The Rubiks Cube Metaphor

A metaphor for love and healing

For a period of my teenage years, I wholeheartedly believed that I did not deserve to experience good things. Not affirmation, nor love, nor happiness of any form. I believed that I deserved nothing.

Still now, I find myself internalising the darkness of the night, spinning stories of my sins which will earn me a lifetime of suffering. When I am the only person awake and all my distractions dissipate, my tears taste of the same torment my brain once fed me.

There are a mix of reasons as to why I have felt ( and sometimes still do) feel this way, but ultimately, each and every branch attaches to a singular trunk. A trunk with the phrase ‘i do not deserve this’ clawed into it, along with a girl with bleeding fingernails lying beneath it,

I believe this lack of self worth derived from a lack of self understanding. In my eyes, life’s most laborious task is to attempt to explain your brain to others, not because it is harrowing, but simply because how can I? I simply cannot articulate how I feel or even begin to fathom why I am the way I am. My character confuses me and my thoughts even more so.

I am a puzzling personality, who cannot understand herself, and therefore concluded that she could not be solved by anyone else either.

I am a faulty Rubiks Cube. Unfixable. Unsolvable.

And who in their right mind would pick one of those up? Nobody, right?

But then you woke to me crying in the middle of the night, hyperventilating for no apparent reason and I couldn’t seem to calm down. You fought your own tiredness to fight my battles alongside me. You held me and kissed my head and taught me how to breathe again. I breathed in for 3, and consumed love disguised as fresh air. I breathed out all of the filth I used to feed myself. We stayed up all hours watching TV and you asked me what had caused my panic. I told you I didn’t know. It didn’t matter why, it mattered that you were there with me.

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I had always secretly hoped that one day love would solve me, despite all odds against it and the seeming impossibility of the task. Every Disney film or fairy-tale story had led me to believe love was designed to solve you. To be loved was to have my bricks rearranged into perfect squares of 9, all of which matched in colour and fit coherently aside one another. I wouldn’t always be this broken, but I could be fixed.

But love cannot unsew the seams of your suffering. It cannot remould you nor reshape you. And it certainly cannot fix you.

But the beauty of it is that it doesn’t have to.

What I have learnt is that love warms the light in which we inspect ourselves under. Instead of seeing an unorderly cube of colour, I see the pattern of my perseverance. I see the formation of my identity, mapped out on the cube. Each colour representing an emotion, and each face representing the patchwork of my life so far.

And then I see you place it on display, untouched and unsolved. As if you invested in it because of all that it is and not all that it could be. As if you understood there was intention behind every colours placement, and daren’t undo the mosaic of my making.

Love is healing, but it does not solve you. I thought it could, but love teaches you too. I may be impossible to solve, but that does not make me unloveable. That is the magic of love. Your individuality becomes a source of pride in a world of compelled conformity. It becomes a trait to flaunt, that you are like nobody else and your pattern cannot be recreated.

I suppose what I am saying is that we accept the love we think that we deserve, but to assume you deserve nothing is foolish. I often look back at the girl who thought she deserved nothing and I cannot fathom how she thought so low of herself. The same girl that used to beg her parents let her volunteer at a dog shelter on weekends. The same girl who wrote stories with the hope of comforting others who had struggled like her. The same girl who slept with all of her teddy bears crowding her bed, so as not to hurt any of their feelings.

I am good. You are good. There is good in us all. We all deserve love. And when somebody sees your seemingly shambolic surfaces as a work of art, you will know that you are loved.

Recently, it has been hard to write about anything but love, so I apologise in advance, but it is truly the most wonderful feeling.

I love you all :)