I’d like to think I’m a reflective person. I’d like to think that I take the time to contemplate things before I follow through. I don’t know how accurate that statement is; it depends on who you ask, but if I don’t try to acknowledge that as a fact, then I’ll never get there.
I ask myself the same question all the time. Where do I end, and where do you begin?
I am someone who indulges in individuality. I follow the crowd occasionally but never want to be a consistent member. I wouldn’t call myself a sore thumb, but I am not a wallflower. I think that’s why I have a fickle relationship with intimacy. I’m afraid of it because it blurs a line I’ve drawn so deep it’s practically a trench.
Intimacy is a strange thing in my world. It’s not necessarily physical. It could be emotional. Being honest with other people about how I truly feel is not something I really do with just anyone. Even those closest to me never really get the full scope of how I think. The few times I’ve crossed that line, I’ve regretted it in some capacity. And each time I find myself contemplating whether or not people needed to know how I truly felt, I end up back at the same place I started.
Where do I end, and where do you begin?
When connected to people, finding a clear divide between what’s yours and theirs is harder. Keeping a clear sense of self suddenly becomes muddy. Your saltwater and their freshwater become brackish. There is a mixing that you don’t have much power over. An overlap is inevitable. Our feelings, thought processes, and interests transform, making them interchangeable between individuals.
I find it particularly terrifying that you can adore someone so profoundly that you lose yourself. You want to give them every piece of you that suddenly they aren’t yours anymore. Boundaries get broken for better and for worse.
A part of me aims to cope with this by romanticizing it. I stop and smell the roses. I think about how lovely it is that someone loves pieces of you so much that they adopt them. I’d like to think that losing oneself to another is the ultimate display of admiration. Trading the innermost parts of ourselves with another is beautiful in its own way.
I can’t ignore the dread it arouses in me.
I am afraid of compromising myself for another. I love my family and friends, and I’m sure I’ll love another in a way that would make me laugh at everything I’ve written now someday, but I’m afraid of risking my wants, needs, and dreams in the name of the partnership. Why should I have to sacrifice so much if I want to stop being alone?
Why should I have to conform? I think it’s essential to spare people and their emotions occasionally, but when can you draw the line?
In high school, I had a Virginia Woolf phase. I picked up her book To The Lighthouse in my sophomore year and found a character who understood me in a way I couldn’t understand yet. Lily Briscoe is a literary hero of mine in her own way. She feared conformity, she feared losing herself in another, and she feared giving up her artistry to find joy outside of it. Lily made me question if I could be both an artist and a woman. There is so much expected of us, so many portraits of femininity and elegance. I know that she and Jo March would’ve been good friends.
Lily Briscoe loved being alone; she found her greatest inspiration in solitude, so I understood her. I can’t write if there’s another body in my space. I can’t write unless I can speak my thoughts aloud. I can’t write if another is taking up space. I couldn’t imagine being so intertwined with someone the way I have been in the past again. Putting so much of myself into them ends with me losing those pieces. I can’t be left with someone else if there isn’t some sense of equilibrium. The last time I let that happen, I didn’t write for ages. Maybe solitude is the only way to find inspiration that won’t hurt you in the future.
In her solitude, Lily discovered that art is the only thing that makes us come to terms with who we are. Those who don’t indulge in it as often might not understand it, but I know who I am, whatever I write. I know what I believe in, what I have to do. Lily Briscoe taught me much about myself and preserved my individuality without realizing it. How transformative art and solitude can be! How influential it is to have your individuality threatened, to be on the brink of disappearance, to almost hit the one-year mark of an inspiration drought!
I ask myself again, where do I begin, and where do you end?
I start with myself. You can borrow pieces of me, and I will borrow parts of you. To love someone is to know them intimately, as much as I dread to admit it. We can borrow from one another, but I won’t keep you just as you cannot keep me. I cannot have the looming shadow of someone else’s expression on my soul. I can adore it, but I will not keep it. No more shadows. The only way to get rid of a shadow is light. It’s time you realize you are the force it shines from.