I just had an insight while high. Yes, high, at 5:17 in the afternoon, what can I say? Artist's life. Anyway, I have mommy issues. And don't get me wrong, but I was so focused on the daddy issues that I never noticed the biggest issue of all is with my mother. Shock. Fine, I suspected I had them, but I thought they only touched a few corners of my life, like:

• never being completely at peace with my body
• or always feeling guilty somehow

But there was always an enormous problem right under my nose: every woman I get involved with makes a fool of me.

Yes, all of them.

I will always be extremely understanding, I will always believe that when they hurt me they don't mean it, I always find excuses for the things that wound me, I try to play the grown-up, I fake a smile, I try to convince myself it doesn't affect me. That it shouldn't affect me. That they don't mean harm, that they, in truth, have suffered and still suffer so much, that they never learned to handle their feelings, that they are human. They can make mistakes. Me? Bloody Mother Teresa, forever believing I'll fix them. Not that I think they need to change who they are — I love the individuality of every one of them. What I want is to cure each one's pain. I try to be exactly what they need me to be, even when that isn't me. I try to fit into their lives without paying much attention to what I actually want, just to have some kind of affection. Exactly how I always behaved with my mother.

Freud must be laughing. It really is a bit comic that a psychology student took this long to see the obvious. The size of my ego never stops surprising me, no matter how evolved I think I am.

And when I say all of them, I mean all of them: from teachers, to bosses, to friends, to the ones who only ever left.

I spent my whole life trying to understand why I never had any luck with women. All of them, all of them, without exception, left. And you know who else left? Yes, my mother. Not literally, she's alive, but she was the first to leave me. Did I read the room? I don't think so — this was always one long storm.

She walked out when I was 16. And that was that. I got no say in it. And life goes on. Or does it?

Of course it hurt, she gave me a flimsy excuse and left me. And guess who else did that to me? Yes, the ones I dated (and a few bosses).

I always treat women like goddesses. I do everything I can think of to make them feel like the only woman in the world. As if they were the sun, and I the moon. One of my friends told me one day that I'm too nice.

“being women doesn't automatically make them good people”

It's true. Maybe I fell for the cultural tale that women are naturally more enlightened than men, that we are calmer, more empathetic, more understanding — I fell for the tale of the domesticated woman, me of all people, who always criticised that tale. These speeches about women only ever show up in two situations:

• when a man wants forgiveness, so he talks about how good women are, and how men err, that erring is man's nature, and that it is woman's nature to forgive and understand that error, that a woman's nature is to care.
• when they want to judge a woman who refuses to fit what this society's patriarchal standard calls natural for a woman; there will always be praise for the ones who accept being domesticated.

I always criticised that tale, and still I fell for it. I always thought men would hurt me, because that is their nature, and the record shows that nature is real.

I always thought women would take care of me, the same way I would take care of them, the same way I take care of my mother, even when she still hurts me sometimes. Because a woman's nature is to care — but the record shows that isn't true.

my great-grandmother
hurt my grandmother,
who hurt my mother,
who hurt me,
and somehow, I hurt every one of them back.

And then I hurt myself again, when I projected all that weight, without even seeing it, onto every other woman I've been involved with. Not only the wish to be cared for — that much is human. But staying close to someone who isn't treating me the way I believe I deserve to be treated. Being disrespected. Mistreated. And sometimes by building unreal expectations for that kind of relationship, whatever it was: student, employee, friend, lover.

Not that every woman in the world is a monster and I'm some poor thing. I love all of them. I'm proud of who they are, even when they aren't perfect. It's just that they aren't perfect, and that is human, a fact proven over and over through history, whether you're a man or a woman, or neither.

Taking almost 27 years to realise my mommy issues run deeper than I thought isn't really that shocking. We often ignore the truth right in front of us, we build an alternative reality, a fantasy, and swear to God it's real. That is human too — I know it well, since I'm human, and I can be wrong.

Gabriela Oyara

The fear of failing is great, but the fear of succeeding is paralysing.

Even if you don't want a situation to go wrong on purpose, when you sabotage yourself you do it because you don't know what you'll do if the thing you long for and dream about actually works.

Your whole life will change if it works, and you know it — a completely new universe, situations you've never handled before, and that is terrifying. If it works, a cycle ends: an addictive cycle of defeats that you learned to handle over time, learned to digest, learned to survive. And with one yes that cycle starts over; it's like moving to a new city after landing a good job offer. Can you take in every possibility of a scenario like that?

If everything works out, the only cycle you've learned to handle so far — the one where you fall and get up over and over — is dead. Nothing you've lived through has prepared you for this, because for the first time things work, for the first time your effort is recognised, you are recognised. And then you realise you never once thought about what would happen after reaching your goal. What comes after success? And because you don't know the answer, you retreat. And you sabotage yourself, and you don't believe in your own potential to live a full life, so when you get the chance to really make it work, you lose it, you ruin it.

As long as you fear succeeding, you will stay paralysed.

Gabriela Oyara

I feel this pain, eating my flesh, keeping me awake for days and nights. It's as if hell were inside me, burning me, and I have looked for ways to make it leave, but it always comes back. I feel this pain that won't let me think, that simply takes me and won't let me live the life I planned for myself. Doctors say I need to take care of myself, people say I have to build healthier habits. I stopped drinking, I barely smoke, I haven't eaten anything that should hurt me. But the pain won't leave. It consumes me and shows up whenever it decides to. They say it's the fruit of my feelings — badly resolved, badly lived, badly immortalised.

How am I supposed to get everything I feel out of me so that this pain stops? Everything looks like a dead end; the more I run the deeper I fall into the black hole, the harder I try the more exhausted I live. I am tired of living in pain, I just wanted it to stop hurting. I've tried everything to live without it, but it seems it won't leave me, no matter how hard I beg every god I know. All I wanted was to live without pain.

And this is about gastritis, and about the greater pain that causes the gastritis.

Gabriela Oyara

Rubbish wasn't always rubbish. Maybe a product of dubious quality, but in the beginning it was something. It served. It killed a momentary hunger, covered a need, worked as a patch. But inevitably it became rubbish. I am a hoarder of rubbish, of things that should have been thrown out, of what no longer serves.

Sometimes I know perfectly well that rubbish is only rubbish. That it doesn't matter if it was once useful, if it once made me happy — it no longer has that function, it's just dumped in a corner of my room taking up space, and even with fond memories attached to that rubbish, it really serves no purpose beyond occupying room that could hold something new, or could perfectly well be empty. But I'm a hoarder, and that makes me think that sometimes the rubbish could work as retro decoration, that I could recycle it and turn it into something new. And only when the rubbish proves to be a bigger problem than the nostalgia I feel do I throw it out. Sometimes I throw it out thinking about its potential to become something else — “if I had more time”, “if I had better tools”. Sometimes I blame myself for having ruined the product and turned it into rubbish, but if it hadn't been me it would have been someone else. Rubbish wasn't always rubbish, but once it is, the smart thing is to throw it out and free the space, so that maybe something that doesn't spoil with time can move in.

Gabriela Oyara

I didn't want her to die, even when everyone and everything screamed that it was time for her to go.

I loved her, in spite of everything. I loved her innocence, the way she believed the best of people, even after being knocked down more times than anyone would recommend for having such faith in humanity and kindness. How many times did she fall for holding those beliefs? And I thought her strong, even when others couldn't see the strength in her, since she was always sad — people can't see strength where there is sadness, they think the strong one is whoever keeps an unshakeable spirit despite the misfortunes and hardships in their life, which to my mind is madness.

I look back and I'm proud of her for always trying to get better, in her own way, the way she was taught, the way she learned, or thought she had learned, from life. How many times did she come close to dying? How many times did she pray for it herself?

And then I arrived, and the more I was there, the less she appeared; the more life I gained, the more she lost. But I didn't kill her. I let her live until she was nothing more than a memory of the past. And when that happened, I felt lost — if she no longer exists, who am I? Who is this person who writes, and what do I do with this life? She always knew the next step, she was used to that routine. But what do you do when none of it is real any more? When everything changes?

For months I tried to keep her alive in memory — her habits, good and bad, her loves, good and bad. Until I understood that I am not her, even though I once was. I am something beyond, something she always wanted but was never able to be. She died so that I could be born. She created me so that I would replace her. Without anger, without resentment, only love. So much love: she loved me before I had any consciousness of my own being, before I understood that I love myself too, and that I love myself more than I love her. And she is so proud of what I am, and I am so proud to be a product of her.

Rest in peace, my old self, thank you for everything, I'll take it from here.

Gabriela Oyara.