More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You lie there and feel a hollow weight. You are small and tired. The black is distance around you. You’re detached from the world which must be functioning perfectly just on the other side of the membrane of your mind. You feel the perfect hole of the loneliness between your lungs. It crawls up, squeezing your throat. You turn your mind away from it desperately. It is not something you can stand looking at for too long.
Kaiyo didn’t know how it had begun. He wouldn’t be able to point out all the stars making up the constellation of his love for Ahmik,
He didn’t want anybody else to enter his world. He had everything he needed in his pack. “Here,” Ahmik had said, offering him half of his Kit Kat. Kaiyo had taken it with a smile. “Thanks.” It had been the first shoots of a seed which had been planted long ago.
It was hard to mourn when you had to focus on life every second of the day.
What they didn’t tell you about loss was that it was a presence instead of an absence. You could feel it, constantly. It was active with memory. A stain, a smell, a word. Anything could take you back to a place which was painful to remember now. Suddenly, the dead would be everywhere.
Ahmik was his. Not like a possession but like an inevitability. Like time and death and growth. It had always been, and it would always be. He didn’t think much about kissing Ahmik. He just did it.
Kaiyo let his body walk blindly down the path he’d been set. He watched it go to class, go out with friends. Watched its face pull up into a smile and words come out of his mouth in order, the plop, plop, plop of them. He ate enough to keep weight on. He would eat untoasted bagels and cold cans of soup. He couldn’t be bothered with the wait inherent in boiling water for ramen. Nothing tasted of anything recognizable anyway.
He’d prepared a list of anecdotes to tell during dinner. He pulled at his lips until they smiled. He animated his corpse and made it dance around the kitchen, helping his mom with the dishes.
During one dinner, Kaiyo’s mom slipped up and mentioned that Thea and Emil had just had a child. Kaiyo had blinked, his coyote legs running off the cliff and circling for a while, looking around in confusion before he realized he had no other choice but to fall straight down.
“Remember the time you thought there was a thunderstorm coming, and it turned out the microwave was broken?” Kaiyo laughed. Ahmik scowled, but a smile twitched at his mouth. “I was like eight.” “You were twelve.” “Ten.” “This isn’t a negotiation. You were twelve.”
“Oh my God. Dude. Look, this is nice. I’ve had fun. But…we’re still us. We’re a team. Pack. Friends. And, yeah, now we’re boyfriends, but we’re still us. Let’s just be…us. With more kissing.”
He would wake up exhausted and simply lie in bed, missing one class after the other. Some of the people whom he had hung out with the previous year texted him, but forming words was too tiresome to conceive. Nothing could reach him. There was no anxiety. No loss. No grief. There was a cocoon around him, and he was the hollow space inside.
He let the tremors go through him, feeling them become consumed by the nothingness until they were just a creak in the floorboard of his soul. The days melted together. The greyscale of their colours ran into each other until time lost meaning. It jumped from one day to the next, getting caught in loops. One day it was Tuesday, the next Friday, and he was getting a text about going out. Time shrunk away, taking a step back, and it was Thursday, stuck in the middle again.
Each imagined step weighed him down. It was a series of fragments to make an impossible whole. Suddenly, the rest of his life stretched out before him, a series of impossible steps. Step after step in action after action after action.
Every day he would have to exist. There would be no respite from himself. Existing was a series of exhausting steps. His head filled with the thought of having another emotion, of having to contend with his morality, with his conscience, with having to have a sense of purpose.
you walked through the forest on the rich earth and you felt. Can you remember that feeling? Like everything in you was aligned. Quiet, quiet, quiet inside. The filaments of you connected to the world around. The sea inside calm. You were what you were, and what you were wasn’t bad. You were part of something. You were part of yourself, feeling whole or close to it. Feeling. Rested.
Everybody I’ve ever met has had the capacity to form relationships with different people, to live in different places. What makes you different?” “Because I don’t want to belong anywhere else.” “Ah, so it’s a choice, not an inability. That’s good to know, right? It tells us—you’re in control, even if it certainly doesn’t feel that way. You can choose whether to stay where you are and not feel that connection again, or you can do something and work through what’s stopping you from attempting another connection.” Kaiyo blinked at the floor. Choice? Choice? “This isn’t a choice. You think I would
...more
I understand how losing so much at once, on top of what you have already gone through, can colour your perspective of the world. That’s normal. But it isn’t accurate. Right now, you are seeing yourself and your future through a lens clouded by past trauma and your current emotional state. Again, as normal as this is, it results in a complete distortion of reality. We have to wipe away at that lens a little.” “Why? What’s the point? Just…what’s the fucking point?” “Because you are making extremely big decisions, like what to do with your life, based on completely inaccurate information. In any
...more
The more he used it, the easier it was to turn the wheel and axle of his body. There were moments when he thought, Maybe. There were others when he thought, Stop.
he knew the back of this lumbering creature was crawling with people. His heart started to race, bile rising in his throat at the thought of the endless demands, brick upon brick upon brick of them, of all the things he had to do, all the things he should have been doing.
Right now, we’re just trying to be analytical about the situation, as we know that emotions distort perspective, and we’re under their influence lately. We have a hypothesis: nothing has changed. We’re trying to see if, factually, that’s correct or not. How you feel about the conclusions is another matter, but let’s at least collect precise information.”
from the information we have collected, you are engaging in more self-care and hygiene behaviours such as showering, brushing your teeth, eating, et cetera. You are doing more things, such as activities that may not be nearly as pleasurable as they once were, like watching a movie, but the fact that you are doing them is a change from some months ago. You are going out more. The lowest points of mood do not occur as often or for as long. Is that all correct?”
At a fundamental level, we have to remember that, yes, depression is a consistent low mood, but its impact is mainly a distortion of perspective. It is a legitimate mental health difficulty. This means that your brain, mind, and body are not functioning in a healthy way. “What this means is that any information processed by your brain right now is going to be corrupted.
let’s keep going. As we’ve been doing, we’ll identify the patterns perpetuating emotion. We will set little goals on how to change them. We can practice it here. And we can do it at home. Eventually, the scale will tip, and you’ll start feeling the changes. Until then, let’s do.”
Kaiyo had never expected his manifestation to feel like this. It was a pyrrhic victory. He ignored it. Ignored the calling, the sweetness of the possibility laying inside him.
like all things in the universe, has value. It is worth something. That is something which cannot be argued with. Nothing, nothing, has no value.
“Why is all this important? Because you must always expect recompense equal to the value of something when you give it away. All these factors affect something’s value, and so it affects its worth and what you ask in return for it. This is the key to balanced Ousía and what all who are aware of it and interact with it must keep as their key principle. Balance. What you give, you must take. What you take, you must give.
You. Your energy. Your time. Your company. You must accept its intrinsic value and how this affects the worth of what you give. If you don’t, you will never find balance. You will never recognize people who seek to take advantage of you by giving less than you and what you are giving are worth. And you will never recognize those who hurt themselves by asking for less. In fact, you will become one of them.
You tried to gather information too, which I commend you for. But this will be useless if you do not understand how you yourself affect the world and the information you gather from it. You must step back and look at the world objectively in order to collect reliable information. What you search for, and what you do with that information, is another matter entirely, but be humble in your search. Be understanding of yourself. Be self-aware.”
There are many types of coping mechanisms. Some—and these are the kinds people usually find on their own—simply distract or, as you said, mask the emotion. For example, avoidance of anxiety-producing situations, things which distract you from thinking or being with the emotion but don’t help you acknowledge
Do you think we can alter how much it means to you?” “No. Not really.” “No, that would be very difficult. So, how about we bring up another goal. Self-care. Good mental health. What if we held up that goal alongside the other? Decided, ‘Hey, that’s important too, so my behaviour should feed both these goals’.”
In other words, if you’re relaxing you’re not ‘wasting time’, because it serves a very specific purpose: to fulfil your self-care, good mental health goal.
you need to know your worth and expect a normal amount from yourself. You need to be aware of yourself and your rightful place in the world.” “Good, Kaiyo. And what is your place in the world?” “Right here. In my own skin.”
Kaiyo had to understand his own relationship with the world to navigate those waters. He had to understand his history with correspondences. How the green of Ahmik’s eyes signified loss. How the ambergris incense his father had used distracted him
His awareness became filled with things to appreciate. Life became worth living. It wasn’t just about finding a larger purpose, or a reason, for being. It was in the act of existing in harmony with the world. In seeing it for what it was. The beauty of the susurrus of the forest leaves, of the orange sky at sunset, the glow of the moon at night.
Everything he used, he built a relationship with as he appreciated it for existing. It was a sentiment that echoed back. He could not thank the drip of the poppy without appreciating the rush of his own blood. Could not treasure the balm of the aloe pulp without acknowledging the synchronicity of his own organs. Could not be in awe of the properties of nutmeg without tipping his head at his own skill.
For people whose negative wheel is nice and oiled and positive wheel is harder to turn, to use your example, it can sometimes be difficult to deal with a lot of positive stimuli aimed at the self. These people often have a voice that wants to constantly argue against every positive aspect of themselves. So, when you receive a lot of praise, that voice can go into overdrive, and you’ll have to expel a lot of energy to crank that positive wheel, which can leave you exhausted both physically and mentally.
With these involuntary changes to his body came voluntary ones. Tattoos began to bloom across his body. Each had meaning and enhanced an element of his skill. The seeing eye peering from the knowing power of the moose. A hand-poked design of feminine hands cradling the flower of intuition. Vines and petals painted across his body as if growing from his skin, hiding runes and secrets. The majestic balance of the Queen of the Night desert flower, pierced with enchanted ink to be invisible but for a single night a year, a sign of balance and good tidings. Kaiyo grew from the earth and from the
...more
He let himself feel the fluttering that had become commonplace. He had missed the feeling, the infatuation of it, the heat those tiny wings fanned.
It had been a trying road, getting where he was. He was not especially powerful in Ousía, or intelligent, or intuitive. Everything he had, he’d gotten through hard work. He’d had to fight tooth and nail for his soul, but it still felt fragile in his hands. It felt like it could slip away the moment he was back in the place that a part of him still called home.
He could do this, he told himself. Even if he was terrified. Fear was an integral part of bravery, after all.
His arms were sleeved in tattoos. Colour swirling with the depth of black-and-white. Flowers, hands, symbols, runes, lines, they all made a patchwork of his power. On his calf, a snake twisted and curled around the mirror image of its shed skin. The other was etched by a hand-poked tattoo, a feminine hand offering herbs to heal. And then, of course, there were the scars. The small one on his face, shaped like a sickle-moon hanging below his right eye, on the edge of his cheekbone. There was a three-nailed slash on his left bicep, camouflaged and embraced by the colour needled there. Above his
...more
He’d masked his scent, his heartbeat, and his presence as he entered Garrow land, but they would soon know of his arrival. He had to prepare for the possibility of seeing them. He had to prepare for the chance that they wouldn’t even bother to show their faces. He had to prepare for anything. He had to survive.
Kaiyo nodded. He didn’t voice what he wanted to say. You don’t need to thank me. You might have exiled me, but my bones are still bound to this earth.
He was trapped in a place that had tried to kill him through exile. The shadow it had cast over him was the darkness of the pit of an unmade bed, of weeks without a shower, of the hollow centre of a sadness that simply didn’t care. He took a deep breath. He’d survived this land before, and he’d do it again.
I wish Claudia were here, though…” “Call her. She might be up for Skype sessions.” “Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Kaiyo agreed. “But I do need to get someone here to write me scripts for the antidepressants.”
Love that after a decade of healing that he still takes and talks calmly about antidepressants, and reaching out to his therapist in the face of a hard change. I like that healing or success wasn’t tied to not needing support or medication or therapy.
The emotion was normal, he told himself, but it did not reflect reality. His responsibility had been ripped from him by force. As much as he wished he’d been there to help, it simply hadn’t been his choice.
Sometimes giving up is just doing the same thing you are already doing instead of making a change. You can put all your energy into that one thing, but if it’s not working and you refuse to be flexible and adapt, yeah. You’re giving up.”
Well, Kaiyo didn’t agree. He didn’t want to see anything positive in that pain and darkness. It had been something he’d had to survive. Had it shaped him? Yes. But not willingly. He could have gone through life without it. It hadn’t been fair, or fateful, or meant to be. It had been shit. A massive pile of shit Kaiyo had managed to dig himself out of, because he’d had to. And he wouldn’t stand there and take someone trying to tell him it had been anything else.
The round window on the wall was fitted with stained glass, casting a spell of coloured light over the furniture, where Kaiyo would be able to relax in the sunlight and the scent of his plants. The piece of land, of home, was everything Kaiyo had ever wanted. He tried not to think about how briefly it would last.
