Dear Reader,
As promised, I’m back this week with my old project, Notes from Within. What you’re about to read is five years old. The impulse to edit/rewrite/make it better is firm. But I’m not going to do anything about it. I’ve done a lot of changing and mending of myself over these years, and I find no purpose today in altering this text. In all its imperfection, it represents the part of me that started back then, faltered along the way, and after a full circle, arrived here today to mark a new beginning; for the past never leaves us, but we need to let it go so that we can move on unhindered.
I’m marching already.
Here you are, on top of a blank page, not sure how to go on, insecure and, at the same time, confident in the pure act of writing. You have no aspiration1 of being a writer, just the need to pull out all the noise from your head and shape your thoughts. Thoughts eager to be written, thoughts dictating you to give them the life they deserve, and it’s clear now that this is the only way: pen and paper.
And lines. You love lines. They hold something of a promise in their empty space that waits to be filled. You need lines. Their parallel universe has a soothing effect on you and the ability to keep you on track as you tend to lose yourself in your own thoughts.
Words don’t come easy on you. Most of the time, all you have are glimpses, ghost-like thoughts hovering in your head, unwilling to fully unveil themselves, giving you no more but faint hints of what lies beyond. And the struggle begins. You write whatever comes to mind. Your notebook is full of scribbles, arrows pointing back and forth, asterisks marking new additions—a battlefield of scattered fragments that need mending and caring to become fully functional.
You tremble every time you’re going to lose the fight, and all you have against the mighty words is your bare hand. “The hand supports the thought,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Pale Fire, but thoughts are swift and slip away before the hand can transfer them onto paper. So you force your hand to make it to the next line, to the next page.
Your hands—you don’t quite like them. They seem to you ugly and rough. Nervous hands with visible veins like roots crawling under your skin. Not the gentle hands a woman should have. You know that’s just a stereotype you need to shake off, but you can’t find a way to do so, hence the difficulty of accepting them for what they truly are: your own hands.
You will never have any others. They will never be something else than what they already are. They have changed over the years; you can see the passing of time over them, and they will most certainly change some more in the years to come, but their essence will never be altered.
You look at them with a newly born affection. They have so many lines, more lines than you could ever possibly count, short ones, long ones, intersecting each other or simply coexisting in parallel ways—ultimately creating a unique pattern, and in trying to decipher its organic complexity, you notice your scars.
One cut reminds you of a cold, lonely winter years ago in a foreign country and the life whose path remained unshaped. There’s one more cut, bearing no emotionally charged memories, but it’s an unforgettable one due to a large amount of bleeding. And then, there’s a slight deformation on the middle finger of your right hand, caused by the way you used to hold the pen as a child, putting too much pressure on it.
You still do it. You always put too much pressure on yourself in your effort to match the standards you’ve been given. But you have come to realise there is no such thing as perfection in life, and the only possible way of being is to listen to your inner voice and hope for the day when you’ll be able to accept and love your hands.
Wow. Glad you didn't change a single word. Marvelous. If we began the work of loving ourselves at our hands, we might find the natural path.
This was touching 💙