🔥 LORENA 🔥

Deeply flawed

🌪

I value offline time, with a coherent, long, captivating story, taken in slowly and calmly, as opposed to short, disjointed ones. The latter creates too much emptiness and chaos in me and too little connection.

That’s why I feel more refreshed and uplifted after reading a book or watching, for example, my favorite series, compared to watching a few short, unrelated clips. Sometimes, the coherence comes from the subject itself, like love; other times, it’s the storyteller’s journey or sense of humor that creates the connection for me.

But my black-and-white lens craves fragmented, categorized short stories. It gives me temporary relief, providing what seems like a bit of order.

Instead of making deliberate choices daily to create order, I tend to watch these videos to get this sense of structure, while my dishes pile up. I crave it, but I need a well-ordered life to have enough space to take in stories slowly and calmly.

Because I know this about myself, it makes me sad to admit that I currently don’t have enough space for the story of a partner or a child. Undivided, loving attention.

No matter how kind and understanding this partner and child might be about this lack, I wouldn’t be able to justify it to myself. And I know I would have a very loving partner and child.

By the time I have more space, I wonder if I will have the privilege to follow the story of a new being from the beginning, a biological child. To receive and bring a child into the world in this way seems like a blessing to me.

By then, I would have the space to sit together, because I would know stability and emotional availability within myself. That is the least my child deserves.

This also ties into my grieving process, accepting that I fail to meet certain – black and white – milestones. No fairytale ending of “and they lived happily ever after” for me according to these standards.

I’m taking small steps, trying to create order. Making do with what I have and learning to be grateful for what I can achieve. Fortunately, I am doing really well according to my new nuanced standards.

The next step in that process is making space for the stories of others, or in other words, training my emotional availability, and soothing myself along the way. The more patience a story requires, the more I know it helps me, like reading a book or planting a flower bulb and seeing whether it grows or not each day.

I’m falling in love with life again, even with my developing, more nuanced view of it. And although tomorrow is guaranteed to anyone, I realize more each day that this life is also time-bound.