Some Kind of Peace

As if it were the one thing between me and healing, I couldn’t let go of a dream about a boy. I reached into the past and resuscitated the connection that had found me on my knees many years ago, and had left me there. The logic behind it was that I needed to make contact in order to make peace. That was true, to an extent. However, I imagined the person I was dragging towards me would be the same one I had left behind; a passionate, kind and devoted young man with a heart wilder than I’d ever seen since, and a mind like a bullet, that still maintained sincerity. He wasn’t altogether different, but he had lived, and that inevitably changes even the best of us. My poor memory had certainly taken the liberty to fill in some blanks in the interim. It was subconsciously a risk I had been willing to take, convinced there was no chance I would want him the way I used to. The irony was that I had never stopped wanting him. The irony was also that he had experienced heartbreak worse than what I had done to him, and it was that that had spoiled him. 

His views on relationships, and anything to do with gender roles, were strongly influenced by the internet dad of the modern millennial man – Jordan Peterson. A year before that, these ideas would have irked me, but coming out of a six-year relationship and finding myself in a crisis of the meaning of love, I was open to entertaining whatever he had to say. It wasn’t long until I was entirely, superficially convinced. The ideals of centuries of patriarchies clicked, on some naïve level, towards the natural biology of a woman. My second-final semester exams were plagued by the ideas of what it meant to bear this gender. Modules on Marxist theory and Foucault did not help, nor did having to face a world where being a single lady in her mid-twenties felt like walking on the edge of an abyss. I began to question the way my younger self had viewed life in general, as well as how I planned to navigate it going forward. Brainwashed by heartache perhaps, but to my advantage, the switch between girl and woman seemed to flip during this phase. After making decisions I believed my future self would thank me for, I figured that this newfound solitude was the perfect opportunity to reflect on everything I thought I knew about the world and myself.

Casting my mind back to every interpersonal relationship I had had with a man, or boy, brought the realization that my aversion to motherhood, and womanhood, was rooted in the disgust of being an object for male satisfaction. It is a sentiment echoed endlessly, now that women have been offered platforms to share their truths, and by no means as strange as I thought it was when it first started occurring to me. During adolescence I refused to believe any woman would truly want a life shaped by tremendous sacrifice and subjugation; that was how I understood the prospects of getting married and having children. The nuclear family was a parasitic threat to the freedom I desired. Could the loss of one man and the superficial gain of another really convince me otherwise after my lifelong convictions? I was between believing in something wonderful I had never dreamed of before, and accepting that I had succumbed to the delusions of all my female ancestors before me: If I find the right man, a family of my own would be an incredibly transformative experience, and a positive one. 

My peers were already there. Many of my schoolmates from a near decade ago were married, many had children regardless of their marital status. At twenty-three, I had openly judged those girls, out of their minds to give their lives up. At twenty-six, a darker perspective crept in: What went wrong that I was now one of the few alone? I had dedicated every part of myself to fostering a meaningful life with a man who, to my excruciating disappointment, wasn't meant for me anymore, because love didn’t consider the logic before plunging me into its throws. Now, at a time when I was considering finding the type of security my womb seemed to want, I had pushed everyone away. And the one man who I’d hoped to retrieve, who was the subject of my most pathetic dreams, was no longer what I had remembered, and no longer interested in anything more than convenience. In this venture of rediscovery, I had hoped to find a man worthy of fathering my children. But between encouraging me to procreate and wooing me, he managed to still casually keep me at bay. The parts of his life which concerned love were in a far-removed compartment from the one in which I existed. One day, he shared what his new psychologist had helped him recognise: how disjointed his life was, and that he should start integrating the various areas in which he existed. So, after months of our uncomplicated affair, he introduced me to his friends on a weekend away. Our un-relationship had been maintained by very strict boundaries, boundaries which were more important to him than to me, which he was now shifting. I suppressed the desire that this was a promising sign, or that he was happy with what we had. 24 hours into our trip, he chose to indirectly reveal he was interested in someone else, and that this – us – might have to come to an end. Along with being thoroughly insulted, I was mortified to be in that situation while lying next to him in bed, nearly enduring his attempt at deluding me into believing it was a hypothetical question:

“Would you be angry if there was someone else and we couldn’t do this anymore?” How original.

He shied away from the truth, and as in every pathetic situation I find myself in, I gathered it and threw it back at him. This lapse in judgment on his part was of great benefit to me once my feelings recovered. This man, who I thought knew himself and understood so many things, even things about me before I had, was in fact still just a boy. 

When I considered having a family in the past, the idea that I would make an awful mother was at the forefront of my anxieties. When my long-term relationship ended, I considered the idea that if I were with a man whose qualities I would want in my children, it might make the dynamic work, and me a good mother after all. I laid the likelihood of my success on the shoulders of a man I had not even met yet, with the belief that it would just take one good man to make me good, too. But what would I do with a good man if I happened to find one?

There is no evidence of the barren woman in my ancestry, nor the lady who decided to stay alone, without a husband or children. No aunts, or great aunts, lived out the adolescent ideals I had maintained until recently. Had they ever longed for a liberated future, too? I may have been first; I still could be. What perturbs me most is having to decide: between two options, between imagined wonder and despair, not knowing which will turn out as which until I have chosen. The tragedy is that I cannot be both. At some point the one will inevitably eliminate the other, and both will likely be damning either way. 

Adolescence for me was a tempest of interpersonal relationships that moulded me with great force. I had a series of frivolous relationships with males, starting at the age of twelve, which now repulses me and gives insight into many issues that I only tackled once in my twenties. There were boys who begged, and boys who didn’t ask, and boys who threw tantrums, manipulated, betrayed. There were also kind boys, but they never approached without selfish desire in mind. This was the stuff your mother should warn you about, but never did – the reasoning behind the “no” they preached with threat; you don’t owe them anything, and you certainly should not let them determine your worth. When I look around me now (virtually, because I have burnt 99% of the bridges that existed before leaving school), I see misfortunes of my past, all well adjusted, married, integrated into society, and functioning in a way I can’t quite achieve. The nightmare of youth doesn’t seem to haunt them in the same way it does me. Were they lucky enough to forget? Am I just the sensitive bearer of my childhood trauma, projecting my own faults onto those who were closest to me at the time? In the series rendition of the nineties original, Irma Vep (2022), the character of René Vidal tells his therapist that ghosts have nothing to do with dead people. Instead, they are about what is dead inside of us. All the ghosts who hurt me are happy, they have moved on, and I’m still just hurt. 

In the reactions of others I always received the message that something inside me was fundamentally skewed. Maybe I was addicted to self-deprecation, not intentionally, but always to my own ruin. Maybe there was something that hid in my face, my voice, my body, that acted as a deterrent. Whatever it was, it still exists, and my daily interactions never fail to remind me that something will always remain inadequate. Perhaps it was my consciousness thereof that was the flaw itself. Admitting to myself that I was hurt, and realising the shame it made me feel, only perpetuated the idea that I would never be enough. 

In the desire to settle down I fear I have reached defeat. It seems that I once wanted brave and exciting things, and now I am only tired. Not yet in my thirties, I would much rather prefer a quiet, pleasant life, one that doesn’t demand too much energy or expect some act of greatness. I would rather make dinner for a family every night than attempt to explore a world full of people that terrify me. The adventure that had inspired me in the past is now intimidating. The simple pleasures of just being and experiencing life in slow strides has never been more appealing. My teenage self would be disappointed. I don’t know which direction I am facing anymore. It is as if I am staring into a reflection and every path leads back to me, unfortunately. 

“Forgive yourself. Be whoever it is that comes automatically to the surface before your self-judgment banishes her,” I noted on my phone one recent evening when I could not sleep, only dream. 

It’s probably good advice. I don’t know how I’m going to get it right.