Growing Pains #8
It's me, Kate, with Growing Pains number eight.
Hey. Hi. Hello. Howdy.
A question that I asked (as you will read in just a few moments below) this week is, “when does the new place you moved start to feel like home?” This question was born of the realization that a place that I called home for the longest period in a long time, but more importantly felt the most like home, no longer felt that way when I returned there. I felt like an encroacher on the streets of New York that I used to walk every day and like a tourist in the restaurants I used to frequent weekly. I even felt like a stranger around people I loved. So if New York doesn’t feel like home to me, where does?
The 5-4-3-2-1:
5 things I read, listened to, watched, or otherwise consumed that made my brain less smooth:
“Emily Ratajowski to Auction NFT at Christie’s” by Kate Dwyer in The New York Times. Ratajowski has been on a unique journey to “buy herself back” after discovering a nude photo of her was for sale (just not to her) at the Gagosian Gallery. In tandem with her forthcoming book My Body, Ratajowski is using a non-fungible token to make a statement about digital ownership of a physical body.
This post on LinkedIn by Johnathan Frostick, a man who nearly died of a heart attack and realized 6 things while in the limbo between life and death.
“What Happened to Vikki Dougan?” by Isabel Slone in The New York Times, a biographical and thrilling account of the rise and strange disappearance of mid-century star Vikki Dougan. It begs questions of the temporality of fame and the value of being known in an era when the aforementioned is almost as valuable as hard currency.
This Spotify playlist titled “idk.”
“What Really Matters at the End of Life” a Ted Talk by BJ Miller in which he posits, “And nowhere are the effects of bad design more heartbreaking or the opportunity for good design more compelling than at the end of life where things are so distilled and concentrated…So let’s begin at the end.”
4 lessons I learned:
Outgrowing people, things and places is a painful but necessary part of growth.
Alcohol sucks.
Fear and love cannot coexist.
Growing up means getting wiser but also moving far away from most of the people you love. (Insert: growing pain.)
3 questions I asked my therapist, Mom, or best friend:
When I haven’t slept in a week, what’s more important—rest or therapy?
Why do people take time out of their day to send me hate DMs?
When does the new place you moved start to feel like home?
2 things from the world-wide-web that made me laugh-out-loud:
1 photo I took, saved, or was sent to me that feels imperative to share:
And finally, this week, On: Love and Fear
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the relationship between fear and love. In my mind, there is a contrast so stark between the two that it becomes polar. I’ve started to believe that deep fear and true love cannot coexist. They’re opposite—so not only do they cancel each other out, they polarize our energy and create tension in the empty space created by trying to jam two incompatible sensations together.
An example through which I learned this lately is my own relationship. When my partner and I have argued lately I’ve realized it’s all come from one central place—fear. No matter what the fight looks like on the surface, it’s rooted in the fact that I am scared of something. If I complain that my partner spends too much time on his phone, it’s because I’m scared that we don’t get enough time together as is, and if that pattern continues, I fear that our relationship may suffer. If I become aggravated that he is taking too long to make a decision and we don’t seem to be on the same page, it’s because I’m scared that we aren’t on the same page overall, and that might make things tougher for us as life itself gets tougher. The list goes on and on. I can trace every argument that we’ve had as of late back to one thing—I’m scared. Scared of losing him, of our relationship weakening, of us not making it and being alone again.
When you hold fear in your relationship, there isn’t a ton of room to hold love anymore. In the beginning, relationships seem to be all love. Think of your honeymoon phase—you were too happy to be scared of anything, right? But as “Life” with a capital L and illusions of what matters begin to creep in, we start to push love out to make room for fear. The two can’t exist in harmony, and fear becomes easier and easier to choose as time goes on. When we are scared of anything—whether it’s losing our partner or death itself—our fight or flight instinct kicks in. When we operate from a place of fear in our relationships, we are left with two options: to fight with our partner or take flight from our partner. If we fight, both of us get hurt. If we flee, one of us feels abandoned, and the other feels lonely.
When we lose focus on how and why we fell in love because we are so scared of losing it, we lose it anyway. Rather than asking yourself how much of your life you have already spent scared, ask yourself how much of your life that is left you are willing to give up to that feeling. How much more love are you willing to surrender in the name of fear? How much more are you willing to lose by holding on to it too tightly?
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