Heady vs. Heavy

If something isn’t at least slightly heady in some way, I’m not watching it. There are exceptions, of course — but you know what I mean. I’ve noticed that a lot of people, however, think that heady means heavy. And that’s ok. We’re only human. We’re very different — but we’re also much more alike than we are different. Heavy is the opposite of light. Guess what! I just wrote life instead of light. Did it again! Life instead of light. I looked at life and thought about just letting life be where it wanted to be. It felt natural. Still. Let’s not go metaphorical that quickly just yet, right?
Wait — why not?

When I abruptly feel something is heavy — usually, it’s something that I know is, in fact, light, but someone chooses to mock it (unconsciously, let’s say) and tries to make me (or you) feel heavy af about it — I’d better open my eyes and truly see. 

When I suddenly feel something as heavy — something I know is actually light — it’s usually because someone, maybe unconsciously, is choosing to mock it, try to make me (or you) feel heavy AF about it. It’s when I’d better open my eyes and truly see. Not blame, just observe. You with me, I know you are. When a wave — not even a big one — comes out of nowhere, and you find yourself underwater, feeling like your brain is being flooded, you pull your head up, shake it, you want your brain back into its beautiful, pinky shape — back into its safe space. It’s great when you manage to. It gets pretty weird when you don’t — when that inflicted heaviness starts to feel heavy for you, too. That’s when the crystal water pulls you in, and you lose yourself. Now you’re with me. And it doesn’t even matter if you know how to swim or not — sometimes it’s right at the shore that the waves make fun of you and pull you in. (The waves would never do that, we’re only symbolically speaking here. And for real.) You’re meant to enjoy and marvel at the crystal water. The sun makes it shine — makes it shimmer onto your face and body, makes it smooth for you to float with ease and become light. So.

The hair is deeply connected to the head.

Both poetically and literally, depending on how you look at things. Perspectives. 

My new fringe – that can almost come across as no fringe; it’s subtle and it comes with a subtle change altogether, but that’s a story for another time – is so new that even I am surprised by how unexpectedly it behaves each day. Straightening it? Without a doubt, not an option. Kinda wavy is what it decided to be.

It looks like it’s just chillin’, but I had to, in fact, look at it — for fractions of seconds — in every mirror I passed on my way places, just to make sure we were in sync. I glanced. I wanted to see what the hair chose, for the day, to be. I knew I liked it from early in the morning. Life… It will make you look in the mirror, on special occasions — everyday — and force you to truly see yourself, to start to discover and rediscover. I like when we’re in sync and this is how a series of pictures — of cool ladies and their cool heads — I bumped into come together on my phone and instantly write a title somewhere inside my brain. Heady vs. Heavy.

Laying in the sun, under an umbrella, in perfect weather, sipping the juiciest frozen strawberry margarita vs. struggling to breathe underwater. And underwater is where one — ideally two — can get so vulnerable in that they forget about breathing and remember about the truth. Like they do in the Runnin’ video. Perspectives.

I learned to escape pretty early in life — as early as I can remember. Love, nature, and art showed me the door. Ever since I figured it out, I refused to sleep alone in my room. So it always had to be arranged for me to sleep in the same room as my brother. Luckily, those nights became some of the happiest we’ve ever had. And now, many years later, we get to praise them, be grateful. Back then, my brother wasn’t exactly thrilled to share the bedroom with me. But I was — thrilled. I still am, every time I remember it. Now, he is too. As kids, we used to fall asleep to the same music cassette every night. Once side A or B finished, the stereo would stop and shut off automatically — no worries while drifting off.

When bed time came, I was hooked. I knew what was about to happen. A calm, charming voice would say, in such a warm way, Hello, dear friends… This was side A. I loved to hear it. It was the moment silence in our room would settle and we, in sync — again, yes, I must love this in sync thing a lot — relaxed in our beds, nothing would come to take the moment away. I was so happy. Calm. Calm again, yes, I love calm just as much as I love a fun concert. And in sync. Serene, peaceful would do, but there’s something about calm. Occasionally, we talked about things, but most of the times, Hello, dear friends… was a moment we shared as brother and sister, although we didn’t think about it in these terms, back then. It was just a moment of pure love. One of the moments in life that made me aware of what pure was and of a song that’s been giving me goosebumps, ever since. It’s — of course — on THE cassette.

We sank into our beds and let ourselves float. And we thought we were only going to bed. It felt like getting onto a pretty cloud to dream. With our eyes closed. At other times, with my eyes open, looking into the ceiling. Whole movies projected onto the ceiling. Or, you know, the depth of the stars, in the sky, at night. 

Lightness is what we need in life. Lightness for me is when being profound allows you to fly high, said Franca Sozzani in — the gracefully directed by her son – Franca: Chaos and Creation documentary, and it completely resonated with my entire being, life. It took me to the lightness I felt in the shared bedroom with my brother, as kids, at home, when Hello, dear friends… — or I don’t remember how the other side — started. My brother won’t give me the cassette so that we don’t, somehow, lose it. Yup, we still got it and I have a feeling we’re going to put our children to bed with it. It has to go digital is, probably, one of the most technology related things to get out of my mouth, but hallelujah and kudos to every technology related thing that I end up enjoying!

When the word meditation started to swim around, I’d not researched it that much, but I could relate to this warm, fuzzy feeling — meditation brings to your soul, body and mind — I heard about here and there. Still, kept questioning myself whether that was really it? I have, all my life, enjoyed escaping into those special, precious moments. Losing myself in music, movies, books, paintings, stories in general. I haven’t ever escaped from my real life, but it is the escapism I was happily sinking into that, actually, helped me ground in my real life. I’m blessed to have been in touch with what feels right. 

Great stories can get you to a place where you start to meditate without realising. You’re so in the moment that the moment starts to feel like a meditation. Meditation teaches you how to be in the moment and, then, moments that feel like meditation start to occur. A song, a movie, a book, a painting, a sculpture, a fashion collection, I believe, can put you in such a holy state that you can’t even tell the difference. Art has the power to make us feel whole in such a natural way that, again, we don’t even know when or how, but, swoosh, we get on that cloud and levitate, basically.

Imagine what music has done to me from the moment I was born. I don’t remember many minutes in our house without music playing on whatever. The amount of some of the best out there I’ve been exposed to is hilarious. From Prince to Fugees, to Pink Floyd, to Whitney, to Simply Red. Stories are everywhere and so is silence. Inside yourself, but, man, when it’s — not only comfortably, but soothingly — shared with someone else… It’s light. We all know what Mia Wallace said in Pulp Fiction: That’s when you know you found somebody special. When you can just shut the f*ck up for a minute and comfortably share silence... I was just a kid when I first saw Pulp Fiction, and I was hooked for life. I watched it with my brother — we share parts of our humor,

I was even younger when I first saw Twin Peaks. I used to watch it with my mom, dad and brother, at home, in our living room. They were watching it from the couch and I was watching it — or hiding from it — from behind the couch. So now you know why I insisted on sleeping in the same room as my brother until I was, I don’t know… 13? You thought it was just because I loved him? You were right.

That’s why I’ve never fallen into eating loads of sweets. Or shopping. Or… what else? Dating? I’ve always been drawn to things with a story — and there’s no story quite like the one you can build through a relationship. One heaven of a story, actually. A relationship is heady. Random people dating random people create stories, but stories that — more rarely than often — last forever and it’s all casual sex lately, it seems. Or no sex at all. For some, it must seem easier — somehow — to stay on a line that does them no good. I’m talking about very fine lines here. Why not try figuring it out? Why not fight for yourself a little — no matter your status: single, in a relationship, or in a relationship where you’re starting to feel alone? The latter will very likely, hopefully, make you choose to be single for a while, so you don’t turn into the one that makes you feel alone and lose yourself. It’s shallow versus eternal. Hop on.

There’s way more potential in relationships. It’s through relationships that we learn the most. So. So, there I went, a long, long relationship, a long relationship, then a long relationship with myself, then a shorter relationship and now here I am. I’m good. Where was I? Right. A relationship is heady to me. Therefore, light. It’s the only way. The intention, while you’re in it, depends on the kind of life you wish to live every single day. Anyway, a relationship, to me, is easy, sexy. Amazing, above all. No, this is not about expectations.

In my last relationship, I had none and it lasted nine months, so that is proof that I’d learned not to have expectations. I didn’t know him at all, so I just went with the flow, enthusiastic to get to know him and eager, it seems, to forget completely about me. The inevitable happened and it, again, hurt like hell. It’s about the everyday relationship. Everyday life. It’s about the little things just as much as the big ones. It’s not just about the family you dream of — that’s the collateral magic.

It’s about making every day feel like Christmas, I mean why not? The second day is still great, but so is the previous one. Cozy af. Or you know, a good day under the sun, a night under the stars. We’re always surprised by the day, whether we like it or not. Like it?! Love it! The trick is to do good, do every thing good, every day, in the everyday life. What else is there? It just feels too good, it feels light. It might, however, become heavy the moment you fall off the cloud, but that’s ok. We’re very different — but we’re also much more alike than we are different.

So, we started with a music cassette, it’s from Los Angeles, my brother got it, at 16, from a friend, as a gift from this friend’s trip to L.A. This friend taped it while listening to the show on the radio. My brother was big on taping music, mixtapes and I know I’m romanticising the s*it out of this, but it’s so worth it. That cassette did wonders to us. I learned that what, where and who we put our attention into is essential. 

Then, we got to meditation and whether or not the cassette might’ve been the way to it. Orgasms! That escalated not that quickly. You know when you have those. At first, you wondered Oooh, so this is it? But then, you’re thrilled.

Now this thrill 

On a heady trip aka sparkling relationship, 

That’s the s*it!

And this is how we get to connection. 

– I want more of the thing last night. The thing that’s been going on, in fact.

– Yup, that’s the s*it, it’s called intimacy.

– With you it’s addictive.

And we’d barely kissed by that point. I was just going with flow.

I believe in men just as much as I believe in women. In fact, I don’t see any boundaries whatsoever, we’re only human. We’re very different — but we’re also much more alike than we are different. So no, it’s not weird intertwining familial feelings with orgasms. We all came from one, ideally from two at the same time.

My dad told me one day, many years ago — when I had no idea what to do in a relationship that made my head so heavy I barely could see the sun from the depths of the water — that sex is as important as everything else in a relationship. It felt so good, I thought God, I’m not crazy. My dad and I, up until that moment, had never spoken about sex. I used to cover my eyes whenever a revealing scene in a movie came up. In a relationship, a woman should feel all the pleasure in the world she wants. A man is a fool when he doesn’t get that and I just don’t think you’d be happy without it. I want you to be happy and I can’t believe my fingers just typed this.

Heady vs. Heavy is easy to apply in today’s weird fight between women and men. There’s no doubt that the water’s about to be cleared out, perceptions and perspectives are about to be put on the table and discussed, but what kind of table are we talking about? If there’s no delicious food on it and wine is not clinking, then all we’re doing, as women, is showing men what they’ve already been showing us, and look where that got us. Fighting and pretending is so far from the truth, from the looking for the truth. Living in fear can only lead to separation, globally and individually. Women are speaking up and I love that. I surprise myself, sometimes, over meals with friends, or people I don’t even know (I know), when something beyond myself takes over and flies this flag of speaking out.

It’s interesting how I’ve been raised by two men — who are the most feminist (and gentle) men I’ve ever met — and my mom — who is the most feminine woman I know and, yet, the word feminist has never even showed up at our table, at home. I know how blessed I’ve been to have had that, growing up, and maybe it’s the reason why I treasure values so much and why that something beyond myself shows up, whenever needed, talking for people who are, in one way or another, afraid to. I observe what’s around me, know when to do something about something or not. I don’t speak from books or history, it’s from my own something inside that I draw strings of sparkles, without any kind of filter. 

When you’re in a relationship — of any kind — with someone who truly gets it, you both become warriors. You stop taking sides. You only fight for love. You are love. Aw. But when you’re in a relationship — again, of any kind — with someone who doesn’t truly understand themselves, and so can’t fully understand the relationship either, something steps in. And it’s not the juiciest frozen strawberry margarita you could be sipping under an umbrella, in perfect weather. No — it pulls you underwater, and you start struggling to breathe. That’s how heady turns into heavy AF.

Learning is a beautiful thing, is one of the gifts life gives us, but it takes someone who loves to actually learn to learn. Paying attention, therefore, again, is key. Water is light, but when water becomes heavy, you’d better run, because disagreeing is acceptable, disrespect is not and consistent misbehaviour must be corrected. A woman’s power is very similar to water. You’d better watch out when a woman reconnects to herself and stands up. Learning gets one to inevitably bump into heady, yay, recognise the bulls*it in the heavy, yay, let that different fall into place. Did you hear the twinkle that different just made inside? It’s like the very small metal ball you’re supposed to move, inside a device, a game, in a way that makes the small metal ball fall into its place. It clicks. Naturally.

Because the love I thought I had for you was, actually, finally, for myself – is that a verse from somewhere or is it me? Regardless, it’s in the notes on my phone. Everything on top of it is a bonus. Like humour — for instance — is if you’re into lyrics. Keep your heart safe and your music dangerous is the best advice Adele has been given and she gives it forwards. Adventurous just came to mind.

To be continued.