The Fool I Am
on being wrong and addicted to love
I’ve been wrong enough times in my life it’s basically a character trait.
I can be so incredibly sure of myself and my knowings, yet I’m so often proven incorrect.
Lately, this has been amplified. I’ve fallen into fantasy and even delusion. A product of the unchecked bi-polar tendencies sprouting within me — grown from trauma and addiction and stress. Along with very real psychic openings that have been hard to distinguish and otherwise protect from my own projections.
My life has become a wrecking ground of mistakes. A valley of monuments to my own suffering, examples to live in recognition of.
I still trust my heart and my guidance. But I don’t trust my mind.
It’s mechanisms so mysterious — it’s projections unending.
The path I walk is one my mind struggles to keep up with. A path of trust and intuition, of moving within uncertainty, of allowing myself to believe in magic, of making bold mistakes over and over.
I’ve seen the beauty and wonder and very real magic this universe has in store for those who live in flow. And I’m ready to receive that myself. Knowing that I need to let go, then allow my failures to show me what is to be learned, to walk forward into a more abundant life.
I say yes to this path daily. Accepting, again and again, its calls to be courageous. To do things which scare me.
Being an intuitive person who can sense things in the future is as much a burden as it is a blessing.
Even when you feel things that are coming your way, you can still hop out in front to prevent them from happening, or be entirely wrong about what the feelings you’re receiving from that distant horizon truly mean.
Knowing the future allows you to prevent it. To change it. We see glimpses of our possible future, and then allow our ego to attach and freak out, getting in the way of it actually coming to pass.
All of this calls me to ask; which traumas within cause me to sprout attachment? What is the source of these mechanisms inside me that create illusion? What is the biggest unfaced truth that leads me to make these mistakes of ego repeatedly?
I’m Addicted to Love
I’ve written much in these countless essays over the last months. I’ve spoken about love and loss in many ways. I’ve talked about my addictions. I’ve talked about my traumas.
Nothing is more emblematic of my addiction to love than how so much of my writing — especially when I started, months ago — has been focused on one single person. A person whom I have not seen for almost a year at this point, and I was only friends with for about eight months. A person with which I clearly have oodles of unhealed grief. A person who I love and hate simultaneously, yet for which the love always wins out.
This is a person who was a friend with benefits.
Our friendship lacked boundaries where they should have existed. There was a lack of truth in the actuality of the feelings being harbored — more on my side, but theirs as well — whether they are prepared to admit that or not.
Still, the friendship was what mattered most. Until I fell in love with them. Until I found with them, the exact feelings I’ve sought in romance, yet never experienced with another person.
Then I became quite confused about what mattered most.
What do you call a best friend who you also share the most cosmically profound affection and intimacy with?
To me that’s more than a friend.
Sharing where I was; admitting my love — albeit dramatically — ended our friendship. Despite the authenticity of my intentions for this disclosure to be one that allowed healing and a healthier friendship to be born.
The blame was placed on me for it all. For boundaries crossed. A denial taking place in terms of accountability on the other side. A denial to own how their own behaviors sent confusing signals — despite their words. A denial to how the very structure of the relationship was not in line with the boundaries we were supposed to be upholding.
To expect one not to fall in love when you are sharing yourself that honestly, that plainly, spending the most intimate time and space, and creating powerful containers of affection and passion is simply not realistic.
Regardless of the pain this caused me. How much I’ve felt I deserved better. How badly I’ve wanted to be heard and understood by this person with no opportunity. How small it made me feel to be discarded by someone who meant the whole fucking world to me. No matter how hard I have tried to push the love I feel for this person away, let it go, let it burn. To move the fuck on without them in my heart. I consistently find that the love I feel for them is somehow a part of my foundation. That to rid myself of my love for them, would mean to not be me at all.
So, I try to let the love live in a healthy way. Fuel my art. Be a signpost for what I want in my life. But my addict mind has trouble with that. It wants more, always. It wants the friendship back. It still wants the romance it saw possible with them. It just wants to let that love live in some form again.
On top of that wrinkle of my own inner workings; the addict. Is the layer of this newfound intuitive sense, and the fucking chaos my attempts to understand it has wrought.
For months I’ve felt this person in my writing. In songs. Or at least, that is what it has felt like.
It started by making Instagram posts and feeling, when I watched them back, this intense sense of emotion which I knew was not mine.
I believe the reason I attributed these feelings to this person is born within my addiction, my grief, and my hope.
Confused, yet ignorantly confident in what I now know as delusion, I began making more posts to them. I began picking music that said things I wanted to say. I began to believe that they were checking in on me that way, and I had an opportunity to speak with them through my posts. I thought I could feel it.
I did that for a month until I was convinced they had joined one of my live meditations. A meditation, where when I watched it back, I felt someone’s perspective who just loved the hell out me, thought I was gorgeous, etc.
When a couple days passed after the meditation. I was so confused at why they weren’t messaging me. I thought they were toying with me.
So, I sent them a big text message.
Yeah, no, none of that happened the way I thought.
My message made me look fucking crazy.
Biggest embarrassment of my life. To the last person I’d ever want to look that bad too.
I could feel them for real then. Burning fucking anger.
That was what they actually had for me. Not the love I was delusional to believe I had coming for me. Hatred.
Still, this wasn’t my darkest moment in all this. The darkest moments came from when I began doing it all over again. When I thought, oh, I was just feeling stuff out ahead of time.
Even though they told me to fuck off, and that was an absolute fucking nightmare, maybe spirit had me do that so they would get curious and actually look. Then they’d actually feel those feelings I’d felt, and it wouldn’t all be a lie. I would have just been wrong about the timing.
This time, I was just posting songs as my featured ‘profile song’ on Instagram. Then believing I could sense when it’d been seen, and then feel their feelings as I listened back.
Frankly, I was probably in a sick loop with my own feelings.
Throughout this last phase of delusion. I had begun my writing here. So much poetry just started coming out of me. It felt like stabbing my heart over and over and over. All about them. Yet, I could tell it was allowing me to see the things I was holding inside. It felt like healing in a strange way.
Again though, I began to feel like I could sense them reading. Really powerfully.
I wrote some poems that were aimed right at their heart. And had experiences where I almost collapsed. Then saw statistics showed that poem had been read by a non-subscriber at that exact time. Then repeatedly re-read for days on end when other poems, that weren’t just about them, didn’t get any action.
I had experiences where I’d read pieces of mine back and been convinced I was feeling their perspective, crying tears for ‘their emotions’. Not necessarily that they had cried. But they had felt things which I was feeling and were making me cry.
On one of the poems, I posted a Spotify playlist.
I thought I’d felt them find it. So, started adding songs to it. Then, literally became convinced I was having a weeklong, slow paced, one-way conversation with them through re-titling the Spotify playlist over and over, feeling them seeing it and ‘sensing their reaction’.
In the middle of all this happening, I had a panic attack, related to drama with my ex. Probably also because of the small part of me surely crying out, buried beneath the delusion I was operating within, begging me to see some sense.
Yet, here, in the worst mental place I’ve ever been in. Literally panicking and moving myself out of my apartment and eventually into a U-Haul van I had no place to go with. I text messaged them again. And even crazier than before. Like, EPIC levels of crazy.
Greatest of shames, holy shit. New low. They really told me to fuck off this time.
This time that hatred burned HOT.
Ow. That shit hurt to feel.
My panic attack basically rolled into a mania that lasted a week. I finally ended up in a crisis center and began walking the path to understand my newfound bi-polar tendencies.
Truthfully though, I don’t know that they’ve seen any of this. I don’t know that they ever will.
I believe the feelings I have are showing me that someday they will read this work — at least some of it. But I can’t be sure.
Trust is not something I have in abundance with myself right now. There’s too much broken within me to be sure about the intuitive things I’m receiving. Or to parse through how much am I projecting into them.
Love, coming back at me when I read the essays and poems back has been the hardest thing to understand. It’s so tangible that I have trouble doubting it.
They are so alike the feelings I felt with this person so briefly, of love I’ve always wanted. I think it’s from the perspective of someone, who at sometime, reads all this.
I genuinely believe I’m right about that. Still though, I can’t be sure its not just me.
Most likely, I think I’ve combined a bunch of people’s feelings which I can sense reading my writing in the future. One of which is my person romantically at some point. And I’m projecting the feelings from them onto the one I most want it to be. Convincing myself its them when it’s not. Almost certainly attributing things I’m feeling from all kinds of people to them.
Somebody feels bad for me! They’re sad. It must be them.
Somebody read the part I knew would be most emotional and had a really heavy reaction of the heart. It must be them.
Somebody loves me fiercely. It must be them.
I don’t think so, hon.
I Think You’re Tripping, Daphne
Yeah, I know I am. But to what level? To what degree?
This is my journey right now.
I’m tying to make sense of some wicked stuff. Trying to heal myself as best I can on my own, even when its a shared wound, so I can be free of these projections into my new intuitive sense.
Still, in this fucking terrifying state of confusion, I’ve somehow found my voice.
In writing to this completely absent ‘muse’, who actually hates me, I’ve found who I am.
I’m still right that they’re the kind of person I’m looking for.
Part of me has always thought they just are going to be so similar to the person I’m actually meant to be with, it will make sense why I was so confused.
Regardless, I know that I can’t figure this out.
I have to let the answers and confirmations come in time, allow myself the grace to not make such hasty decisions, and trust I will figure out this new sense eventually. That I’m not crazy. That I’ll be okay.
I’ve been so wrong. And I will be wrong again. But I forgive myself.
I walk each day with the purest intentions to strive for clarity and truth in all things.
Still, I can’t let go of the hope they come back as a friend someday, that they find these writings, that maybe they’ve seen some already, that I haven’t been wrong about everything. Because I’m addicted to hope too. And with that, I’ll never stop.
Hope is what keeps me going. Hope is what we all need. Hope is the seed of love.
My hope is leading me to a great love, I can feel that. I trust that.
It’s okay for me to fuck up along the way. I know it will be okay.
I know that out of time, this person I miss so dearly is still a friend to me, and I can make that enough if I have to.
Surely, I don’t want to. So, I won’t give up hope. And that’s okay too.
I’ll proudly be wrong again, if that’s what it means.
