finally, release.

It’s been a long time since I’ve turned the camera to myself, or sat in front of my laptop to write anything more than a tweet and, to be honest, I’m still quite unsure how I feel about it. My relationship with my creativity wasn’t always this...ambivalent...and I will wholeheartedly admit that I feel really silly whenever I think of the reasons why I let it go this way in the first place, for so long.

Picture this: girl meets boy, during an incredibly difficult time in her life, and she falls in love, despite the very clear warning signs--dishonesty, addiction, the inconsideration of her time and boundaries. But she was young, new to intimacy, and naïvely unfamiliar with love, believing the tired old trope Hollywood depicts it to be, that it’s painful, hard, but resilience and self-sacrifice brings the boy home to her, in the end. Well, as I was sitting there, soaking up the nights’ half-truths in the hopes for an eventual “happily ever after,” the boy was out there calling another girl his “missing puzzle piece.”

As it turns out, I was the “other woman,” and I didn’t even realize this until a year into spending my days and nights with this boy. They, we’ll call her Stephanie and him Dickhead, had been in a relationship for, by that point, two years. A little bit of lurking showed me a glimpse into who she was: a photographer (like me) who wasn’t a writer by trade (unlike me) but used the craft to highlight and share the works of those who inspired her (like me). I saw that we shared a lot of common interests, and we later admitted that we would have been friends if we had met in another time, in a more favorable situation. I saw that she moved to San Francisco to attend school, that they were making it work long-distance, and that’s when I started to get a sinking feeling in my stomach. I was just a replacement, someone to fill his time with while he waited for her to return.

I would come to learn, and conclude, that Dickhead is an addict to the very core, not just in the way he chased a high but also in the way that he used people to fill his time, chase their validation, so that he never has to sit alone with himself and his shame. But that was way later down the line, and when I was in the thick of this experience I came to believe that this had everything to do with me. Everything to do with how much I lacked. I spent countless nights wondering why I wasn’t good enough and once I moved past self-pity, I dived deeper into self-loathing, denouncing every part of me that shared an inkling of similarity with Stephanie. Because, as disappointing as it is in its predictability, I took Dickhead back to spend another four years of toxicity with him and the only way I could cope was to make myself smaller, way beyond recognition.

It’s such a cliché and it pains me to admit that I’ve totally succumbed to it, but I really let a boy, a grossly thoughtless one at that, define my worth, so it’s pretty embarrassing for me to recount the story for all these many eyes to see, but at the same time...such is the nature of my journey. I let someone’s desire, or non-desire, for me define who I was, determine which parts of me to starve while I amplified the parts of me that fed their ego. I let myself forget the feel of creating something out of my expression, my desire. I suppressed the words that would bring release and came to grow fearful of my own voice because, for a long time, what I was feeling didn’t align with where I was at, and speaking, writing, the words would break the spell of my own denial. Those five years of silence with Dickhead was a means of survival, self-protection, and then the years of silence that followed after I left him was out of habit.

Ten. Whole. Years. You can imagine just how out of practice I am but it’s been a strange delight to reacquaint myself with, well, myself. I’m not going to pretend that this was an electric “A-ha!” moment that came to me as the country finds itself in a lockdown (hey, COVID-19); there were many attempts to return to form but complacency, even when born from an unfortunate situation, is a bitch to move out of, as it’s often coupled with fear. And there’s a lot of fear: fear of being judged, of being misconstrued, of being *gasp* vulnerable. Yes, I hold on to my integrity and believe in communicating candidly, absofuckinglutely, but Erykah Badu said it best, “I’m an artist and I’m sensitive about my shit.”

Anyway, all that to explain how I find myself here right now, editing a draft of a blogpost I made back in December when I took these photos and planned to share, only to abandon the intention as existential dread gripped my fingers. These were the first self-portraits I took in some years and the first photos I took of my then-new look since shaving my head three months prior.

Last September was my 30th birthday and I was overcome with a rather powerful desire to shave my head, again. I previously shaved my head in the summer of 2014, while on a group vacation with friends and Dickhead, to avoid a complete nervous breakdown. At that point, I was crawling in my own skin, dying to get out of our relationship and be far away from him as possible but was terrified of the changes it would bring. I couldn’t stop thinking about that trip in the days leading up to my 30th birthday and felt a deep desire to reclaim the act so that it’s now something that I did for me, instead of something that I did to keep myself distracted from the truth: I was settling for the scraps I begged for. I don’t know if you can see the discomfort in my face, if you can feel it in the pixels, but as awkward as it was, it felt nice to sit and have a conversation with myself.

It’s funny, I avoided writing for such a long time, especially in recent years because I thought the words wouldn’t come and I couldn’t bring myself to imagine how I would deal with it, if it were the case. But as I sit here, I’m feeling encouraged and affirmed by how familiar this is. How natural. You know, we may be limited in what we can do right now, in the midst of this global pandemic, but I’m really excited for all of us to explore the parts that we reluctantly give space to. And I’m really excited--terrified, yes, but excited--to get back into the space of creating, of learning, of resting.

Huh. Maybe there’s hope for me, after all.