Day 1

Nov 15, 2024

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

- Lord Alfred Tennyson

It has always felt quite arrogant, to me, the belief that my writing was of the quality that anyone would want to read. Tonight, while tossing and turning and intermittently scrolling through TikTok, I came across the Substack of Emilie Mendham. It was a rare example of doom-scrolling paying off, something really genuine buried under the content slop.

Emilie wrote so personally and potently about her experiences of rejection and love and making sense of early adulthood that it jolted me out of a state of ignorant isolation where I’d been wallowing for at least the last year or two.

I felt, and to a large extent still feel, as if I’m a completely unreasonable person. It is very difficult to write about this without a billion qualifiers attempting to explain that my feelings are actually justifiable. Paradoxical and a little stupid indeed. So I will write purely about what I feel.

It all seems to begin and end with love. November 2021, I woke up at 7 AM to the alarm of the girl with whom I was sharing a bed. It was a Saturday morning, why the hell was I up so early? Her landlord was visiting, they had a cat in the house they weren’t supposed to have and the place was a mess, a true second-year university house in the east end of London. I spent the morning scrubbing red hair dye off of the bathroom floor and rounding up any and all cat-associated paraphernalia. We left the house at about 9, I had the pet carrier that she had wrapped in a blanket to protect from the icy wind and we set out for the local park.

It was there, on a park bench at 9:15 on a random Saturday in November that I knew I was F*cked. We had been friends since late 2018 and romantically involved since August 2021, we had agreed to keep it “casual”. Whatever that meant. It hadn’t meant that we didn’t say I love you to one another, nor did it mean we wouldn’t spend days at a time together or travel at ridiculous hours to see each other. Nor did it stop us from meeting each other’s parents and siblings. All that title really did, was give either one of us an easy out, should we want it. It was on that stupidly cold November morning, while listening to some old, unreleased Kanye song, that I realised I wasn’t going to be the one to use the out.

3 years on I want to say I should have set clear boundaries, or communicated what I really wanted but if I’m being truly honest, I’d do it all over again.

I had felt so unbelievably seen. Despite knowingly marching straight towards my own annihilation. Since then, nothing has even suggested it might come close. I know I need to turn all my love and devotion inward, I can see just how much better life would be if I did, but for some reason, I just can’t do it.

Emilie’s three essays on love spoke to that part of me that has felt so unknowable all this time. They gave me the strength to share that side of me in a very literal sense, to come on here and spill my guts to no one in particular and not to justify it one way or the other. This is me and that’s okay, it might even be good.

-Oliver