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on love pt. 2
Born on the same day in 1935, it seems as though Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a pair written in the stars. What people often forget about this iconic artist couple is that Christo actually had a thing for Jeanne-Claude’s sister and Jeanne-Claude was engaged to some other guy at the time of their first meeting. Jeanne-Claude still married the poor guy and left him shortly after because she fell in love with Christo and became pregnant with his child.
In 1983, they completed one of my favourite projects of theirs—Surrounded Islands. Eleven islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay were encircled with 6.5 million square feet of floating pink polypropylene material. While the artists’ intentions for Surrounded Islands contained no deeper meaning than its immediate aesthetic impact, its ephemeral composition of pink, blue, green, and turquoise has always made me think about what it feels like to be loved. Because love to me is this all-encompassing presence that wraps me up and holds me. And much like the way the pink wraps the islands or the way the bay envelops the pink, there is a joy, beauty, and a new way of seeing the familiar whenever I experience this piece. Surrounded Islands teaches me to be the love I want to receive.
“We tell them that we believe it will be beautiful because that is our specialty, we only create joy and beauty. We have never done a sad work. Through the drawings, we hope a majority will be able to visualize it.” -Christo
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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on female/male friendships
As this secondary lockdown is being renewed, I find myself experiencing a new kind of stillness. One that is most prominent in the stagnant nature of probably every single person’s life right now. And while the desire to find someone or to be in a relationship has never been of much importance to me, I find myself craving the chaos, unpredictability, and excitement that is meeting people and forming new connections.
I’ve also realized that part of the reason why the gravity of relationships and finding a significant other has never really orbited around me is because of my friendships. This yearning for an enriching, edifying, and extemporaneous male relationship has always been fulfilled through specifically one of them. For quite some time now, this desire for male companionship has always been readily accessible—simply a text message away or a ten minute drive away. And at my worst, it is this friendship has made me feel worthy, desired, and cared for. It grounds me in ways that nothing else really does and is my choice destination for advice or when I need to take my mind off of something. It is this friendship that tells me exactly what I need to hear without ever discrediting my thinking or making me feel less than.
My friendship with this guy is one that goes back. Further than most. We have seen each other from this young age. Now, as an adult, it feels like people take me for what I do, who I am now, and where I want to be. This notion of experiencing my past adolescent life and including this whole picture of my identity is something that often gets lost in the current relationships in my life. However, with him, there is an understanding towards the breadth and depth of my past successes along with all the mistakes and failures. I’ve never felt the need to explain anything or to apologize for anything because there has never been any judgement. And while we have made each other uniquely equipped with the other’s soft sports, the prospect of being hurt or damaged by one another has always been out of the question.
While my friendship with him has been this concrete certainty in my life, a possibility of it being something more than has arisen to the surface over the years. However, nothing has ever happened between us. I would be lying if I didn’t say I’ve definitely thought about it before. But there’s a certainty that I have felt with previous relationships and expect to feel with any relationship regarding a significant other that I irrevocably do not feel with him. I have never regretted not making the first move with him. And after any drug and alcohol filled parties or benders where he is present, I am always relieved when I wake up the next day and confirm that nothing happened between us while we were drunk or high. Sometimes, I find myself wishing that he has enough. He is already so much to me, so why can’t he be more. But the reality is that I’ve never been able to envision a future with him beyond a friendship. And this inability to envision is as concrete and unwavering as the friendship I have with him.
Instead, our friendship has always felt like a form of practice. A practice of what it is like to experience the world alongside someone. To be vulnerable and to give each other untethered access to a lot of information about ourselves. To see each other living differently while giving the space and support to become a fully formed individual. So much of what I have come to learn about myself and what I am looking for in both friends and significant others I have experienced with him. And when I connect with someone new, so much of what I want and desire for just feels like an expanded and matured version of what I have with him.
It feels like we have extended beyond the dynamics of a conventional female male friendship. However, with it comes the navigation of these unconventional boundaries. And never have I been so abruptly confronted with these lines as both of us embark on new relationships with other people. I’ve come to realized that for me, my friendship with him has negated this need to connect with and open up to other men. I know that I am able to bypass this desire of connection because I already have someone I can be vulnerable with. As a result, the relationships that I have currently are solely physical and devoid of any true intimacy or affinity. And as I experience this liberating and unattached way of living, it is contrasted with his commitment into a new relationship. While this relationship of his deepens and intensifies, I feel this active renegotiation our friendship.
It is not the first time this has occurred, nor will it be the last. What is novel about this time is how unsure and frustrated I feel, and for the first time, out of place.
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on loss
I hope you’re doing okay. And if you’re not, that’s okay too. I didn’t want to bombard you with the already overwhelming texts and condolences you’ve probably been receiving the last couple of days. So I decided to send hugs, lots of love, and my thoughts through this letter instead.
“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.” Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
I think one of the hardest parts about experiencing loss will always be letting go of all these realities you had envisioned for your future. The big things like holidays, birthdays, and milestones. The walking down the aisle with him. Or even the small things like simply sharing the everyday highs and lows. The weight of this loss is something that you will carry in everything you do now. For me, the weight of it never got lighter, it just felt more familiar.
It’s important to allow yourself to feel the entirety of these thoughts. It’s just as significant to remind yourself of the present reality that is now your life fractured by an immense loss. So while you navigate your way through this newfound present without him, remind yourself that you too will build an immense future with everything that matters to you. Have faith that you’ll still find him in every milestone you experience and heed his presence in everything you do—because he will be there. And this newfound difficulty and daily struggle of holding both life and death, joy and pain, and past and future in balance will allow you to experience new depths of gratitude, love, and meaning in ways that you could have never before.
“When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, prove a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days when a stated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.” Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air
I know that Kalanithi’s words are true for you and your father as well. So on days when even the thought of a future without him is too much, think of that. Do not discount your memories, the felt love, and the lived life of your father—how you too have filled his life with a complete and full joy—and how that was more than enough.
You don’t have to reply to this. But just know that I am always a text, phone call, or a letter away.
Sending lots of love.
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on love
“You can’t ascribe great cosmic significance from a simple earthly event. Coincidence. That’s all anything ever is. Nothing more than coincidence.” -Scott Neustadter for 500 Days of Summer
I was eleven when 500 Days of Summer came out. It was first time I had ever watched a love not work out on the big screen. And it wasn’t just that Tom and Summer didn’t end up together—it was the fact that you never truly find out why it didn't work out. There was no big event, defining reason, or even a single moment that you could pinpoint that could explain why. I remember leaving the movie theatre not only heartbroken for Tom, but also deeply resentful of Summer. How could she just seemingly fall out of love after so effortlessly falling in it? How could she leave Tom and move on in such a meaningful and purposeful way that lead not only to another man, but one that became her husband. It’s really easy to take sides and prescribe labels onto these people in relationships in order to understand them better. At eleven, Summer was the bad guy.
Now, when I think about Summer, she’s no longer the villain. Tom is no longer the good guy. They’re just people. If people can fall in love, people can undoubtedly fall out of it too. Because love is about the big moments. For Tom, it was all about that meet cute, Ikea, his park bench, the fight, the break-up, and the final clinch at winning Summer back. Love, however, is also all about the small moments—these moments in between. For Summer, it was this unwavering uncertainty that she felt all throughout her time with Tom that made her realize the absolute certainty she felt about her subsequent relationship.
There’s never a definitive why. Why you fell for someone can also be the exact same reason why things end. Opposites attract just as easily as they repel. Like-minded people connect just as fast as they crave novelty and difference. No good relationship is perfect and no bad relationship is ever completely void of good and happy moments. That’s what makes love capable of evoking every single feeling and emotion ever. It’s this distinctly human experience that is completely unique for everyone, all while being ever-changing.
The Ancient Greeks broke down love into four different forms. Modern and contemporary thinkers have broken it down even further. However, much like the concept that they’re trying to delineate, you can’t really define love’s forms cleanly. It’s complicated, contradicting, and conflicting. But maybe that’s the beauty of it. Because how naive is it to assume that there is someone out there just for you, and simultaneously just as naive to believe that out of the billions of people inhabiting Earth right now, you can’t find someone for you.
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on november
Time is a weird thing right now. October felt like going 80 in a 40 zone and simultaneously each day still feels unpredictable and long. What’s crazy is that it feels like I have only read about these rapid world-altering events in history books. To now actually live through and experience this pandemic is not only surreal, but it also makes me extremely curious about the long-term implications. There are children who are growing up without this element of touch and physical closeness, kids who are facing an education disparity at such an extreme level, and this whole generation of people who are experiencing life through this intense digital lens.
As for my gratitude and appreciation of being able to pause and reflect on my life and family, I think it stems from what feels like my generation's obsession with having established careers before 25. And I feel like social media has only exacerbated this idea that has now led to a hyper-competitive, opportunistic, self-centred, and deeply insecure mindset and outlook on life. I think one of the main things for me during this pandemic that has helped to counter that perspective is thinking about my life within these larger social, cultural, political, and technological changes. I find myself trying to expand my sense of self while recognizing a need to truly find purpose and meaning within my experiences. Part of this introspection is how instead of only striving for new things, I can also find comfort through operating upon my repertoire of the already known. Through recycling, repositioning, recontextualizing, and recombining past experiences and available conventions in order to restructure my life and future. But who knows, I think we all are desperately grasping positive things to hold onto right now. This point of view is definitely something that I've really appreciated.
As the world is becoming more accustomed to life within this pandemic, I hope that you are adjusting well and making sure that you too can discover purpose and meaning within this shared experience. That through this chaos that is our world right now, you can find balance and grow in this wild of changing times.
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on life
“In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”
I am reading Being Mortal by Atul Gawande this week. The humanism Gawande is able to weave into all these anecdotes, experiences, and thoughts is absolutely incredible. Growing up, I have always had a unique relationship with mortality. I do not think I have ever been afraid of the act of dying itself. It is the aftermath—what one leaves behind—that shakes me to my core. I think it stems from watching my father being hospitalized and passing away as a child. What is crazy about this book is that I have already experienced so much of it before. Near his end, all of my father's organs were shutting down. He became incapable of the simple human mechanics of living. He could not talk, eat, walk, touch, or hold. He was not living—he was just existing. I remember there being tubes everywhere. It felt like the machines were doing a million things from all the noises they were emitting. There was this clear juxtaposition from the energy of the room versus the life-saving instruments—one was lifeless and the other was operating at full power.
There were a lot of things that I did not understand at the time. I thought that if Dad was sick, I too would get sick when I visited him. Because at seven, sickness is a cough or a fever or a tummy ache. And if I came home ill one day, it was always this collective experience as it would not be long before my entire family got sick as well. My mom explained to me how Dad was a different type of sick. During this period, I watched my mother be a million things—a parent, a wife, a daughter-in-law, a friend, and a medical power of attorney for my father. When she carefully and painstaking decided to take my father off of his life support when it became blatantly clear that any other decision would be solely for the living and a form of sick torture for him, she also became a shield. She was my shield from the rage and resentment that my father’s family had blasted full force towards her, and by extension, my siblings and I. I did not know at the time but in choosing death with dignity for my father, it came at the expense of our relationship with our paternal grandparents. I did not understand how she and my grandparents, had different definitions of life and what it means to live.
Gawande puts explanations, stories, and perspectives in ways that even my personal experience cannot. His proximity to death has had such visceral and profound effects on his life and practice. He is able to authentically develop and discuss a line of thinking that drastically shifts the way medicine should be viewed. He begins by explaining medicine as a means to extend life. That is the version and the story we all accept and expect. But then he also advocates for nuance in this understanding—that extending life does not just simply mean one’s existence. For him, medicine has to also include actually living. He makes this profoundly human case for the dying and the terminally ill. For freedom from discomfort and pain. For maintaining mental awareness for as long as one’s body and mind can truly allow for it. To really live—whatever that living may be for you.
Near the end of the book, Gawande writes about this couple. The wife is terminally ill and had been fighting numerous bats of cancer for years. Chemotherapy, experimental drugs, radiation, everything. A couple days before her death, when her husband had a few seconds alone with her, he whispers to her
it’s okay to let go
you no longer have to fight this unwinnable fight
and that I’ll be reunited with you soon
I can only hope that I can carry as much grace and love and dignity as they did when this happens to me, never forgetting all the lessons of my childhood and all that I have learned from Being Mortal.
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on sex
Today’s episode of Armchair Expert featured Peggy Orenstein. Many episodes have experts that specialize in things that I do not know anything about and have become quite this window into subjects I have historically been intimidated by. However, today’s episode was brilliant because it was about a topic that I consistently seek more information about—sex. My relationship with sex has transformed as much as I have throughout the years. A lot of the nuance and truth to the understanding I have of it now is something that I wished was discussed and shared with me throughout my life. I feel like most conversations and narratives revolve around the physical aspects of it—protection, STD/STIs, birth control, consent, etc. But there is really nothing about the mental and psychological effects. Maybe our parents also do not have the healthiest relationship with sex, or maybe it was for them, but in my generation’s porn saturated, sex infused, and body dysmorphic culture, it is absolutely incompatible. There is no way porn and masturbation cannot be in these conversations anymore. There is no way for people to have healthy, realistic, and balanced sexual relationships otherwise. Women are now subconsciously forced to compete with this digital woman in complete submission with a very specific body shape and type. Men are operating on false assumptions of female pleasure in addition to notions of masculinity and dominance. They have been co-opted to experience sex and desire in a way that is now so ingrained into our culture and society. As a woman, it almost feels like unless you play along and subscribe to those ideas, you are no longer welcome.
As I navigate these all precarious boundaries, I do find myself playing with, and at times subscribing to specific ideals and notions from guys. In high school, sex and sex acts were rites of passage. Once completed, felt like a currency for coolness and an ability to retain the male gaze. Everything was new, everything was messy, and everything was not very great. Orenstein illuminates this discrepancy between pleasure with boys and girls partially to how by 17 (the average age for teens to have sexual intercourse for the first time), boys have already spent on average, six years watching pornography (the average age for teens to experience or search for porn is 11). That means by 17, boys have this preconceived notion of what sex is and have also spent years masturbating. It might not be correct or true to them as an individual, but by 17, boys know what they want, what feels good, and how to orgasm. At that age, girls really have no clue. Porn is taboo. Masturbating even more so. We are told our first time might hurt because of a whole laundry list of reasons, so for many, when we experience these pains and discomforts, we silently endure it because god forbid we express the novelty or our inexperience of it all. After a couple years of that, as we finally start experiencing sex, navigating pleasure, and understanding our bodies more, high school ends. For many, university starts, and with it, a whole new set of problems. In university, sex becomes infinitely more complicated because it is now synonymous with one’s identity. Kill counts, labels, and relationship statuses (or lack thereof) are all now a part of the university zeitgeist because going out and partying play this integral role in university life. Sex now becomes this social norm that is used to measure not only identity, but also normalcy.
So now, there’s me, at 22, trying to navigate this new world of relationships where age relaxes more as a boundary between people. I find myself beginning to develop this line of questioning that grew from me examining my ever-changing relationship with sex, femininity, and pleasure. I have experienced (for lack of better words) virginity sex, high school sex, and university sex. I would currently classify my sex life as single sex, and so I guess that means I can also label relationship sex as checked. If I had to describe those five classifications, they would all be distinctly different experiences. So building off of these classifications, I now wonder what long-term relationship sex is like? Engaged sex? Married sex? Trying to get pregnant sex? Pregnant sex? And when people become parents, parent sex?!? The divorce rate is in the 40 percent range. Statistically, it is quite plausible that I might go through that as well. So divorced sex? And what of the other 60ish percent? If you are staying married to that person, you are going to experience menopause with them. So menopause sex? Nobody talks about any of this. How are people supposed to figure this out, or at least have a realistic expectation as to how it will be for them. How does one navigate and negotiate these dynamics? At this point, I do not know if I am overcomplicating sex or if my line of questioning is extremely valid and highlights an aspect of the human experience that no one seems to be talking about.
This is just on my end from the perspective of a cis straight female. What about for the guy? I am certain that they are going through shifts and changes while simultaneously needing to deal with ours. We can’t just be expected to dive in headfirst into all these critical and eventual events thinking that it is something we can just simply figure out. Bodies change, minds evolve, and souls might grow to want and need different things. The environments we inhabit will change as well. However, it feels to me that the expectation is that sex will largely remain the same.
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on normal people
“She’s not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works. If he silently decides not to say something when they're talking, Marianne will ask “what?” within one or two seconds. This “what?” question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them (26).”
I am currently re-reading Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I have realized that this passage was the moment when I first found myself within the narrative of Normal People. And when I find myself saying “what?” to break the silence and stares, it is also as a response to the notion of being carefully watched, dissected, and interpreted in the eyes of someone else. Someone whose opinion should not matter, but does. Someone who your happiness should not be based on, but is. And someone who you think cannot hurt you, but will.
I think what makes this novel resonate so much is how authentic it feels to the relationships I find my friends and me to be in. Where things are a relationship and also are not. From the outside, it resembles one. However, from the inside, both parties are spontaneous and open but ambiguous—quick to draw the line of where labels exist but carefully teetering the space before it and consciously never crossing it. It is in this space, where I constantly find myself analyzing everything. Sometimes, it even feels like a form of self-protection—if I can fully understand what I am feeling and why, my emotions will no longer be able to hurt me. However, contrary to that idea, is the inevitable reality of misapprehension. It also leads to this unavoidable response of accidental hurt to be shock and betrayal. Just because I am fully aware that this romantic relationship is unhealthy, unbalanced, not a very good idea, or never capable of a happy ending, it doesn’t mean that it can’t hurt me. That is why when it does, it feels like an absolute bombshell. And rather than being directed at the true origin point of self that these emotions stem from, they are often targeted at one another.
The heart of Normal People is this tension on how it is not actually about the way people hurt each other in relationships, but rather the way that hurt and true intimacy go hand in hand. Rooney is emotionally truthful about how people can hurt each other while simultaneously letting her characters fall in love with people who hurt them. She showcases how one lives through things before one understands them. In a way, there is this element of romanticism in her writing. People can hurt each other but still mean the world to one other. That despite clearly doomed relationships, Rooney’s writing subscribes to this idea that if two people make each other happy then it is working. Her compelling take on this possibility of allowing pleasure to reside above better judgement—how I can recognize my relationship is doomed and still let it make me happy in the moment—is Rooney at her most empathetic. It is this unwavering empathy and authenticity that draws me into Normal People in a way that I have never connected to a story about love before.
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