do not romanticize your love life you fool

oh sweet fetishization of tragedy is fucking stupid seriously??

I have this fantasy about this guy, J, who I once dated before I moved to New York. He lives on the Upper East Side but works in SoHo where I frequent. We haven’t spoken since I ended up here, but he was the one that made me believe in magic in a way I hadn’t in years. I still walk down the streets sometimes and remember that hazy summer where we twirled around his block, teasing each other and laughing.

For a while, I’ve thought I’d one day see him in the distance, from across the subway platform. It will have been years, yet feel like just yesterday when we’d last held hands.

We will make eye contact, and reminisce on our short lived but passionate affair. We will compare it to our lovers since, and wonder at what could have been. Yet we will not speak, but softly one of us will smile and the other will follow. I believe it would be me who smiles first, as I want to thank him for being there for me when I most needed it.

Then, as the train passes by, the one who gets on disappears as they board. I also believe this would be me.

It will be beautiful, like that scene in The Dark Knight Rises at the end when Bruce smiles at Alfred, showing he’s alive and happy and finally free of his burden, and Alfred can wordlessly get up and go.

That was a fucking good scene.

That movie is not real life though. Holy fuck.

*****

What the FUCK are you doing? I recently slapped myself silly and I woke up out of this stupor for long enough to actually read the things I say in my journal.

And upon rereading some of this, I’m genuinely impressed I have any friends who put up with my — quite frankly — whining. When I actually take a moment to ponder what exactly I am doing, how I have gorged myself on convenient narratives and not taken any responsibility for the hand I had in my own pain, I am simply astounded at how I’ve been idealizing having my life resemble some sort of post modern performance art, at accepting “the ides of fate” as if my life is a story?

Yes, I am the main character. Yes, every life has a narrative that rules us. But at what point is it too much? At what point are you strangling the magic and making it your slave? Where you are pretending to yourself that there is no magic in agency, that you relegate it all to the workings of destiny?

I noticed a long time ago that romanticization is what I do best. I can make anything sound fun and exciting and interesting. This quality of me, a tireless ability to muster up enthusiasm and see beauty, is what makes others love me, but also is my downfall because I’ll prematurely make pain also a source of inspiration. In fact, it’s scarier to try to weather uncertainty with my pen, because if it’s not a fixed point of light, I can’t capture it. It is actually a harder task to put the ineffable into words.

In essence, my life has to serve as the fuel for me to stay creative. And sometimes, possibly, I can creatively fuck up my life if I don’t communicate to the live people in it. If I communicate, instead, to my memories and myself, I am talking into the wooden hollow at the end of In The Mood For Love.

In college, my friend said he was afraid of healing “too much” because what if that interfered with his art? Because pain gives the best inspiration sometimes, for otherwise his fiction wouldn’t have the right bang. Some of our peers said that was fatalistic and self indulgent of a perspective. Others said that you can both heal and have art, and he’s wrong.

I have come to the conclusion that he is right to be afraid because this is true. This may be about art, and art itself is often not for the comfortable. When you have healed enough, you don’t need to put pen to paper, or need to put brush to drawing. You have less to say, because you have nothing left to preach if your pain is not here.

This is why artists of all sorts have eternal snowflake syndrome, despising the proverbial “normie” life. Because the normies don’t need art. That’s why they can work in tech and sleep well at night, while you have to work a blue collar job just to have time to play your guitar! The artists are trying to make themselves better constantly. Maybe they’re even milking the tragedy of their own lives because they want so badly to see beauty in the complex.

This also falls in line with my critique of Taylor Swift’s art. As she’s grown more and more to legacy status with her recent tour, I must admit that while I find her an interesting songwriter, I mainly think of her from a psychoanalytical standpoint. I think her personality is interesting and trends similar to mine, minus the extensive arrogant preoccupation she has over how easy she is to get over.

A key similarity is I don’t think either of us is very aware of our impact on others, truly, in an embodied way. To me, it doesn’t appear that she has considered the brutal toll that her public persona writing music about her life and profiting greatly off of it has done to her own self image of being deserving of love. I doubt it’s the fact that she’s a superstar and some people just can’t handle the paparazzi — it’s that she has a gift for universalizing her own experience, but also damning it by commenting so vividly on it as if you know the ending, and many people don’t want to date someone who’s going to capture that even if they’re talented at that.

Because there’s a certain amount of privacy you need, as a public-facing artist, if you want things to work out in your real life. This is why I said previously you should not write about a breakup if you want your boyfriend to come back someday, or roast a friend you still want in your life. If you write a memoir, you better make sure the lids are sealed shut for real on every situation and that you’ve done everything humanly possible to salvage them/have truly given up interest in closing those doors.

I’ve always been dying to ask Taylor Swift this question: if some genie came out and told you, you can know all the cheat codes to keeping the love of your life, if you gave up the fame in the world you’ve amassed. Which would you choose?

Taylor Swift could possibly choose the keep fame option in an attempt to ~ love thyself ~, but I would absolutely choose the first one. That’s the thing though — this genie exists. This genie is yourself. It’s cliche but you already know your own bullshit. You just often don’t slow enough down to hear it.

Because why is Taylor so obsessed with being so specific and petty about her love life? Sure, other male and even fellow female pop stars have done this, but she’s made billions off it compared to them. It’s because she has bigger, more intensely public feelings, and an axe to grind with how much the disconnect of her charisma hasn’t helped her keep anyone. And you know what? I relate. I may not know her, but I feel a kinsmanship in how it’s obvious we both romanticize our tragedies way more than the average person, which makes us really popular with people, yet keeps us really alone even in a crowd (which she also sings about). Deep down, Taylor Swift really wants to find true love, or else she’d have less to sing about. Less to mourn.

*****

The dark part of romanticizing your life is you end up romanticizing your own death. A lot of artists speak frequently of their own funerals. They speak frequently of how they want to go down in history, and they put off living properly — really working on yourself enough to find love, to be healthy — for the proverbial clout they begin to become addicted to. That was me once. I wanted to be famous when I felt I was destined to have no friends, to justify things. Writing was honestly my revenge for being overlooked, for fashioning myself an underdog (when really I’m just autistic).

These romanticizers have something to prove, like revenge bedtime procrastination but for life itself. You say to yourself, I must be memorable for those in my life to give proper due honor to. I will keep my life and my own goddamn self and potential in a comfortable, non-normie shaped box. And I will write my own obituary, perhaps even commit suicide to make it an ~ aesthetic ~. And then what? Everyone is sad but moves on anyway.

That’s about death itself, but I also romanticize the deaths of connections I’ve had. I’ve romanticized letting them walk away, letting their scents linger, their smiles fade into the foreground of my memories, to walk down a dimly lit street and ponder if they think of me too, to have someone to always yearn for. I’ve collected a few of these people, and I’ve gotten into this toxic idea: if I can’t have you, I’ll set it up so I’ll have a great memory of you, of what could have been.

But what if I could have had you? What if all I’d had to do was chase harder, ask to stay? What if my pride wasn’t in the way? What if love had been the higher commitment?

That instinct that can even pick up if someone likes me or not, is the same instinct I ignore when I don’t fight for clarity. When I don’t chase after closure, when I don’t let myself fully give myself over to the steely conviction of I want you and I refuse to be ashamed of it. What if I exhausted my tongue to your face, instead of behind your back, long after it’s too late, in my books?

****

I’ve recently decided to romanticize, instead, my own agency — for I need to romanticize something. I’ve already tried to stop romanticizing tragedy, but it won’t work, because this imagination was meant to grind. This brain won’t stop ticking.

Initially, I felt there was some paradox of having agency yet being an artistic writer, the same one that my David Foster Wallace idolizing friend felt. Yet there are writers every day, who are commenting on business, politics, ideas, self help. Truly it is the “idea,” a contrived image of a writer who is self indulgently intent on never improving or never living out who he truly is, who will sacrifice his soul for the sake of this picture of Dorian Grey that wordsmithing or brushstrokes has made him, that seems so contradictory to believing in yourself?

Because why does agency feel unsexy, uninspiring, unbittersweet? You only have to muster up your agency when circumstances feel dire, don’t you? Is that not its own act of heroism?

What if I decided I want it all, that I can find a way to accept that perhaps leaving romanticization at the door would not leave me muter, make my tongue duller, my vocabulary less rich, because life is always full of tragedy anyway and you don’t need to create more of it to write things worth talking about?

What if I insisted that this would not make me a bad writer, but instead a different kind of writer?

Why should I be ashamed I haven’t been prolific, because I was busy living my life detangling my own bullshit and making my relationships true art based on love, instead of writing narratives that fit people into fucking boxes?

The thing is - I don’t regret romanticizing my life. I had to, to get out. But when do I stop expecting beauty in tragedy? When do I wake up and smell the proverbial roses? I can start today.

****

R and I talked briefly, after I posted my last Substack on Instagram. It’d been years, but since he follows me, I conveniently didn’t prepare myself for the possibility that he’d see my latest post and enjoy that I was advocating for modern love. Perhaps even enjoy how I memorialized him in the post prior. In any case, the “like” he threw my way sent my heart aflutter.

The romanticization of him and me, Wong Kar Wai style, all felt painfully dull compared to the real life person I was still connected to. Even if the time for romance had come and gone as we’re firmly on opposite sides of the country, I knew I was not trying to go in silence this time.

I considered letting him “spot me from across the room” and leaving it at that. But I had to reach out. I had to say something. So I reached out — I thanked him.

He said to me he looks back fondly at the memories we shared. Any artsy ideas I’d had of him faded as he confirmed that it mattered to me too. I was there too.

The only reason I’d ever romanticize someone is if I didn’t see there’s another person across the vastness of souls sitting in front of me, a person capable of loving me back in a real way, even if it doesn’t quite touch where I want it to. Like a soft kiss on the forehead, still conveying tenderness, but not a ghostly apparition of my own limited imagination.

****

I have resolved starting now that what I’ll be fierce about instead, is healing. That’s the thing that doesn’t change, that helps me stay strong. If the romanticization of guys it didn’t work out with was fierce, so also fierce will I be about staying with the game, staying with the connection, staying around to make sure I try my best to not give up too easily, to not lose before I see if I won.

For the first time I thought to myself recently, I don’t want to screw this up. It was so satisfying to decide that’s what I think, not I hope it works out this time, somehow.

Even if the events of my life aren’t like a fucking sad Wong Kar Wai movie anymore, I’M the character I root for. I will have the fierce attitude about whatever the fuck struggle I have, bc life is about struggle, but not control. Let me keep throwing myself off the edge of sanity again and again, whether or not it gets me what I want. Let me tell my friends to tell me to hurt harder and differently than I did last time. I’m not the narrator, or just the main character - often I am the god with the mastery of my own destiny. Let there be light.