Intense.

I’m not sure where I would have to go, or with whom I would have to be, to stop being told I am [too] intense. Of course it’s rarely said with that language, but it’s said in other ways. Am I too intense or am I just more honest? I cannot imagine living the things that I have lived and then tying them up neatly with bows and ribbons, and tucking them into the closet. This seems to be the implication of the censure. I look for different ways to process my life experiences, Instagram captions or entries in my memoirs, emails to friends or lovers, voicemails left on WhatsApp, drawings in the margins of my notebooks, yoga sequences, dreams, poems, watercolors. I distill them into other forms.

I’m not trying to take the edge off. I want to capture the edge - something of my life and my own orientation toward it, my own development, the questions that I am asking or avoiding, the answers that I am considering, the resources that prove meaningful, the companions that pass through, all these things which I hold so sacred, but for which there is no standard altar. We see the art that others have created out of the intensity of their experiences, and we praise it. But would we have answered the phone if the creators called? Maybe if we answered the phone, the art never would have been created. I guess that is the hardest part of it all—suspecting that my own legacy is better off, with no-one to walk with me on the journey.