122. A blonde curly haired girl changed my life.

I finally got to experience what girl-friends are at the age of 24.

My teenage years were what rocked the boat and flew me off my path. I had an extremely toxic boyfriend at that time, my main friendship was a shit show and, I myself was hanging on by a thread. When someone is living life on a daily basis in these conditions, it’s almost impossible to create safe emotional bonds with people.

I was also made to believe for a long time that girls couldn’t be friends with each other because they were filled with envy and venom, so to stay safe (because I was already living in a hurricane) I stayed away from most people, I kept my guard up and relied on the same few people.

Friendship drama continued until I was pretty much left friendless by the age of twenty one. I’d moved away to go to university, I stopped going out partying, I got a job, I was dating C and we moved in together, and I kind of just started making decisions that would end up sending me in a different direction.

I had a few friends, who were a group of guys because I was still scared of girls, and I spent most of my time with them and my family who helped me immensely during those years. They were safe places I could retreat to and ask for help, which I needed.

Being alone was important, and very painful, but it forced me to spend time alone and also gave me the space to dig deeper. It helped me to find myself and for the first time in my life, heal things that had absolutely destroyed me, broken me, ripped me into pieces and had been left unattended. This was the first time I actually started to notice the pain I was carrying every day. There was a reason I couldn’t connect with people and make honest, deep, healthy friendships and the reason was because I couldn’t love myself. I’d been on autopilot for years and I’d forgotten that there was a person inside of my body that needed taking care of.

*

I wasn’t totally friendless, there were some people in my life, and the memories I have with them are special, but nowadays we’re no longer in contact apart from a few people that have popped up again and we’ve put the effort into growing our friendship away from who we were back in university.

This period of me being very alone lasted for around three years and I was okay with it in the end. I’d accepted it. I spent a lot of my time with my boyfriend, C, who’s also my best friend. I’m lucky in that sense because we have so much fun together and it’s always so effortless. I was also blessed to get to spend so much time with my tita and tito who are like my best friends too. We lived close to each other for two-ish years and spent a few weekends a month together in their house. I never felt alone. My babysitter who took care of me until I was sixteen is also my dear friend to this day and has always shown me that she’s there for me, she is a big part of my life, she’s like an angel looking over me.

There have been some people that have always stuck by my side and made me feel incredibly loved, but I was friendless in a sense that I didn’t have many friends my age that weren’t from my childhood until I met her.

*

I used to think that we met by chance, but now I’m able to connect the dots, I realise that she was placed in my life to act as a catalyser. She changed my life completely.

We met at a gig, she was the singer’s girlfriend at the time and I was the singer’s friend. He introduced us and that night. I met a blonde, curly haired angel that was so full of light and energy that I was instantly mesmerised. She danced as if no one was looking, she held my hand and made me feel safe enough to dance with her, she never stopped smiling and laughing, and for that one night, she made me feel like I’d met my soulmate.

Then life happened, relationships are complex and more so when you’re friends with one of them more than the other. It was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and I was stood on the wrong person’s side watching it about to explode.

That was it, she was gone and I’d done nothing to try to stop it.

I never forgot about her and as the singer gradually left my life too, I began to ask myself if I’d been a bad person. Had I only paid attention to one person’s perspective? Had I believed everything to be true without realising there are two sides to every story? Had I believed, again, that women are crazy and toxic while men are always chill and the victims of these unleashed women? …

Time went on and I learned how to heal my wounds, how to express my most honest and vulnerable feelings, how to own up for my mistakes, how to say sorry with my heart in my hand. And so I messaged her on Instagram to receive an angel’s love in the form of a reply. She understood everything and there were no hard feelings. I, who was used to people bashing me whenever they could in these scenarios, was being taught what it was like to be held by another stranger. I wasn’t in danger or in trouble, I was slowly being welcomed back to my soul’s true self.

*

Everything changed when we spoke on the phone while I was living in Barcelona. She rang me and I went up to the rooftop terrace and spoke to her sat in the sun. It was a long phone call. She told me that she’d recently met the love of her life, she was happy and I had met the love of my life too, myself. We were both moving into a new state of being and I felt like I was ready to take a truer version of myself to her.

I booked a train ticket to Madrid and slept on the sofa in her living room for the weekend. She tattooed my arm, we sang Jorja Smith at the top of our lungs in her bedroom, we ordered vegetarian pizza, we got Ubers all around the city, we went out at night and drank iced tea in a club, we met up with some of her friends in a bar, we walked all day, we went to speciality coffee shops, and she hugged me and kissed my cheeks like no friend ever had. She took care of me. She made me ginger and lemon tea in the morning, she made me avocado and feta cheese toast for breakfast, she made sure I washed my face every night before going to sleep. She mothered me and covered my whole being in a healing balm that I didn’t know I needed so badly.

I remember journalling on the train back to Barcelona feeling like a new person. I’d discovered in 48hrs what feminine energy was. It felt so pure it had to be godlike. There was no envy, no jealousy, no venom, no hatred. She only spoke kind loving words about her other friends, she spoke to me about them as if she were in love with them. She introduced me to her flatmates full of pride while I hid behind the doorframe. She told all of her friends about my newsletter, telling them that I was a writer when I would never have found the courage to say that out loud. She never wanted to keep me as hers, she wanted all of her friends to know how special I was, and that changed my life. She laid down the foundations of what I deserved.

Thanks to this blonde, curly haired angel, I was able to kickstart the Book Club. She was the first person to join and so she shared it on her Instagram story bringing beautiful souls my way. She introduced me, on another trip to Madrid, to the second person that would be another angel in disguise.

The first thing this new angel said to me outside of Acid Café in Madrid was “Dios, eres hasta más guapa en la realidad” which means, “God, you’re even more pretty in real life”. And that’s when I lost it. Another girl was being extremely nice to me and she hardly even knew me. I didn’t think it could ever be this easy.

How can this be real? I couldn’t wrap my head around it, I’d always been told that three was a crowd and us three girls together made me feel like the strongest girl alive. I felt pretty, I felt loved, I felt listened to, I felt interesting, I felt light. I felt like I was floating on a cloud with two angels by my side that were lifting me higher and higher. When we were up there together, I was a different person. I was allowed to love myself and love them abundantly. They would only do nice things for me and be nice people, there was no laughing at me, shaming me, making me feel small and stupid. This had to all be a dream I’d sooner or later wake up from and be faced with the reality I knew too well. But that never happened.

*

I’ve heard hundreds of times that “you’ve got to heal yourself and love yourself before others will” and that’s probably true to some degree, but what they don’t tell you is that when someone else loves you so wholly and purely, you’ll heal twice as fast. They bring out things in you that you’ve not felt before and once you’ve felt them, it becomes easier to realise that that’s what you deserve.

Once I’d discovered this and I knew what it felt like to already have it I guess my energy changed. New girls kept arriving in my life, randomly, as blessings. People that were similar to my two first angels. Every new girl arriving in my life had these angelic characteristics and I’d gone all my life without ever letting them in.

The girls in the Book Club made my heart feel full each month in our meeting. They were my first contact with “a group of girls” and they were so lovely, so kind, so gentle, so intelligent, so respectful; they healed a part of me. They will never truly know how much they gave me by showing up every month to talk about books.

More and more girls kept appearing in my life. They’d find this newsletter and begin to comment, follow me on Instagram and slowly but surely find their way to my inbox. To this day, they are my girls, my people, my heart. They healed another part of me.

All of these girls have shown me so much admiration, respect, support and pure love and they are now a part of my daily life. They are my friends, they are my sisters, they are my people and I now understand what it’s like to love your girlfriends with your whole entire heart and want to show them off to the world. Because they are my world and nowadays, my world would mean much less without them in it. I guess this is what my curly haired angel felt when she used to talk to me about her two best friends with a twinkle in her eyes. I wish you could all see how my eyes twinkle while writing about my girls.

I am full to the brim with gratitude and my tita was right…

One day as we walked around Gràcia in Barcelona, I told her how I wanted to make friends but didn’t know how or where to start and so she told me “just be yourself and you’ll attract people on your same vibration, you’ll find your tribe” and she was right. My tribe is extremely valuable to me and I can now say, at the age of twenty six, that my friends are my angels and I truly love them with all of my heart.

I don’t feel the need to mention them all, or give them names here, because I believe that they’ll know who they are when reading this. But I do want to remind them that I love them all so much, that I’m grateful our paths crossed and I hope they receive this essay as a big hug because I miss them dearly.

STUFF I WANT TO SHARE ↓

1. carlota 🦎
   ha publicado un nuevo texto en su Habitación Compartida. Este mes ha escrito su prima, Paula, y me ha parecido muy bonito e inspirador. Carlota está haciendo cosas preciosas en su newsletter así que no te lo pierdas!!!!

2. Jesús
   es mi novio y escribe la newsletter Ocurre, lo que pasa es que yo en mis ensayos le llamo C, porque le conocí con un mote que comienza con esa letra. Estoy llena de orgullo por los últimos tres Ocurres que ha publicado y me gustaría que os leyeseis los tres, pero el que más me ha hecho explotar el corazón es este: “He sido panadero por un día” porque he sentido a través de la pantalla, la misma ilusión que sentí cuando volvió a las 7:30 am.

3. I may be repetitive but

   Kayti Christian
   makes my heart beat harder and faster while reading her newsletter. In this essay, called “a soft place to land”, she wrote about how people had helped pull her through the hard times and in a way, she inspired me to write today’s POMELO.

4. I also read this piece by

   Bryanna Gillespie
   called “a love letter to friendship” and it feels like she’d written my experience. It was beautiful, it was wholesome and it also inspired me to write this week’s piece. There seems to be a theme throughout this week’s recommendations so if you want to read more about friendship, Bryanna and Kayti’s essays are a beautiful place to start <3