I also regret to inform you that I also just spent the absolute best part of five minutes rummaging through the small waste bin in my room looking for a Glossier sticker I thought had taken leave from my bedroom wall, floated down the back of my desk and found itself in the debris of the working week. Carefully lifting out discarded micellar water-soaked wool pads, Tesco receipts, clothes tags, used blister plasters (ew) sticky note reminders and crumpled Amazon packaging I believed the sticker to be lost, indefinitely. Now staring at the faint shadow outline of the beauty brand’s trademark logo, I picked at the remnants of blue-tac telling myself that sticker would've probably been worth thousands in 20 years time. No. Millions. As it turns out, I’d moved the sticker several months ago over fears that it would lose its affinity to the wall and slip between the floorboards. It’s still there, don’t worry.
Taking a rather steep change in the course of this post, I wanted to share something: In the summer I went on what I call a dating collision course (all safe) in an attempt to figure out how I go about falling in love. Stupid. Very stupid Lauren. (I'm also fairly certain I've mentioned this before but here we are!) After nearly a dozen dates I felt worse, horrid, just terrible. It was as if I had been putting my self-esteem through some rigorous, extreme pain. I ceremoniously packed in dating apps and decided to focus on myself.
Several days ago I had the extreme misfortune of experiencing something that brought with it a series of strange feelings I thought I'd altogether forgotten. In the past years, I've actively pretended the girl who fell haphazardly in love before wasn't me but someone else, anyone else. I make a point to not to use that love as a template, but I do, sometimes. It's like that inescapable love which was so dreadful I was marred by it, forever destined to wonder what I'd be like should it never have happened, if I'd taken the stairs and not the lift. Hesitated more at the amber light. Turned right instead of left. It was the kind of love that occurs in movies when you're willing the protagonist to start afresh and become a florist on the Isle of Wight and live in a cottage on the edge of a cliff with four windows and a tiny dog.
Lining up my romantic experiences side by side while thinking about my own capacity for connection and love, I analysed all those failed interactions, dead ends, rejections, lost sparks and miss fires to understand this: the love of my life is me and what I need to know is not how to love someone else but how to love me. And so, to my strange, recent encounter (and the one I'd been dreading all along) that I thought would devastate me, rob me of everything, and leave me depleted, I say thank you. Thank you for holding up a mirror to my tremendous growth, perseverance and strength at a time when I probably needed a good kick up the arse.
To the women I have become, who I always was and always will be this is for you. Plus, it's time, it's time to move on. I'm ready to let go.
To bring this all to a close I just wanted to add the following quote (I watched Brené Brown: A Call to Courage on Netflix and I 100& recommend it)
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
All the best, stay safe,
Lauren xo
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