To Thine Own Self

There’s a saying I deplore and that is, “Love Yourself.” Well, to that I say, “Fuck Yourself.” Okay, let me start again. When I hear the words, “Love yourself,” I cringe. And it doesn’t matter that it may be a fine phrase, a lovely thought or even the key to true happiness, I just loath it. The phrase.

As I walked up the hill tonight there was a slight chill in the air. Already, fall is letting us know that it’s on its way. And the changing of the seasons is always slightly painful, I don’t know if it’s because it’s another season that my father isn’t here, or another season closer to Annie becoming a woman, or another season closer to Christmas, a holiday I have little tolerance for. (In New York it starts getting shoved down your helpless throat beginning in October.) Or hell, maybe it’s just hormonal, biological, something that can be easily explained through science. (Ugh.)

Like all those articles that have come out in recent years about the “Science of Love.” Hey everyone, guess what? We’re just a bunch of chemical machines walking around aimlessly, and why we fall in love, the way we fall in love, when we fall in love, and with whom we fall in love, can all be easily explained and predicted: “Here you fuckers, take some meds, get breast implants, vote Republican!" Jesus Christ! Why is there always a force that wants to reduce humanity in this way? Why is there always someone or some thing that wants to rain on a parade, turn romance into chemistry, love into shit, and true spiritual enlightenment into a fucking 100 page book that can be seen on Oprah and reviewed by the New York Times? Love yourself? Fuck yourself!

Sit me down with Sigmund Freud and he’d tell me that because my father was preoccupied with his writing when I was a little girl ...I have always, since then, been searching for the love of my Daddy. Put me in a room with Carl Jung and he’d tell me that Eros has been waiting for just the right time to shoot a dart in my ass and wake me up to all of my dissatisfaction.

When I was young I actually thought that if the Van Morrison song, “Tupelo Honey” was written for me, no matter what happened before or after that, I would be guaranteed to die a happy woman. And the truth is, I still believe it.

But I don’t.

It’s like I’m walking a line between dreams and reality, and although my goal is to get to the heart of what is “real,” I refuse to give up my dreams.

Then of course I think, “If you find reality Katie, if you find the truth, about yourself, who you are and what it is you truly seek, then it will be even better than your dreams.” Ugh. Love Yourself. Fuck yourself.

Tonight is Friday night, and like every night, I have been compelled to go out, meet up with friends, walk the streets of Greenwich Village or dance my heart out in a salsa club, but I refrain. I refrain because although there is nothing wrong in wanting to do these things, I know that right now I am trying to run. I am trying to run from the quiet of my apartment, a place in which I now live but that is not my home. I am trying to run from the place where I have sat, and am sitting now, and will sit again, alone and in silence with only myself. And although I know, because I’ve experienced it over and over, that if I just keep sitting, if I just keep waiting, if I just stare out that window long enough, listen to this album hard enough, the pain and the fear and the running will cease, and that I will return to that place of endless comfort, that place of constant forgiveness and abundant love.

I will return to myself.

Love yourself… love myself…love yourself….