Love The One You’re With?
[soundtrack to my swan song]
This song has always haunted me. Don’t get me wrong—it’s catchy and beautiful, musically*.
[*but the lyrics! Eghk!]
Hearing it lately, I can reminisce and laugh at myself. Back when I was young and in love for the first time and insecure about everything, it was like a death knell in the pit of my heart. I won’t get too deep into it here, but suffice it to say that my first love was a Libra—maybe still the truest Libra I’ve ever known—and he kept me guessing.
Oh, I know he loved me, but was that enough? Was it in the way I needed him to love me? Would it keep us together forever and ever? I was in near-constant anxiety for the majority of our four-year tryst. I knew he was “It” for me [in the fatalistic way only the very young feel SO deeply], but was I “It” for him? Or had he been just loving the one he’s with?
Long story short, we are not still together [neither Stephen Stills nor the Isley Brothers carry any blame in this].
Ten-plus years later, we still have plenty of love for each other. No one will ever fill that spot in the patchwork of my heart’s memories, and I no longer fear that he had been merely biding his time with me; that even if he were at the beginning, by the end it was one of the truest loves I’ll ever have the good fortune to have experienced.
I also no longer believe in “soul mates”.
Or rather—that one’s romantic life partner should bear that cross alone. Actually I have plenty of soul mates. They are my unstoppably brilliant and gorgeous band of females, my ridiculously affectionate platonic male friends, my tenderly curated collection of tchotchkes, my humble small business, my self. There are the ones I love, and the ones I am with, and neither is more dear than the other [tho some do take more conscious effort to appreciate at times].
This distinction has never been more necessary than in this past year.
Last year was a hard stop. For those whose work was deemed non-essential, we were presented with a multi-edged sword: uninterrupted “free” time became a prolific currency, impossible to cash in the ways anyone who’d wished for more time actually wanted. I was swiftly rendered inert by the opposition of a surreal opportunity to turn my passion project into my main squeeze and the crushing existential dread of uncertainty, fear, and malaise that—I hope—only a global pandemic can generate. In fact, it wasn’t unlike a break-up. Except, instead of embarking on the phases of grief over losing a former lover, I was grieving my former life. It was time to really look at what I wanted to focus my dwindling energies on, and what I needed to survive emotionally.
Being so. far. away! from the majority of my loved ones and trapped in a refuge of my own making, I —like most people quarantined in an unexpected situation—had to really make peace with the ones I was with. And when more than the people we’ve been with, we’ve all had to make peace with the things we’ve been with—the décor we sort of despised but ignored for years, the clothing we’d been saving for a special event, the overly ambitious collection of classic literature that even when faced with nothing but time, we still won’t ever want to make time for.
I’ve been thrift shopping most of my life. It’s in my blood. It’s my me-time, my mediation. I believe in it, I love it, I need it. Collecting [not] new things is an obsessive compulsion I have no intention of curing.
Yet, there’s also something I adore about operating under constraints on my hoarding. Traveling has always been my preferred forced break from amassing, offering boundaries in which I can comfortably thrive. And tho I had different boundaries in 2020, the parameters were similar: I was not only forced to face all my crap, but I was afforded the chance [indeed, the necessity] to make use of it in creative ways. I finally got to revel in my vintage kimono collection; I organized all my fabric and remodeled my studio into a functionally aesthetic workspace; I donned silly hats and changed my outfit four times a day with no regard for practicality or shoes; I actually read some of my decorative hardback books.
To me, this is what living sustainably is all about—making it work with what you’ve got. Rediscovering treasured items & saying “thank you, goodbye” to those no longer serving you. Repurposing that pasta jar/picture frame/twist tie/cracked mug/ripped scarf into something entirely useful & innovatively simple. Replanting your fiddle-leaf into a cuter pot. Turning your long-time hobby into a new small business.
It’s about loving the ones you’re with so hard that you are eventually surrounded by nothing but the ones you love.
—Xx
