Love Song, Part 3: Lilac Wine

In this three-part series titled Love Song, actor, writer and producer Victoria Loke deep dives into the idea of love through a series of literary essays. This series inspired by classic love songs takes the reader on an explorative journey through the three ways in which we tend to experience love: romantic love, platonic love, and self-love. Each essay combines her personal experiences with universal lessons about the nature of love and seeks to inspire you with ways you might bring more love into your own lives, whether in your relationships with others or with yourself. By inviting you to fall back in love with yourself, each essay can be described as a love song to the self.

Part three explores the idea of self-love through the song Lilac Wine by Nina Simone.

There was a time I truly believed that love could only be found at the bottom of a wine bottle.  

As a pretty young thing, I’d spent my teens and twenties flittering across  penthouse parties and underground raves all over New York, amusing myself with  hot summer flings from London to Paris to Barcelona, flirting my way out of  trouble in every Asian capital there is. I’d marked each of my international  journeys with a trail of red wine stains, burgundy rings on expensive tablecloths and lipstick prints on clear crystal like ink stamps littered over the pages of a  passport.  

Life was a blur and I’d loved it; it was as if my eyes were a camera turned on long exposure, and all my memories from this time coalesce into a flurry of distorted neon lights and the obscured faces of celebrities, artists, millionaires,  derelicts.  

I tasted everything I could get my hands on from glamour to grunge, my voracious appetite for life matched only by my enthusiasm to drink myself into oblivion. For years I labored under this false impression that one had to first dull the senses in order to properly savor life unfettered by the restraints of one’s mind and ego.  

It was only as I began to mature, ironically, like a fine wine, that I began to  see past the brashness of my youth and realize how hollow this illusion of a so called “life” was. When you’ve spent enough time surrounded by smoke and  mirrors, you find yourself believing that the shadowy simulacra is real. Like many artists throughout history, I thought I had to first anoint myself with wine in order  to fall into wonderland, to fall in love with wonderland. I have a sneaking feeling that all my greatest love affairs were only lit so fiercely ablaze because of how booze-soaked we were.  

But the sober truth at the heart of all of this, really, is that I believed I could only love myself as a hazy outline. 

To confront the self with microscopic clarity is a terrifying thought to most, and it certainly was to me. It is easier to observe the self in broad strokes, because it allows you to paint over anything you might not want to see.  

And the ragged contours of our true visage look the most flattering when bleary-eyed, through the lens of Bordeaux colored glasses that give all our rough  edges a glossy magenta glow.  

I had become so adept at obfuscating the hard truths about myself, from myself, with years of artful illusions and yet I could not conceal the truth that this was nothing but a shiny veneer. Fabulously wrought, but achingly empty. Beneath  the surface, existential ennui ballooned like gas and it soon came to the point where  the only thing left for me to do was to set it all on fire.  

Life, à la flambée.  

Because I could no longer recognize myself in the drunken haze, I decided to burn it all down and search for my true self amidst the ashes, like a phoenix  reborn. I burned down every bridge there was that connected me to this hollow self  that I wanted to believe was me but really wasn’t, and every cord that tied me to  the people whose opinions I thought were everything but really weren’t.  

While I was ready to build my life again entirely from scratch, from within the flames I witnessed a curious form of alchemy start to take place instead: I didn’t see myself disintegrate into what I thought would be nothingness, but instead, I saw myself emerge with the clarity of the purest gold.  

There are certain things that do stand the test of fire and brimstone, and the soul is one of them.  

Through my willingness to let go of all the things my ego once held dear,  raze it all to the ground, I was able to discover the true self that lay hidden beneath the years of stories, wounds, and deceptions about myself that had crusted over me like volcanic rock.  

Just like countless other people, I had been held captive by the fear that I would not like what I would see in the mirror once the cloak of cloudy intoxication lifted, but what actually happened was that I was finally able to see how absolutely  precious I am.  

And just like me, anyone can do the same as long as they muster the courage to not only walk into the fire, but sit within its flames.

I am standing on the balcony of the penthouse suite at the Mondrian in Soho, where we’re having an afterparty for a friend’s art opening at a gallery nearby. I’m only 19, but I never quite had friends my age anyway, and as an Asian girl in New York I can get away with pretending I only look underage rather than actually being underage, which I was.  

A man walks up to join me, a well-known Manhattan-based artist looking to take a breather from the crowd inside, amongst whom networking is practically a  competitive sport.  

We admire the night sky together, and strangers standing on a balcony turns  into him picking me up after parties for late night dates in diners, turns into a Thanksgiving dinner together at his loft on Spring Street, turns into a joint passion  for scrutinizing the wine lists at every artsy new bar, always a Pomerol for me, and a Sancerre for him.  

He listens eagerly to my idealisms, and he doesn’t laugh at my opinions the way older men have always tended to do. I think to myself that maybe this is the first time I have felt seen.  

He carries a notebook around and sketches me every time we meet, and one day he finally shows me one of his sketches.  

I recoil like I’ve just seen a ghost: for all my vain attempts at trying to convince myself I had it all together, the girl staring back at me in fine pencil lines looked so, so young and adrift; her expression tentative, searching. I fly away for the Christmas holidays, and I never speak to him again.  

It would be years before I could look at a depiction of myself and not flinch in distaste, or just run away entirely. As someone who enjoys observing others, it  has always been rather jarring to remind myself that I can be perceived as well.  

Most actors I know can’t stand to watch ourselves on screen, and I was no exception. It doesn’t just magically get easier to look at yourself captured in high definition, and exposure therapy doesn’t exactly do the trick either, based on all the  seasoned actors who still find it uncomfortable to watch their own work.  

But in the spirit of committing to my self-rediscovery, I took an oath to myself that no matter what I saw reflected back at me, I would love myself anyway. With each polish of the glass, each unedited picture on a screen, each unpleasant memory tenderly peeled back to reveal the hurt and the innocence underneath, I slowly began to adjust to the light of who I am, my eyes stinging like a newborn opening hers for the first time.  

And as the vision of myself became clearer, it mattered less and less how  other people saw me. All that mattered was that I could see myself, finally, for the  first time in my entirety.  

I write so often about love, because in a world of mirages it is the only thing  that is real. Despite the myriad projections our mind tries to conjure up to color our experiences with some sort of makeshift meaning, there really is only love, and our  freedom to choose love or not.  

In choosing to love myself with my eyes wide open, bright as day, I learned to see everything around me as well through the lucid lens of love and love alone. It feels as if I have rendered in technicolor a life once swathed in the black and white of punch-drunk nights.  

These days I leave behind me a trail of love like fairy dust as I fly across the  globe, and it is the most marvelous feeling to have had people tell me that seeing me live my life so authentically, lit a spark in them to do the same. It is with crystal clear vision that I see the joy igniting in their hearts as they begin to embrace parts of themselves that they’d once kept hidden; even Dionysus himself could not create for me a more beautiful tableau.  

And so I write with the utmost conviction that nothing feels better than knowing exactly who you are, and loving yourself as is. It is wholly possible to wake up every morning, and to look at yourself in the mirror with little cartoon hearts in  your eyes.  

But it is not a matter of squinting through wine goggles or airbrushed filters  to find the most flattering version of yourself – it is simply a matter of choice and conviction. The choice to see yourself with the utmost clarity, and the conviction to  love yourself regardless of what you see.  

It is so worth it to wake yourself up from the stupor, because when you do awaken face to face with your true self, spark of the Divine, I promise you that you  won’t be able to help but see how thoroughly worthy of love you are.