on moving on
I write to you, slathered in moisturiser, string cheese in one hand and knee deep in my summer of unemployment.
My hair is wet against my ratty sleep shirt. I used to hate the cold trickle of water on the back of my neck. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore.
When I started writing this newsletter back in January, I had just handed in my letter of resignation. It was cold, it was dark at 7am, and I felt a loss that gnawed at me for the following 4 months.
In these past 5, almost 6 months, I have moved homes, I have done things to make a career switch, and I have written so many words. I gained people, I lost people. I’ve let people go.
And now, I’m looking at my last month of being twenty three.
For the longest time I felt an endless emptiness in my being that I couldn’t fill, no matter how hard I tried. In all fairness, I was too emotionally burnt out and physically exhausted to really try to begin with.
I re-read A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams last week. I had read it when I was 17, in English class. It was a shocking read, then and now. It was grimy and it was tense. As well as I thought I knew the book, seeing it from my current perspective proved it to be an incredibly personal experience.
Back then, I could see the paper lantern. I could smell the heady, heavy scent of Blanche’s hot baths. I felt irritated and disgusted and sad with every character flaw that Williams had written into Blanche’s being.
There were parts that had completely flown over my youthful head though. I wanted to break Mitch’s wrist when he acted like yet another man - I felt Blanche’s disappointment in my chest. The ending was another level of horror, a grim testament to Williams’s time-transcendent insight into cycles of abuse. I hated that I recognised the scene from many others in real life.
And then, the famous line.
Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
“Stop depending on the kindness of strangers, Blanche, you moron.” Is an actual sentence that I have written in my journal entry from a couple of months back.
I had broken up with a boyfriend because I was sad and anxious and seemingly unready for the future. I had felt that I was depending on outside sources of validation and happiness to keep me afloat, when in reality, I was rotting on the inside. I felt that it was fair for him and for myself to end our relationship, so I could just figure out all the sadness and make it go away. (Newsflash, reader, the problem wasn’t that simple.)
The shameful truth is that I had done the exact stereotypical thing that everyone talks about: picturing and grieving a breakup before the breakup happens. (did you communicate with him that you had a problem with x, y and z? no, because i didn’t fucking know it was a problem until after the breakup? my body processed it before my brain did?)
I probably blindsided my then partner. And the guilt ate me up for a long time after. In the following months I processed everything that had happened. I dug into myself to see what had gone wrong.
With every week that passed, I felt a clarity that I had not felt in my period of grief.
I will always feel a twinge of shame when it comes to how things ended.
But I know now that I was, true to my character, a harsh bitch to myself. And I want to rectify that.
I will always want to be in love. It’s an addictive feeling, and I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum. I’ve begged and cried for love and not received it. I’ve also fully been loved the way I needed to be in order to mend what had been broken before.
Both times I had molded myself into the ‘perfect girl’, an image of what befits the person I date. (A rockstar boyfriend? I can be your groupie. A family man? I can be your wife in our white picket fence home.) And it left me an empty shell of a person, with not much energy or heart left to give.
I am sick of it.
I got my nails done for the first time in months. They’re a deep cherry red. My friend says they look like women-seducing villainess nails. She really does have a way with words.
I cut my own hair the other day. I had my mother hide the scissor away for another few months in case I do something really irreversible.
I’m looking at my unworn collection of skirts and dresses with renewed fervour - this summer is already sweltering and the only way to cope with the doom and gloom of a climate crisis is floaty linen and cotton.
Stone fruits are in season. I’ve had a few.
I’ve gone to the aquarium, finally. I went to an art exhibit spontaneously. I’ve gone to the only good Indonesian place in the city, twice. I’ve partied with my girlfriends. I went on a trip with them. I’ve cried and laughed more than ever, and I’ve taken my time and space to figure out what it is that I like for my life.
Time keeps going and life keeps going and I keep moving around, listlessly and purposefully all at once.
Moving on isn’t some kind of grandiose moment. You don’t open your eyes to blinding sunlight and realise, with Clean by Taylor Swift playing in the background, that ‘Oh, I’ve moved on’. (this is fully how I moved on from my first ever boyfriend at age 14 by the way. sometimes it is grandiose, especially when you’re a teenager.)
Moving on is dusting yourself up after tripping in front of a crowd.
It is ordering food for one and getting an extra set of cutlery that you take absolute offense to.
It is sleeping in until 10 am, and texting your best friend about grabbing lunch.
And it’s letting the pangs of sadness and love enter and leave your body, at all times.
P.S: I missed you. I’ve been living life to the fullest but I never stopped thinking about you. I’ll be back more regularly, or at least, I’ll try. Thanks for sticking around.
Till next time,
Kim xx