Rilke, Heartache, and the Majesty of Movement

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.” – Rilke.

When I recently went through a break up I did what most people do in painful situations; I lost my mind for a bit, worked a lot, ran a lot, went out a lot, drank a lot, sat in baths for hours on end, drank more, ran more, went out more, ate shit food to make myself feel better, threw it up because it made me feel worse, and then finally, I contemplated what life would be like without the person who had been my best friend for three years. What I didn’t do: cry. Not because I didn’t want to, but because my body wouldn’t let me. On the evening we broke up (loose terminology as we’ve seen each other since in varying capacities) we had just been out with our parents for a wonderful meal. They got on like a house on fire; we ate brilliant food, drank wonderful wine, and discussed the world for hours. He had held my leg under the table most the night, paid for my meal and fallen asleep with his head on my lap in the cab home. We laughed a lot because we always did. We both made multiple mistakes in that relationship as we were both just two fools in love trying to learn how to do it. I regret none of it and I miss him and his calming, kind and amusing presence, but some things are better to walk away from when they have been good rather than shattered. Stripping away all the anger and the pain, I can say that I felt we had a brilliant relationship, full of kindness, easy reciprocity, laughter, and good sex. However, the trust, that foundational element of any good relationship, has gone from both sides, so the notion of continuing feels pointless.

In this case, two forces are at play at once: loss and love, both of which I find interesting subjects to explore and discuss. For example, one thing I know about myself is that I have a capacity to love very, very deeply and very, very quickly, which makes me incredibly vulnerable and incredibly brave. At the end of the day, I am proud to have loved someone so genuinely, deeply, and yet gently. We must remember that a love that smothers is not love. On the flip side, I acknowledge we made mistakes, that I made mistakes, that I didn’t do everything right. Yet I have also discovered something about myself in this period that has shocked me; namely, that I can flick a switch in my mind and make all the knotted complexity of feeling inside me stop. I guess this isn’t unfamiliar; when a friend of mine passed away in October 2022 I just stopped feeling. All that love, all that pain, all that loss, all that guilt for feeling like I hadn’t been there enough for her, that I could have stopped her – I could just turn it off because the first blow of hearing that news was enough to shatter my ribs, puncture my lungs, disembowel me. God it was so physical, that pain, it was so annihilating. Frankly, I couldn’t actually comprehend how bad the situation was, how palpable, tangible, and final her death was, how much I missed her, how much I couldn’t speak to her or knowing that I could never hug her or hold her because she became a ‘no -- body’, in the sense that her cold body was buried in the earth. It was just too much – her complete lack of presence or perhaps I mean her utter irreparable absence. Retrospectively, I realise I willed my mind into convincing my body it had no pain within it, and God, I was in so much pain at that time for so many reasons (job was shit, relationship was at its most hurtful and then her) and it sat there in me, and it sits there still - lurking, waiting, grumbling, and rumbling. I think maybe this is a complex way of discussing compartmentalisation – that fantastic storage mechanism that allows you to package up obstructive emotions without ever having to work through the shit or unpack it. Cheers to that…

I am no stranger to intense love and intense loss, yet compartmentalisation always requires a desire to escape and a refusal to genuinely confront or cry or live through those feelings. It’s a great mechanism for high achievers but ultimately, a form of self-destruction. The problem isn’t just that I’ve mastered compartmentalisation, it’s that I’m consciously aware that I’m doing it and can’t stop. Instead, I deal with pain in two ways; I drink/party, or I intellectualise my emotions into such a numbness that I forget to feel them. Drink murders the mind, whereas intellectualising stimulates it; they are oppositional. Interestingly drink allows me to completely let go, it allows me to cry and feel all the unbearably strong emotions that sit inside me but oddly I can only do this because when I’m drunk, I feel separate to my body and my mind. So, all that feeling isn’t actually feeling, it’s just an ultra-expression of feeling that is paradoxically utterly empty. Alternatively, intellectualising allows me to think my way out of actually feeling anything. This is a denial of ultra-expression in the form of nullification. So, my way of coping with pain is completely paradoxical – to drink or to think, two different methods of escape splitting me in half. I don’t know, it’s complex – I wish I could cry simply or just stop thinking or maybe stop drinking. Ha, God. The thing about pain though is that it sits in the body. Like love, it is physiological, and deeply entrenched. I ache with love for my friends – like actually sit there listening to their beautiful minds with this feeling in my body that sits outside of language. I think language is brilliant, in fact it’s all we really have, but my god, there is a point where the body feels things that words fail to translate. In this respect, I am incredibly lucky to have people in my life that I love so much I almost cry with frustration at the lack of language that exists to tell them, with precision and vigour, what I feel about them. Sadly though, pain and love are not so dissimilar, and right now I am so frantically in pain somewhere in my body, but I can’t locate it, and it’s just sitting there, and I can’t get rid of it and if I can’t locate it or know it then I can’t express it, or deal with it.

Now to intellectualise; half the chairs in my gorgeous little flat in South London are broken. I was telling a friend about the flat and without context, I said, ‘everything is a little bit broken, but I love it’. She said, ‘I’m so sorry darling, about the brokenness, yes, lean into it, but understand there’s so much beauty’. I was talking about the endearingly shit chairs and the wonky shelf; she was talking about my life. ‘Lean into it’ – I assume she meant the pain. I looked at the chairs differently after that, and my life too. Yes, everything is a little bit broken at the moment, but she was right, there is so much beauty in the world, so much fun to be had, so many people to meet, so much pleasure and plenitude, so much love to give and receive. You know, sometimes I get so overwhelmed by how beautiful everything can be and yet also so overwhelmed by how horrible everything can be. I wish I could mute everything, dull down the colours but then I think how wonderful that my whole life sits at a quivering boundary of wild excess; I feel everything in excess, every colour is electric, every sound is full volume. It’s so hard and exhausting trying to rationalise or fit all of that into the realm of ‘professional’, ‘put together’, or liveable. I go to work, I work hard but it’s always the tip of the iceberg – always a feeling that the people there see 30% of who I am, that a job will always just be unfulfilling because unless I’m writing I’m not myself. Honestly, I don’t know where I’ll end up – I have always been ambitious and performed at a high level because why bother getting out of bed to simply be average? In fact, bluntly speaking, I have always said ‘be the best’; get the best grades, run further and further, write more and more each week, consume more and more literature each month, make sure you have the wildest nights out, the best conversations – basically, just be fucking good at whatever you do or don’t do it. Firstly, it’s exhausting, unsustainable and pressurising, but secondly, it’s that final phrase ‘be good at whatever you do’ - where to go with this, what to want, who to want and what to do? I don’t know the answers and perhaps I never will. Maybe this is ok.

What I do know though, is that I love being naked. This seems like a strange diversion, but a lot of this piece has revolved around the dichotomies of body and mind, beauty and terror, love and loss, so actually nakedness is highly relevant. I danced naked in my flat for over two hours yesterday. There are windows on both sides, but I really couldn’t have cared less who saw me: I thought, watch me, I dare you. My skin was hot and flushed, the flat was cold, the music was loud. I can’t remember the last time I danced alone prior to that. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was naked for myself prior to that. I think maybe nakedness isn’t just bodily. I make myself naked emotionally, strip myself down, bare my soul. I love that I’m unafraid of being naked in this way. Yes, of course it gets me in trouble sometimes but who wants to live the life of a fucking saint? I love feeling my body in the shower – running my hands over my skin, feeling my body’s curvature, the fleshiness of my beingness, the discs of my hipbones and the hardness of shoulder blades. When I feel my body like this, I am reminded of my luckiness to simply be alive and occasionally this makes me think of my friend’s body-lessness, her lack of life. Sometimes this brings me near to tears, but other times it’s a good feeling because I know I carry the memory of her within my own body. This always makes me think about a gorgeous book, a favourite of mine, in which a woman describes her lover’s shoulder blades as being like twin razors turned towards her in the form of angel wings. I can never forget this image. How beautiful and terrifying to think how much the body can wound and entice. I think I know how to use my body because I understand that it’s both my greatest weapon and my greatest weakness. For instance, I hate that my body makes me vulnerable – that it makes me grabble, trappable, assaultable, rapeable and yet I love my body for how it makes me touchable, kissable, holdable and most importantly, present. When I was dancing, I was fundamentally present in and of myself. I felt like all the clanging worries that normally chain my ankles to the ground were suddenly gone; all those memories, all that suffering, all that pain just – poof – gone. There’s a weightlessness in the movement of hips, a beauty in the quick step, the flailing arms, the reptilian twist of the wrists. God isn’t it seductive, isn’t it wonderful - the majesty of movement? I was breathing heavily but kept moving and moving until the struggle to breathe ceased and there was a wonderful clarity of rhythm and breath and sound. Christ, I love nakedness – I will be naked alone more often from now. This makes me sad, but it also makes me smile. I will dance too, until someone comes along who is ready to be naked with me both in terms of body and mind. I hope to dance with them, naked, perhaps, in the beautiful brokenness of the flat. Yes, yes, that’s it - we will grow like wild trees in desert sand, stripped, and alone in the vastness with only each other and our naked peace.

Peace, ha – maybe that’s all it ever is, and all it ever needs to be: gentle, naked peace.