We might all live a little better if we lost our minds a little more
Notes from a woman who has mercifully lost her mind
Hi friends,
It’s been a minute—or more like a month and a half. I feel trepidatious to be here, as if I’m trying on skates after a prolonged injury that’s kept me seated.
My reality has been far from “seated”—in fact, I’ve spent the past two months being the most embodied I’ve ever been. A novel experience for someone who has lived most of her life in her head. I called this newsletter The Percolate because it’s meant to be a distillation of my thoughts, a slow-drip cup of mental joe. I usually spend most of my time observing and processing, after which I’d come here to muse and share.
Lately, there’s been a significant shift in the way I experience life: less thoughts, more impulses. Everything is physical, all of it is now. I’ve thrown myself bodily into the waves of fun and opportunity and curiosity with intense urgency because I need to live, and I need to live immediately. I’ve found myself prioritising connection over all else, the overriding requirement being immediacy and intensity. It’s taken me away from publishing and back to Instagram, because it affords me the directness of expression and connection I’m looking for. I go out more and stay out later than I’ve done in years, get less sleep than than I thought I could live on, and meet so many people in real life that I’ve deleted all my social/dating apps.
There is a frantic, effervescent vitality I’d previously not associated with my character but which I discover is, in fact, deeply vital to my being. This is who I am. I always questioned the accuracy of my Gemini for me, but my God, there she is—along with my Scorpio moon and Sagittarius ascendant. It’s a dizzyingly alchemic cocktail of vitality, curiosity, intuition, intensity, intimacy, sensuality, independence, and sensitivity, that’s been stoppered for years by anxiety, people-pleasing tendencies, and a predilection for over-caution.
So much of my energy has gone into dialing it down, making myself smaller, less loud, and palatable, and into keeping others comfortable. Other people’s comfort has always been more important than my own. I’ve spent a lifetime worrying that I’m “too much” for most people. Recently I’ve realised—finally—that that, in fact, is true. I am too much for most people. I’m too sensitive, too emotional, too opinionated, too verbal, too inappropriate, too communicative, too curious, too intimidating, too intense (oh God, the intensity); my expectations are too high, I ask too much, I need too much. It is—I am—altogether too much for most people to handle. It has taken me 38 years to finally realise the truth of it. So I may as well start saying whatever the fuck I want to say and being exactly who I am, right now. I am way too curious, have way too many questions, and want to have way too many conversations to worry that any of it is too much.
When I think of the energetic toll and opportunity cost of moderating myself for the benefit of other people, it makes my eyes water. The biggest waste of my time and energy—of my life—has been trying to be something for everyone. Whom would I be if I had been letting my fire burn my whole life, rather than rationing my access to oxygen to keep my flame under control? How much bigger, brighter, and more beautiful would I be raging now? Because I’ve always been too much; I was an offbeat kid with too many questions, intense curiosity, a bizarre sense of humour, discomfiting sexuality, and a profound existentialism that made grownups uncomfortable, and other kids think I was weird. I have been queer—in every sense of the word—since I was a small child, and I never gave myself permission to own that and see whom I would be if I did.
No one has ever really got me, and all I have ever wanted is to be got. Even now, emotional isolation is the most soul-crushing part of my experience. Who will see me? Who will love me? Who will be with me? Who will stay with me? The only answers to these questions are my coven of women friends who hold space for me, a fiercely protective circle of ferocious femmes who witness me, support me, and will see no harm done to me. These are my soulmates, my spiritual partners. Men have been merely tourists in my life who come to enjoy the view and leave with a heightened experience, colonists who come to take of me what they will, leave with more than they came with, and claim it as their own.
I am spent, furious, and heart-weary, but I am never without hope. However much I’ve dimmed my own light, I can’t deny it’s always been there; there has not been a dark period in my life where I haven’t illuminated my own path. These days, it’s all I’m interested in: the light. My own is no longer enough. I seek it through sunshine, through connection, through the enlightenment I get from following my curiosity. This is where I get my energy. The only way I want to feel is fluorescent—no, incandescent. I want to burn so brightly it hurts people’s eyes to look at me, with such intensity that only few can hold me, for as long as I am here, however long that is. It may be shorter than we think.
This is what’s done it—tipped my over-full bucket on its side, drenching all in my vicinity with my multitudes. Nothing can contain me anymore, and what it took was a war. How afraid of ourselves do we have to be that we only free ourselves in the face of being robbed of our liberty? For the first few weeks of the war in Ukraine, night after night I awoke from terrifying nocturnal animations that felt too vivid to be imaginary; they’re a technicolour extensions of grey-scale tableaux I’ve been having for years, since I moved to Berlin. I didn’t know what they meant then and I don’t know what they mean now, but I’ve been waking for weeks with a single impulse: Live. Live. Live.
For me, living looks largely like gratitude. A profound appreciation of the life I have before me, of the circumstances I had the dumb luck to be born into, of the lifestyle currently afforded to me. Everything about my present situation is so idyllic and glorious it makes my heart break. Experiencing it is so unadulterated that it is impossible to feel selectively; I have lost all my filters. I love hard and openly, and have embraced the reality that I fall in love easily and often and get my heart broken with the same frequency. I’ve also acknowledged that so much of what I fall in love with is who I am when I am in love, and what I bring out in the person I am with. It is my own reflected glow; I’ve yet to meet someone who can match it. Being a whistling kettle of emotion that lives on a full burner now, I cry almost daily—aesthetically-pleasing gentle weeps and full-throated, face-drenching bawls in equal measure—and surround myself with people who make me laugh and feel joyful. I listen to music constantly and dance frequently (it is remarkable how much these things are tied to the joy). I move every day, with my full body, using it in ways that make me feel more powerful and feminine than I’ve felt in my whole life. I want all of the beauty, all of the time, and I make myself drunk with it then go home to sleep it off and then saturate myself in it all over again come morning.
I lead with curiosity, not fear, and ask uncomfortable questions that lead to fascinating conversations. I’ve learned that the more I can share of myself without shame, the more other people feel comfortable doing the same. This is real connection, and this is life; to know others, and to see ourselves in one another. I cannot think of anything more beautiful, and anything that makes me want to live more. We all want to be known, to see ourselves reflected; they say hate is fear of the unknown, but I think it is of being unknown. And to know others is to know ourselves, and that is where we find love. There is only light to be found there.
Things that helped this month
This won’t be the usual listicle. I find myself moving away from wanting to add value; I so apologise if this is what you come here for.
I want to share one thing that I hope might be helpful. It is one theme that I have seen coming up again and again for weeks: self-denial.
Perhaps my perspective is skewed by the fact that I have particularly sensitive, empathic friends—but there seem to be many other people who are struggling firstly with survivors’ guilt, and secondly with a sense of impending doom and a fear of mortality. These same people won’t talk about it openly because they don’t feel entitled to their own emotional response to the tragedy that is happening to other people. I have done the same thing; we are out here invalidating the fact that we are struggling with the news, and its potential implications—which, if you have an active imagination, will be enough to put you in bed for a week.
Regardless of what we do or don’t feel entitled to feel, you know what is valid? That you are struggling. If you are struggling, that is fact; it is not an interpretation. We can interpret a great deal about our emotions but what is not open to interpretation is whether or not we are struggling with them.
If you are afraid, please—recognise it. If you want to cry, don’t hold it in—that shit will poison you. If you want to make life changes, now is the time baby—with or without the possibility that our time may be up, sooner rather than later.
I’ll end with some words I found very comforting from a close friend for whom geopolitical conflict is a fact of life—in other words, someone whose advice I take at face value right now:
Life is a terminal condition, and the only medicine for it is to live.
With love,
