relationships

Love Immortal

entrope, , , Leave a comment

There is a pervasive antipathy to turning everything into pathology in my world.  Sometimes the names are important.  Sometimes they turn into opinions and definitions that must be judged by their effect.  Sometimes people are just confused.  Sometimes, they just need some breathing room to figure things out.  That doesn’t make them bad people.   And refusing to interpret things in that way doesn’t make me broken.

On one hand, I’m incredibly lucky to have people in my life that are protective and defensive and ready to go to war on my behalf.  On the other hand, would it be so hard to just let whatever I’m managing have some breathing room, and me with it?  Time to let the thing evolve, to let my own reaction evolve?  I mean, the extra excuse to come up with reasons why the people I love are worth loving isn’t a bad exercise.  I can be grateful for that.

I’d just like to reaffirm, for anyone who is curious, that I’m not actually broken.  Patience, curiosity, kindness, these aren’t traits associated with weakness, they are traits associated with strength.

Before I sound too much like I’m singing my own praises, let’s just get this out of the way: whatever I have of a muscular, compassionate kind of love is Neal living on in me.  Pushing myself beyond the patterns I witnessed as a child, the model of a relationship where the only way a girl could feel loved was by driving everyone around her to the point of crisis – it must be true love if he’s on his knees begging – that’s all Neal’s influence.  Neal is my awareness of ego.  Neal is my faith in the divine fire.  To abandon the effort to love better, whatever kind of love we’re talking about, would be another death.  Losing him once was bad enough.  I’m not willing to lose whatever of him that lives on in me.

Love Immortal

Love is a Battlefield

entrope, , , , , , , , 4 Comments
Love is a battle you wage with your ego on behalf of the beloved.   
 
The division of self is a dubious concept.  The whole idea of the id/ego/superego, Freud’s conscious, subconscious, and unconscious categories…  Meh.  I’m not a psychiatrist, so I’m just going on what makes sense to me.  (This guy says it is a load of crap, if that helps bolster my supposition.)  We do know that there are three parts of the brain and that they each have different functions and that they don’t always work well together.  But none of those physical structures correspond to what I mean when I use the term “ego.”  And as much as I don’t like these lines between selves – they make about as much sense to me as the idea of a 3-in-1 G-d – I’m reluctantly headed in that direction with this. 
 
Ego is the I am.  It is the part of us that is firmly rooted in a perspective, a set of experiences, opinions, histories, beliefs, and definitions.  Ego says I want, I need, I deserve.  Actually, it might be more of a caveman than that.  Me hungry.  Me horny.  Me tired.  Me thirsty. 
 
Ego is the quitter.  The demander.  The now-insister.  The faithless. 
 
Ego is pride.
 
Ego can be destroyed, it feels its own mortality.  Ego is vain.  It must be seen to know for sure that it is there.  It’s fragile and constantly under threat.  It is insatiable: the more you soothe it, the more soothing it requires.   
 
You are not your ego.  Neither am I.  To twist a quote from the fabulous RuPaul, you are not your ego, you are your awareness of your ego. 
 
The ego is of the body, constrained by the limits of both time and skin.  Our awareness is comprised of Source.  That awareness is the part of us that is eternal, that recycles through lifetimes, that goes on when our body-rooted ego gives up.  It is from our awareness that we can choose, and in that choice, love.
 
Which sounds good, until the ego realizes it is being marginalized, at which point it kicks up a tantrum worthy of a four year old in a toy store.  I want what I want and I want it now.  There is never enough for the ego.  Never enough attention, never enough love.  In this world of scarcity, fear dominates.  Jelousy, anger, judgement, posessiveness, any attempt to control another…  all expressions of fear.   
 
And it isn’t like you can deal with the ego once and be done with it.  It’s a never-ending argument between your divine fire and the body that houses it.  Love isn’t the longing, the wanting, the feeling like you can’t breathe without the beloved.  It isn’t the heat or the hunger.  Not that any of those things are bad things – why else would Source choose this form of expression if not for the capacity for joy that resides in our bodies – but they are not love.  Love is the fight with yourself, the never ending battle to keep track of which is ego and which is you and beating back ego for the good of the strange alchemy that is us. 
 
You do it so the beloved doesn’t have to.  You do it because it’s better this way.  You do it because it’s hard, and it’s love, and it’s the best of what you’ve got.  You do it because what comes out of the effort – patience, kindness, compassion, balance, growth – is worth it. 
 
If lust is all you need, than roll around in it.  Sit in your ego and feel all the fear that goes along with it, the insecurity, the constant need for more, and revel in it.  You might as well, it’s what you chose. 
 
Just don’t call it love unless you’re willing to attempt the fight.  I’m not saying you have to succeed all of the time, I’m just saying that the fight is the difference between love and everything else.   
Love is a Battlefield

How I Got Over

entrope, , , 4 Comments

There must be someone smarter than me, more scientifically minded, who has done a thorough study of this issue.  I should find that person, and quote him/her extensively.  But I’m not going to.  I’m going to sit here with my avacado and opine without the benifit of scientific evidence or a study to back me up.  This, my friends, is going to be straight up anecdotal. 

The assertion that words matter isn’t going to be a new one.  They are the means by which we interact with and understand the world.  A select few get past the words-only forms of intercourse, and the importance of the communication that takes place through touch should not be underestimated.   But mostly, we fight with words, we promise with words, we agree and we contract and we explain ourselves and we share and we grow and it all happens through language.  I am in awe, always, at the power of language. 

But that’s all external.  What about our words and the internal life?  After all, doesn’t most of our thinking come to us in words?  When you look in the mirror and find a new line that you didn’t notice the day before, the image is just the image.  It’s the words that carry the judgement.   Our opinions are in our words.  The images exist without judgement, it takes words to make blue the wrong color of blue. 

Once upon a time, I was dating a man.  He was an interesting man.  A strange, unfamiliar man full of football and fishing who made me laugh sometimes and made me cry sometimes and seemed (at the time) like the whole world.  It didn’t work.  Of course it didn’t work.  But my heart and my head weren’t in agreement on that.  My head was sure that it ought to be able to corral my heart by berating it for its irrationality.  Or more precicely, my neo cortex had a good explanation for what should happen and my limbic brain, upon seeing his shirt comingled with my shirts, said “but I love him.”  On it went.  Head: this isn’t worth it.  Heart: but I love him.  Head: not worth it.  Heart: but…  love, damn it. 

The pathway between seeing the shirt and the voice that said “I love him” was as well worn as a deer path in the direction of a salt lick. 

I did stop loving him, and I did it deliberately.  I didn’t pull off this feat of sensibility with my logic or my rationality or with any kind of evidence.  I just stopped saying “I love him” to myself when I saw the red shirt.  I picked neutral over affirmative.  I’d start with the cascade of those three words “I…” and I’d divert.  “…see a red shirt.”  Oddly, it didn’t take that long.  Of course, he helped me out by saying something completely assinine and that was the end of that, but even before his ill-considered mouth, I broke the grip he had on my emotional state by changing the words I used when I talked to myself about him. 

You don’t have to change your mind.  You have to first become aware of the things that you say to yourself.  You have to hear them, really hear them and ask questions like “Is this true?” or  “Would I say this to someone I respected?” or  “Would I like it if someone said this to a person I cared about?”  You can’t change it if you don’t know it’s there. 

Then you have to replace the words.   Or just stop saying them.   “I…”  <insert sigh>  “oh, nevermind.” 

This is another one of those things where we mistakenly think there is a how.  There isn’t.  It’s a bianary system.  You’re either on or off, you either do or you don’t.  You wake up one morning and you decide this isn’t working, and then you stop.  You stop incrementally, but it’s the decision that counts, not the speed of your implementation.  You’re allowed to stop telling yourself something and then backslide and then stop again.  We all do it, these things take practice.  It took weeks, if not months of concerted effort to short circuit that voice that told me I loved the football fisherman – I’d been telling myself that I loved him for at least a year at that point.   But if I hadn’t, I might be married to him and just as miserable as I was dating him.  By that measure, the time it took was totally worth it. 

So there you go.  Change your words, don’t worry about changing your mind. 

How I Got Over

On Unpopular Love

entrope, , , , , , , 2 Comments

Oprah ruined love.  Hallmark delivered several death blows, but Oprah (and through her, Dr. Phil) killed it.

Love yourself.  It’s a pop psychology mantra that we hear everywhere.  But who can really qualify what that means?  It’s a concept that’s been broken down into 15-second sound bites for commercials.  “Next on Tyra/Oprah/Dr. Phil…  Love yourself in time for dinner.”

But our whole concept of love is completely fucked up.  We think it is what we see on TV or read about in trashy romance novels.  A proud broken man, a woman with a secret.  They fall in love but their differences tear them apart.  All until the man realizes that he doesn’t have to be broken any more and the woman shares her secret and then they stay married and have loads of babies and wedded bliss.

We think we can do the hard stuff once and be done with it.  You can’t.  The hard stuff has to be done over and over and over again.  It’s like going to the gym.  Or staying away from the FroYo.

We think love is roses and chocolate and bubble baths and sunset walks on the beach and Paris and diamond rings.  And all of these ideas came from people who wanted to sell us shit.  People that wanted our money in exchange for the accessories that they told us were associated with love.  We gave up the real thing for the “as seen on TV” version.

So now we’re supposed to love ourselves.  With the diamond rings for our right hands since the left hand is reserved for Prince Charming?  Let’s face it, some of us take the TV version of “love yourself” a little too far.  It’s called narcissism, and I promise you, it doesn’t make for good partnerships.  All this love yourself nonsense starts to look like it belongs nestled up to our notions of “deserve.”  We know how I feel about that, and if you don’t, I’ll summarize: deserve is the wrong damn question.

Love yourself is not about looking yourself in the mirror deeply and saying “I love myself” over and over again.  It isn’t about justifying a Mercedes Benz.  It isn’t about justifying a new piece of jewelry, or a new house, or a long vacation.  It isn’t approving of everything about yourself unconditionally.  Loving yourself along the lines of Hallmark and Oprah hasn’t gotten us very far.

Let me tell you what I know about love.

Love sees clearly.  Even more important, love is willing to look.  Love doesn’t gloss over faults or pretend that they don’t exist.  Love is willing to acknowledge the parts that are ugly and selfish and mean-spirited and arrogant and lazy and fragile.  Love sees all of those things and doesn’t flinch and doesn’t condemn.

Love gets out of the way of the consequences.  Love doesn’t deprive the beloved of the benefit of their failures.  Love lets the beloved fail because any meaningful success is nourished by the shit that didn’t work.

Love doesn’t have the answers; love sits with you while you ask the questions.

Love doesn’t save you; it stands next to you as you save yourself.

Love is pragmatic.  It acknowledges reality and adjusts accordingly.  It is more interested in what works than it is in being right or preserving its ego or defending its opinions.

Love takes the long view.  It looks at the aggregate, not the last five minutes.

Love is supple.  Flexible.  Adaptable.  Resilient.  It can be okay in a variety of situations.  It might grumble a little, but it will find a way to make it work.  It’s strong that way.

Love is loyalty.  It is trusting someone even when you don’t understand what’s happening or why.  It is speaking kindly of someone to the external world when you really want to smack them in the face.  It’s keeping the personal between you and the beloved.  It believes in someone when the evidence points in other direction.  It acknowledges their imperfections even as it acknowledges that your place is next to this flawed individual.  Hell, it might find those flaws endearing in the right light.

Love shows up.

Love finds reasons to laugh, even on the most miserable of days.  Gallows humor counts, and if you’re going to go down, you might as well go down laughing.

So what does it mean to love yourself?  Own everything, your good and bad qualities equally.  Acknowledge that perfect isn’t possible, but that trying is well within your capacity.  Have a sense of humor, risk failure, show up relentlessly, tell yourself the truth, do what you can from where you are, and forgive yourself for being a bloody idiot.  Because we’re all bloody idiots in one way or another.

If you can do that for someone else, you can do it for yourself.  And if you can do it for yourself, you can do it for someone else.

On Unpopular Love

what they don’t tell you…

entrope, , , , , 5 Comments

It isn’t like you’d listen even if someone tried, not when you’re 16 and so certain that there are right answers and wrong answers and you are supremely confident of your ability to differentiate between the two.

Now, at the grand old age of 35, I am slowly giving in to the reality that there are only costs and consequences.  Right and wrong are only available in the extremes: hurting things that are less powerful than you, stealing, drive by shootings.  Most of our choices don’t fall into those categories.  Most of our choices are between decaf and regular, dinner out or dinner in.  Those choices aren’t particularly problematic either.  I mean really, beyond the fact that our days are like slips of rice paper – inconsequential until taken in aggregate – the hundreds of choices we make every day don’t matter.

But between the extreme and the inconsequential, there are choices about love and relationships, about who we’re going to be to the people we meet and how we’re going to handle ourselves.  And the “right” answer to those questions, to what loyalty looks like in practice, to how compassion is to be put into play, to how far you go or what you owe to another person, those answers evolve.  Sometimes by the second.  Opinions on the subject are multiple, but the consequences, those are yours and yours alone.   And maybe the consequences are not as permanent as a murder, but words are permanent for as long as they are remembered.  What you do matters, and it matters profoundly.

I’ve been vacillating.  Wildly.  Silently.  I’ve given up several times a day over the past week, but it always comes back to this, to the things that seems true beyond the facts of the matter.   Giving up on a friend is a sad choice of last resort.  Shouldn’t there be someone for everyone?  Someone that believes positive outcomes are possible and will stand without judgement as a witness, as a “withness,” not to do the work for the person in question, but in quiet support of that work?  How can you look at someone within the boundaries of non-psychotic/sociopathic humanity and say that they deserve to be left to rot in their own limitations? How do you just give up on someone?  It doesn’t compute.

Still, its one thing to think it through, to arrive at a conclusion that has the resonance of  truth and agree with yourself.  This is how it should be.  It is quite another to live it.

I’ve been on the down side of this circle.  The people who let me work it out for myself and maintained a sort of bland attitude about how I wouldn’t always be exactly where I was and that I’d get back to good in my own way in my own time…  their conviction that it would get better in combination with their non-judgement of when or how I got there…  what a relief.  Both the company and the expectation-free faith (if there is such a thing.)

And why should I not be that for someone else?  I can’t think of a good reason…

what they don’t tell you…

People are Icebergs

entrope, , , , , , , 1 Comment

And so are relationships.  Maybe 10% is visible to you and will submit to the tyranny of language.  90% is submerged in a place beyond description and way too big to get your judgement around.

Just … be easy on other people.  Yourself too.  There are some truly awful people in this world; but most of us, most of the time, are doing the best we can with what we’ve got.  It’s so easy to be certain of what other people should do, of what you think you would do were you in the situation…  but you don’t know what kind of a victory it is that some of us make it out of bed in the morning.  Sometimes just hanging on is so unbelievably brave that asking for more is like accepting a vault full of diamonds and pouting because there weren’t pearls involved too.

Before you get certain about what someone else should do, figure out whether or not you’d be willing to assume their burden of experience first.  Unless you’d gladly take on what they’ve taken on in their life, see what they’ve seen, endured what they’ve endured, and survived what they’ve survived…

Of course, if you did all of that, you’d have nothing for compassion about whatever it is they chose today…

Other people’s opinions are a heavy thing.  Even when unvoiced, we carry around concern for what we think someone else might think.  Don’t make it worse.  Honor the 90% with your quiet company, and hope to G-d that you have someone who can love you cleanly enough to do the same for you.

People are Icebergs

Umami

entrope, , , 1 Comment

You’ve heard about the five flavors, right?  Salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and Umami.

Umami is a Japanese term for that flavor you can’t exactly define, but it’s deepens the other flavors, adds complexity, and makes everything better.  Chemically, it’s known as L-glutamate, and it was only discovered in the 1800’s.

All my favorite people have Umami.  There are no real words for it, just approximations and words about the thing itself.  Maybe “old soul” is close to what I mean, but it’s more than that.  People with layers, complexity, depth, imagination.  People that you don’t have to talk to in order for them to understand what you mean.   People that make everything just a little better, even camping in the rain.  People who laugh with you when it’s all gotten so un-funny that it’s hysterical.

Umami.

Umami

Cut Out

entrope, , , Leave a comment

Generally speaking, I don’t add many people to my circle of friends.  It isn’t that I’m a snob, but I’m not for everyone and not everyone is for me.  Besides, the people I do associate with are people with whom I have meaningful connections, mutually established loyalty, and a shared sense of oddball humor.

So cutting people out of my life is an unusual experience.  So it’s twice as strange that I’ve got both a drifter and someone I’ve actively cut out all in the same year.  I don’t know how I feel about it.

In friendships where the “I’d do anything for you” clause is in place, I’ve never had it turned into an expectation of “you’ll do everything for me.”   Obviously that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it isn’t stretching it too far to say that this individual has taken and taken and taken some more, been informed of incidents where she’s pushed my boundaries too far, and has subsequently pushed them too far again.  And today I told her that, since she won’t respect my limits, I am left with no choice but to enforce them.  And then I put her phone number in the “go directly to hang up” list on my phone.

I don’t feel good about this action, but I’m in no mood to retract it either.  I’m done.

As for the drifter, I’m a little less clear.  For my part, there was a healthy dose of shame involved after a particularly disastrous interview. I didn’t mean to eff it up so badly, but I did, and I was ashamed and embarrassed.  She helped me to secure the interview in the first place and I’m sure she was not pleased that it went so far sideways either.  That makes for a healthy dose of awkward.     I’m not mad, there are no hard feelings, but with everything else that has been going on, I really don’t have the resources  to pursue it.

(Incidentally, it turns out that it is a good thing that position didn’t come my way.)

Anyone want to comment on legitimate reasons to cut off a friendship?

Cut Out

Fine Lines

entrope, , , , , , 1 Comment

There are some heuristics that I’ll stand by until there’s any evidence at all that they’re wrong.  One is that no one has ever thanked someone else for saving them.  At least not in the metaphorical sense.  My sister once gave a guy who had a heart attack and fell off a barn roof CPR until the ambulance showed up.  He thanked her for saving his life, but other than clear cases of being rescued from imminent death?  No one ever got thanked for trying to save someone.

The other relevant heuristic is that everyone gets to be the expert on themselves.  If someone says “I need x, y, and z,” believe them.  We know.  Give the other guy some credit.  Your friend with the bitch of a wife knows she’s a bitch.  But he’s juggling a bunch of competing priorities and if he isn’t dealing with the fact that his wife is a bitch right now, it’s because other things are a bigger priority.  You don’t get to decide for him.  You listen until he asks for something.  Your perspective is unwelcome until specifically invited.  Anyway, you’ve got whatever it is going in your own life that your friends are all looking at you and sighing over.  You know, Missy needs to loose twenty pounds.  She knows that her Momma has type 2 diabetes and if she keeps on the path she’s on she’s gonna end up there too.  It seems to be universally true that we all think we can live the other guy’s life to more success than they seem capable of.

So it’s generally better to celebrate the beauty you see in your friends and let the rest go.  They’re the expert and they aren’t going to thank you for interfering.

Which is a problem.  Because when you see someone standing in a hole, does lowering a ladder for them to take advantage of if they don’t like their hole anymore…  when they haven’t asked for a ladder…  does that count as the kind of saving that someone is never going to thank me for?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Fine Lines