intimate tea with Raquel at the blue teahouse

This time I didn’t want to be accommodating. I realized that intimacy for me is only taking place if I am sharing as well – I mean sharing deliberately and with a vengeance. So I came into that café and talked Raquel’s head off – about my winter depression, about all my difficulties in the creative process, about healing, therapy, obstacles in life. About fear and longing and loathing in Las Vegas.
I must have sounded like a very depressed grumpy old man. I was complaining, complaining, nothing but complaining. I think Raquel was doing her best to take in all the black mess I was puking on the table. Sometimes she was offering little bits of advice, but mainly just listening. She was very patient – yet slightly surprised, I felt, to find me in such a state. At some point she said something that caught my attention: It was something about people who control so much what they are saying that it doesn’t give you space to enter. I don’t remember why she said it and I didn’t feel she was referring to me at that moment. But it made so much sense to me.
And at one point she said: Stop trying to control life because it is fucking impossible! Which I knew and had heard many times. But at that moment it really sank in and made sense.
Raquel claims to be someone who isn’t able to control what she is saying or thinking. Meaning she doesn’t think or act in a structured way, but rather follows her impulses and intuition. She has tried to live a more structured and controlled life in the past, but it didn’t work for her. She has tried to prepare and organize her thoughts before voicing them. Yet she came to realize that communication runs much more smoothly when she just speaks her mind in a kind of stream-of-consciousness way.

I think for me too that might be a much better way of communicating.

Eventually the conversation became more balanced. Meaning that I gave space to Raquel to puke her mess on the table too. Which she did in a more graceful way. And from there we started constructing new things. We talked about upcoming projects, future things we were looking forward to, hopeful things, not solutions but possibilities.

Raquel told me about a period in her life where she used to sit at a table with friends or family without saying a single word. It was a period when she felt cut off from the world, shy and introverted. And maybe we need periods like that.
I just had one at home at X-mas again. I went to my room even before dessert. My aunt asked me about the weather in Holland and my uncle about the house boats in the canals. I didn't have much to say on either subject. I didn't know how to relate to my family anymore. But now I promise I am changing. I went to the Andy Warhol exhibition and did a laughing meditation there with Helena and silver clouds. I decided during that laughing meditation to perform my life from now on as an active propelling force. I'm done with my victim. My self-pity and my passive everyday routine. My good student needs to die. I'd rather be a clown again than a control freak or wimpy victim.