The Tenderness and the Teeth: A Twitter Memoir

The great escape from reality.

I still come for the humor and humanity. I still smile when I see photos of nature and animals. Giggle at pets. I still am in awe of the talent and creativity. The beautiful souls and lovely poetry. The music I didn't know I needed to hear. Forgotten lyrics that somehow find their way back to me. Sometimes I just sit with it for a while.

I see breakups and people wanting to be seen. Not in likes or selfies, just daring the mass to truly see them. I feel deep grief and sadness, loneliness and insecurity. I stay amused by the audacities and unshaken confidence. The budding friendships and people who are genuinely kind.

The tenderness and the teeth.

And sometimes I am surprised by the bullying and ignorance that passes through my feed. How casually cruelty takes hold, how effortlessly contempt passes for conversation, and how easily people turn on one another. The ugliness of it all, and how comfortably they wear it.

The contradictions hold me. The way some people evolve and other people never change.

I feel lost in a place I like to wander.

The news, the clickbait, the thirst traps, the rage bait, the politics, the sports, the way beauty gets buried beneath the rubble of a world that has shattered.

I see the hopeful collecting the glass and trying to make sense of something so right. Why does something so right tear us apart so wretchedly wrong?

The anxiety, the depression, the creeping, the ostentation. The onslaught of hypersensitivity and oversexualization. The desensitized, the leery, the otraverts. People finding each other. Losing each other. Holding on too tightly. Letting go without looking back. The community. The loneliness of it.

Some leave an impression. Some leave a wound. And some disappear so quietly you don't notice until you go looking for them.

And sometimes I'm the one who disappears.

Shutting the door and still passing each other. In the same place.

The chair between us, empty.

A madhouse full of all kinds, a Pandora's box left open and neglected.

I wonder why I keep coming back.

A Bumblebee Sleeps Here

 

The seed was there first.

Before the roots knew how deep they would reach.
Before the stem knew how to follow the sunlight.
Before the flower ever knew of its colour.

There was only a seed, buried in the dark.

And the seed had to break.

We spend so much of our lives believing that breaking means something has gone wrong. We hold ourselves together long after we've outgrown our own edges, afraid that if we crack open, we will somehow become less than what we were.

But a seed cannot become while remaining whole.

It must break to find its beginning.

And it does so in complete darkness, without ever having seen the flower it carries inside itself.

There is something beautiful about that kind of trust.

The seed does not know what waits above the soil. It doesn't know the warmth of the sun or the feeling of rain against its petals. It has never seen spring. It has no proof that there is light somewhere beyond all that earth.

And still, it opens.

And before it reaches upward, it reaches down.

Roots pushing quietly into the darkness, finding their way through heavy soil, around stones, searching for water, nourishment, and something strong enough to hold what has not yet grown.

No one sees this.

We see the flower.

We admire the bloom, the colour, the way its face turns toward the sun. But we rarely think about the roots beneath it; the quiet, unseen architecture that makes all that beauty possible.

As above, so below.

To reach toward the light, we must also be willing to deepen our roots in the dark.

Perhaps that is what our own dark seasons are sometimes doing. Not burying us but rooting us.

Teaching us how far to reach.
What sustains us.
What we can grow around.
And what we must push through.
It's the anchor that holds us when we finally become tall enough to meet the wind.

And then, one day, something blooms.

Not because it escaped the darkness.

But because it was nourished there.

The flower is not separate from everything the seed and roots endured. It is that unseen becoming made visible.

And even the bloom is not the end.

The flower doesn't desperately hold onto its petals simply because they are beautiful. When their purpose has been fulfilled, it lets them fall. And the plant changes again. It bears fruit. It makes more seeds. It rests. It begins again.

Maybe we aren't meant to spend our lives trying to remain perpetually in bloom.

Maybe we are meant to trust the seasons.

To be the seed when it is time to break.
The roots when it is time to deepen.
The stem when it is time to reach.
The flower when it is time to open.
And the falling petals when it is time to let go.

Because when we are still buried in the dark, we cannot possibly know all the small, beautiful things waiting for us above the soil.

The seed cannot imagine the life it hasn't yet lived.

It has no way of knowing that someday it will feel sunlight.

Or that the rain will collect on its petals.

It just anchors its roots to be strong enough to hold it through the storms.

Never knowing that something else might find nourishment because it grew.

Or that one warm sunny afternoon, after all that breaking and rooting and reaching...

that the flower will giggle when a bumblebee drunkenly sleeps on it.

And maybe that is reason enough to trust the darkness.

There are beautiful things waiting for us that the seed could never have imagined.

So go ahead and break. Find your roots. Reach for the sky. Bloom each time with everything you have. And when it is time - it's okay to let go. Because you can always begin again.

All the grief that swallows us whole is pooling over the edges and bleeding into everything; changing the shape of what it touches. 

Chasing hunger

We’ve mistaken hunger for love and consumption for connection.

Yet the things that sustain us have always been quieter: respect, companionship, affection, patience and safety.

We trade them for intensity;

obsession instead of presence, 

attention instead of understanding,

possession instead of intimacy, 

performance instead of truth.

It’s all spectacle.

And when the noise fades, and the validation trails off, there’s nothing left to devour or consume. So we find ourselves surrounded by everything we thought we wanted, and starving for the things we actually need.  And wondering why we still feel so empty. 

But have we mistaken hunger for love? Or have we chosen it? 

Hunger is exciting, where love is often quiet, hunger is pursuit, and love is presence, hunger is longing, where love is acceptance. Hunger keeps us moving, when love asks us to stay and let’s be real, staying is much harder than people are willing to admit. Because the idea of, “if I remain hungry, then I can continue chasing and I can continue fantasizing, and I can continue consuming, then I can continue believing that fulfilment exists just beyond the next corner. 

We did not mistake hunger for love. We romanticize hunger because it feels more profound. We overlook love, because it can feel ordinary. 

Love doesn’t offer that; love says, sit down and be here. You are enough. Love is enough. 

Love is the nourishment we are craving, while blindly seeking obsession and excitement. But love - love is grace, love is safety. Love is a place to rest. Love is somewhere nothing is being demanded of you except to just be you. I think this is what we all want. We want the radical idea that our existence, even in the quiet, is enough. 

Social media distorts this reality. It makes our heartbreaks, our obsessions, our conflicts, our grande declarations visible. But devotion is quiet, it doesn’t need an audience. The tragedy is that we have built a culture that documents attention and overlooks presence. We chase visibility while starving to be known. We demand to be heard yet forget how to listen.

And if love is grace, if love is safety, if love is a place to rest, then why do we keep choosing hunger?

Capable

Everyone admires the strength. 
Few notice the weight that built it.

They praise the shoulders that never bend, while remaining blind to the burden that made them broad. 

Capability is celebrated. The cost is rarely acknowledged.

These veins

These veins,
they bleed stories of survival.

My wounds do not weep;
they harden.

I will not tear open the scars
that prove I have healed.

I will collect them,
for they are my stories to tell.

They keep my heart soft
and let my soul triumph.

Monarch

He is the monarch that cannot change his opinion once he has made up his mind. He expresses his thoughts eloquently, owing to the amount of forethought and preparation he has put into them. He may spend his life putting his head first, but that does not imply he cannot articulate his heart: he is governed by his actions, and still, he is a master of his words.