Sparks Fly

I am who I am who I am

She instigated a flutter of back-and-forth between us yesterday. An emoji ladden ‘thank you’ for thinking of her, for delivering a treat I retrieved from a sweets shop at such a thought when last we met. She enjoyed it… thinking of her enjoying it sent my mind’s eye into a movie-worthy montage of her teeth
breaking the shell of the pink raspberry macaron;
of her lips,
grazing gently upon the crumbling edges;
her tongue, tasting the layered textures, wrapping
around their flavor as they meander upon her pallet;
her sensations, sparks running from her mouth
to her brain
to her…

My thumbs fumble to find the line between flirting with levity and worshiping in brevity. We’ve been playing at this tension for over a year. There’s no rush in its unfolding.

Without having yet breached the doorway of directness, we stay dipped in the nuance of the basking, of the juice from the mere existence of it–of an electric connection. Steeping in the gentle awareness that something is here, acknowledging it via subtle intrigues, our energetically laden tête-à-têtes eat like an egg bagel with extra cream cheese.

I’ve found a new game to play with myself–to find pause and
redirection before the fuqboi poetry that
bleeds so readily into
my mind when
I’m with her
tumbles
forth.

“…How was your day, in a type of foliage?” I ask.

“…I am feeling
like the big potted plant
we just moved from one corner
of the room to the other…trying to get
used to things shifting and seeing how much
space I have to do so, but also really grateful to be
inside and to have such a comforting home environment.

How about you?”

I love how thoughtfully she considers my obscure questions. How she readily plays peas-in-a-pod to my particularly sideways approaches to conversation.

“Mmm that's a lovingly buoyant framing. I dig it. No pun intended!”
(I am deeply not entertained by intentional puns.)
(Whenever I avoid my said fuqboi tendencies, I come across a total goon–replacing come-ons with nerd-behavior.

It’s cringe,

but at least it isn’t crossing a line.)

I sit on my carpeted staircase and take a breath.

How has my day been?

“My day is akin to...the finger-sized, crunchy, dried branches
laying on the ground in my backyard—piling
up under dappled shade. There's some light,
both fleeting and consistent at the same time.
The fragility is real and potential for kindling high.”

“Aww… So evocative. I can see/feel them so clearly…”

My eyes are still puffy from all the crying I’d just been up to over the phone with my brother, who is back in Hawai’i. Crumbling under the weight of my consistently poor mental health, I am deciding to jump through necessary hoops in health insurance and financial aid applications to acquire psychiatric care to get back on medication.

I let my tears fall with him; he holds space for me as my breath heaves, terrified of these feelings of failure, terrified of my own need to please my other brother and my birth father. Pleasing them by successfully figuring out how to live without medication. But I can’t, I can’t. I’ve tried… Oh, I have tried, and I just can’t live up to their beliefs about how the body and world work. Up to even my own.

I will never be a shining example. A bit of leverage, another feather in the cap of confirmation bias to exalt the part of the puzzle that is: diet, exercise, and lifestyle, and ultimately choice.

I can’t do this day-to-day thing alone–without regular support from a psych department and medication. Well, I could, but I’d be miserable. My misery has become my posture; it holds me up and conducts the manner in which I take up space.

Frankly–it just won’t do.

It’s been about a year and a half since I began this particularly unmedicated approach to living. I feel like a failure to be this depressed and hopeless with everything I have, but I know that this life can be experienced differently. I remember that to be true.

A part of me also thinks: well, this is who I am and thus the experience I need to work with…
BUT I cannot waste my time here being this hopeless.

No matter how much disdain I carry for the health care system, the pharm farm, and the matrix that runs us all so dry…

Knowing things are fucked doesn’t omit you from their fuckery.

We cannot escape the entirety of this holistic system we are a part of, no matter how much sunlight we catch or grass-fed organ meat we feed on. No matter how aligned our lifestyle is with our values around health. No matter how much gratitude and forgiveness and ho’oponopono we practice.

I can more easily rationalize that I should be Okay with all the work I’ve done than I can rationalize a decided reliance on medication for a lifetime. But… I am not, Okay, that is. And I have to own that truth. I’d like to experience all this belief I’ve absorbed that I should be able to control my outcomes better by being so clean and calculated about my inputs, but frankly… I am not. I am not okay. I am not going to be an anecdotal tale of success in overcoming mental health issues via a holistic approach.

Unmedicated: Even when I am functional–which is being at my best–I am without true joy or any compass towards it. My best is just existing, and it is not a state I can reasonably sustain nor from which I could ever live in accord with my values.

My work as an artist and as a teacher calls upon my values of passion. Of love and of joy. It makes this significant and long-term departure I’ve experienced from this list here’s parade of existence within me impossible to ignore.

So I am doing it. I am giving up.

I am giving up on letting my dried-out state of being
lay in wait, as kindling for a foot to trample upon, to
break into bits and grind into dust as they dance for the
mill of the matrix. I am gathering it now–my fragility–the pieces of me
so brittle they crack at any pressure caused by lack. And I am building
a fire with intention. A fire for me to thrive in, to warm myself in, to accept
help from, and to finally, hopefully, feel joy again in.

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“…Mm. Thanks for asking :)
I wonder what sort of fire
I shall build... this newfound
intentionality feels... better.”

“Yeaaahhhh. Glad it feels better”

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A hui ho,

Julia