A New ReflectionĀ
I don't expect anyone to be reading this, but I wonder if there are people out there who think about their Tumblr lives long after it passes because I am not one of those people who do. When I left, I simply left, but in the last few days I started thinking about this blog, this place, that has been so long forgotten by so many.
Not that anyone has to justify why they stopped posting, but I stopped because I got into a toxic, all-consuming relationship that took up my body and mind, even after it ended. For a while it was good -- I was satisfied of the romance that I craved and wrote about on this blog. But it turned bad quickly, and I don't think I've been the same since.
I lost all idealization of any relationship. I lost all urge to love to have domesticity, comfort, support. All of that began feeling more and more foreign and -- even vulgar -- to me. For some, maybe that's a good thing. A good thing that I let go of the juvenile desires and fantasies that I held close to me, because "real life isn't like fanficion." But what happens when you lose all of it? Not just the unrealistic fantasies, but all desires to love and be loved?
This blog only really ever comes up when I'm getting to know someone new, on a deeper level, and so as I did a lot of healing and found myself in a new, long term relationship, I also found myself telling my new partner about my time here on catpopfeels. I logged into this account for the first time in years this morning and read some of my old work. God, I used to be so eager to love. I wanted to explore love in all forms, all sides. I wanted to see love as small gestures, sweet longings between strangers or friends. Even though I've done so much work to let go of the hurt I went through, reading this blog again as a 27 year old is still jarring because it's so different to how I am now. I'm still so hesitant to share myself and to be intimate, to trust others that they won't hurt and consume me like I had been before.
But next week my partner and I will be taking another step forward with our relationship. We met online in early 2019 as friends, which gradually turned romantic. The pandemic stopped us from meeting in person sooner, but next week we will finally be able to meet and be together. I know that it's unconventional to be in a relationship with someone you haven't met, but as we pass our mid-twenties I think we trust ourselves and each other to know that this is real and we want to take it as far as we can. And now that I think about it, the pursuit of this relationship is the closest I've been to the 2014/2015 version of myself that started this blog.
That's important to me because this version of myself is in many ways my inner child. I want to honour the person who started this blog out of love and spent her nights writing about and believing in a kind of love that would last.
I'm not sure where I'm exactly going with this. I'm not sure that I will be able to honour my old self, but in reading some of these old scenarios, I remember the kind of hope she had and the things she wanted, and it feels a lot like the hope I have for my partner and I. I'm glad I spent my morning reading the hundreds of babbles I wrote so that I could remember what love meant to me before. I feel so much more healed, more ready to take this next step for my partner and I.
I'm not sure who's out there reading this, but if you have, thank you, and I truly hope that you're doing well, and while this blog was just a short-lived fanfic blog about got7, I hope that it gave you love.
