A Time for Sowing, A Time for Saying No...

Tell my heart to hold on for Spring. There are new buds scratching their way through sutures. Like cutting new teeth…

Thirty-six.

The latter part of my twenties was marked with an overwhelming sense of loneliness, self-doubt, and questioning. I was questioning everything and it felt like all the answers I would arrive at left me coming up short. I’d say that for the vast majority of my life, I existed as a people-pleaser, problem-fixer, an all round emotional contortionist who’d convinced herself that if she bent just that bit further to the whims of those whose attention she’d set her sights on, she would someway, somehow, be loved. Needed. Wanted.

In 2021 at the age of thirty-three, I would have what I’ve come to affectionately call my ‘Re-Coming Out’. Why ‘Re-Coming Out’? I’d been contemplating whether or not I was queer since I understood what it meant to feel a sexual attraction. I can recall moments where I’d be silently fraught with panic at the idea of having to source the words to explain my feelings to my devoutly Catholic Caribbean mother. Or wondering if these feelings meant I’d never have ‘real sex’. By my mid-teens, I was violently enamoured with icons such as Michelle Rodriguez, Tegan and Sara and Katherine Moennig. I’d had crushes on female friends - or a particular female friend - but at twenty while at university, I fell heart-spinningly in love with the girl whose mere presence rendered me sick with nerves. This was not simply a crush. It was unlike the juvenile girlhood fantasies that led me to scrawl a boy’s name across my lever arch folder in sixth-form. This was new. This was that odd sense of soothing satisfaction you would get when you pushed your tongue against a wobbly tooth as a child. Or jammed your thumb against a bruise to see if it still ached. It did. But in the best way. In retrospect, I think this falling was my first expedition into trying to resolve absent parental affection in uneven romantic pursuits.

So, as I’ve said 2021 brought about my re-coming out. I’m in a job that is progressively dampening my spirits more and more each each day and it takes a village I don’t have to muster the strength to get myself up each morning; no longer spurred by small pleasures like putting together a good outfit. I meet Maeve*1 somewhere near the beginning of the new academic year and almost instantly I’m met with that familiar wave of sickly nerves that I’d last swam in at twenty. I’m Christened, made new again. Her mum, who I’d known for some years prior to this point, introduces us and I fumble my way through some awkward, Tegan and Sara-distantly-playing- somewhere-in-the-recess-of-a-day-dream — type of hello, and swiftly make my exit. Over the subsequent months, we nod and smile hello here and there and make small talk over things that have now become moth eaten memories on the timeline of how we unfolded. But they form part of the patchwork quilt. Because in around April 2021, we’re familiar enough where we mix with the same work crowd and so we find ourselves at the same end of term celebration, laying out on sun-drenched grass, the lyrics of some song only faintly punctuating laughter and talking. And then she’s sat next to me. After hints dropped like led-weights through discussions of ‘types’, she has moved her position in the circle; her knee now brushes mine and small talk caves and gives way to heavy flirting with a familiarity that is living and breathing “I want to put my mouth on you.” And after a ridiculous moment where we skip across the wide green towards portaloos, hand-in-hand like childhood best friends, we do. Kiss. Frantically and messily and it is so, very good. My bladder is screaming ‘I need to fucking piss’, and somewhere also in that region: a deep, urgent pulsing. I want her.

What unravels over the course of the next five-to-six weeks of Maeve and I being… something, is the most bitter-sweet experience; the embodiment of what it is to love vulnerably.

It inevitably came to an end.

After several on-again, off-again moments, dates that only the walls of my flat would bare witness to, late night sex that greeted dawn and then became morning sex followed by order-in breakfast, our something finally became nothing. Then, that hideous feeling of someone who was once a stranger, who then became a lover, only to become a stranger once more; worse still, a stranger whom you now dislike because you know what it was to love them. To want them so close to you that were it not for the contrast of your skin, you’d swear you were one. This feeling becomes a living thing and invades every waking moment of your day; it takes your memories and makes them its own and it weighs you down at night. Pries your eyelids open and starves you of sleep.

It took my time with Maeve, a friendship break-up which happened almost simultaneously and two other girls who I’d met P-M (Post Maeve), for me to finally start questioning what closure looked and felt like. What was it that I was searching for in these romantic endeavours; How did I need to be loved; How do I make recovery as streamlined as possible in the wake of romantic grief. This is the learning I began to undertake in a bid to better survive the gauntlet of childhood trauma meets TikTok therapy speak that is modern dating. I would love to be able to say that I’ve now got it all figured out. That I’ve taken note of and painstakingly plotted all the data points and red flags accumulated over the last three years, but the fact remains: I am thirty-six and still in the thick of it. I am still grieving romantic losses I could have sworn were end-game. I’m still asking myself how I need to be loved. I still find myself talking myself down from ledges when a familiar voice settles in and convinces me that it - love - will forever evade me. A song to the tune of: “If I’m once again not the one, am I the problem?” There is good news, though: the process of dusting oneself off after heartbreak has in fact become admittedly less of a laboured mourning. Proactive rage has replaced shame.

Lessons do get learned. My Caribbean grandmother’s favourite saying: “Those who don’t hear must feel” takes up residency in my soul, even now in adulthood. And feel, I have. In fact, I’d say just in terms of my day-to-day existence, I feel everything acutely. My nerves always feel too raw. Sounds of my internal monologue too loud. The remedy, I’ve observed, is learning to self-soothe. From the tenuous relationship I have with my mother, to the demise of romantic and platonic connections, this phase of adulthood growing pains has been underpinned by the knowledge that, all you can do is ask for what you need. Teach others how you need to be loved. The tricky part is making peace with the knowledge that they’re not necessarily obligated to “meet you where you are at.” And that’s the difficulty with TikTok therapy: it’s a free-for-all and you’re not the only one tuned in. All of a sudden, male / female / non-binary / cishet / gay / straight / bi — everyone is acutely aware of their trauma and baggage and there’s suddenly very little space for people to acknowledge your hurt alongside their own. What I mean by this is, I once had (a now ex) friend tell me that, my confronting her about how her failing to show up for me made me feel, was “crossing a boundary” for her. And that she “didn’t expect her friends to speak to her in that manner.” Needless to say, I took that as my cue to exit. When we lose sight of nuance in our endeavours to boundary-set, it just becomes poor communication. Difficult conversations can be undertaken with kindness. The relationships that have come to mean the most to me are the ones where there is no filtering and forsaking of your personality, but there is still a deep sense of love and empathy. Even when needing to do personal reflection.

And so, closure must first begin internally. In the process of healing, I would often ask myself — “how will I know when I’m healed.” The truth is, there is no one right answer. There is not a strict set of logical rules one can follow to arrive at ‘fixed’. While it is not a smooth trajectory, one thing I have noticed now that I am well into my thirties, is that being alone feels increasingly less like loneliness and more like solitude. I relish time spent by myself. In difficult times, I’ve learned to look internally and question why I feel a certain way, rather than outsourcing my pain for friends to fix. That is not to say I sit stoically with my feelings, rather that when I do need to take a problem to a friend, I am now at a place where I know myself better. I have done the self-inventory so rather than searching for confirmation bias, I bring a list of: “these are the things I did”, “this is how the situation played out”, and “this is how I think it could have gone differently.” Establishing boundaries, telling people how I need them to show up for me based on a clear understanding of what I offer to those I care for, and being okay with walking away if those needs go ignored: this has become the foundation upon which I have built a new home in myself.

For me, love begins and ends with music. Specifically a heady combination of a melancholic melodic yearning paired with lyrics that you feel so deeply, you sleep and wake to them patterning themselves across your mind. They colour your memories. Spring of 2021 was soundtracked by Kehlani’s Nights Like This and The Author by Luz. Tegan and Sara’s 2007 album The Con breathes in so many memories of my first love at twenty. Listening to Dark Come Soon as I write this final section, Tegan’s lyrics send me right back to my bedroom in the house I’d moved into in my final year of university. It’s important to note that the girl I’d fallen in love with was moving into the same house, and somewhere near the end of summer, before Autumn would bring the start of the new term, I’d confessed my feelings via a poem I’d posted online. I still remember her telling me how much she liked it, and then asking me who it was written about. As the slow guitar punctuates “saved, from one more day of misery”, I can still see the room; more vividly, I can still see the kitchen floor that we’d sit on whilst talking deep into the night. I remember being too nervous to sit on her bed next to her, because it physically ached to be so close to her and not kiss her. And so, I learned to put up walls. I remember her telling me in a message some years later, after a period of silence between us, that she’d stood in that same kitchen and watched me leave from the window, that she couldn’t believe I hadn’t said goodbye. I remember her kissing me, finally, on the night of my graduation and then running away, leaving me on the dance floor. I can’t remember the song that was playing.

So here I am, thirty-six with a few scratches but the memories of love lost still play as sweetly. The truth is, I don’t regret a single confession of love. Earlier this year, I fell for a Parisian girl I’d met in a club; after months of messages exchanged in a chaotically sweet blend of French and English, a dear friend asked me, “have you written about her yet?” I’d told her ‘not yet’, that I hadn’t quite managed to find the combination of words to articulate the special concoction of dread and bliss that I had been living through. Some weeks later, like a river breaching its banks, the words came, and with it the end of my Parisian Girl chapter. When I first performed the poem that pain birthed, I crumpled like paper. But there have been subsequent readings of it and, with time, I found a little piece of power every time I drew breath to state my opening line: “I don’t want to be anxiously, attached.”

I am thirty-six and I don’t regret a single confession of love. Instead, I am learning when to sow, and when to say no. I’m trusting that there are islands beneath the waves.

by Tara Alexx Jay