It's kinda ironic to decide to post just a couple of hours before the New Year (at least here in my lonely corner of the planet), when I have barely made any other posts during 2023.
This year was as great as it was tough.
This year also nearly sucked my soul dry.
For the first time in my life, I am spending the R̩veillon Рthat is how we call the New Year celebration here Рcompletely alone. It wasn't my plan, originally. I first hoped to spend it with L, but he got invited by his father to go to the beach. He is on holidays, I am not, so I could not go.
Then I hoped to be with my mother, since I figured she would want to celebrate at home after returning (she spent Christmas abroad with my sister). Turns out she had already made other arrangements with a friend.
My father was my last option, as he had told me he and his wife were going to spend the New Year's Eve here in the city. But in the last minute, a colleague agreed to fill in for him at work, and off he went with his wife on a little getaway.
I do not feel lonely. I do not feel anything, to be honest. I am thinking about taking a cleansing shower, with salt and herbs, as I always do. Then eat lentil stew – it's a food associated with abundance here in Brazil. Maybe light a good quality incense and smudge my flat. Maybe drink champagne, put some music on, dance. Maybe speak to the Gods – I haven't talked to them since... forever.
And yet... yet there is the tiredness in my heart. A heaviness on my forehead, between my eyebrows, one that often feels like a fissure, like I have a gaping hole where a third eye should be. And then comes this ugly little voice proclaiming the absurdity of it all. What is the point of doing all this, this pantomime of rite and celebration, of spirituality, if nothing inside me seems to change? If I feel constantly crushed by this unnameable anguish that will not allow itself to be cried out of my system? If I often wonder if the Gods care, if They see, if They listen, or if I am just grasping at straws, wanting to believe because otherwise I feel hollow and meaningless.
I think this is one of my greatest flaws: my veiled (and often denied) dependency on an element outside of myself to confer meaning and importance to my existence. Rationally, I know this is not the way to go. And from a purely intellectual point of view, I realise that I must create my own reason to be, because nothing is a given. But as a person who is irremediably called by spirituality, it simply does not suffice to merely accept the reality I see without seeking something beyond.
Like Mulder in the X-Files, I want to believe. Something within me needs faith. And yet, the older I grow, the less I seem to be able to just trust and believe. How does one escape such a conundrum?
I have never been prone to nostalgia – the past is the past, I must understand it in order to not repeat it, but there is no point in holding it too dear, for I am never going back there again. But lately, I have this sad longing for who I used to be when I was younger. Who I was when I first began to write this blog. So silly, and yet so hopeful, so wide-eyed, so prone to passion, so trusting of my own desires. So willing to try and lose because I believed still had enough time to recover what was lost, if needed.
I usually do not linger in the past. I do not dwell on the missed opportunities, on the dreams that fell apart, on the many doors that were slammed shut in my face before I ever got the chance of seeing what waited for me on the other side. I have come to accept that there are no shortcuts, and that the only way forward is to carry out the tasks I am given by life. I now understand that all important decisions are ultimately made alone, and that I will be the one to pay the price or reap the benefits of what I choose to do with myself.
So I press on, and try to not scrutinise too much the wounds that have carved me into who I am. Sometimes though, I do wonder about what has been lost in the process of my own making. The pieces of me that fell off on the road to who I am now – a much harder, less trusting person, one that has learnt to protect herself and to prevail regardless of the cost. I am stronger now, more resilient and overall a better player of the worldly games.
I am also smothering inside my own armour. And try as I might, I can't seem to remember how to take it off.
What is the point about this post? There is no point, really. I will now get up and do my rituals, because the other option is staring at the walls and feeling sorry for myself for being such a mess on the inside. Truth is, I can't keep expecting for something or someone outside of me to crown me with meaning and importance, and it seems that not matter how much I try to divest myself from this debility, I nevertheless still cling to it.
And perhaps this is the big lesson of ending up alone during the New Year: that I am, indeed, alone. Thus, I must create light and meaning and reason to celebrate in my own solitude. I must know myself to be worth existing even if no one sees me or admires me or approves me. That any rituals I decide to do are not for the benefit of something outside myself, but rather are meant to satisfy something in me, to express something of myself, and no one else needs to avow its validity or not.
Perhaps this is a call to strengthen myself in a new way. No longer by wearing this heavy armour that lets nothing – life, included – pass through. But by fully embracing the expression of myself, in such a way that the armour will no longer be needed.
