welcome home.
a missive on softness and coming back to life
I’m having a vivid memory of this time I visited Los Angeles for the first time since I had moved to Oregon. This was in 2018 and I was staying in an apartment, small but light filled and covered wall to wall in books and art. It was the first time in a long time I had been properly alone and on my own.
I wore jewel tones. I let my skin be kissed by the sun. Everything felt possible. It was on this trip this I discovered and listened to ‘Causers of This’ by Toro y Moi for the first time. That album is now one I associate with me remembering in my body what it felt like to feel vibrant and unguarded. I felt myself come back to my aliveness after surviving many dull and dreary winters (and years) in Oregon. I remember daydreaming about moving back to Los Angeles, having a place of my own. I fantasized that the Airbnb that I was staying in was mine.
About 8 or so years later, I write this while listening to ‘Causers of This’ on my record player in an apartment that is less than a mile from that apartment rental. This apartment has been the home of a few others—a dog, a husband, a partner—and now it is mine.
I look out my window to blue skies and the movement of leaves inspired by the wind. I glance back again and see guava ripening on the tree outside. I’m surrounded by green and plants and light. I feel deeply called to heed the plans of my body, to make good on the promises of pleasure and protection it’s asking for. I feel connected to the gardens that i am tending in myself, and I’m patient for the fruits and blooms they will bring.
Mercury retrograde has me very reflective on everything that has changed in my life over the last year, the last two years, the last decade. I feel compelled to take stock of all the versions of myself that have died, been shrugged off, been rebirthed. There is still so much i don’t have that i really long for—a free Palestine, a home with land that I own, the destruction of racist, capitalist systems, reparations, land back—but what I do have, I feel so awake to, so grateful for.
I recently dyed my hair platinum blonde, a change that feels startling to me each time I look in the mirror. It took me some time to really enjoy it. I kept thinking that it was too much for me to be so striking in this way (a blonde buzzcut is a statement). I got into a habit of shrinking myself down to digestible proportions for the betterment of a relationship that sought to disappear me, and this reflex to become smaller won’t be leaving my bones for some time. Allowing myself to take up space again—not just out in the world but within my own body—is a practice I’m cultivating to enact revenge on the voices that wished to shrink me to embolden their fragile egos.
A phrase that came to me many years ago when I was having a hard time (another rebirth, perhaps) was “Love yourself deeply. It is the greatest revenge.” I invoke the practice of taking up space as an embodiment of that incantation. I also invoke it as a curse on what (and who) has tried to destroy me.
Singlehood has given me more space, made my life simpler. Simple doesn’t mean easy. With all of this space, my grief and anxieties have more of my undivided attention. I’m prone to loneliness, to feeling like I cannot trust my desires or the self that has them. More space means more time to drift toward the dark corners of my mind—regret, rumination, insecurity. Being alone, I’ve had to practice discipline with how deep I go. I’ve had to practice noticing when I’m drifting too far from myself, then speaking up when I need a life raft to pull me back in. And even still, I luxuriate in this space because I know it is not always so freely given. I also know that it has been hard fought.
I’m the sum of all the people and beings that have poured goodness and life into me, myself included. I know how to live my life, but aliveness—being deliberate with my own softness—is new in my body. But not the sensation. The sensation of aliveness is one I have felt a million times in my life, in the tiniest of moments that I was moving too quickly to recognize them. Now, I know how to slow down, capture them, savor them.
If I could give advice to the me I was two years ago, I would tell them to pay attention to the whispers of their body before they become screams. I would tell them the shame they carry is truly unnecessary—as in, there are some people for whom they should feel shame; should carry it like a backpack that bows their spines, makes them prostrate in remorse. And they (my younger self) is not one of those people.
I would tell my younger self that the insurmountable heartbreak you’re avoiding is way less pungent than the repercussions of abuse you’re being consistently exposed to and that your body is remembering. I would tell them that even if something feels good that doesn’t mean it is not also a poison.
And I would tell them that the reason your softness seems like a threat is because it is a weapon against willful hardness. I would say, “Your softness is a gift, not for softness’s sake, but as a liberatory praxis to counteract a world that makes things so unfeelable.” I would say, “Don’t forget how good you can feel when you are fully at home to yourself. This is the only home that matters.”
To this current version of myself, I say, “Welcome home.”