Prologue
EVEN WHEN I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU, I know that you are there. In that place where you hid, who knows exactly when or why. In that place where you decided to stay.
I have spent long years of my life coexisting with your presence; at times your force was wild and hectic, irrational. Authoritative.
Paradoxically, at other times I have hardly been able to sense you.
During entire nights, insomniac, you had me sitting at the edge of my bed begging you to let me go. To abandon me.
How absurd.
How could the idea of asking exactly to you to let me go popped in my head? How, when I know that your strategies and mechanisms are so precise, that I am impregnated with them. How, when I am fully aware that your attacks leave my defense lines each and every time bleeding to death. How, when even and despite it all, I still hold on to you and your voiced ideas about love…
You made me travel half of the World, through unthinkable paths, chasing, questing after. Forcing me to leave in every single one of those places a piece of myself.
Dominated by your absolutism, I have been witnessing your evolution. How you moved from taking up just a small space to consume it all. And how I would grow too… into an observer, a non-participant watcher. Inactive. Weak.
You made me believe your stories about myself, about others. You made me feel I was unable to change them, that those were the reality and that you, YOU; that you were me.
I ran after shelter and found it in the arms of desperation. Of panic, of anger, of solitude, of darkness. Of hate. Of insanity.
So then, you shape-shifted.
Your voice was multiplied into voices, and they became stronger. They jumped out from being inside of me to being reflected upon others. You laughed out loud while I kept questioning my decisions, in who to believe, what to believe; you saw me ripping apart while trying to find my strengths and my weaknesses. You certainly had the time of your life creating despairing scenarios over and over, while whispering to me that those were my lessons, my punishments…
Because if I would ever dare to stray from your core beliefs, then I would undeniably and incessantly be left broken, shedding tears and with my hands full of destroyed hopes.
And so, you would take me back, comfort me, reinforce your ruling over me.
All around me, people always would look at me wondering how it was possible that such an intelligent, brilliant, and beautiful woman was living tied to a monster of that kind.
Some of these people would listen to me, for some time.
Most of them, however, decided to retreat from my life. Because it was a big risk, a big investment, a big and uncomfortable constant mess to deal with, to compromise to.
Those who fled never wanted to take a leap into the complexity of my mind, but surely left scars in my soul and heart.
This is my story. Or a part of it.
These are my stories, while living with my traumas and fears, with this voice, this other self, this Minotaur settled inside.
These are my stories, and I will not silence them anymore. I will not let this ensemble of chaotic feelings and thoughts refrain me from showing that I AM vulnerable.
These are my stories, and now that I can lift my head a bit more and accept a bit more that my searches may never be attained, that impermanence is as inevitable as life or death and that being vulnerable is just fine…
Now is the time to share my path, the path that moved from waiting for somebody or something to rescue me from myself to this new orbit where I am the one and only, the one and only who always had the power of rescue(ing) me from myself.