Lights at night or my interpretation of street photography.
Musing:
We all suffer differently. Why do we often think that our pain is more valid and deeper than anyone else’s? It’s not a competition. We live very short lives. Nothing is eternal and one day, everything about us will be forgotten. Hopefully. One day everything that made us special will be gone and every trace we left will vanish into thin air. As if we never even existed.
Sometimes, I see life differently. There is beauty in the mundane and there is magic in the things we see daily. I took the above picture without being aware of it. In fact, this is only a tiny part of a larger photo, but this small part is so much more expressive than the rest of the picture is.
Every day on my way from work back home, I have to stop at the same red lights before entering a roundabout. That day, it was raining and as I was waiting, I took a photo of the street signs to send to my son. I did not send the picture because the light turned to green. I drove home and did everything a mom does when she comes home after a ten-hour shift. In the evening, I scrolled through my phone and looked at the photo, and I noticed the reflection on the right end. I zoomed in, cropped it, added a little bit of contrast, and was in awe of this little piece of magic. You can see the rain on the pavement – a puddle, and the wind moving it. (or aftermath of a car driving through it.) You can see the lights turning from red to orange… And the reflection of a couple of posts. That’s all there is to see. And after this explanation, there is not much magic left.
I had no intention of posting this photo on the blog because it is on IG (micqu_1), but this morning I had a conversation with an online friend who was unable to sleep. I wanted to entertain him. Little did I know that by the end of the day his blog would gone. It leaves me sad and I am wondering what I did wrong, because that is how my mind works: he is gone – must have something to do with me. It sounds conceited, but I cannot see any fault in my behaviour. Maybe that makes it all worse. His last message was that he hopes he helped me in some way. But the truth is, I did not ask for his help and I did not need it either. I know, that is hurtful too – it sounds as if I did not need said friend; but those are two different things, in my book. I don’t want or need anyone to save me. I don’t want or need anyone’s help – except if I explicitly ask for it. And that – as you all know – is something I rarely do. What I crave however, what I need, is people to be silly with, to take the weight off my shoulder for a moment or two.
I am not weak, I never was. I am not strong, I never was. But I get lonely and needy sometimes – quite often. So much so that I even invited an almost stranger for Christmas – he declined (sadly), but it is all good. My neediness is not about being saved, it is about being seen and about approval. It is about being liked with the walls I built for myself, and without them. It is about being liked despite the ugliness I carry in my soul. It is about being liked with my nerdiness, my flirty side, my intelligence, my clumsiness and my absolutely inappropriate sense of humour. I am not looking to save or fix anyone, but if I can help in any way – by listening, laughing, sharing music, writings or whatever comes to mind – even money in a special case, then I will do that. I am not a very open person, in fact, quite a few people think that I am distant and unapproachable. It is not true, I am just very careful and don’t easily trust for fear of being judged. But we judge and are judged all the time.
I am thinking a lot about roots these days. I don’t feel as if I have roots. I have a family – both parents are still alive, but they are strangers. I would never rely on them. Never. I never could rely on them as a kid or teenager, and now I don’t have to. But I feel rootless. There is no family, and yet there is. I mean, it’s my (half)sister’s birthday next Sunday and I am invited, but there will mostly be family from her mother’s side, not from our dad’s. And that is okay. It really is. But it will show me again, that she has a set of roots I will never have. I have my kids though, and I am painfully aware that I am their safety net.
How did I go from explaining about a photo I randomly took to stripping some of my soul? I don’t know. It’s not the music I am listening to, and definitely not the online meeting I suffered through this afternoon. No, maybe it is indeed that my mood is shifting.
With you in my life, I don’t go under.
This is an old picture of me. I like it quite a bit. In a time without photoshop or filters, I looked like this when the sun was about to go to sleep and the first half of the bottle of wine was empty, lol
There are not many pictures of me as a young woman; here I was 19. (My husband took the photo in 2002)
I was in Brittany with my husband, my sister, and three German guys whose lack of knowledge of the French language made for a couple of running gags that are still existing 17 years later. My sister married one of the guys and ran off with him. She never came back home again. (Well, she did, but only about a handful of times in all these years…)
The woman on this picture is not the same woman I am today. And that is good. Physically, I stayed the same height, just a little wider – more to love?! Emotionally, I am a different person.
Writing these sentences is quite trying. I am not my best friend and focusing on nice things to say about myself is hard. I wrote a lot that put me down but erased all the negativity again.
The woman on the picture is a strong one. She achieved every goal without any emotional support. In fact, she was often told that she was stupid and not good enough for anything at all. A lot of my emotional damage comes from this time and the years before that. Caring for my mom as a child was challenging, but I was naive and didn’t know it any other way. It became a burden when I was a teenager. I believe that if I had been treated with more love and care from my family, a lot of my mental issues would not exist. Maybe that is a bold statement. Maybe I was born this way. Maybe I was born with a predisposition… I don’t know.
But yeah, this woman on that picture, that version of myself had a goal in life. And I achieved it. And despite everything (and the mental health…) I became a successful woman. And I did it all without any help from my family. Granted, I often wonder why no one was ever there for me in times of need, why did I have to fight alone; but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Because I got shit done. It would have been easy to find excuses, drop out of school and do nothing – but that was not how I was wired. And so, I got my driving license, I got my professional degree from a university of applied sciences, I have a family with loving children (and they are loved and supported unconditionally) and I was told often enough that I would never become a good mom when I was pregnant with my first child… No matter what I did and no matter how many successes I had to celebrate, my family always found something negative to say about it, and I was always a failure for them.
But what can we do? We all fight battles and we all have a past. I am not trying to belittle mine, but my own experiences aren’t better or worse than yours. The only difference is that they are mine…
Below is a picture of me with my two angels. They didn’t want to let me go to work so they decided to pin me down to the bed by climbing on top of me.
What a difference 17 years make!
Still powerful words – please don’t let me go
reflections of an unquiet mind 