Month 5 of my Year of Intentional Celibacy

In May, I successfully completed my 28th circle around the sun. The wisdom of my years is a burden I shall be unleashing on you in this longer-than-usual newsletter, split into multiple sections.

i.

I spent a restless afternoon pacing around my bedroom and thinking about my childhood.

My childhood was generally a happy one — I had a loving family, plenty of friends, did well in school. But there’s always something that’s missing and ends up fucking you up in ways you have to deal with for the rest of your life. I don’t blame anyone for it in my particular case; it’s just not possible to give a child the best of everything.

The thing I was missing was stability. I left behind my country of birth and my first ever friend¹ when I was 2 . We moved to be closer to my mother’s family, I went to kindergarten and made new friends… and then moved again when I was 5.

My parents put me in an international school for the next 6.5 years of my life because they (especially my British dad) wanted to make sure I would grow up fluent in English, too. It was a really good school and I have no idea who I would be today if I hadn’t had that experience.

The thing about international schools is that almost everyone is there temporarily. Most of my friends were kids of diplomats who were only sent to Estonia for a few years, and even the teachers didn’t usually stay for long. I got used to saying goodbye to people very early in my life.

There’s a defining moment that I remember. I was 9, and one of my closest friends was leaving after we had spent 4.5 years together (the longest friendship I had had at that point in my life). Our families went out for dinner one last time, they walked us back to our apartment where they’d parked their car, and we went through the motions of saying our farewells. We hugged, promised to chat and Skype all the time, and as I stood by my house and waved at them as they drove away, I realised it was the first time I hadn’t shed a tear while going through this process.

In that moment, I knew something inside me had changed. Looking back, I don’t think I’ve built a healthy attachment to anyone since that day.

I stopped pacing, and decided: if I want things to change, I need to start doing things differently myself. I need to learn to give myself the stability I didn’t have as a child. I won’t uproot my whole life and move to a new country whenever I’m bored or things get difficult. I’ll devote more of myself to building lasting friendships and communities. I’ll be consistent with things that make my life feel good and safe. I’ll invest in my home. I’ll stop avoiding buying things just because they’ll be a hassle to deal with when if I move. I’ll make commitments. I’ll grow roots and I’ll water them.

ii.

When I broke up with my ex six months ago, I asked him not to text me for a while. The last months of our relationship had been a rollercoaster, and I really needed space from all of it. I also knew that breaking up was the right thing to do, but that I still loved him, and staying in contact would make it more difficult for me to stick to my decision.

I’ve never really been good at the whole no contact thing. My previous ex and I continued texting regularly and pretending we could be friends for almost a year after we had broken up, and my earliest relationships ended amicably after I had already fallen out of love, so we genuinely did stay friends for a while.

You know how I said I haven’t been able to build a healthy attachment to anyone since I was 9? Mostly, that has looked like being unable to feel strong attachments in platonic relationships and feeling incredibly strong attachments within romantic relationships. My friends are ephemeral side characters in my life who may leave at any moment, while a romantic interest is The Person That Might Stay In My Life Forever And Save Me If I Just Hold On Tight Enough.

My partner becomes my rock and I become like moss, an organism learning to grow roots for the first time deep inside their crevices. When the relationship ends, fully detaching feels impossible. Like, I think it would have actually killed me if I hadn’t been able to stay in contact with my previous ex. Losing the one thing I was attached to felt legitimately life-threatening.

Anyway, after this most recent breakup I managed to maintain no contact relatively well for someone who had never really attempted it before. Over the first four months, I reached out twice and we had a casual catch-up and that was it.

Then we talked three separate times in April and after that the whole “I want to reach out again but I can’t because I’m Not Allowed because I’m supposed to be doing No Contact” thing became an obsession and I started crying and freaking out every day.

After three weeks of this, I decided enough was enough. I’m a pretty obsessive person, and one of my biggest obsessions is Being Perfect — forcing more rules onto myself seems like the opposite of what I should be doing, actually. When I first decided to take a break from contacting him it was a decision I made for myself, but then at some point, it became something I was doing for others, or for my perceived idea of what the Right Thing To Do was. It became a pattern for me to come up with reasons or excuses to contact him, and then text a friend to ask what they thought, and then they would tell me I shouldn’t do it, and I would listen and feel briefly empowered and Totally Chill, and then the next day I’d freak out and the whole cycle would begin again.

So I decided I wouldn’t consider “no contact” a rule in my life anymore. I want to trust myself to make my own decisions and to be able to deal with whatever the consequences may be. Maybe a few weeks or months from now I’ll regret it and change my mind, but I think finding that out for myself is important.

As of writing this, it is almost 3 weeks since I made the decision to “allow” myself to contact him, and I have only contacted him once. I still have bad days, but I am less obsessed with my desire to text him, which feels like progress!

iii.

I’ve been thinking about how I can incorporate more of the things I miss from my last relationship into my life while being single. One of those things is spontaneous adventures and dates — I miss going on random daytrips and being taken out for dinner. Mostly what’s been stopping me from going for trips and dinners by myself is limited funds, but I’ve decided poor is just a mindset² and I can probably afford to take myself out at least once a month.

Accordingly, I am adding a new section to this newsletter series (along with a bonus sub-section)…

Where I’ve Been

Last month, I tried out a new restaurant for my birthday dinner: Mariposas, a vegan restaurant in the cool part of town. Honestly, I didn’t want to specifically eat vegan food, but after being vegetarian/vegan for half my life, I got overwhelmed by how many options there are if you aren’t restricted by diet. Choosing the one vegan restaurant was the easy way out of indecision hell.

It was okay. I was excited for my entrée of stracciatella and blueberries over courgettes, but it really was just stracciatella and stray blueberries over cold courgettes. I’m not sure what I was expecting. For my main dish, I ordered gnocchi, and what came was definitely penne. The sauce was good so I can’t really complain about the taste, but… that time I do know what I was expecting, and it was gnocchi.

Marseille is really not the most vegan-friendly city, so it’s good that Mariposas exists as an option — but if you’re willing to travel to the other side of Europe, the best vegan restaurant is still Vegan Restoran V in Tallinn.

Swimming count: it is officially summer here and I went swimming two times in two different beaches in Marseille. One time, a guy swam straight into me and basically punched me in the neck and injured my birthmark (with his nails? I don’t want to think about it).

The site of the incident

What I’ve Made

I’ve actually been working so much this past month, mostly for my regular translation agency but I also edited my first novel for a client and felt like I did really well!

A few things I managed to do besides work:

• rehearse for my upcoming choir and ballet performances (first performance done, five more to go)

• run my first ever 5k

• publish an essay on nuns and Turkish men

• draw a zine about horses that went semi-viral!?

My Substack has actually been growing for the first time since I started it a year ago, which is pretty exciting. If you’re one of the 30+ new people who subscribed to me, hello! (Please say it back!)

What I’ve Read/Watched/etc.

I finally started watching Girls (the show by Lena Dunham) and I can see why people have been recommending it to me. I just finished season 2 and I have a lot of thoughts, such as why do I feel so attached to Adam? and why does Hannah’s OCD make her more relatable to me even though I’ve never displayed these types of symptoms? and how come Marnie gets to live the getting-back-together-with-your-ex-after-he-becomes-hot-and-rich storyline? What does she have that I don’t? What does he have that none of my exes did?

As part of my celibacy studies, this month I read At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life by Fenton Johnson, in which he studies the lives and thoughts of nearly a dozen writers and artists who he deemed solitary, as a solitary writer himself — after his partner died in the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, he never found that kind of romantic love again, and embraced a life of celibacy. A few of the people he wrote about were also queer in times when it was not easy to have a traditional romantic relationship with someone of the same sex, which I found a bit depressing, since these people did not really choose to be solitary. Some others were married, but were either absent husbands or abused wives seeking solace in their art and in solitude. Basically, this book did not really give me many hopeful examples of freely chosen and satisfying solitary lives as it aimed to do, but it did give me a push to finally start reading Thoreau’s Walden (which I’ll probably have something to say about next month).

A very good book I read this month for my book club was Change: A Method by Édouard Louis, a French memoirist. In this memoir, he talks about his journey from his rural working class upbringing to living in cities, going to prestigious universities, learning the ways of the middle and upper classes, finding freedom in his homosexuality, changing his name, appearance, identity, and finally becoming a successful writer in Paris. He did all of this driven by pure will and determination to escape his abusive childhood and make something of himself.

I remembered my own ambitions, which I have never chased as determinedly but that have chased me across three countries and three decades. If I forced myself to sit down and write every day, what would happen?

Who knows, maybe June is the month I will finally get all of my shit together and change my life. I guess I’ll tell you about it in the next newsletter.

1. Her name was Chloe and we were born three days apart. Our parents met in the hospital. They are still in touch to this day, but by the time Chloe and I had our own email addresses, we were strangers to each other. The last time I spoke to her was when she and her parents visited us 2 or 3 years after we moved.

2. I’m joking but also I tend to get a little bit more stressed about money than I probably should be (although I am a 28-year-old with no savings or safety net so maybe I should actually be more stressed). Guess what other type of stability my childhood was lacking ha ha