The feels:
Earth is asleep, and the soil is feasting on its own hunger. The winter has gone on for far too long. If only I could be chosen by spring, so it wouldn’t be so laborious to exist. I’ve sunk my teeth too deep into this pomegranate, and now the ghosts from the summer won’t let me rest in peace. Everyone loves the summer because it’s a season of feasting, harvest, and being merry with all the bounty from spring. It feels like life has chosen you by sealing a kiss into your naturally tanned skin. You’re alive, and people see you. Hell, some may even choose you.
Seasons change whether we ask for them or not. They are fluid and arrange themselves in collaboration with an intelligence most of us fear. But we live, whether we are conscious of it or not, around this rhythm. There is no second thought. We don’t choose Earth’s seasons; we live in them. But this intelligence speaks to us, too, at the threshold of our individual seasons changing. It tells us when to linger in the winter slightly longer and when it’s time to invite spring in. These changes of seasons may not be marked by the falling or growing of leaves, but we certainly feel the rotting of an old, familiar feeling in our stomachs. Something we can’t quite break down, because it never belonged to us. The long, stretched silence between you and a person, project or lifestyle you once begged would choose you, irrespective of whether it could dance with you even after you woke up from your sleep.
The fine print:
The effortless change in seasons is a metaphor for the cyclical nature of our desires. We want what we want not because of who we are, but because of the infinite source of energy that is flickering an ancient lightswitch inside of us. But it’s 3 am, and that light switch is disturbing your peaceful sleep. This disruption will trickle into shaking loose the neatly arranged five-year plan that revolves around you being chosen.
Track down every goal and future you or others have walked towards. Now, imagine the logical facts of these goals and plans written at the front of some wrinkled parchment paper. Turn it over and tune into your spirit and ask for the fine print of this scroll. It will say something along the lines of “I have been taught not to trust the feeling sensations of my desires before it has a name, especially when it means I will deviate from a script. This is because my worth is said to be attached to being chosen. I have been taught to fear those whose bodies move to a rhythm I envy because I can’t bear to feel the weight of my self-betrayal. In the simmering heat of my sticky discharge from Hades, I will ask them, in their bourgeoning light, who chose you?”
Relationships:
I’ve been reading social psychologist, Bella DePaulo’s book “Happily single” and I have been enlightened into the underlying assumptions that even the wellness world has about people who are “single at heart”. People who are single at heart have chosen singlehood as the destination. It is their home base and modus operandi. They are not searching for a romantic partner or seeking coupledom, in either the temporary or permanent sense. They are their most authentic self when not in a romantic relationship. This choice has nothing to do with gender, sexuality, race, class or how able-bodied one is. It also has nothing to do with whether you have previously been, or currently are, coupled. According to Depaulo, being in a relationship doesn’t change the fact that someone is single at heart. This emergent truth just gets pushed further into the unconscious. For the single at heart, singlehood is the most natural, joyful and authentic way of existing in the world.
She says that even as society has progressed and traditional gender roles are shifting as well as same sex relationships are getting legal recognition, there is still a consistent throughline in all of these progressions that being-in/in pursuit of/ open to—whichever stage of coupledom— is proof you are “normal” and a functioning adult in society. According to this narrative, coupledom isn’t only natural, it’s superior to singlehood. She argues that most people fail to see that singlehood isn’t just a phase someone is in until they graduate to coupledom. Phrases like “ you’ll change when the right person comes along” denote that a person can not be wholly complete in themselves unless someone has chosen them. There is something deviant about listening to a preverbal desire that aches for lifelong singlehood. Refusing to arrange your time, energy and resources around a romantic partner, whom you may love deeply, but not deeper than the source of love itself, makes you a dangerous person.
This is especially raw for femme-bodied folks, as it is still largely unknown what happens when a femme person does not arrange their life, priorities or emotional labour around another person. This is not exclusively romance, but in relational fields overall, who does a woman become when she is not bidding her time and creative energy in return for being chosen? How does she walk, talk and arrange her life when she is not in pursuit of being chosen?
DePaulo argues that many who bask in the glow of their own coupled status and singles who aspire for this status would like the rest of us to “kindly refrain from creating ripples”. DePaulo says she is not “aiming for ripples”, she wants to “create tsunamis.”
Folks who have chosen to remain single, simply by responding to the light that flickers at 3 am, become a target for the purgatorial discharge of a structure that is invested in us believing we need to be chosen. We only get to be fully alive if someone or something outside of us permits us. This belief acts as a cord that allows our inner resources to be siphoned as we unconsciously give up a part of ourselves that holds immense power, so that nothing interrupts the trajectory of us getting picked. This keeps the spell alive and kicking.
I am aware that many of us want to liberate ourselves from the prison cell of being chosen. But we give up too soon. Usually, at the first sign of internal contraction. The painful moment when your old adaptations seize your whole body in a deathly grip. When the universe suddenly brings you a string of lovers like a delicious à la carte buffet menu. Deep down, you don’t want any of them, but a deadly whisper echoes inside you—but they have chosen you.
The part of you addicted to being chosen will create a fog of confusion and fear. It will remind you of all the party invites you’ll need a plus one to, and the overseas wedding all the coupled folks will terrorise you at if you go alone.
The question is, can you begin by choosing yourself, in all the small and big ways, and see how your life wants to shape itself from that place? DePaulo says she’s not looking for love, she’s looking for life.
When we flip the question to “Do I choose myself, anyway?” Life begins to respond.
The taboo nature of being a self-chosen artist:
In the late 2010’s, fresh into the London poetry scene, I discovered my love and talent for writing poetry. I had one or two creative friends who championed my art. Other than this i kept it low-key. I wrote all the time (still do), on the tube, on cafe napkins. I’d run out of the shower mid-way with shampoo trickling down the back of my neck when a new verse was beginning to form. But I was a baby writer-poet, not in terms of talent, but when it came to understanding the stigma around the deviance of being a self-chosen artist. In my mind, a writer is someone who writes, and a poet is someone who writes poetry, in the same way as a lawyer is someone who practices the law and a doctor is someone who practices medicine. It was logical and uncomplicated. I defined myself by what I spent every waking hour of the day doing and thinking about. I didn’t know calling yourself an artist before someone else permitted you to do so was so deviant. But at some point, the virus reached me, and the seeds of doubt began to take root.
I remember telling my therapist that I want as many people in the world to read my words—but in that vision, I don’t see any gatekeepers, publishers or establishments that choose me. I am not opposed to collaborating with a gatekeeper, but I am not invested in being chosen. I don’t have a yearning to be chosen in the way that all my creative friends and mentors do. I was speaking about this lack of desire as though it was a crisis—like I had to search for this non-existent feeling and psychoanalyse myself into submission.
The lightswitch that couldn’t reach me then was saying, my words do not suddenly elevate in status because it was chosen by a gatekeeper. The deeper feeling that was buried 10 feet below this knowing was, i dont care how my words will land in someone else’s ears, I only care about how it lands in my own. But as a young creative in my early 20s i was vulnerable and had a sweet innocence (still do) that assumed everyone was responding the best they could to the lightwitch. The echoes of life, deep within.
Until one day, I went to an academic conference to support someone I knew on the panel. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that academia is a site of learning. I believe many academics stopped learning the day they became academics. Following the conference, the panellists were going for dinner nearby, and I tagged along as my ride home was with the panellist I came to support. As the group split into two i was walking alongside the panellist I came to support and a white Swiss man who was a senior academic in the field of the person I came to support and was mentoring them in the latter phases of their doctoral thesis. He was a gatekeeper in that world, holding the keys to shiny opportunities.
He proceeded to ask me —a question I earnestly loathe to this day, one that you can’t escape if you dwell in the global north—“so, what do you do?” Most people respond with a soft, discerning yet accommodating voice delivered in a non-threatening cadence, what their day job is and proceed to sneak in their true passion, pretending it’s an afterthought, as a “fun hobby on the side.”
But the version of me that responds to the animation of life present in a moment rather than a script—not because I am brave or rebellious—but because I am a bad actor when it comes to playing out scripts I did not write, responded in that moment, “I write poetry.”
There was a pregnant pause that held the weight of all the toxic shame that killed the dreams of millions of creatives. I innocently assumed he was taking his time formulating a thoughtful response. Alas, he said, “Where can I find your work?” In other words, who chose you? Who permitted you to call yourself a poet? It felt like an intruder was trying to kick me out of my own house. In my “house” where “I live”, I am a poet, what other explanation did this white man need?
He then went on to ask me whose work he may know of that my poetry resembles. Firstly, that’s a question for a critic or an editor, not a writer. His assumption is comical that his subjective taste must translate to a universal global standard of quality literature. What he was saying was, if you can’t tell me who chose you, at least show me the proximity you have with someone who has been chosen.
I didn’t say who my work resembles; instead, I answered a question he didn’t pose. Please don’t give me brownie points for diplomacy or handling it like a pro, because that was not my intention, and a part of me wishes I had made life very difficult for him.
My answer was partly unconscious, as there was another spirit that moved in me before I could think. This spirit felt sorry for the future him that would have to lick and swallow his stale old vomit from the cold concrete floors of Bloomsbury, London, when he remembers who he posed those stupid questions to.
I share this anecdote to further illustrate the hall of mirrors called shame that breathes carbon monoxide into this question of who chose you. This is the question slapped across the faces of people who are ok with not being chosen, and yelled at when their desires are still hanging at the roof of their mouth.
Who are you to validate your creative gifts and practices? Who are you to see yourself as complete and whole when no one has chosen you? When no one is adorning you with heavy trophies and fat paychecks? Who endorsed your talents? Who chose you?
Sadly, I could give examples where this is the underlying question in every other area of life. It’s so cancerous that I will be honest and tell you I am still in the very early stages of recovery. And who knows, I may relapse. How can I not when this is the air we breathe and the toxins laced into every conversational script?
People have always projected a FOMO (fear of missing out) onto me that I didn’t feel. As scary as it sounds to many, some people are excited to live a life that doesn’t have a script. Where their internal life and their collaboration with divinity take precedence.
When you can make a meal from your own hunger and drink alcohol free cocktails (yes, it’s still a cocktail if it has no alcohol, fight me), there’s not much a person can say or do to control you because you exist inside yourself.
Because you chose your-damn-self.
references:
DePaulo, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, 2023