"Love will not heal me, but it will hold my hand if I ever heal myself, and maybe teach me a joke that I can stay alive long enough to laugh at...
I love you, enough to want to love myself too."
- 'Healing' by Nayo Jones
(Art by Rana Mehanny @_rourri 2021)
I’m tired of being asked if I’m okay when they’re not ready to hold me. I’m exhausted of witnessing work even as I refuse to work. I’m tired of surviving in bliss, working on myself and relationships only while watching the world progress not enough to process. I feel as if no one knows me enough to love me, or if someone actually know me they wouldn’t love me. I am deeply afraid of myself even if I choose love every time. We joke and justify me crying, sleeping, peeing, and even talking gibberish in public as dramatics and performance art but for me, the real and more difficult performance is social functionality… I hate myself and I’m scared of being a liar if I live. I hate myself, and I hate how it feels that everyone will be too tired to grieve for a girl that never felt enough. I want to love enough to want to love myself too. I want to love enough to want to live too. I want to love, enough to live… I want to live, enough for love. I say we don’t know ourselves if we are not afraid of the possibilities we can harm. I say we don’t know how to hold each other yet, so I take another breath and wait, and practice… I still hate myself when being in the world, but I love us becoming of the world.
"We don't yet have a word to make sense of that initial sense of loss: of a body feeling like it doesn't belong to you anymore. sometimes the act of enduring itself becomes too much to bear and you forget how to go on in a world that didn't want you in the first place. how do you mourn something you can still see in the mirror ?"
- Billy Ray-Belcourt: 'An Elegy For Flesh'
What is art and life; what is performance and reality ? What is feeling, but a living process of creative research, thus ego death shall be my deepest art: a performance offering perhaps inspired by all the artists around me with thriving egos. I dare to imagine what we will create if not for ourselves. How will we create if not for ourselves ? Will we even create if not for us ? Why create if not for us all ?
Sometimes I’m scared that I get too tired of life in this world that I forget the love of this world. I’m scared that I get too tired that I won’t feel enough for the world. I’m scared, of how artists create without actually feeling or questioning themselves through this world... I think of how unlovable I feel when I’m tired, when I cry, when I’m uninspired and when I question. I think of how unequipped we are to hold each other, even when we say we love, we don’t care enough to not prioritize ourselves. And I’m sure it’s violent also how I demand for ego death but I feel no way else of how to survive… Perhaps I don’t need to survive when the world is obsessed with becoming through survival instead of being beyond survival. Perhaps we’re not ready for the love we want to choose yet...
We wait until our loved ones die to read their words, to learn about their dreams, and to wonder of their potentials. We wait until our friends or family to estrange to finally remember, to regret, and to dare return to ourselves; we wait until our lovers to leave to then love ourselves… Why do we wait to show the care that we feel and deserve ? Why do we wait on the heart-fulfilling work that is needed and truly fruitful to soul ? Why do we wait on choosing love ?
"I want to live in love and believe in love. If I have to die, I want to die in love. This whole world might be coming to its end, or it might be in the midst of an enormous and terrifying change that leads to something better. Either way, I want to go through it in love with the people I love... So this is [...] about love. This is [...] about revolutionary love. Love that might not save us at the end of the world but that might make it possible to live through. It may be hard to believe in. It will be harder to live. I hope we choose it anyway."
- Kai Cheng Thom (2019)
Let us choose love, not only to love or be loved, but to become love. May we embody the love that is deeply rooted in the possibilities of solidarity and healing. Let us grow and give flowers to all in regardless of worth or worse as being alive is the most gracious gift itself. And may we learn that loving life means to embrace grief also, let us believe in the life that blossom even in death and decay…