For Women Who Are Difficult To Love

photo @superlativelyLJ

Oh I
have missed you, my love, she concludes, at the end of LEMONADE, and with it I cried heavy, loaded, sobs of relief, because I have
missed you, too.

I thought she was talking about her
husband, at first. That she was coming back to him after an affair, ready,
after many tears and so much anger, to try again. I don’t think she does mean
that, though, and the realisation, when it hit, is what had the emotion push
for escape. I think she has missed herself. I think she is tired and renewed,
broken and healed at the same time, and that’s because she’s willing to slice
open – wrist to elbow - and bleed in the name of truth. And I also think she has only
just learnt that doing this once isn’t enough. That our becoming is endless. That
the work of humanness is exhausting, and it is beautiful, and it is true for
all of us that growing pains do, indeed, hurt.

Nobody is immune.

Hero-worship is so very dangerous when we
think they have the answer to everything it is we question. As I watched the
hour of footage that is, essentially, the most famous musician in the world
saying yes, I got cheated on and I have
daddy issues and the women of my life are the ones who have saved me meant,
that for sixty minutes, Beyonce and I were the same. The humanity of that is
staggering. The humility of it. The vulnerability. LEMONADE is a visual album
that serves as the great equaliser that truly, none of us is fucking up like we
think we are. We will continue to worry, though – even if we are Beyonce. Why can’t you see me? she asks, desperate,
like me, like you, like everyone, to be recognized in love. I tried to change, closed my mouth
more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake, she
explains, mirroring, painfully, the dance of the lost: practising different
shapes of self, desperate to find the right combination of angles to be deemed
loveable. 

If I seem dramatic, forgive me. It is easy
to dismiss a middle-class white girl fawning over the bootylicious,
freak-‘em-dress of a pop star. Don’t worry if you don’t understand: this post
isn’t for you, then. This post is for the ones who have hurt, and wonder why
the healing never quite seems complete.

This is a post for the ones who struggle,
who marvel at how easy it is for everybody else.

This is a post for the ones frustrated at
the work of it all. Of life. Of being. Of becoming who it is we know we are
capable of being and how we are not icebergs, alone. We need each other, and
those relationships are messy and complicated and marred by mistakes we have to
forgive and forget and learn from. If Bey’s last album was about growing into
herself as a woman, this album is about how that is not enough: we must grow
into our relationships with everyone around us, too. How horribly frightening
that is, for so much of that is out of our control. I don't know when love became elusive. She
doesn’t only mean the love of another. She means the love for herself, too. The
goalposts forever change, and it takes a lifetime to master changing with them.

The backdrop to Beyonce’s world unravelling,
her descent into “crazy”, is the elements. It made me think: I am woman, too.
Resourceful. Unbound, creative, able, running with the wolves. I home the elements
within me, as well. My fire will burn you, and fuel you. I flow like water,
fluid, but uncontained will wreak a hell you cannot prepare for. My feet are on
this earth but there is dirt under my fingernails, because the work of
humanness is never, ever done. LEMONADE is a story of a woman coming home to
herself, through the heartache of having to forgive others and we don’t talk
about that so much, do we? We’re selfish, fulfilling our potential without talk
of how everyone around us challenge that. Affect that. Stump us and punish us
and push us and confound us. There’s relief, for me, that the lesson of
Beyonce’s life is that of my own: how to play nicely with others, whilst never
losing sight of who we are.

Reconciliation. That’s the word. I watched
LEMONADE and saw myself in the way Beyonce is reconciling being who she is with
who the people around her need her to be. How other people have made her: her
parents, and her parents’ relationship. Her husband. Her children, both dead
and alive. I cry when she says, oh, I
have missed you, my love, because losing yourself and rediscovering
yourself and learning and relearning how to trust yourself so that you may
trust others is… is exactly where I am at. Trade
your broken wings for mine, she offers, and the generosity of so
unabashedly saying “I have not been okay, either” makes the tears come again.

If we’re
gonna heal, let it be glorious, she says, and
because another woman has so poetically, thoughtfully, shown me her scars, I too
have the strength to upturn closed, trusting eyes to the sun, inhaling the glory however it may come.

I appreciate that much of Beyonce's inspiration for LEMONADE has come from Warsan Shire, who is a force and woman from whom we can all learn so much. Start here, maybe. I am in awe.