Where Do I Start, Where Do I Begin

Sunday morning I'm waking up
Can't even focus on a coffee cup
Don't even know whose bed I'm in
Where do I start
Where do I begin
(The Private Psychedelic Reel, The Chemical Brothers)


Each morning I wake up with the pain of my separation from the greatest love I have ever known. And each morning the pain is getting less. Today is the first morning I haven't cried first thing in the morning, though I am sure that that will come. I am immersed in the question: who am I? What am I doing with this life of mine? Now that I am separated from C, what is left of me? ... the tears have come now, those bitter, sweet, healing, tears. This grief which flows from my heart leaving space behind for new love to grow.

To feel rejected by the person I have loved with all my heart is a bitter, bitter pill to swallow. To feel that I am not attractive enough, not man enough to retain her interest makes me question all that I am. It doesn't really matter anymore I suppose what her reasons or her feelings are, what matters is that I need to know how how I feel, how I act, what I want in this life. I am thinking of my life's soundtrack at the moment. Since I came to Japan I have lost some of my connection with music. C and I came together over our shared passion for the music of our early adolescence: the Cure, the Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus. The heartache in the songs matched our own heartache as we struggled to grow into adulthood. Both of us left these musicians long ago as more joyful lyrics sang us into a more joyful life. I return to them sometimes, to remind myself of how I felt as a teenager, to grieve to, to cry about my relationship with C. In the last few weeks as I grew to know in my heart what I refused to recognise in my conscious mind I have listened to them again and mourned the passing of something on which I have built my life. On which I have built my sense of self.

"Where do I start, where do I begin?" This lyric from the Chemical Brothers has been ringing in my ears lately as I try to sort out what is left of myself out of the emotional wreckage of my long term relationship.

Houses and gardens and children all loomed large for both of us a few years ago until finally C snapped and decided that she wanted to go back to uni and become an artist again. This firm rejection of what I had been dreaming about set in train a process of reevaluation of my own life in which I discovered how unhappy I was about dreaming myself into a stereotype. C and I have spent most of our time together being deeply depressed and we have spent most of our time together really stoned. In amongst all that our lives have been lived and they have been full lives but neither of us were happy with being slaves to a drug that only distorted and diminished our ability to face life full on. I think she is much more courageous than me. She quit smoking before me and seized hold of her Sydney artist dream while I continued to wallow in the emotional turmoil of my failed homoeopathy practice, my poverty and my lack of any clear idea of the line of march.

As much as I still don't want to admit it it seems obvious now that the relationship which has been a constant feature of my life since I began my journey into adulthood would change radically as the two of us wrestled with what it was to be adults. Being depressed together has meant that we both were able to avoid the question of who am I in favour of taking care of the other one. Maybe it is time, at this point in the piece to stop talking of 'us' and limit myself to my own experience. For the truth be told the deeply depressed girl that I knew has blossomed into a much more confident woman who is more than capable of taking care of herself. The truth is that I built a lot of my identity around taking care of her and in turn derived self-affirmation from the fact that I was the stable one. As she changed and stopped relying on me so much for emotional support I felt lost. I fought to retain the power I felt from being the dominant one in the relationship and as she grew stronger I lost the battle. It was a battle I had no desire to win. I would often recognise this feeling in myself and hate myself for it. To resent someone that you love for being happier and stronger is not a good place to be. I have watched myself try to undermine her as she struggled to be a better person even while at the same time I tried to support her. Of course, being human, she still needed emotional support and so I was able to continue to derive my identity in no small part from this ever shrinking window.

At the same time I began to create my own separate identity too and of course, in its turn this evoked a somewhat similar reaction in her. It has been a two-way battle for power and control which has exhausted the love we feel for one another and blinded us both to the unique individuality and strength of the other. In my case it blinded me to my own uniqueness, beauty and strength. Upon this foundation of continuing affection and love, mixed with powerful feelings of resentment, jealousy and the desire to escape it that we hatched a plan to live apart and see how we went as individuals. Not wanting to do things by halves only life on separate hemispheres would do.

This separation has had different effects on me. Part of me has struggled against it and tried to hold onto the old relationship we had. I have romanticised that relationship and created an image of it in my own mind which is far rosier than the reality actually was. I tend to forget the abandonment and isolation I felt even when we were in the same room. At the same time, the better part of me has used this opportunity to begin my search for myself. Constantly dogged by my own idealisation of her strength I have sought my own strength not because I wanted to but because I felt I had no choice. What I wanted to do most of the time was to sink back into it and give up and have Caitlin pick up the pieces.

When I was in Australia I was working all the time and made deeply unhappy by it but at least I had friends. I had old friends who understood me and supported me and new friends who not only gave me their love but gave me the opportunity to understand that I was in fact worthy and deserving of love. I think in the bitter struggle which my relationship with C had become I lost my sense of how amazing and wonderful I am. Her constant pulling away from me made me feel like this is all that I deserved. My friends made me realise that I was worthy of love for my own sake.

Then came Japan.

Since I arrived here all my fear, my anxiety have returned with a vengeance. Every day is an enormous struggle again. I don't have any close friends around me and so everything I do requires me to rely upon myself. I can't really rely on anyone to include me or think of me because they don't know me. This is starting to change. I have kept knocking at the doors until someone noticed I was there. Of course, I am so anxious that even when I do get to meet people I am not able to manifest my qualities fully. I hold back and my unhappiness comes through in my words, my posture and my actions. Somehow in spite of all the obstacles I have kept pushing out though and I feel like I have some friends now. I know that with time I will develop many more.

I have questioned all of the reasons that I came to Japan. I took a job here at an English conversation school in order to finance my vision of pursuing a life in Japan. Unfortunately I didn't fully appreciate how difficult it would be for me to cope in the corporate environment. I work for a large corporation and so my working environment is pretty much the opposite of what I desire! It is a struggle to get through the week and make it to the weekend when I can go out and experience the life I came here to experience. I can't decide whether it is worth the sacrifice of 5/7 of my time for the sake of 2/7 that I actually enjoy! To build a life here that can make me happy is going to take so long. I can't decide whether I am prepared to make the effort and whether it is worth it when I have such a good life back home. I miss my friends so much. I struggled so hard to build those relationships and so many of them are so new. I am really questioning whether I want to do without them for the sake of living overseas.

Then I think about my dreams! I dream such vivid dreams! It is my usual habit each day to construct a hundred castles in the air. I know that part of this is escapist but another part of it is just who I am. This life we know, this divided, alienated life-under-capitalism is not ideal. I dream of a better life for myself and for the people I love. I dream dreams of overseas study and involvement in political movements all over the world and a deep sense of connection with the revolutionary movements which seek to change it. I have heard so much about the joys of travel. Of how it helps people to find themselves. Of the freedom it brings. I am desperate to taste that. Coming to Japan was a bit like deciding to travel but it was bound up with the idea of building a life and ongoing connections which surely requires a more stable existence? Now I need to make some decisions about my life.

This great love I have known and do know is a part of who I am. Who I am will always in part be determined by the people with whom I share my life. It is in others that we see ourselves reflected. We learn from others, we compare ourselves with them, we experience their love and it gives us the strength to carry on the struggle. But the Chemical Brothers words seem to me to encapsulate an essential part of the question. Although we must of necessity build ourselves out of the people that we know and love it is our love of ourselves that must form the foundation. Where do I start, where do I begin? With myself - now, who is that?