this year. i remember a void. a growing, terrifying void. i have never been very good at asking for help. to this day, i am terrible at it. i don’t know how to speak of my troubles. and most importantly, i struggle to find any meaning in it. anything interesting about it. i always rejected sadness like a disease. i would repress it. i would repress everything. and as i opened up, unveiled what i felt, i would be told it wasn’t the right way to do it. i was too sensitive or too cold, too kind or too distance. too much of this and not enough of that. it is very hard to know who you are and stand your grounds. i am still learning. but if you are like me, you know one thing, the world does not stop for you and all the people that kept you in a tiny, little box do not either. do not hold onto a version of yourself. there’s no good in that. i am still learning that too.

Lily James as Ella, in Cinderella (2015) dir. Kenneth Branagh

now, on the threshold of twenty seven, i dare say; embrace the void. no, embrace your void. embrace your sadness. and your loneliness. and your fucked up-ness. everything that makes you sink and sink until there is no more air. embrace it. i used to think of good and bad things and feelings. hope, love, joy; they were all good. sadness, pain, silence; they were all bad. and loneliness was in the middle. nor good nor bad. a middle ground. now, i know that hope is there because sadness is. because pain is. because silence is. we are hopeful because we know all of those things exist, we know we will be in pain again. we know sadness is just a step away. even when we are overwhelmed with joy. i am hopeful because i know i am in pain and will be in pain again. i choose to embrace my void. i choose to remain kind and hopeful. i choose to be good. not because i aspire to be seen as good, to be liked, to be loved. but because it is my void and i chose to do something good with it. in my void, there is hope. and there is hope in yours too.

all my love, always

your friend in loneliness, lea