How has your experience as a 23-year-old been? I’m a month in – exactly – and I think it’s going pretty well. Of course, it’s not like I see any instant growth or changes but I see little new patterns and my stance growing stronger in things that matter, and it’s all been building for the last few years. It’s nice to see it getting finally materialised in actions, however.
I’m sorry about your breakup. I’ve never been in a long-term ‘official’ relationship but I have been in relationships that have fucked with my mind while breaking my heart so I know how it can significantly affect you for a while to come. And take it from someone who tried the long-distance thing for 6 months, it’s never worth it and it never works out anyway.
I have been, quite uncomfortably and amusingly, been watching a lot of Daniel Sloss stand up comedy and I literally just heard him talk about something I think you should hear too:
“When I was seven years old, my dad said something to me that to this day is the reason I will die alone. Very happily, I may add. But I was seven years old, I didn’t know what life was. I didn’t know what existence was, how the fuck would I know? So I thought I’d ask my dad ’cause he can fix a computer, so he must know. So I was like, “Dad, what do we all do? What’s the meaning of life? Why are we all here? What what the fuck?” And my dad loves his kids, so he wants to explain to his son in a way that he’ll understand, but unfortunately, his son’s a fuckhead. So he has to explain it in a way that a fuckhead will understand, and he accidentally did it perfectly, and it’s stuck with me since then.
This is what he said, right? I’m seven years old. He goes, “All right, buddy. Just imagine that your life, my life, everyone else’s individual life. Imagine all of our lives are like our own individual jigsaw puzzles. As we’re going through life, we’re just slowly piecing it together, bit by bit, based on experiences and lessons that we’ve learned until we get the best picture, but the thing is everyone has also lost the box for their jigsaw. So none of us know what the image we’re trying to make is, we’re just confidently fucking guessing. So the best way to do a jigsaw, when you don’t have the image to work off, is to start from the outside, the sides and the four corners. Family. Friends. Hobbies/interests. Job.
Now obviously, as you go through life, some of these bits are subject to change. Sometimes you’ll make new friends, and you’ll lose contact with old so you gotta move this corner around a bit. Sometimes you’ll get a job. That means you can’t have certain hobbies. You gotta decide then, “Do I want more me time or do I want more work time?” You gotta move the stuff around. Sometimes you’ll have a family member that dies, and they’ll leave a big hole in your life. In that moment you’ll have to find a way to fill that void, otherwise you’ll be incomplete forever. ”
Now, that made perfect sense to me, because I was seven years old. I fucking loved jigsaws. So I was like, “All right, okay. So once you’ve got the stuff on the outside, what’s the main bit of the image? What we are all working towards?” And he goes, “Well, that’s That’s the partner piece. You and this perfect person who you’ve never met before to come out of nowhere, fit your life perfectly, complete you and make you whole for the first time in your life, much like your mother did for me. ” Seven. Seven years old. I wish you just said, “Ice cream!” And we could have fucked off.
And even though what he said sounds sweet and whatever, what it manifested in my seven-year-old brain was this, “If you are not with someone, you are broken. If you are not with someone, you are incomplete. If you are not with someone, you are not whole. ”
And that’s not just something my dad made me feel, that’s something that we as a society have made every single child born in the last 40 years feel. Every Disney princess has a prince, every prince has a princess, every television show or movie always has a character in it that doesn’t want to be in a relationship. They’re happy with who they are. But then by the end of the series, guess what. They were wrong! They were wrong for wanting to be alone, what a fucking idiot. Everyone needs someone, yeah. They were just a toasty little marshmallow, weren’t they? It’s all to do with love.
Divorce, an entirely common thing that there is nothing wrong with. When you’re growing up and your friends’ parents get divorced, you’re told to not talk about it or mention it to them because it’s taboo, and it is taboo is because every relationship on the outside is perfect, because none of us are willing to admit that none of us know what the fuck we’re doing. And when you raise children in that world, where everything points towards love and everything’s perfect on the outside, when you’ve raised them for 18 fucking years, when we become an adult for the first time in our late teens and our early 20s, we’re so terrified.
We’re so trying to be an adult that some of us will take the wrong person, the wrong jigsaw piece and just fucking jam them into our jigsaws anyway, denying that they clearly don’t fit. Oh, we’ll move pieces out the way, I don’t need this hobby, I don’t need this opinion. Mom who? The bitch with the tits. What’s she done for me recently? I’m gonna force this fucking person into our lives because we’d much rather have something than nothing. Then five years later, you’re stood looking at a jigsaw you don’t recognize, being like, “Ah! There’s a fucking cunt in the middle of this.”
Maybe you do meet the perfect person. Maybe you meet them, you go out. They make you laugh. You make them laugh. They’ve got a stupid laugh, but you fucking love it. They like what you like. They like your idiosyncrasies. It’s great. It’s perfect. Oh, my God, they’ve completed you. For three months. Every relationship is perfect for three months. And here’s why. ‘Cause after three months, that’s when you realize that nobody else is a jigsaw piece.
Everyone else on this planet is as deep and as complex and individual as you are, which means they too have spent the last 20 or so years of their life working on their own jigsaw puzzle, in the same way that you’ve been working on yours. You can’t suddenly expect them to give up everything they’ve come to achieve to suddenly fit into yours in the same way that you’d be pissed off if they asked you to sacrifice everything you’ve done, suddenly come fit into theirs, but now, because you like each other and because you’re interested in each other, now you have to make a jigsaw together. And we all know how fucking annoying that is. But you do it ’cause you’re in love and you’re interested, and maybe for the first couple years, it’s great. It’s like, “Oh, my God, you love this bit of me. I love this bit of you. Oh, my God, we got the same thing, yeah!”
But time does not equal success. You can spend five or more years with someone, and only then, after all the fun you had, be looking at the jigsaw and realize you’re both working towards very different images. Only then realize that you want different things. And in that moment, you have a very, very difficult question to ask yourself. One. Do I admit the last five years of my life have been a waste? Two. Do I waste the rest of my life? 55% of marriages end in divorce. 99. 0% of relationships that started before they are 30 end. If those were the stats for surgery, none of us would fucking risk it. But because it’s love and we’re stupid, we just lie on the operating table like, “Maybe this time I won’t die inside. ” My generation has become so obsessed with starting the rest of their lives that they’re willing to give up the one they are currently living. We have romanticized the idea of romance, and it is cancerous. People are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with.”
You should definitely watch his whole special on Netflix. That guy makes you uncomfortable. But he also makes you laugh. And sometimes, like in his above sketch, he makes you really think.
I think he has said all I would want to tell you about your break up – and I hope it’s helpful because I spent 30 minutes trying to find its transcript haha. And I don’t know what his conclusion really is, I still have the rest of the show to watch, but I think….I think love will come to us when it has to. Until then we just have to live our lives with joy and love for ourselves anyway.
Your meaning of love…I described something similar when I spent 13th Feb – the night before Valentine’s Day making my profile on Hinge. And that’s the thing that most people don’t understand – while 90% people I know first care about the physical appearance of the person, I care about whether we connect and have a spark. Whether we can make each other laugh and kinda just be at the same level/frequency. As you said…Connection of minds and souls and knowing each other to your core. Interestingly, there’s something that hit me like a fucking truck a few months ago and I scribbled it down before it had the chance to move on and leave me confused:
All this. Writing in your journal, underlining sentences in books, taking pictures you’ll never put up on social media or show anyone. All this is your consistent and earnest effort to try to communicate and connect with your past self and get to know your future self and coordinate between the three dimensions of who you were, are and will be. It’s all for you. By you. No one else needs to validate you. Or understand you. Or question you. It’s not their place, it never was.
You need to realize the person your past self was trying to become. The person your future self will need to be. You need to have patience when you can’t figure it out. When you feel betrayed. Because no matter how lacking you may be, you will never have any malicious intentions. You’ll not be flaky, you’ll not be weak, you’ll not throw yourself under the bus. Writing letters to yourself, making playlists so meticulously to capture every season, every mood and continuing despite being uncertain and confused…it’s all you reaching out to yourself.
And I think…it’s when we’re earnestly and constantly trying to connect with ourselves when we come across a person who does the same…we will easily and naturally connect with them, their energy.
I realize that due to the Jigsaw sketch by Daniel Sloss this letter has gotten pretty lengthy. But I still want to talk to you for some more. I hope you’re with me and have connected with my words up until now
About the work friends and how they were there for you and made you feel…isn’t that one of the most comforting, lovely and reliving things? Kinda unexpected too, no? I remember last year, a random lunch on a random workday, I looked around at these 4 smart, brilliant, kind and strong women – my co-workers and friends – at the round lunch table talking about meaningful things – personal and worldly – as we always did and just thinking – wow, finally, I finally belong! I’ve always been a very one-to-one person when it came to friends and was never part of a group (other than groups that feel absolutely uncomfortable and unwelcomed) that was so accepting, loving, sensitive and sincere. And smart! Gosh, so damn smart!
Soon after, each of us left that company – horrible management – and it’s been a year now. We are in touch but of course, it’s never going to be the same as before. And that’s okay. Just thinking of those times and them is enough to make me feel as loved and accepted as I did back in those days. And that’s what I want to tell you – you will come across such people who will truly care about you and help you nurture yourself but their life will overlap with yours just for a while. As a child, this would make me sad and angry! Now, it only makes me super grateful and mindful about being present in the moment that is now, in the life I am living right now. And I hope you can too
So, Cat, I don’t know how many months you have of being 23 but I hope they are all, as well as the coming years, full of connecting with yourself, with people that genuinely care about your well-being and growth and with everything that brings you joy and peace.
I wrote this letter for Nura basis some questions they answered. You can read the questions and their answers here.
Guys - I have received 29 people’s responses for The Love Project - 29 days of love letters. So I won’t be accepting anymore, however, you can read other letters here.
I may do this again later in the year and if you would want to receive a love letter from me then, you can drop in your email ID here xoxo
