your new life will cost you your old one

or, forging a new life will cost me letting go of every set-in-stone thing i think i am

summer is a season that, like clockwork, i wish would last longer. if only for a few extra hours — even when it’s one i have very few memories from. i think it should be custom for summer to end only when the sky is clear enough to see the sun sink at every stage and be swallowed in colour. something bright and triumphant.

the first rain of september feels like its washed away the memory of every sunset i’ve experienced up to now. some sort of seasonal object permanence, or emotional tie to the season that makes it feel like i’m losing myself everytime summer ends.

i’m reaching for the words to say that this was a good summer, that it was worthwhile, and instead i’m pulling fistfuls of rainwater out from the ground, it dribbles through my fingertips and follows the same pattern as my veins. me being alive and nature being alive share the same consistency, but how i wish i could share nature’s resilient way of continuing.

instead of continuing, i dig my heels into a life that has already slipped away. i’m tired of chasing it. how do you stop looking for something that can’t be replicated? when i’m most crazed by the monotony and routine of my life, i want a shock to the system, for my life to be completely broken down and destroyed. i want to feel ruin and then build myself again from square one. i want to see myself with no predetermined view of myself or idea of who i am. complete reinvention as a way of escapism.

how much can you change about yourself before you’re unrecognisable to everyone who loves you though? could i really change everything about myself and still be the same person to them?

i don’t want to crave my life being uprooted and ruined anymore.

so i’m trying to create change instead of waiting for it. i’m trying to be a vulnerable person again, someone who proclaims and feels deeply without a second thought. when did i start thinking so much, questioning myself so much? when we was the last time i expressed something without explaining it?

i have this horrible fear of being seen in the way i don’t want. i want to smash every mirror held up to me and replace them with frozen images that encapsulate the me i want to be seen as. a person’s nuance is regularly lost on us all — everyone’s lives as full of depth as our own. i forget my own nuance by this erasure of my fluidity, i think. i want so much to be a static, set-in-stone thing. like a sim, i want all my traits, wants and aspirations laid out in front of me like instructions.

i fear my own free will and it’s a leash i’ve tugged on since childhood. who would i be, given the chance?

recently, i’m trying to believe that nothing is ever that serious, that reinvention is unnecessary and i can simply just be. but that’s really hard to internalise when all you’ve ever done is spin meaning out of everything that has happened to you, all to make it mean something. because if being a lonely child didn’t make me a sympathetic and heart-centric person in the face of adversity then why am i those things?

i have to give reasons for all my traits, almost as if to justify and give proof for the fact that i am these things, e.g. i think i’m kind because of [anecdote], i’m an emotional person because of [childhood memory], i’m creative because [my art got put in an exhibition once], i have high standards because [i want my art to meaningful enough to be in an exhibition again] etc.

no trait of mine has ever gone unexplained, always accounted for and asking between the lines for someone else to confirm who i am because i don’t trust my own judgement of myself enough. i learnt the term unreliable narrator and chose to believe all the good things about myself came from my own bias.

because how can it be that my personality just is without my input, without me giving reason to my personality traits existing, how do i know those traits are really apart of me? there’s been so many times i’ve cried into my hands and the girl in the mirror cried back, but she didn’t feel like me. times where i felt fully separated from who i am and fully estranged from what i want to be. because if “nothing is ever that serious,” then how do i know what things are important enough to hold onto and consider these important parts of me?

i don’t really know who i am and that’s the scariest thing i could ever admit to myself as someone who wants so much but never knows what’s true about myself. self discovery is something we’re doing since childhood, favourite colours and foods and what concepts we’re quick to grasp in school that we’ll be told we’re “naturally talented” in and told to frame ourselves around.

i went by unnoticed a lot of the time. i was othered to the point i felt as if i was a black hole no one wanted to get close to, isolation in the shape of a little girl.

i played shop in my tiny bedroom and played with the new boy at school that everyone else ran from because he liked my little pony, i cried before assembly when i didn’t get to take home the world war II history poster i drew because my project partner took it despite doing less of work, i felt a lot and talked very little. i don’t have many memorable experiences outside of these. it’s not enough to form a sense of self from, is it?

i don’t think anyone saw me, really saw me, until college. now it’s been a year since i graduated and i don’t know if i’ll ever be a thought on anyone’s mind unless i’m the one who thinks of them first. i think a lot about the fiona apple quote where she talks about being a sad little boring thing. nothing has ever resonated stronger as someone who feels like they’ve never had any substance, any stories or anecdotes, interests or anything worth mentioning to another person.

we all have these pillars that make up who we are, i think — i like to think mine are heavily focused around breaking the cycle, going further, being more than what i felt was ever planned for me, exploration outside of my hometown and bedroom, finding love in forms i was never privy to experiencing in childhood, romance and friendship and true, vulnerable and heartfelt bonding. i chase these things, but unfortunately they’re goals that can be hard to achieve when they’re so vague and idyllic.

they all share the same sentiment though: getting out and getting more out of life than what i’ve been dealt.

so maybe the life i want to create, where i’m free and creating independence, finding opportunity and creativity, being fully submerged in love and emotion, open to newness and welcoming of change, maybe this life will cost me letting go of the past. it isn’t coming back and neither is the version of me i was back then. i’m trying to treat this as the best fact there is, the fact that i get to grow up beyond that and reach for more than just a summer from years ago — that summer was not my grave and i will not stay in this hole.

i have to climb out and make my own life, it all starts with me and this messy heart of multitudes that is learning to live without explaining the why or how.

from the warmth,

char ♡

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thanks for reading!

this entry’s song recommendation: you love me by kimya dawson