Alara
@paperthin
“For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
I was feeling so ashamed and so embarrassed and so stupid and so alone and lonely and pathetic and dirty and awful. And then, I got really mad. I got mad at everything about him. That he’d pulled away, that he’d made me embarrassed, that he didn’t feel the way I wanted him to feel. Or, maybe it was that I suspected he did feel that way and he wasn’t admitting it. But any way you wanted to spin it, I was angry. It wasn’t rational. I mean, what ever really is? But as irrational as it was, I was livid. I was furious. There was rage in my chest. We are talking about probably the first man in my life who really saw me, who ever really understood me, who had so much in common with me…and he still didn’t love me. When you find that rare person who really knows who you are and they still don’t love you… I was burning.
Reklam
She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.
But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that. Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.
When you’re living your life, you’re so inside your head, you’re swirling around in your own pain, that it’s hard to see how obvious it is to the people around you.
I said something like “Sing it so hard, so loud, that you can’t control where your voice goes. Let your voice crack. Lose control of it.” I gave her permission to sound bad. Think of how you sing when you’re singing to the radio at full volume. When you can’t hear yourself, you’re not afraid to really belt it out because you won’t have to cringe when your voice breaks or you veer off-key. Daisy needed that kind of freedom. That takes a crapload of confidence. And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good . Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.
Reklam