The Diary of a New Beginning: Gardening a Forest of Thorns
06/10/20208/10/2023 (11pm)
Just returned home after a weekend of familiarity. Padova treated me so kindly. Far enough from Milan to make everything seem smaller, but not so far away as to erase the feeling of loss, nostalgia and heartbreak.
This weekend, I wore it like a life vest, hoping I wouldn’t drown in my feelings, but rather just flow with them downstream.
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As soon as I board the train, I put my headphones on, my music starts to play, and the feelings that had been wrapped around my stomach, building pressure all week, make it upstream to my heart, where I feel the discomfort, uneasiness, and pain; finally, to my brain, where memories flash through my eyes along the lyrics of the Spanish songs, mourning the loss of a friendship.
Having two “homes” makes it easier to see reality as makeable and disposable (to some degree). I live in Milan, but I can take a train and basically disappear, so, what holds me back? What is it that makes one want to stay? What makes a place worth fighting for?
It’s what Milan has made of me. That’s my answer. I’ll fight for her because I like who I am with her. She challenges and inspires me, something my hometown, Lima, stopped doing before I left.
Milan isn’t perfect, but it’s real. I’ve already made mistakes, but I’ve reflected, and tried again. Even if the consequences are difficult to face, it makes this experience real. Milan isn’t as it first was, only pastel green. Now that I know her, and therefore love her too, she has shown me some blue, red, and black, revealing herself to be human too.
Milan has seen me in my most recent, genuine, flawed version. Maybe once I outgrow the person I aim to be now, my journey here will be concluded and I will have to say goodbye. But for now, I’ll fight for her.
09/10/2023
What even is friendship?
And is it friendship if it closes its doors when you take a step back?
10/10/2023
I might have needed to hear you say it one more time.
You have officially set me free.
Not all people will want the kind of friendship that I can give them, but that’s all I have to offer, or I’d be giving a part of myself too.
11/10/2023 (1:20 pm)
The problem with fear is that it makes you act in ways that aren’t authentic to your human core. I’ve lived my social life being so afraid, feeling so beneath everyone, so I built walls. These walls, I called my best friends, and I loved them, entirely unaware of the role that my fear had assigned to them.
12/10/2023
Maybe the reason I like to think of myself as an artist (deep down) is the licence it gives me to be different. Not in the way I appear, but in the way I experience life.
As I grow up, it becomes clear that something in me challenges what my friends view as “normal”. Unintentional. Sometimes I’m surprised to have to explain to others what for me feels innate.
13/10/2023
“A friend to all is a friend to none”
- Cardigan by Taylor Swift
If you are a friend to all, how can you befriend yourself? How can you be a friend without being whole?
14/10/2023 4:43 pm
I made the choice to go to sleep for a couple of hours, and meanwhile to forget about the pressures, expectations, duties… because my body was too tired. I always go to sleep feeling lonely, as if my only option left is surrender to the realm of sleep and nothingness; taking it as a reminder that I’m human and not omnipotent, not eternal, not supernatural.
But I woke up, rested, conscious, grateful, with all the earlier fear having vanished away. To my surprise, at peace.
I was just scared of one thing, checking my phone. In this instantaneous communication, online presence, metaverse, we are never truly alone. Even when by yourself, you can have everyone and no one. By having a gateway to connection in your hands, you become always reachable, and if nobody is reaching out…what does it say about yourself?
It’s weird, the duality of solitude and interconnectedness. Have I ever been all by myself? And by that I mean, being alone without the knowledge that everyone around me still exists. That complete mental isolation from humans and time, to exist without limits in your solitude.
And I say this because for me it’s always been easier being alone when I know as a fact, I won’t be later that day. I need the reassurance of others to exist peacefully, to know that someone can always drag me out from the mystery of being, and that existing in solitude is a momentary thing, and not my natural state.
But now I wish for nothing more than to know how it is to wake up and continue being, without my tranquility relying on whether I’m existing in someone’s mind. To be unapologetically in charge of my energy, my day, and my ability to connect.
15/10/2023
“Turned away from it all like a blind man
Sat on a fence but it don't work
Keep coming up with love
But it's so slashed and torn
Why, why, why?
Love, love, love, love, love”
- Under Pressure by David Bowie & Queen
18/10/2023 (11:31 pm)
We are all trying to hold onto something that just wants to be relinquished, control.
19/10/2023
Even nature has a breaking point. Just like me, it’s fugue went out today. The sky transformed into grey thunder after months of exuberant heat. Nature isn’t constant, planned, predictable… so why would humans think we are?
A month ago I asked myself why it couldn’t always be summer? An eternal paradise, a summer-scape, a routine of never-ending joy.
But our cosmovision is built on the idea of change, because that’s what we learnt from the world. Duality. Every culture observed and understood it from the earliest days. Opposite but complementary forces needed for life to exist. This concept, known as tinkuy for ancient Peru or as yin & yang in China.
For us it's easy to challenge nature because we didn’t grow up learning from it. For us, nature was always trivial. We were taught everything second-hand: the seasons, the weather, the natural processes. We absorbed it without learning anything from it. We formed conclusions from an entirely makeable world, in which we have infinite control.
If I really wanted to, I could spend the rest of my life living in summertime. I'd just spend six months in the northern hemisphere and as soon as it gets cold, I’d travel down south. But if I did it without stopping to reflect on why it isn’t this way in the first place, I would forever ignore a lesson that is bigger than me, a lesson on life itself.
Seeing nature as something factual, foreign, and trivial, might be our greatest mistake. To think we cannot learn from the environment that harvests our existence, and think we are in no way intertwined with it, can prove to be lethal, in our understanding of ourselves.
Just like nature I have taken a step back, and I was able to see the extremes that consume my existence; to see that if I continued to live in one sole state, heat would eventually leave me dry, consumed, and less than alive.
My hatred for winter doesn’t come solely from the fact that it’s cold, even mentally it’s the complete opposite from its counterpart. Winter urges us to stop, ponder, reflect. Inhibited by the weather, it’s a time for self-discovery, introspection, to fight the awkwardness and find life within ourselves.
Summer and winter, a juxtaposition needed for wholeness to exist. And even if humans love to believe we are just half, we are also whole.
19/10/23
When can one not understand sarcasm? And when does one feel the need to make use of it?
Fear. The same one that makes us feel small, defenceless, and scared in the dark.
In one you are too scared to say the truth, and in the other, you are so scared of hearing your fears become a reality, that you take it as your truth.
Miscommunication, not rooted in the words or the phrase or the formulation, but in using fear as a way to experience the world.
Fights, rumours, dramas start out of what seems like “nothing”, however, fear is immeasurable, and it can be found in tons even in the lightest remark, or absent in the most serious ones. It’s more about the spectator than it is about the spectacle.
As rational or justifiable as actions might be, people’s interpretations of them are outside one’s domain.
All I can do is choose the words that will attempt to translate my psyche to those that have been caught in the crossfire of my understanding of myself. War casualties of the inner conflict of my mind; non-intentional, non-personal, innocent in a way.
Once feelings are involved, the story becomes a virus that mutates from person to person, triggering innate fears and accrued insecurities. Facts become subjective, opinions get a voice, guilt and morality start to circle by.
Decisions are personal until they are not.
23/10/2023 (6 pm)
So, what does it mean to be social beings?
Is it true that we need other’s love more than our own?
It’s all about concepts, and some aren’t innate to us, or maybe they are. But we cannot know, because before we can figure it out by ourselves, we are taught.
Is there a point in life where you can truly be unattached?
We form our personality based on the boundaries that others have set for who we are. A daughter, friend, lover, etc.
If we are mere definitions, is there a point where we learn them by heart and become in fact who we are? And if so, when we become sure, too defined, do we break from those that have done the job of defining us?
Or is there always something innate in who we are, regardless of the definitions we become? A sense of self, always alert, that is triggered when we deviate too much, or become defined in ways that don’t allow this core to breathe, to repair, to grow.
Maybe it’s that uneasiness in the pit of my stomach, whenever I play a role, or whenever I become a joker for others and not myself. If we are merely makeable creatures, how do we become aware of what it means to pretend?
08/11/2023
Fleetwood Mac by Fleetwood Mac, 1975