Re: Soulmates

dublin: do you believe in soulmates? 

This popped up in my asks while I was scrolling through Tumblr, a blue '1' above the envelope icon, perhaps mocking me for my lack of concrete beliefs on matters. 

I often reblog these 'ask me' posts on Tumblr and never have the energy to write a full-fledged answer, and if I don't write a full-fledged answer it eats away at me the rest of the day as though I have cheated the person out of their right. Their right to what exactly, I'm not sure. This one was Questions as Cities. I got two more but the question for Dublin stuck with me, if only for the word 'believe'.

It's very rare where I can give a solid opinion on something. I'm guessing it has to do with my liking of playing the devil's advocate, or maybe it's because I'm sure of so little and I tremble at the thought of growing, which comes with growing out of your opinions.

All I know is that ever since I saw this video, I like to follow John and Hank Green's advice of periodically shedding away your opinions until you are left with very few core opinions, but I digress.

So do I believe in soulmates?

I don’t know what I believe in. I don’t believe in a lot of the beliefs going around, but I believe in a lot and I’m scared of saying it out loud, I’m scared of the time when I’ll be let down by all of which I have believed in, the time when I realise I’m just a lost kid grasping at the edges.

I constantly feel like I need to make an updated list of what I believe in order to contain my full identity in a box. This is what I believe in, and this is what I don’t believe in, and these are what make up the person who I am. 

I'm scared of forming my own thoughts. I’m scared I don’t have the inability to form original thought. As if ‘I think’ has any meaning at all. As if it reflects anything about who I am except what I want people to see me as.

As if my thoughts are not an interaction of everyone else’s.

As if my thoughts are mine at all.

But I don’t believe there’s someone for everyone. I believe in family. I believe in blood family and chosen family, and I believe strongly in that. I believe that support is love.

I believe we’re in people’s lives for a reason. I believe people are in our life for a reason, and sometimes that reason is fulfilled. And sometimes that relationship fades. And I believe that these two are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. But I know at heart that some people will have lifelong reasons.

I believe in love. Strong unconditional love that grows, love that heals, love that ebbs and flows. I believe in other things that I don’t like, and other things that I’m still trying to accept. I don’t believe in soulmates, a concept that erases the choice to love, and the choice to continue loving. There’s work that needs to be done, to maintain, to grow, and to grow together, to fix and fix and fix. 

You choose to be a soulmate to your soulmate and that’s as much as I can believe in.