I just came back home a month and a half ago when this whole COVID-19 hell broke loose. I am graduating this semester, and although the quarantine news felt like the holly gospel sang by squishy baby angels, it meant I had to pack the past four years in two suitcases and get the hell out of there without the chance to properly say goodbye to the people and places I will eventually miss. I say eventually because I suppose it will take me about six months to a year to recover from my studying abroad experience and all the hardships it came with. Growth hurts in the way being thrown off a cliff hurts, and then ordered to sing a song, navy seals-style; only you have no one to hold on to, no one to sing along. It’s just you being crushed by the Pacific Ocean waves at the end of the steep rocky cliff. But like our muscles, it is the healing part that has to take place before one becomes stronger.
Part of what I am currently faced with in my effort to readjust to my life back home and heal is the realization of how deeply lonely I have become. There is absolutely nobody on earth with whom I feel comfortable being open and vulnerable with. Four years of absence will estrange you even from those you love most. My family is afraid of my depressive episodes, so I hide any sort of discomfort from them as not to get them worried. My sisters are my best friends, but I am the eldest and don’t like showing them how childishly weak and pity-worthy I can be. The few friends I have kept (or rather, that have stayed) seem to have moved on with their lives and into problems more important than my inefficiency to deal with my break-up (it’s been over a year Eirini, just let it go) and my desperate need for closeness. “What happened to you, you were our Nietzschean Superman, the divine being that needed no one, our role model, our independent, no fucks-giving goddess.”
What happened? Well for one thing I had to live on my own on the other side of the world in a place so foreign to our culture that the term “lonely” does not suffice to describe the slightest part of what I felt day and night. I got to watch the love of my life fall out of love with me. I got to be thrown out of a house of people I loved and made me feel like I belonged over the most stupid misunderstanding, proof of how they just needed an excuse to have me gone. I tried to make friendships and was disappointed again, and again, and then some more. I got to the point where if I was handed a loaded gun at any time of day, I wouldn’t think twice. Only when my youngest sister joined me on my senior year did I finally give up that idea, which had become so strong it dominated every second of my day from the time I woke up to my final thought before I fell asleep, and sought serious help just to get me through the year. She had done nothing to deserve getting traumatized over me. Nothing to deserve living with me in the state that I was. The way I really have been for three years in between our video calls.
I thought coming home would solve everything. I still haven’t learnt, after all these years of running away, that no matter where you go you have to take yourself with you. That the only thing I have been trying to get away from is this weak, desperate, needy side of me, that does not fit the idea I have created for myself and convinced everyone around me of. What is the point of going through the pain and facing the demons and fighting the emptiness, if you don’t learn anything? If absolutely nothing comes out of it? If you fail to heal and are simply left with open wounds for the rest of your life? Do you retreat into your tailor-made cave and lick them in eternity or walk around covered in your own blood and tears?
There’s only one thing that gives me hope and keeps me going right now: Love saved me once; it might do so again. My finally asking for the help I so strongly resisted for years was an act of love for my sister. The way this man once loved me gave me proof that I could, indeed, be loved. That maybe, one day, I can love myself that much. That I might finally drop the armor and feel light again. Hope is lost when love is lost. And I think that to seek love in every way you can when it seems absent – in the dusty corners, in the dirty alleys, under the heaviest rocks – is an act of love in itself. It might even be the key to saving oneself.