I want to know everything so please don’t spare any details. Did you see the sun today..?

I love your nail colours, what inspired you..?

I want to let you know, I love when your hair curls and you’re half asleep to put the kettle on in the morning. I love how you hold yourself to standards built on self love and strength.

Did you know? I think the stars shine for you… I look for signs of you everywhere because you’re always where I want to be.

I love that you wear your activewear when you can’t decide on what outfit for the day.

The way you take care of others and cheer them on is beautiful, please don’t ever change that about you.

Thank you for asking how my day was, and really listening. Same time tomorrow gorgeous?

I genuinely find myself in a predicament (this isn’t new for me) anyway i wanted to write about it. Maybe you too, often find yourself in predicaments.

Ever heard of a sh*t sandwich? It’s where you layout the good, then the bad, then some more good. It’s how I like to view most things, or word them sometimes as it focuses less on the negative and allows for a natural and abundant way of bringing to light the crap but also acknowledging the good that exists, so lets start there.

The good? Well, I survived. I always had a roof over my head growing up, i had beautiful aunties that were always around, and 2 grandmothers that i adored as much as they adored me. I was lucky to have 4 siblings, all older than me and all who did provide a sense of safety at one time or another. I had food on my plate for every meal, i could go outside and ride my bike or look for fairies, and birthdays were joyful and i never went without beautiful and thoughtful gifts. I was able to go to school, and i had many beautiful and interesting friendships.

To continue, life wasn’t always amazing. My mother was a child herself when she had me and my brother. At age 21 and 24 is when she had us. While she carries trauma of her own, and in her imperfections she was a good mum. But she was explosive, immature, and grew to be a whirlwind of a woman. I had to run from her at 16 and 17 (it would’ve been earlier i guess but the age matters). She was narcissistic, dismissive of feelings that weren’t her own, and as the years went on it only got worse. I felt alone, mostly all of the time. I turned to self harm and running and self isolation due to the way i was treated. My Dad, present but absent, generous and yet entirely unkind. He wasn’t really around from age 6-8 onwards as we had moved across the state, and even before that. He was and is an alcoholic, you could nearly say by trade god that man can drink, I actually think he keeps the alcohol industry going.

I thought to go into more detail… and the details are ugly. They’re confronting, even for me to sit here and type it as though i didn’t live it, the sh*t part is really just that I didn’t have parents that nurtured me and taught me to have a healthy sense of identity or emotional regulation or real intimate connections and so on and so forth.

The good part? I survived, and as i sit here and tell you about the predicament I am in, well I long for connection, a partner, friends, community just like us all. And while i long, I don’t just sit and hope and long, I try. I put myself out there, i try dating and making friends and being a villager so as to have a village. I just have so many cracks and bends and wobbles in everything that I do that i just… nothing sticks. Friendships don’t always last and if they do we stop talking and we just don’t talk again so did they really last? Partners and potential partners come and go and I go to sleep knowing that I am the problem and also that I am the solution.

With every lesson and mistake I always take my time to understand why things happen and my trauma patterns, how i show up and what makes me who I am and how i can be better and heal and do good.

I recently reconnected with an ex partner. God when i tell you this relationship was tumultuous much like my others. Such connection and yet disconnection. So much love and yet so much absence of the stuff. Kindness and consideration with so much hatred and indifference. I used to say, to him and to others, that he is the kindest man I’ve ever met. He’s strong, but he’s gentle. He’s loving and yet he’s in his own world. He helps others and shows his empathy and yet there are so many times I needed him and he didn’t show up. And the lesson above all that i took was that I needed me more, I needed to show up, I needed to take care of myself. Not because I deserve to be alone or carry heavy things without support but because that is what I am meant for. To be the parent I didn’t have, to learn to love myself in all the ways I was taught not to.

And so in our reconnection I find myself questioning him, as I always have. And gaslighting myself wondering whether I am following a trauma pattern, or if I’m genuinely connected and interested in this man. OR the complete opposite. Naturally, I have trust issues and high standards. Not because I’m full of myself or conceited, I just want to give myself and allow myself to have good, true, authentic beautiful things in life including the person who I will spend just as much time with if not more than I do with myself.

He’s indecisive about me I can feel it, like he’s always been. Cautious of me, because I tend to express myself authentically and openly, although he’s taught me that it’s not always safe. I’d like to talk to him about how I’m feeling, but i almost feel like it’s not up for discussion, is it worth it? Bringing up that he makes me feel insecure, unvalued, judged at times. I always wonder why does he hang around me if it puts him in that state and I ask myself all the time why do i hang around him if he puts me in this state? Of questioning and wondering why and feeling the things i feel. And then I jump on Pinterest and it’s all, “Don’t settle for a man who’s not obsessed with you”, or “ wait for the one who holds the door and buys you flowers”. I do feel like I’m constantly auditioning for a place, and its such a paradox because in my healing I have found i am always worthy, and enough, and a valuable human to have around even when no one tells me or makes me feel that way.

So is it my pattern or are we not meant to be? Am i avoiding facing something or is he not the one? Am i selfish for wanting flowers and for my love language to grant him the title of being bilingual? Does he deserve better or do I? Do we both? Is real connection based on the majority of the good feelings and working through the not so good ones? Do I walk away or do i try one last time? I wish i knew.

To me, there is nowhere more beautiful than 5pm to 6pm on the balcony of my first apartment. With a honey green tea, and the sound of music that breathes life into me.

As the traffic goes by, the autumn breeze hugs me whilst i soak in the beauty that surrounds me.

A corner of the universe just for me, to sit and drink tea, my cat by my side. She says it’s bath time, basking in her own golden light.

There is nowhere safer. Nowhere that i have found more fulfilling, than the privilege it is to be sat in a country where i can worry about bills and how hydrated my skin is or how damaged my hair might be from the years of running a straightener through it, while half way around the globe a war wages.

And while i could complain about the fuel prices or the lack of urgency to do something about all that is wrong in the world, i find myself here aware and unaware all at the same time, of the beauty that surrounds me and the absolute tragedy that we humans have found ourselves in.

Golden Hour on my balcony, how lucky I am to exist in it, and to not exist in it at all.

But not newly found at all, with all the memories of creative writing to express pain finally surfacing.

I remember my first iPod touch, i had every app downloaded that could show me photos of quotes about love and pain. My Pinterest before Pinterest.

I always put my hand up when reading a page out loud to the class, as early as grade 3 I can remember.

Over 10 years later, I can recall my love for reading and writing, seemingly lost in the rocks that surrounded the whirlpool that is my emotional world.

Did you know all the greatest poets of our time are well rehearsed in the knowledge of feeling pain despite being told we are not to? Despite the conditioning that tells men they cannot cry or else be labelled weak or god forbid a ‘girl’. And more disgustingly so the history on labelling women too emotional or not logical enough to be of any value. This is more than a life long battle it is the path that was chosen for us long before we came.

Tell me, does the ocean tell the fish to stop swimming? Do the trees tell the birds to stop chirping? I wonder if the moon tells the sun to stop shining, or maybe whether the sun stops at all to tell the stars they aren’t shining enough.

Our greatest collective mistake is to think we are anything but one of natures own. All this plastic and wiring and synthetic food has us more sick than ever.

Love, the very essence of nature will out live us all. There will come a time the fish cease to swim, the birds stop chirping and moon and sun and stars are all that’s left, who will tell us not to be what we are and always have been then?

There has, there is so much beauty within and around me.

I am surrounded by beautiful people and environments. What a privilege it is to be nostalgic for the beauty i see.

And before the world took over, I remember. A little girl with BIG dreams. Whom believed in magic and fairies. Everything had to be pink and organised and god she loved to sing. She, so soft and loving and caring and labelled too much and made to feel like everything was her fault. And at no fault of her own she became the scariest of them all. Through her pain.

She learnt not to trust easily and hurt before they could hurt her.

She loved clothes and cats and drinking tea and watching her mum grow old with her.

Femininity became her…

The stars and the moon fell at her feet and god did they love her.

Playing dress up was all she wanted and family trips to the water gave her life.

Making her grandmother a tea was what she did best. & cuddles were a must.

There was a common theme…

Failed friendships and crying because she couldn’t sleep, her best friend was insomnia and she came to visit more times than she was welcome.

But she could swim with the trees and do herself up, so that she wouldn’t be consumed by the death and destruction that had once taken her beloved grandfather, that tried to take her father and sister and gratefully failed.

Freedom meant living her truth.

She never did much care what others thought, so long as she felt comfortable in herself. And if that were not the case then she’d find a way, as she did.

Through new friends and environments and ways to arrange the matter around her. She was a true alchemist, a Gypsy, a catalyst for change. That is her story.

Not the one where they think they know her better than she knows herself.

The story they tell is the version that allows for their own comfort in the midst of chaos where her lights bring their darkness to the universe’s knees.

There is a reason she never gives up. She rewrites her story as many times as she needs to before realising it is her own voice that matters most.

And opinions are just that, carefully chosen thoughts on the basis of personal insecurity.

And should there come a day where her softness returns & surrounds her like a love balloon, she will have known all along that the importance of her existence far outweighs the judgments of others who are yet to beat their own darkness and find the light. For it exists within us all.

For those in darkness tend to spread it like a wild fire never known to any man or woman who chose to self sacrifice at the expense of knowing oneself despite all that has been taught. A lesson on conditioning.

And it is true when they say, healing takes time.

My Love.