The ‘Courageous’ Gremlin:
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO SAY I LOVE YOU
This week, I write the newsletter from the belly of deep, d e e p silence. Right now, I’m on my fourth of ten days in total silence, sitting Vipassana (wish me luck; I haven’t gone insane, started eating my limbs and screamed to the wolves yet). I wrote this in advance, so here we go…
Why do we wait for an ultimatum to say I love you?
A wise woman once told me that our legacy is the love that we leave behind with others. That wise woman was me, I told myself, but I’m pretty sure I picked it up from a romcom or an IG meme. This week, as I left London and said goodbye to my soul family, I couldn’t help but think of this sentiment.
Before I entered the void of silence, I wondered - WHY DO WE NEED TO MOVE AWAY, LOOSE SOMEONE, OR BE CLOSE TO DEATH TO SAY I LOVE YOU?! Is it that hard to say three words? Well, yes, maybe it is. Perhaps it takes the fear of never seeing someone again to tell our loved ones how much they mean to us.
When my friend who had just got diagnosed with cancer recently found his salvation in photography, I realised there are a lot of parallels between love and creativity.
Often, we need the fear of staying the same to outweigh the fear of change to step out - it’s why we wait for someone to leave to say I love you and wait for time to run out to create.
I’ M L E A V I N G L O N D O N
I’m leaving London, and someone I met only twice before tells me they will miss me and wish we got to know each other better. “But why, we’ve only met twice,” I say. And he tells me it’s because he “felt a connection, and when I ask him how he is, it’s like I genuinely care, and that's rare in London.” As lovely as it was to hear, I was also frustrated.
The frustration was that we’d known each other for two years, and we had all that time to get to know each other, so why did he wait for two days before I left the country to tell me this? Because I no longer became an option. He took me for granted, and I took him for granted. But, as the song says,'you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’ So it was only when I was no longer going to be in the country that he told me his feelings.
I couldn’t help but think, “damn….”
Not because it was a missed opportunity but because I saw this as a way that we wait for outside circumstances to force us to express ourselves. What if we dared to go first? To say the words, leap, and make the damn thing before our back is against the wall?
This will be the sixth time I’ve moved away from the UK. The first was hard, and this time is challenging differently. Eight years ago, I was running away from myself. Now, I’m running into myself.
In this nomadic life of movement, I’ve learned to open my heart and tell people I love them as much as possible. I want to suck the life out of life and treat every day like it could be the last so that when I go, people remember me by the love they felt. That’s the kind of legacy I want to build, from kids in the future to viewers of my work - let it all be a legacy of feeling love.
Amen.
Go and love Gremlin, you know you want to ;)
K x
