Punctuated Scoop

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again - Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

These are lessons I swallowed up along the way and lessons in the making that I scribble on grocery lists, the back of an old economist, on a memory charter that grew dysfunctional in time and on walls yet to crack open

The first one is a weird statistic I have been musing over ever since I have had the luxury of time on my hands from not having to fix broken pieces of a vase that I once thought to be my raison d'etre

Little did I realize that these pieces were never meant to be fixed and their beauty lay in hopelessly lying around. 

My vase was a gorgeous cerulean blue in its prime and the beauty that seeped from its nearly perfect shape and form was astonishing. 

But the more I look the more I realize how perfect each broken piece of the same vase is and how each broken edge adds to a finish that seems nothing short of breathtaking and yet surprisingly and holistically complete

 

We are all vases – tall blue, short green, luminous, crimson, earthy, glass, Greek, porcelain, brittle, broken

Back to the weird statistic: the number of smart, single beautiful and genuinely interesting women I have known are hopelessly vulnerable to bouts of incredibly low self-esteem and are living with a horrifyingly flawed assumption of not being ‘good enough’ for themselves and the people around them. This statistic has been disturbingly gnawing at me and sometimes I wake up to be such a woman

I love how dangerously forgetful men can be in the matters of their heart and their own taking. The only time you know they are acting stupid is when they confuse ambition and foresight

And yet it could only take a man (a man who we all wish would exist more often) to culture and grow a feminist prerogative, because only then would it be appreciated and not taken for granted 

So here goes an honest confession made well before its time: I am sorry I cried foul. I am sorry I said it was all about sexism because it isn’t and it never was. I do not defend my gender anymore.  Selective sexism is here to stay. I think I appreciate the fact that we are all terribly flawed and the only way to deal with this massive unfairness is to know where each one of us is coming from.

What I do, however, defend in all honesty is courage in the face of defeat and a kind of rare courage that will never show, but will glisten on your forehead and trickle down the back of your ear. You know this is a defeat that will have a brighter tomorrow

So I decided to take a step back, to look at the world as you might not see it. There are traces of your own life missing color and you have to fill them up – that is your streak of madness, your streak of sanity waiting to be withheld, waiting to be snatched away and yet so desperately wanting to stay

And I was a child again, running back to where it started, prioritizing aspects of my life I have no control over, giggling until the alcohol wears off, filling in journals with details that define the infinite aspects of pointlessness, falling asleep at odd hours, dreaming big, clutching at my coffee mug like there is no tomorrow. This was healing I suppose

This time I pack my bags humming ‘the Voyager’ by Jenny Lewis

She asked to be ruined after all. Yes she did, she even begged for it