How to love?

I’ve been thinking about this issue recently, which is what Love is and how long does it stay in your life?

It seems to be me that it’s a choice. I never thought before that Love could be a choice, because of the influence of German Romanticism, as if it had to be endless and only end with Death.

I used to feel this way as well. That all good relationships ended with Death, and that Death had to be where they all ended.

I have constantly been a property. That’s how it felt when I was growing up.

Also I feel like so much of my life was surrounded by the Romantic idea of Death, and so much of it can be a result of the way that my aunts and uncles, my father’s generation, were brought up, and the things and connections that they idealized, which were largely artistic. In some ways I follow this path too, mostly following the way and direction that Art takes me, whether I like it or not.

I feel like, with this way, what families are doing are trauma-bonding, including picking apart each other’s faults. It feels sometimes like we are actually a family of losers, but that no one would admit to it.

So I’ve had to learn to love myself anew, completely wholly, as I am. I have probably spent the most money on myself since the beginning of 2015, where something just snapped and I went to India.

India, March 2, 2015

And so I realised. What was good enough for my grandma was no longer good enough for me.

Back to this picture in Varanasi, or Benares, the death capital of India – where the cremations of Hindus happen. Sitting next to me is my friend Natasha, who’s binary like me, a Lebanese Dutch woman, who later married a Malaysian Sikh man.