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essays tagged with {connection 🌹} are short snippet pieces about my actual thoughts and my actual life, before they become teachings or analysis. they’re for connection. just like it says on the tin. so glad you’re here. love you.
I want to reach back in time, through the threads of love and heartache and torn-open wounds to the Self I was when I was 19. I think of that Self often these days. of course she planted the first stones on the path I walk now. endless gratitude, et cetera. so much rage too at all she accepted, at all the ways she undervalued herself and her time and her body. all the ways those stories of unworthiness and shame became a part of the tapestry that is my ever-evolving soul.
I want to reach back through time and tell her that the love of her life is not the man she finds herself using gentle parenting techniques with on a daily basis. that in fact she need not be the mantle for his growth, his development, his maturity. that the hurt and humiliation and violence she is enduring is not character building, it is not a wound to be tended, or a shadow to be integrated. it is abuse and it need not be glamorised.
I want to reach back and tell her about the chilly Tuesday afternoon in her future, where she’ll find herself living in a cottage with a mountain view and a truck-stop-sized village and a dog and a lover-man who delights in her comfort, her safety, her joy. not because of who it makes him, or the way his own character is fortified by it, but simply because he sees her as fully human, and fully worthy of the same joy and comfort as he is. oh, what would she say! I don’t think the Self I was when I was 19 ever really thought it was possible to be seen as fully human by a lover. I don’t know if she even saw herself as fully human. a series of cardboard cutouts maybe, all lined up so that they become human shaped all pressed together, but a high wind or a volatile yell sends them fluttering to the ground. not yet a person. not even fully alive. a convincing performance of humanity, of vulnerability, love, loss, aliveness, personhood… but never quite meeting the eyes.
I'd tell her about the totally unremarkable Tuesday afternoon when apropos of nothing, the lover she’d eventually choose would start vacuuming and mopping the floors. not as a performance, not for accolades or winning points in a game no one else is really playing, but because it’s what you do when you live somewhere. I'd tell her about offering to help, because even after all those years of being doted on as a loved and venerated equal, there’s still a part of her that wants to believe that love can be won with labour, and labour not done is love not given. it’s that part of her that the Self I was when I was 19 would recognise most easily, I think. she still has that part too.
I’d tell her that he said you sit down, love, you’ve got enough on today when she asked to help. and that in the intervening years since she lived, there really was an emotional infrastructure in place that let her receive that. feel it. exhale into it.
I want to reach back in time and tell the Self I was when I was 19 that actually, a good fuck is supposed to make her feel good! not look good. not behave good. not be seen as good. but feel good. it’s supposed to feel like a prayer of thanks to Aliveness itself, where suddenly the fact that bodies exist at all makes sense. it’s supposed to make the sun feel like feather-soft fingertips on skin, and the breeze to enter lungs like the caress of silk.
it’s no wonder end-stage empire is so terrified of well fucked femmes! to be well fucked is to feel deeply that your body belongs to you. because you have to animate your body fully to be fucked well. you can’t evacuate it, or shame it, or dissect it with your mind. you have to breathe it and live it. then it becomes a body that situates itself in context. instincts long-abandoned start awakening and they hum, they hum with the rage and the indignity of how much has been lost, and the grief of that won’t be pushed away or numbed anymore. it demands to be felt.
I'd reach back to the Self I was when I was 19 and I’d tell her that being well fucked is her birthright, and her ministry, because the feminism she thinks she is living now is a pale shadow of the ancestral, ancient, all-bodied wrath that being well fucked will awaken her into.
I know too about the immutability of timing (I have met Saturn, after all), and a story of pain passed is an easy one to write over and nitpick, pointing back into openings that seem so obvious now. openings where the reclamation you now live could have taken root a year sooner. a decade.
beloved reader! hear me please! timing is so urgent! your recovery could not have happened a single moment before it did. hindsight is a weapon in a shaming mind. please dis-arm yourself. I imagine now, reaching back to the Self I was when I was 19, that the love and the delight I experience now was extended to her. it wouldn’t only be a case of she can’t hold it, even though she obviously cannot hold it. her shame and self loathing was such that if love arrived, if it truly arrived, she would have crucified herself in snarling spirals of unworthiness and undeserving. every breath love took would be torture, because even as it moved through her unwilling body, she would curse it and doubt it and use it as evidence of her own inadequacy. not me, she’d say. something terrible is going to happen now. this is so much more than I deserve that the retribution will destroy me entirely. if it doesn’t, I will destroy myself to restore the balance.
which is to say that it’s never a case of you’ve finally done the work, you can hold it now, you deserve it now, you’ve “earned” your recovery… it’s more that if the ecstasy of it all came even a moment sooner than it did, it would have caused you harm.
may we all be well fucked because it means liberation, but only when it wouldn’t harm us to experience that kind of joy.
love you so much.
love to the Self you were when you were 19 too.
cheering for your creative and liberatory becoming, always.
Leila xx
PS, grown up Gifted Kids & parentified eldest daughters working in helping professions who didn’t realise you were neurodivergent til adulthood and are now desperately trying to align your own ongoing awakening from colonial patriarchy with the liberation of all while also attempting to reclaim some of the joy, love, creativity, and tenderness you never got to experience as a kid because your mum had Stuff™️… REWILDING is for you.
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