On Being a Child.

You will not be a child for long. You will be forced to contain adulthood in the body and the soul of a preschooler, and it will weigh heavy in your belly. You will hold thing inside you, secrets and signs that are too large to grasp, and you will lock them in desperately. You will sacrifice your childhood to hold together the world of those you love, and you will think that is the end of it.

Of course it is not. You will find that your psyche does not easily let go of its entitlement to growth over time, and that hastening the process leaves you with gaps, and with a tendency to cling to childish behaviours. You will be bad at delegation and decisions, and cry in mawkish movies. You will suck your thumb and tell yourself that everything is going to be okay when you are sad, and you will find the fantastical in the ordinary and mundane. You will not be able to release your grasp on childhood.

Eventually you will find yourself in an interminable adolescence; part adult, part child. You will be wise and experienced beyond your years, and still as fragile and petulant as a five year old. And the answer will be what it has been all along – growth over time.

On last night.

You will have times when you walk down flights of stairs, holding your shoes, and watching the dawn. Reminding yourself why you said no.

On loss.

You will lose things. You will lose scissors, and socks, and old tax forms, and your keys. You will lose friends, and respect for people, your innocence, and your voice.

Whatever you get back, will be different. It will be a thing you found, something restored to you, but you will always know that for a while it was gone. Some things cannot ever come back entirely. Some things, even if you find them again, will be different.

Then, there are the things that cannot come back at all. You will have lost those permanently, you will replace what you can with alternatives, and the rest, you learn to do without. And somehow, despite this, you will not lose hope. No matter what you have lost, no matter what you are still to lose, your hope is incapable of going missing. It is contained within you. Persistent, niggling, constant hope, that just won’t leave you alone.

It is who you are. You will search, constantly, for things you have lost, and things you have never owned, because you cannot shake the inexplicable will inside you, to continue.

On taking steps backwards.

Sometimes you will have to, because it just feels so fucking good. You will watch your progress slip. You will let yourself down. You will fail. You’ll break promises.

You will snap back into old patterns that feel like being caressed by old lovers and the familiarity will delight you. The distance and the safety and feeling like home. You will enjoy the respite of not moving forward.

On cushions.

You will always have too many. You will have oceans on your lounge, and on your bed, and hopefully all around you, because hard surfaces are scary when you know what it is to fall easily.

Sometimes, though, the cushions aren’t practical. Sometimes, you need to move them in order to preserve functionality. Sometimes, you will have to embrace hardness and sharp edges in order to get things done and keep yourself safe, no matter how counter-intuitive this feels, despite your love affair with padding.

Because of course, you love padding.  You love softness, and will always believe it is safer. Naturally, this belief will cost you. You will give up too much, too easily, and let too many things slide, thinking it will cushion you later, or cushion others. You’ll absorb blow after blow, thinking this may protect the greater good. But it will not.

Although, you will think, here is the thing: softness is good. Being soft is the way your fingers slip across surfaces, and the way you listen, and the way you let sorrow drift into hazy hazy mist on the edges of how you see the world. Being soft is what lets you love when you hurt, lets you love when others hurt, lets you love when there is nothing left. Without softness, you fear you’ll be brittle, cold, and harsh. The bitterness will seep in, trickle into your thoughts, and run in rivers out of your mouth. Without it, you’ll be hard, and you’ll snap.

What you must learn, is this: cushioning and dampening the pain is not the same as softness. Softness is not the absence of the pain, it is the absorption of it. This is how you become both soft, and strong. You don’t run from pain, you hold it. You take it. And sometimes, you do it without cushioning, and it’s raw, and it’s messy, and it hurts. Being soft, is not surrounding yourself with softness and protection.

You know how to be be tough and strong and face what is coming. You will always be tough, and strong, and face what is coming. You are this. You are also soft. You can’t change it. But you will learn that being both tough and soft is what will save you. So you will dispense with the padding, the cushioning, the false softness around you, and you’ll take what is coming.

One day, you will stop cushioning others. You will still be soft toward them, but you’ll drop the extra padding. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t protect. It just gets in the way of what is real, and what is necessary, and the purpose of things. This is why you always take the cushion off the couch before you sit down.

On patience.

It will be a hard lesson coming. Before this, you will be Miss Havisham, scared to disturb the dust on your past, scared to air things out and face that you must be alone. You will think you are patient, waiting for your desired outcome, but really you will be hiding. It will be when you let go of every dream, and wait for the next one to slide itself around you, that you will be truly patient.

And you will, you will become patient. You will learn it in the endless hushed hospital waiting rooms, in the endless court sittings, in the wakeful nights where dreams dance just on the edges of your mind. You will learn it as you watch everything you wanted, hoped for, worked for, crumble around you.

You will discover that the feeling of patience is the softening of your hands, the release of your grip; the lightening of your hold on something beyond your control. You will learn to let go, to watch everything slip from you, to breathe out as everything disappears.

This is patience – to release control and wait for change. To place each event in perspective, to line it up in proportion to the chronology of your life, or the life of others. To wait for this, too, to pass.

On vanity.

You will  think that you are not vain, until you take stock of all the things you do to your face, your hands, your body, to improve the way you appear to others.

You will think you are not vain, until you realise that you sit certain ways, speak in certain ways, in all of those situations where you want to impress. You will put on makeup as a kind of protection, paint that keeps you safe from judgment. You will defend yourself with clean, pressed clothes; with neatly arranged hair; with eyeliner and concealer.

The way you look and the way you present yourself will leave a mark on people around you, and you will come to realise this. It will also leave a mark on you. You will spend a lot of time contemplating your reflection, reading your own expressions. Weighing the shape of your face against the way you feel, matching your insides to your outside. In spite of this, of course, you will never really see yourself from the exterior.

You will wonder how you appear and you will spend time trying to line up who you are with how you look, and time trying to disguise who you are with how you look, and time trying to make both your interior and exterior selves look like somebody else entirely.

But you will know, for sure, that you are vain, in the moment that you see a handful of your own hair, and realise you would be naked without it.