I’ve lived many tornadoes and sunshowers, consecutively and spontaneously, for some time now. What have I learned?
Patience.
I tend to be all ‘woe is me,’ ‘how is this my life!’ about the melodramatic events that make up my life but lately I’ve been feeling an immense vagueness about it all. I have felt heartbreak and hope and nothing at all and yet absolutely everything. This is life, I guess. Today I want to speak to you reading this; life livers; chronic thinkers — You are alive. You are living, breathing, and reading – you, and the rest of us, are SO lucky.
For the past few months I have woken up everyday with a brain seeped in deep fog and a throat sore from caught emotion. Everytime the fog began to clear, another tornado swept through. Byt I have not felt true complaints or whines bubbling in my belly. I feel complex grief and gratitude. I feel such a range of conflicting emotions that my face lacks any expression at all. Sometimes I drop back into my body and either cry or laugh for hours. And then I float back out and let the fog resettle. And still, I am alive. I am practicing patience and grace – it is incredibly difficult but also comes quite naturally. Of course my life is falling apart, it’s what a life does! And it will come back together in such a beautiful mosaic of the debris and the dreams and today.
If you revisit my past month-worth of newsletters you will track a consistent record of me being lost in change. Whether I was able to put words to it or not, it is there. Here I am today, feeling at the precipice of the end of that lostness (because surely we passed the climax of change…right?), writing about patience. Thank you for having patience with me. I have felt unsatisfied with my newsletters since the beginning of March and I credit it to this change maze I’ve been getting myself through. I am proud of myself for still posting here every wednesday, but I want to express how minimally me those posts were. They were of course me and my voice and my thoughts but they were not Me, as in the writer and thinker who authors this newsletter.
That being said I’d like to reintroduce myself and set some ground rules that I hope you can hold me and yourself to.
I am Victoria. I am a young woman. I love writing.
VIC’S RULES
I can do whatever I want because I own this place (within respectful parameters – I’m not a fucking monster or anything)
You can say whatever you want (…respectfully) because you are a welcome guest in my home
There will probably be some changes – again – to my structure and consistency in the wake of my patience-practicing and everything else. Stay tuned for something, hopefully you’ll love it.
P.S. I wrote the above paragraphs a couple of nights ago and within twenty four hours my life’s natural disasters escalated Today, in a responsive fit of anxiety, helplessness, and resentment for trying to practice healthy coping (a moment if purposeful ignorance re. all I’ve been preaching), my best friends sent me these texts:
I’m passing this tough love on to you.
Spring cleaning
Keep
Alone time
Meaningful time with friends
Swimming / being in and around water of all kinds
Walking for hours
Following feelings
Donate (to the void)
Self-sabotage
Spending energy thinking anxious thoughts about more than one month into the future
Being 20
Not talking
White queer media
Holding impossibly high expectations for myself
Totally free newsletter…sorry!
List of nonwhite queer media
Heartbreak High on Netflix
substackRecently in AllLoveVic world
My new Tiktok - might do some random talking on here… we’ll see. Tik tok feels like such a joke platform sometimes so I think I’ll treat it that way.
Recently in HotLiterati world
The anxiety one feels after trying to make a “healthy” change especially is arguably the worst kind bc it feels so nonsensical like I’m trying to cope healthily why don’t I feel healthy yet?
Let the fresh and new emerge! 💕🌺