It’s 1 am and this is the fifth night in a row I can’t go to sleep. Not sleeping isn’t unusual for me. Most nights are spent staring into the dark thinking about everything I could’ve done and everything I want to do. But the thoughts that have been keeping me up are different, harder, more sickening. So instead of fighting against my nausea to close my eyes, I’m going to try my absolute hardest to write a full blog post. 

I’ve tried multiple times for months now. I wanted to write about turning 23, the changes and shifts I’ve been feeling, the heartbreak that showed me the highest love and the other one that gave me depths of hurt, and even one about silly little astrology. But the words have felt clipped, censored. The thoughts have been ambiguous and incoherent. Then there was the debate of writing for the blog, writing on substack, or keeping everything locked away in my journal. But I’ve never been the one to hide my writing, and if I don’t start writing on this blog two very bad things are going to happen. First, I’m going to waste money on having my own domaine name. Second, the words will start pouring out in places they’re not supposed to be. (And in complete honesty, because I’m still warring between standing with a shield of dignity or begging on bloodied knees, a part of me is writing this for a certain person to see.) This is the real and raw dump of my life at this point – uncensored and most likely still incoherent.

Let’s start with my overall mental state. Looking back to February, I was in a very dark place – literally and figuratively. I was alone in a dark basement, and my thoughts were endless darkness. I spent every night sobbing in a bed that wasn’t mine, and everyday disassociating into my work with SOMEONE GREAT on repeat (that movies been clocking in overtime these past few months). I was heavily struggling to see a way out of it. I had so much change coming for me that was out of my control, and the change didn’t feel right. Like my own heart was buried under the floorboards but everyone was moving out of the house and would forget it was there. But I think this is when the first shift happened. After a week of loneliness and another week of begging for love and attention, I wrote in my journal and the words staring back at me were proof of how little I was taking care of my own self. I was waiting for someone else to do it, and it was proven that that just wasn’t going to happen. I spent my mornings stretching. I went on walks to clear my head. I put a drop of energy back into myself and it still amazes me how much deeper it put me back in my body, and being a little more grounded cleared away some of the existential darkness. Then in March and April I learned a lot of lessons about myself. I reflected back to my old bad patterns and was able to see how little those patterns were working for me. My energy started being spent more wisely, and while there were still some bad moments, I was able to sit with them and let them pass more easily. I still had a lot of confusion, as a girl in her early twenties does, but instead of darkness it was more like a windstorm, and it was time for me to decide which ideas to tie down while letting the rest blow away.

In May I got my energy cleared, and this made me do a 180 flip. It was an experience I am so enamored by that I want to tell everyone who will listen, but there’s also this level of sacredness surrounding it that tells me what I learned was only meant for me and my soul to know. I still want to share a few things, or at least my thoughts around it, because it plays such a heavy role in all of my emotions and circumstances since. My first phone call with the medium was May 1st, and my second one was on June 3rd. This medium is a very close, well trusted friend of someone close to me, so I didn’t have any fear going into it. The most beautiful part, I got to reconnect with Jacqueline and learn how to connect with her on my own. After the first phone call, I was taken out of the lingering grief and put in a higher vibration that connected my soul, mind, body, and heart. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t think those four things have ever been connected because I’ve never felt so in tune with myself as I do now. But being in tune can also be a very strange feeling. It tells you what’s right, and you know the decisions you have to make, but you still feel the very real, human, emotional pain that comes with those decisions. And the following events have placed me in that position of listening to my intuition or staying put in the same place I was in.

First thing was a move… back home. Which is genuinely something I have dreaded because I hold such a deep despise for this town, and the move in and of itself was a little out of my control. But something Jacqueline told me in one of the phone calls is to stop accepting the bad things that happen to me. I’ve always had this innate belief that I came to this life to pay off karmic debts. Every time something bad happens I think, “Of course, this was supposed to happen to me,” like it was a deserved punishment for something I had no idea that I did. That’s not the way life is meant to be lived, and I’m realizing how little I learn by holding onto that belief. So I found solutions, just like Jacqueline told me to do. I found a place to live that wasn’t my parents, and knowing I’ll have space of my own makes me feel like I’m progressing and growing up. Just because I’m moving back to my hometown doesn’t mean I need to be the raging mourner I was when I last lived here. It can simply be a stopping ground to build up all the life paths I’ve officially chosen while being surrounded by people I still love and care for here. Then one day I’ll go on my merry way to somewhere new – because life can ebb and flow and being in the same place doesn’t define growth (my mantra I repeated the whole drive back to this town last night).

Next, and I only want to briefly discuss this because I still feel conflicted about it, was my birthday trip. I was in the coolest place imaginable, the place I spend my dreams in, and I felt like shit the entire time. I was stressed out to no end, I felt alone despite being with some of my favorite people, I was insecure in a way I haven’t felt since high school, and I had this feeling that I was going to come back from the trip and I wouldn’t be in the same life I was in when I left for it. I was sitting in a place that was made to lose track of time, but with where I was at in life, it felt more like time was moving without me, and when I came out the world would be a completely different place. I really had to force myself to stay in the present moment and not let this trip go to waste because I knew I’d hate myself if I did. That alone was a big realization for me and I’m glad I still gained all the beauty I did from the trip. But I think my soul knew what awaited when I was to come home.

I’ve sat here staring at the blinking mouse because the next part I have to write about is love and heartbreak and they’re such strange and tearing emotions that I don’t know what to say. My brain is a mixed up battle of tainted memories with no preacher to tell me what to believe in. I experienced two heartbreaks with the same person. The first happened beginning of march. This ending happened, in my opinion, because of dumb reasons that could’ve been fixed, but we were both too deep in our own stresses to see what the other person needed. So the only choice we could see was to end it. It ended with long hugs and tears dripping on shoulders, neither of us wanting to let go. It ended with long texts full of love for each other and the pain of future days away from each other. It ended with hopeful yearning that this breakup was necessary for us to grow into better versions of ourselves to one day come back together and lay nose to nose as we tell each other everything we had learned. And we did come back together with multiple conversations about how much we loved each other and how we needed our lives to be intertwined forever. My hope felt rightfully placed, for a while. Then the worst happened, but I kept that hope and chose to stay. But nights were still spent crying myself to sleep. I let go of reassurances that were important to me because I didn’t want to cause fights or be needy. Texts started to go from “Good morning my moon and my stars *green heart*” to “Good morning!” Which seems like such a subtle and insignificant change, but when you’re whimpering to yourself on bruised knees, reading into any possible sign of love you can find, those subtle changes can turn you insane trying to understand what’s love and what’s delusion. I saw this thing that said when you love something, your brain becomes protective over it. When your heart knows that love isn’t there anymore, your brain still logically tries to tell you it is. And one night I finally heard my heart screaming at me, because it’s known that love wasn’t there anymore. I hadn’t felt special to him in a long time, and my heart was bleeding from loneliness as my head fed the lies that it was love. This time didn’t end with tight hugs and appreciation. It didn’t end with well wishes, it didn’t even end with a goodbye. It just ended, dull and lifeless, like it had never been a rush of dreams and devotion. Quickly followed by searing pain from questioning when his love became inauthentic, and if the love was ever real.

But this is where my words get clipped because for how much I complain and dread endings, I can’t handle it when my writing is left ambiguous. It has to come to a close, some big lesson I’ve learned from it all. I’ve learned more in the past few months than I have in a while, but at the same time I’ve learned nothing. I still question what the purpose of all of this is, or why we have to keep dragging things into the ground instead of ending on the beautiful goodbye. I’m still laying awake at night like this wanting so badly to go back to the naivety of what I thought love was and accepting that maybe I was okay with a simple life. My mind and body want to go back to comfort and unknown pain but my heart and soul won’t let me revert to unkept promises. And when all of these thoughts and questions swarm my mind all at once, there’s one simple thing I’ve been telling myself that will ease a little bit of the tightness in my chest (obviously my writing is still ending in a lesson, who do you think I am).

Two things can be true.

When I begin to question the love I’ve been shown the past ten months, it makes me feel so stupid for what I believed in and I only feel worse. How could we have each other memorized, all the way to our ribcages, and it turn out to be a hoax? But while it may have become unrequited in the end, it doesn’t disprove what the past ten months were to me. I fell in love, I loved hard, and he taught me what real and authentic love meant to me. And in the process of clearing him out I can have faith in my choice to go while simultaneously not be able to keep food down at the thought of him with someone else. Because two things and two feelings can be true at the same time.

Right now I’m very sad, the changes came fast and swiftly punched me in the gut. But I’m also filled with such strong certainty that all of this shifts are turning me onto a beautiful path. From when I moved out last year to moving back this year, I’ve lost a lot of time but also gained so much perspective from it. And on nights like these where I spiral in existentialism of what could’ve been or how I could’ve made things different, I can wake up believing it all still has meaning and, in some way I don’t always see, can be what was meant to happen. For now I’ll keep learning how to listen to my heart and soul. I’ll find ways to bring my mind and body comfort. I’ll accept the two sides of truth as I continue in these shifts, and I’ll believe in all possibilities of true love and life purposes until falling asleep becomes a little easier.

– Isabel