August 30th, 2014. Saturday night. 9:08pm. I’m eight minutes late to my nightly Facetime with my girlfriend at the time. I’m fresh out of high school, 17. The world is your oyster and all that. I was looking at vintage photos from 1945 that night, for reasons I don’t entirely know for sure myself, and Wait by M83 was streaming through my earphones. I was lost in thought about life in general - past, present, future. No time, no time.
One of the many sticky notes I wrote to track my feelings in 2016.
10 minutes later, I was no longer in a relationship. There has never been an event in my life more confusing, life-changing, devastating, or seismic. It took me about a year and a half to realize it, but after my breakup, I became good roommates with depression. It was my best friend, and it never paid rent. It tagged along every time I took a picture, ordered a coffee, or sneezed. It hummed along in the background before I was forced to acknowledge it. I moved through my life and I looked fine - smile on my face, I spent much more time with my friends, and I went to Europe for two weeks wrapped up in various countries.
I was on the top of a gondola above the clouds of Switzerland, enveloped in the Swiss Alps surrounded by dozens of people. It was beautiful and yet my heart was still with a girl in Edmonton. You wouldn’t know it only from the picture I took below, but the Swiss Alps are my favorite place, visually, in the world. The houses on the hills and the paths that connect them are like markers that trail and pinpoint, veins running through peaks and valleys. A quick google says the highest elevation of the Alps is 4,810 meters.
When I came home, I posted the pictures on my Facebook - mountains and skies and lakes and lion statues and Eiffel Towers and Venice and etc - and I desperately tried to appear happy. How could you not be when you’re surrounded by something so breathtaking and undeniably gorgeous? You’re literally on top of the world, and you’re just not that into it. Everyone else was happy, it was all over my feed. So why wasn’t I? I was in this stunning landscape, on a gondola with a bunch of people I didn’t know who all got startled when someone dropped a soda can on the floor, and we remembered we were on a platform in the sky sustained only by wires. I ate strawberry gelato in Assisi. I was 17 with the world in front of me, and in Switzerland the world was below me too.
Fast forward to 2016, my depression had hit its Swiss Alp peak and it dropped me 4,810 meters into the valley below. I can count the nights I got a full 8 hours of sleep on one hand that whole year. I felt as if I was carrying those alps on my shoulders every day. It’s hard to breathe properly when you’re carrying mountains. I came home from being with my friends one night - and it was another moment that I realized I was deeply in trouble, because what usually would leave me feeling at least a little happier and more energized had ran me empty. My emotions were disappearing. If I wasn’t empty, I was miserable. If I wasn’t miserable, I was empty. I went around and around in my brain, trying to figure out the answers that I knew I would never receive, attempting to find resolution in a stack of sticky notes, trying to alchemize closure with hands that had gone cold. I looked in the mirror and became increasingly unrecognizable from my usual chipper nature people around me had become accustomed to viewing me as.
I thought it would be easier if I just didn’t have to live anymore. I thought about death a lot. I wondered if I had a place in the world. I wondered if people actually cared about me. It’s a weird time when your own obituary is formulating in your head at the age of 19. That year and including a good chunk of 2015 as well, I had many days (various shades of countless and endless) that were bad enough that I should’ve gone to a doctor. And I wanted to.
I’ve become better. I am better.
But there would be this recurrent thought that would always come into my head seemingly at random. It was a 11th or 12th grade science class when I was in high school, I don’t remember exactly which grade anymore - but biology was the only subject in high school science I could even moderately stay interested in, and that’s still a stretch. So this one day, my science teacher talks very briefly about this thing that happens when a fire rips through a forest, and instead of the forest being completely destroyed and scorched-earth forever, she says that the forest and the plants and the trees and the flowers actually grow back despite the fire. A highly destructive event, yet nature thrives again, contrary to what you would believe. I don’t think she even spoke about it for more than a minute, and it is the only tangible thing I carry with me from high school science class. It is one of the only things I remember from science class from grade one to graduation, and perhaps all of school period. Upon googling this phenomenon, and also finding out what the name of that particular process is (by the way, it’s called succession), I found a bunch of studies about it. This small, miniscule thing I learned about in 60 seconds and maybe brushed with once or twice on a homework assignment has stuck with me because I saw myself in those woods that were burnt to ash beyond recognition.
I’ve seen my life combust since that August night, and I’ve seen my life in these flowers that have grown back roots-up after fireballs threatened their existence, and yes, wiped them off the earth. My house - my brain - went up in flames. My mental health circled down the drain, countless showers I never paid attention to, so many moments I was never mindful of because I was so lost in a never-ending vortex. I spun down the drain every day. And even my room didn’t feel the same anymore (and that’s actually not my room anymore.) There was nothing left to do, when the butterflies turned to dust that covered my whole room. So I punched a hole in the roof, let the flood carry away all my pictures of you.
“The forest fires of today lead to the forests of tomorrow. The heat and pressure of the fire explodes cones filled with seeds that start the growth of a new forest days after the fire has stopped.”
“Forest fires can destroy everything in their paths, burning trees and vegetation until the landscape is uninhabitable for months or sometimes even years. But, they can also usher in new life, creating a completely new ecosystem and fostering new growth.”
The flames of my breakup eviscerated and destroyed. But when it passed through my forest, I didn’t know that it had the potential to make it even more beautiful than it was before. I wandered the woods for a year and a half, trying to find my way out of the winding trees and the endless myriad of confusion, much in the same way I got lost in the walls of Venice for over an hour before I found my way back to the main path. But now I know I’m going to carry a lighter next time I get lost in the woods with the wolves chasing after me. If I find myself at the top of the Alps, I won’t be afraid to fall anymore. And if I’m ever swallowed up by that deep darkness ever again, praying for that light at the end of the tunnel, maybe that light will just be in my matchbox.
So, how did I get better, if I’ve always kind of sucked at quitting things long past their expiry date? I have never been good at letting go, and I am even worse at forgiving. But I can say that I’m sort of becoming good at both of those things.
Here’s the thing about forgiveness - if someone tells you that you need to forgive someone, you aren’t actually gonna forgive them until you’re ready to and want to. Forgiveness is as organic as the flower that grows in your backyard. It’s as organic as the plant that dies in that same backyard because you didn’t water it. It’s about realizing that sometimes, it just isn’t what you may have done, or who you are, or what they did, or who they are. Forgiveness is about accepting that there are more human beings in the world than you, and that we’re all human and we make human mistakes, and hurt other humans in a way that is just oh-so human. It’s easier to poison ourselves with bitterness than to heal someone else with compassion - and giving myself compassion was the hardest thing, and I was also not very good at lending compassion to other people.
I hated my ex. I hated her more than I have ever hated anybody in my life for our breakup and the circumstances of our last conversation - which in retrospect is also incredibly spectacular and weird - because I also loved her more than I have ever loved anybody else in this world. But when I was ready, I tried to figure out what exactly forgiveness is, what it involves, and what it looked like, what it feels like when your soul touches it. It comes in a lot of forms, and it’s ugly and powerful, and wavering and unwavering, and I pray to be more okay every day, and I think I am because of it. People say forgiveness is about compassion (thanks, Giles) and how forgiveness is always about you and not them. And that’s all correct stuff. But forgiveness is also about letting go of the idea that whatever happened to you is always awful, or that it’s that person’s fault. It’s about giving yourself a second chance when your demon whispers that you’re not good enough in your ear. It’s about accepting that everybody tries the best they can with what they knew at the time, and that includes yourself. I let myself finally feel my emotions, and for a solid year I desperately wished my ex could just be as miserable as I was. But hopefully, it doesn’t take too long to realize just how useless of an emotion hatred is, and how toxic that particularly brand of negativity can be. Wishing the people that hurt me to feel the same things I felt never created anything productive, beautiful, warm, or pure. By all means I was allowed to feel that way, but just because I had the right didn’t mean I should’ve stayed that way, and I’m glad I didn’t, because that was never who I was deep at the roots of my heart. Forgiveness is about gratitude for the beginning and the end, no matter how it unravels. Forgiveness is about realizing that someone dropped you off in the woods, but you have a tent and you can set up camp. Forgiveness was me getting to the point where I hope my ex is happy, even though I don’t hate her or love her anymore. It’s an inherently graceful act, even if the journey to the destination is ungraceful. Forgiveness lets go.
It’s easy to be mad. It’s a lot harder to open up your heart and understand the pain of someone else even if it’s at your expense. It’s easy to assume that nobody could ever understand the depths of what we feel, even though humanity in general is the same across the board. We all want to feel important. We all want to be valued. We all want to be loved.
So I basically slammed the lid on my Facebook and decided I would put my Instagram and Twitter on lock for good, and they still are, but sometimes I would come crawling back to Facebook for extended periods of time (nowadays, I just log in for a couple seconds every few months). Facebook used to be my obsession. When I was that age I just wanted everyone to like me and have a good opinion about me and think I’m funny and think I’m hot and think I’m cool and think I’m this and think I’m that and did this person check my profile and if I check their profile will I pop up on their profile? Despite the fact that I became more and more private and exclusive when it came to my inner circle, I still cared about the numbers and likes and comments and attention and would compare it to people I knew in real life and celebrities who get more likes in one photo than I ever will in a lifetime - even though my social media was intended only for my closest friends and people I actually like anyway. It’s a lofty daydream and an impossible expectation, and obviously a cruel comparison - trying to define myself by my struggles and screwups and bloopers, and only viewing one half of everybody else’s story on social media, the side they want everyone to see. It was easy to think I was the only one suffering when no one else was talking about how they suffer.
Because if I get dumped, that means I’m not enough, right? If I’m the one staying at home while my friends are sneaking out and having sex, and I’m still a virgin at 20, that means I’m behind, right?
I wanted to have it all because I felt like I had lost everything.
There’s this delusion that you can’t talk about how sad you are online, because people think you just want attention. Or that sadness isn’t a good environment to foster optimism and positivity or whatever, if those are the things you want to be. But even as an optimist at my very core, I still find it necessary to talk about sadness because it’s the ugly back alley everyone avoids talking about. In my opinion, the world needs more emotion. I banished the idea that strength is about not showing your weaknesses. I believe the strongest people are the ones that know when they need to be weak. I tried so long to find the equation to happiness that I figured avoiding the inevitable fire was supposed to be a part of it, but the solution usually involves just letting the fire burn all your math homework with that happiness equation scribbled all over it. All that happiness-math homework only made me more hungry for perfection and gave me the shittiest papercuts.
I needed to start taking care of the girl I was looking at in the mirror. I was less mean to myself, and praised myself more the way I would praise my best friend, because I am my own best friend. I surrounded myself with collages of my friends encouraging me to slay my demons like a Sarah Michelle Gellar montage. I started reading again, listening to music again, meditating, writing, being mindful. I hope I can work my way up to 15 constant minutes of meditation every day by the end of the year. I reconsidered what it means to actually treat myself like royalty, and that even queens need a good cry sometimes.
I look at that girl in the mirror today, and instead of the flames that wiped the earth, I get to witness succession. Instead of mental illness, I see recovery. I get to see that there’s someone there, as opposed to no one at all. I get to see the light sneak its way back into her face, ray by ray. Maybe she isn’t Clean yet, but the dirt is finally coming off. I look at that girl and don’t wish she looked different anymore, that she had different colored eyes or something or was a different race and maybe then people would compliment her, instead, I melt into my own eyes now. I love her smile. I love her wit and how funny she is. I love how she is now capable of cheering herself up. I love how she’s okay with not marrying the person she thought she would in high school, and how the idea of not finding someone for a very long time doesn’t terrify her anymore. I love how she is now more interested in herself than she has ever been, in that relentless pursuit of herself. She put the ring on herself. Consider me engaged. I love how brave she is and how she knows when it’s time to commit a little self-arson. I love how it finally feels like the cloud has lifted and the sun is breaking through, and she gets closer and closer to her truth every day.
I’m proud of myself. And it doesn’t matter if anyone else isn’t. It doesn’t matter if someone stopped reading this 17 paragraphs ago, and it doesn’t matter if they read this at all. I don’t care if you like this, reblog this, or view this. It doesn’t matter if you think or don’t think I’m cool or funny or hot, because I think I’m cool and funny and hot. She likes being alone and isn’t as concerned as her concerned family who fear she’s lonely because she’s been single for almost 3 years. Really, all she wants is happiness and a root beer or two, but maybe those two things are synonymous. There’s this hopeful little vibration, this optimistic hum that buzzes louder each day for me, and I don’t need some weirdo from Plenty of Fish who’s 9 years older than me to tell me I’m beautiful (oh and hey how about you come over to my house and we take a shower together? Fuck no, thanks. Can’t you see a bitch is engaged to herself?)
Passing through Utah on a tour bus in 2012 staring at the U.S. mountains, or maybe it was Idaho, I don’t really remember, listening to Holocene, wondering when someone would finally just fall in love with me. Texts in July 2013 and disloyal order of water buffaloes. M83. Tangled thoughts and all too quiet. Forest to fire to forest. Up and down like a gondola somewhere in Switzerland. The flower. The universe doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle. Will be chosen. Can be chosen.
It’s okay if no one sees the flower that’s growing inside the forest that still has burn marks. Because what matters is that flower is becoming what it’s meant to become.
Like the flower that bloomed after inferno, like the tree that gathered ring after ring, like the girl that kept living despite what happened. For the girl that cared too much about what people thought of her and whether or not they were thinking about her, who wondered whether she was good enough or if she mattered and if she needed someone to stay in love with her so she could love herself: flowers need fire. For the girl that embraced the flames, and now gets to see that small sprout in the middle of the ash. For the girl that wanted to end her life. For that girl, I wrote this for you.
I just want to drink root beer and be in a relationship with myself.
I still remember when my ex-girlfriend told me she had a dream that she made a garden for me.
Maybe the garden that was growing, was me.
Thank you to the following resources, also I don’t care that I literally won’t do citations right because this wasn’t for school or anything lmfao:
When a forest is burned, what comes back may not resemble what was lost (2015) by Elizabeth Pennisi for Science Mag
After the fire, how does a forest grow? (2016) by Mark Washburn for the Charlotte Observer
Rising from the ashes: forest fires give way to new growth (2007) - ScienceBuzz.org
Growing back; forest recovers from Sask. 2015 fires (2016) by Spencer Sterritt
Fire ecology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Here are things that changed my life.
