Few peo­ple have been able to fill the void lately. The ones who do sing to me the unashamedly erotic songs of John Dowland and help me test new decks.

Through it all, I’ve been try­ing to take five breaths every now and then, inhal­ing and exhal­ing a lit­tle more fully than usual. Trying not to live like it’s a fri­day every day. Trying to fig­ure out if I should apol­o­gize for using your song to score the moments I shared with some­one else. Trying to rec­on­cile my old Taoist beliefs with my new Buddhist views. Trying to be happy with the per­son I am, instead of let­ting dis­con­tent drive self-improvement.

 

Frigid win­ter days are teach­ing me patience and vul­ner­a­bil­ity. Some are eas­ier than oth­ers. I’ve been work­ing with the fickle swings instead of against them. Otherwise, it’s a con­stant strug­gle when try­ing to impose sta­tic order on inher­ently unsta­ble processes. The hard part is mak­ing plans when you don’t know how you’ll feel from one day to the next.

Back in the day when we were doing cov­ers of Frank Ocean songs. One of the most rec­og­niz­able things about Jesse’s room are instru­ments strewn about.

The great­est test of my progress so far will be an acoustic show Jesse asked me to play with him on Sunday. Anxiety has been get­ting the bet­ter of me lately, and the prospect of hav­ing only two nights of rehearsal does noth­ing to assuage this.

I’ve been keep­ing in mind that we were able to pull off a decent per­for­mance last time when I didn’t know the show was going to hap­pen until a few hours prior; one of those exer­cises to fos­ter pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences and com­bat neg­a­tiv­ity bias. Fortunately, Jesse is a great front­man to be behind, cause he com­mands the atten­tion of any­one watch­ing, also tak­ing the atten­tion away from ner­vous fin­gers and live jitters.

 

The jour­ney of self-discovery has been dif­fi­cult. When there’s a his­tory of trauma, it’s inevitable that an uncom­fort­able feel­ings get stirred up every now and then. I take care of myself by mak­ing sure I see the impor­tant peo­ple on a con­sis­tent basis and liv­ing in those moments. The lit­tle ways to heal are found in both the expe­ri­ences them­selves and the time one takes to inter­nal­ize those experiences.

This is how I learn that self-compassion isn’t self-pity, and that most peo­ple bring less kind­ness to them­selves than to oth­ers. To get on my own side, I’ve been visu­al­iz­ing myself as a child, just as wor­thy of care as any other. I would wish the best for that lit­tle per­son, and it helps me under­stand that I should wish the best for myself as well.