I wasn’t letting him take the lead, so I got bored really quickly.
We hadn’t even started, but he was already disappointing me.
I wanted him to make me feel excited, to get the craziness out of my head. Yes, sadly, I love controlling… That’s why I kept doing it with each one of them for hours, until the moon was high up in the sky.
…Me with the book in my hands, reading until 1 am.
It is one of my favourite (healthy) activities to get out of my own self when I’m in trouble.
This time I had picked the book Conversations with myself. Nelson Mandela is the author.
I picked it out of curiosity. I was expecting to find something hidden about Mandela, something that nobody else knew: His dark side!
I wanted to find the anger translated into words, which he felt when he was treated like rubbish by ‘non-black’ people. I was hungry for his words of rage and hate. HATE.
But passing the prologue by Barack Obama I felt disappointed. I realised that The Mandela Foundation would have never allowed anything too horrible to be published. They would never let the world know something from his personal life that had the potential to damage his public image.
The truth is, in case you haven’t already figured, that I was disappointed because I wanted to find an echo of the rage I’ve inside. I wanted to feel identified with the hate towards life that can’t be shown, but remains hidden. It’s burning me inside.
Of course, I can’t let it out because I’m the good girl. The one who gets distinction at uni and is always quiet. So there I go, strictly following this anger-free diet.
Ironically, I look for every single chance of letting it out, because the body ends up expelling everything that is unnatural for it.
I look for it in the music, in books, in people who can give me an excuse to be angry – misogynistic men, emotionally unavailable people.
The saddest thing about this behaviour is that I get isolated from life. I avoid feeling.
I don’t let life to tell me its own story …let alone my own.
I want to drive the car at any cost. I want to teach life what to make me feel and how to do it.
However, life is wise: it gives me what I need; not what I want, and it doesn’t matter if I carry on refusing to receive those gifts, I will eventually get them anyway. It’s like trying to walk through a concrete wall.
There’s nothing I can do. I have to accept it: I can’t control it all.
Most importantly, when focussing my efforts on controlling life in order to avoid pain, I waste them. I cause the opposite effect: not being prepared to take what has been stored for me in the road.
I’m not religious mates, but I swear that life gives you small signs to tell you where not to go or what isn’t good for you. Deep inside, you already know it.
I almost cried: the feeling of being so small, powerless and insignificant is overwhelming.
Nevertheless, life is there with its books, its tails, its songs, its ways of reconciling with your own self, its good feelings, its walks with good music, its good conversations.
And that single book showed me that I wasn’t listening to them…
nocureforme 