Have You Ever Been Truly Loved?
Think about it. What would that look like? What would another have to do–what lengths would another have to go through–to let you know that you are deeply loved, cherished, adored, understood; that you are real and irreplaceable, and that there’s no way the other person is going to walk out on you, turn their back on you, leave you, except through death? (Or except if you do something hideous and unprovoked.)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Someone asked me the other day if I’ve ever been in love.
And I replied, Maybe, when I was much younger; maybe when I was 19 or so.
But then I added to the effect of:
But as an adult, I would rephrase this question to: Have I ever loved deeply?
And yes I have. I have loved very deeply. To me, love is a verb, a choice, a decision, an activity of the soul, not just the heart; it’s an expression of who we are and have become as a person. It’s so much more than a feeling that another elicits in us; it’s an expression of our depths and the level of inner development and awareness we have reached. And so, yes, I have loved another person very deeply—I let someone else very deep into my heart and soul and mind, I exposed myself, I allowed myself to be vulnerable—very vulnerable—I allowed myself to be hurt (a few times). And I believe I “lived the questions” very well in that relationship (much longer than most people would). I believe I went the extra mile two or three or four or five times for her—and these were some of the toughest miles I’ve ever had to go—I was bruised and battered and heartbroken.
But what other choice was there to make? There was enough of a connection and a spark initially, and so I leapt, I took the leap—I rowed, rowed for the falls. There really is no other choice to make if one really is going to take this “living the questions” stuff seriously!—
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ― C.S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”
What other choice do we as human beings have? Save ourselves? For what? Life is short, and no one gets out of here alive. So either we get busy loving or we get busy shriveling up and dying.
And so have I ever been deeply loved? Have any of us?
I know I haven’t. I’ve been tried on, used, betrayed, discarded, but never deeply loved or understood or cherished—it’s all been very temporary and flimsy. And that is not an exercise in self-pity; this just is what it is; this is just reality. And I haven’t lost hope/faith by any means. The search goes on. . . .
“Late Fragment” – Raymond Carver
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Oh but you are truly, madly, deeply, profoundly, unselfishly, unwaveringly loved by God… and He wants you to do the same with yourself … & others… and when/if you recognize how much He loves you, then and only then, will you feel beloved with a love no human being is capable of ever delivering… nice post
Ah. Melissa, you are so very kind to write what you did.
But the love of God . . . what is that? I ask that sincerely. Is God’s love something that we feel? Because for me love isn’t a feeling, so if God does exist and he does loves me, then his love can’t be something I feel–or just because I did feel it, if I were to feel it, that wouldn’t necessarily be love that I was feeling.
Is his love something theoretical–is it an idea that I have heard that others have and that I have internalized and invested in? Is God’s love something other than this?–an idea I have? How do I know what God’s love looks like or feels like or acts like? is God trying to purify me, improve me, heal me, prune me, through this last relationship and the hellishness of it? And if so, then what about the ex- and the kids?–How is God loving them? My life has been filled with a lot of pruning; is that the majority of what I am to know of love–pruning? Or is there something more that I am to experience of it this lifetime?
How do I recognize God’s love of me? How does anyone recognize it? And get filled or fueled by it?
I think we pawn off on God our dirty work–the work we don’t want to do. We know what love is supposed to look like and feel like, how it’s supposed to be, how powerful it’s supposed to be, how transformative; yet we see how paltry and ineffectual most human attempts at love are, how for many of us, our parents didn’t really love us and extend themselves for us, put our interests first, et cetera. And so we need to invent a God who loves–and who loves us perfectly–to make up for all of the foibles and failings of other human’s love?
I don’t like putting off onto God what we as humans ought to be able to give and receive were we to get our acts together and be a bit more serious and focused about living, and stop effing around with our lives and in our relationships.
And if I experience God’s love and I feel beloved in a way that no human can love me, then why would I even look to another human being for love? Why would I even need or want or desire love from another human being? Why would I even bother? Wouldn’t God’s love be enough, so I don’t need any more love because I’d be so satisfied and filled?
I don’t know. Much to think about; much to think about.
Thank you for reading and commenting, Melissa, and for your kindness.
Warmest regards,
John
Ps. Check your spam folder; I tried to comment on one of your recent Lewis excerpts that you posted on your blog.
John, this is a beautiful post. You’re lucky to have loved deeply. I know you might not realize it since you’ve been hurt but to love on a mature level must be a wonderful experience and a tribute to your character.
Ah, thank you, Jaen, for a very warm and tender reply.
And it–loving–was certainly a wonderful experience while the other person was there, present; but not so much otherwise. It’s an amputation of part of oneself, one’s heart (the beating part), one’s soul. It’s a conversation where someone no longer answers, deliberately, by choice, by illness, by sickness, by madness. Maybe the conversation was started out of madness as well–it likely was.
I just remind myself that there will and have been worse pains I’ve endured than this. There will be death; my own and others. There will other bigger losses and tragedies. She wasn’t the devil, the father of the lies; she was just practice. manipulative, scheming, lying, conniving, pseudo-, false through and through. A chameleon.
And this time I was better prepared, better-practiced, I wasn’t really shocked. Disappointed, saddened, yes; shocked, no; she had already shown what she was capable of; she had done this numerous times to others, not only me; and she seemed rather proud of it actually. “When someone is showing you who they are, believe them.” I pretty much knew who she was and I definitely know who she is now. This whole “I want to get better and wake up” part of her that hooked me is just a part of her that she doesn’t want to give up either, because to wake up and really want to get better would mean to give up even that part of herself that longs, searches, and do so all over the place. She wants to be the eternal searcher–in search of a self; and whenever she might get close to selfing herself, she’ll run and unself herself.
It’s part of the sickness. Identity confusion.
I did the best I could. Not A+ work, but solid B+ / A- work. I was out manned and outgunned. I had no idea what I was up against. This wasn’t merely an impulsive and emotional sensitive person, this was someone who was devious, manipulative (yes, I read that article on manipulativeness you posted about a month ago), constantly scheming, going back on what she had promised a few days or weeks ago. I had never met any like this; I had never seen anything remotely like this. Looking back now I can see the patterns–all of the fits and starts and reversals, all of the walkaways and come backs; and they always escalated–got bigger and bolder and more dramatic. Ultimately she was false; a liar. And still is. No moral center, no functioning conscience other than the desire not to do something that would get her throw in jail or have her kids taken away. That’s her baseline. She doesn’t want to raise her kids, be a role model of truth, goodness, virtue, decency, help mold their character, teach them right and wrong, encourage them to think, etc. She just wants to be free to be impulsive, act out, and not have to answer for it, pay the price for it, not be able to have others pay the price for her–that’s freedom to her–to be free of consequences and constraints.
This is not a beautiful comment; it’s a tough-minded but realistic one. It’s what I lived through at times.
All quite sad.
Thank you again for your wonderful and kind comment, Jaen; I greatly appreciate it!
Warmest regards, (and keep up the wonderful work you are doing on your blog!)
John
John,
This woman doesn’t have BPD she has Antisocial Personality Disorder. Go through my blog I have articles on the subject.
Correction: The symptoms described pertain to someone who has Antisocial Personality Disorder NOT BPD. I’m not able to diagnose anyone over the internet.
I know you can’t and weren’t trying to diagnose over the internet; and so I didn’t take it that you were. You’re trying the same as I am to make sense of something that is confusing and chaotic and not completely out in the open, even to me. –I still don’t know everything that went on behind my back–what was *really* going on–the full extent of it.
I was so angry when I read this this morning. I tell myself just do not read this anymore, just wall it out, etc – but you have been my life for almost three years now and some days are harder than others to try and move on. So I check your sites and look at your facebook, to feel connected to you in some way. Of course doing those things only makes it more painful. So I remind myself of all the things you did that SERIOUSLY pissed me off. And then I feel better or justified, but I am not false – I am not a lie. I know that I lied to you, jerked you around, flip-flopped. I know you tried to be cautious, but you inevitably did say or do things that hurt me, and I would feel terrible for weeks. And forget about it when you sensed that I was pulling away or checking out – caution was thrown to the wind and you were on full white bull mode.
I think honestly, if you were my therapist, or my very dear friend, you could have been the best friend I ever had, and certainly the best therapist. In therapy, two people come together to change one of them into somebody else … someone who can let love flourish in their life. But because you were my beloved, every time you encouraged me to change into someone else, I felt like you were rejecting me. Too many wires were crossed between the various hats you were trying to wear with me. And because you were emotionally invested, you got hurt by my withdrawals and evasions and self-protections.
This is from the book “A General Theory of Love” (I know, not your favorite book)
When I came to you and said I want to change, I want to grow, I meant it. If I knew how to do it, I would have done it. But I was clumsy, and distracted and hurt and untrusting. I asked you to be my friend because I admired you, and your way of thinking, and I sensed that somehow you could help me to overcome myself. And I wanted to Love you. I wanted to be good to you. I still do. I want to stand up at your funeral and be able to say my life is better because I knew John. Knowing him changed my destiny. Like that “As Good as it Gets” moment….
I am sorry you do not feel like you were ever truly Loved by me.
So please, I do hope someday you will forgive me.
Well, you’re there and I’m here, and I’m doing what you always leave me to do when you leave–try to move on and pretend that I’m not devastated by not having you and the children here in my life in this house to come home to, to spend time with, to have in my life–my real life.
You have no idea what it’s like to be on this end of things–no idea. You never have. And now you’re immured somewhere in upstate NY with the children, with life going on around you, in total control of everything. You control the distance, you control the temperature, you control the contact we have. I don’t and I never did. This relationship was always according to your whims. And all I get to do is miss you and the kids and imagine talking to you and them. It’s another amputation; one I don’t like getting better at suffering and enduring.
And I never encouraged you to change into someone else, Jen; I always encouragied you to be who you showed up to me as and who you said you wanted to be and were determined to be. But that was never enough for you. And I don’t think it was just about “trust” issues; you never really intended it–you never really intended to be that person, to make growing into that person the central focus of your life. So please do not pawn that off on me. You made decisions not to be who you said you wanted to be. You made choices to blame me rather than deal with yourself. Those were your choices. You could have gotten into therapy back here, so I wasn’t wearing so many hats. You could’ve tried harder.
That’s one thing you never said to me; you never once looked me in the eye and said: John, I am trying; I am struggling here and I want you to know that I am trying; I am trying my darnedest; I am trying to be my best for you and the children; I am struggling; please encourage me; please be patient; please support me; please be my friend; I am really really trying.
What you wrote here is easy, Jen. It’s easy to say these words. The truth is always in the choices we make and the actions we take.
And whether I feel like I was every loved by you or not is immaterial; the actions speak and dictate what I “feel” and shape what I perceive. Love doesn’t do what you did to me. It just doesn’t. It doesn’t sweep through my life like you have. Why you even left this last time, I have no idea. What was so bad, so awful–what did I do or not do–that you felt like I deserved this yet again and that NY was the place for you and the kids to be? I have no idea. You are so unforgiving with me. One little thing isn’t a little thing; it’s big thing.
And anything I did in this relationship that made you angry was because I was trying in some feeble way to protect myself from you. No one had ever been so inconsistent, so callous with me as you have. No one. I was unprepared. I came from a place where words mattered, where what people said counted for something; it showed there intentions. I have been learning the last 3 or 4 years that words don’t matter with most; that action alone is king with most people.
And what you did in this relationship was never about protecting yourself from me; yes, I am Helen Hunts character in “As Good as it Gets”–that is how I see myself and how I try to live my life–”in every single thought that you have, and how you say what you mean, and how you almost always mean something that’s all about being straight and good. I think most people miss that about you.” Maybe you saw that about me; maybe you got that; or maybe you didn’t, because you’re back there, I’m here. (How does someone walk away from that!? If I ever found that in another, she would have my utmost devotion and loyalty, especially in this world!) Either way, it wasn’t enough for you. It bored you at times; and at other times it infuriated you or made you angry or it/I didn’t measure up to what you wanted out of me or for me to be like.
Again, what you did in this relationship was never about protecting yourself from me; it was about protecting yourself from people in your past and what they did to you. I didn’t do any of that stuff to you. And anything I did do, I had to be provoked like heck into doing. You had to kick the shit out of me emotionally to get much of anything unsavory to trickle out of me. You had to push me to my utmost limits–and my limits were pretty darn big; you had a lot of leeway, a lot! I put up with (endured) a lot. You don’t give me credit for that. You don’t see that. And that’s the point: you have no real idea what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your own behaviors and your “love” (and actually maybe you do; your mom, dad, and step-dad have imprinted their malignant forms of anti-love like a handprint or closed-fist upon your heart). When you grasp that, then that will show some real remorse, some real sense that you know what you’re asking to be forgiven for. Until then, it’s just abstract, sterile, not real; just like me.
And you didn’t come to me asking me to be your friend; you came to me asking me to be your partner, your lover, your beloved, and your friend. And I have done and continue to do all of the above, to the best of my limited abilities and considering my considerable ignorance in this.
Words are cheap; actions speak. You’re there and I’m here; and I was left at the drop of a hat again; what does that say? Who ever loved you like that?
The irony is that I seem to keep getting sloughed off and you keep going back to the dream instead of a better reality with me. You don’t seem to want to stomach the work.
And whether I forgive you or not does not seem nearly as important as the type of person you decide to become. Forgiving you would be for me only. And this isn’t about me; it never was; it’s about you and whether you’re going to make of your life a cautionary tale for a legacy of parental anti-love, or whether you’re going to be one of those few who rises above her past and her conditioning, the type of person Frankl talks about in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”–the person who was unmasked by all of the hideous things that happened to him or her and demonstrated unwavering saintliness and goodness. . . .
“Freud once asserted, ‘Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.’ Thank heaven, Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the ‘individual differences’ did not ‘blur’ but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.”
Yes, horrible things have happened to you, Jen, horrible and unspeakable things were done to you; but none of that gives you any license in doing horrible things to others–to treating others–especially those who dare to get close to you and love you and the kids–as if they are not fully real–every bit as real as you. I’m not a prop or someone from your past; I’m not something or someone for you to play out your past on; I am real flesh and blood human being who tried to love you and your children the best he could and be a good and descent human being to you. And, yes, I failed you at times; I snapped, got angry, but do recognize how far and how hard you had to push me to get me there. I never came home and took out things on you and the kids. I never did any of that. I was a basically very happy person before I met you, I was just looking for someone to love and be loved by, a woman who I could grow with, who I loved to talk with and hear talk, a woman with whom I could converse about things that mattered to me because they also happened to matter to her. That was what I wanted. Not to be gutted, eviscerated, betrayed. Not to be a karmic sump for someone’s past. When you see the reality of this–who I was and am, what I tried to do, what you showed up here looking for and wanting–then you’ll start to get an idea who I am as a real person and what this has all been like for me to go through.
There’s no real personal growth or healing without a growth or awakening of our conscience and an elevating of our level of moral reasoning. Your healing and growth–anyone’s healing and growth–really begins the moment they start looking at themselves honestly, objectively, and really see themselves and what they’ve done without any blinders or softeners or self-deception or a lot of excuse-making and blaming and diffusing of responsibility, and then start showing contriteness, remorse and doing real repair work. Yes, Jen, you had horrible horrible things done to you as a child, you were abandoned by your father, abused by your stepfather and mother, and your mother didn’t love you and your brothers enough to leave your stepfather–she was weak,and you’ve proven that you’re not her and you’re not weak by leaving every man who has ever tried to get close to you and love. But–but–deep down there’s a part of you that knows better, that knows you are better than all of this, than always reliving the past in the present; there’s a part of you that can see yourself clearly and knows better. And that has always been the part of you that I have been drawn to, that was drawn to me, that I have sought to encourage and nurture. Always.
And I always will.
Because that part is the best part of any of us; and it’s a darn rare thing to find active in this day and age.
Namaste as always, Jen,
John
I didn’t make choice to blame you rather than deal with myself, I don’t blame you at all. And I am not hurt or mad at you trying to move on with your life. And I certainly don’t think that you didn’t measure up to what I wanted you to be, because I never wanted you to be anything other than who you were.
And you are right, I don’t know what its like to be on the receiving end of my “love” and you don’t know what its like to be on the receiving end of your “love”. It aint easy. On either side.
I am not asking for your forgiveness of me, for me. I was asking for your forgiveness for you. Not that I don’t want for you to forgive me, I do.
When I moved out of my house, I used to carry a picture of my stepfather in my wallet and every time I would look at it, I would tell him that I forgave him. Not because he deserved it or asked for it or even wanted it. I did it because I did not want to carry that pain around in my heart for the rest of my life. Maybe I didn’t do enough. Maybe I didn’t know how hurt I was. Maybe I tried to paint over it with flowers. Maybe I should have gotten angry and wrote blog posts about it and vowed never to be that way and then defined for myself a set of principles to ensure that I would not pass on that pain to another human being. I didn’t do that. I did not know how. I did the best I could.
And when I met you, YES, absolutely and undoubtedly I was like a blind person walking through a museum in the dark. And you threw the switch quicker than I was capable of withstanding – and I buckled, I ran, I hid, I spun out, I fought, I cried and was frightened by all that I saw.
And you admittedly had no idea what you had done. And you reacted to my poor ways of trying to metabolize and entire buffet in one sitting by putting out extra helpings. I failed. It’s not because I didn’t want to stomach the work. I don’t think it helped to try and get me to stand at the edge of tall buildings or find my way home from downtown with no money and no shoes in the snow. I don’t think it helped for you to “keep your options open” in case I couldn’t do it, and continue to nurture relationships with other women. But we each dealt with things in the ways that we did.
I forgive you, because you are REAL to me. And I know as a real person that you were trying the very best that you could. That is why I have come back over and over again. Because your actions were done out of fear and hurt and pain and frustration. I have compassion for all that you have endured these past four years – going back to watching your Mom die.
And I know and feel that life has been especially hard for you because of your truthfulness and perceptibility and I know that you have been deeply disappointed by other people’s inability to live up to your clearly defined principles and highly ethical standards. And I never wanted to one of those people. Certainly not the one who has hurt and disappointed you the most.
I am deeply saddened that things have turned out this way for us. And I Love you (in my own malignant way) and will think of you fondly and wish sincerely for your happiness. And someday, when all of the red hot nerve endings have cooled, that we will be able to share the things that were wonderful between us … jokes, great books, deep and meaningful conversations and chicken dances.
Be well.
It’s all very easy to say/write all of this; these are just words; your specialty. The reality is you (and the kids who I deeply love as well) are there; and I’m here. You left; you blindsided me–again–you angrily, self-righteously, what have you, blindsided me again. All of that speaks to your work ethic. It’s easier to hole up and live in isolation (or among a bunch of crooked mirrors) than it is to actually face reality and deal with yourself.
You used me; you left here without paying the rent for most of April and for May. You used me and your time here with me to clear up your credit scores at my expense.
You came back here–I took you back–because you said you were done running, wanted to be the best parent you could be for the kids and the best partner you could be to me. Noble sounding things; but clearly over-promises. They meant nothing. Those promises lasted a week? A month? Did you even try? Have you ever? Have you ever actually tried to be your best, do your best, and put in the time and the effort? Or has it always been the easiest side of the easy–make excuses, blame others, the grass is always greener somewhere else where someone else has taken care of it?
And no one has ever complained about the way I love. I try to treat those I love with the utmost decency, respect, care, concern, compassion, warmth, affection, tenderness; I try to be good to them and for them, and help support what’s best in them, be honest and truthful with them. You?
You lied and lied and lied to me so many times, i had no idea from one day to the next, one week to the next whether you were in this thing or not. And when I gave you what you wanted, it didn’t change things, help you stabilize; in fact you seemed to become less stable, because there was less reason for you to try and put on a good show and keep it together.
And you NEVER ONCE tried to make any sort of amends, do anything to repair the damage that YOU had done. Never once did you try to stand upright, earn trust, show trustworthiness, not lie when lying was the most convenient thing to do. Where was you conscience and your courage to actually ever deal with yourself in any and all of this? It never appeared. Your conscience was absent, not functioning. You stole and plagiarized my poems in order to pass your college class. You turned my work in as your own and preened yourself on borrowed glory.
This is who you are, Jen; you cut corners again and again; you steal, you lie, you manipulate, you deceive, you blindside, you go back on your word, again and again. And you take pride in it; you think it’s a joke; it’s secretly something you’re proud of–it means you know how to survive, how to work the system, how to get the best of others, how to wrap them around your finger.
And heaven forbid someone not take your callousness and exploitativeness perfectly well; heaven forbid someone get angry at all of that shite you put out there and pollute a relationship with. For every “bad” thing I did, you did 10, 20, 30 things to me before that that effed with me, effed with my heart, effed with my affections, effed with my head. And you want to fault me for “keeping my options open” and being more than a little confused by whether you were actually trying to have a relationship with me or not? Nice try.
But you don’t have the conscience to acknowledge that. You can’t actually feel another’s pain, because you can’t get past your own. That’s why I’m not real. No one else in the world is to you, not even your kids–they’re just extensions of you, luggage, furniture to be moved and carted around. You live in a bubble of your own feelings and emotions. Others’ feeling and emotions are hypothetical, abstract, just possibilities; but they’re not real. Others are just playthings, toys, props, tools, things for you to use and discard. So don’t tell me I’m real. You engaged me in a level one or two way (see Schnarch, “Passionate Marriage,” pp. 247-251), and you always have. Your own benefit at my expense. That’s not love; that’s not how you treat someone who’s “real” to you. When someone is real to you, you don’t try to benefit at their expense; instead, you sometimes sacrifice yourself, other times you extend yourself, you look for win-win solutions; but you don’t consistently use them and try to benefit at their expense.
This lying and hiding and running away and exploiting men and life is a pattern you have practiced and perfected for years–10? 15? Who knows.
You have done so many things here with me that broke trust, that violated trust, that showed disrespect and anti-love for me. And you did it for reason unknown to me or really even to you. You change your mind constantly, go back on promises and your word as if it’s no big deal.
And you still can’t/won’t acknowledge it. Where is your conscience?
Where is your conscience???
And what I wish is that the kids were here–I love those kids and miss them dearly. I wanted nothing but to help raise them properly, give them some stability, give them a better environment, one of good boundaries, solid structure and expectations, some discipline, sensible consequences, and a lot of warmth, and time. And you have taken all of that away from them so that you can give them a free-for-all and raise them in the same environment you were raised in and ignore your role in shaping and nurturing their character, their conscience, their courage. You can’t teach them what you’re not; you can only teach what you are; that is how pathology gets passed on from generation to generation–the sins of the father and mother are passed on to their children. And that’s one of the things that hurts the most out of this. You had an opportunity to get so many things right her with me, with us, and not just for you, but for your children; but you won’t even take on yourself for their sake. Instead you yank them around like pets, like luggage, uproot them constantly so that they can become just as unrooted as you; you use and value them as a source of distraction and time-consumption and because they make you feel needed, valuable. But you don’t actually try to deal with yourself and with what’s worst in you for their sake so that you can give them a truly better upbringing than the one you were subjected to. You had a chance to give them stability, and with a guy who actually was capable of providing it and loving them as if they were his own children–almost 2.5 years around them and you don’t think I’d take a bullet for each of them or rush into traffic without hesitation to save one or all of them??? And you take them away from that? Why? For their sake? Not a chance. For your sake? Yep. None of it makes sense. You had everything–or close enough to it and closer than many ever get to it–there was so much love here, sooo much–and you seem hell bent on ruining it, shooting it out of the water, making a hot mess of it. WHY?
Where is your conscience in all of this????
“I am deeply saddened that things have turned out this way for us.” Saddened? Why? You chose this. Not me. You did this. You chose to blindside me; you chose to lie to me; you chose to go back on your word; you chose to take me for granted; you chose to use me. “I” statements, Jen; “I” statements. “I am deeply saddened that I did this to you and to me and to us and to the kids.” That would be a start. That would be honest. The way things turn out here will be exactly the way you decide for them to. You are in complete control, Jen. And apparently you are choosing to be sad rather than to face yourself.
Having my husband love me through my infidelity has been incredible! A gift.
That is indeed a gift. And if he is basically a decent guy and it was you who did something indecent and uncalled for to him, then honor him, cherish him, thank God for him and the gift he is to you for sticking by you through this! Appreciate him with tears in your eyes and your heart and your soul.
And your change isn’t complete until you have that change of heart where you have some degree of a spiritual awakening or an awakening of your own conscience and you carry your wisdom and insight and message forward to others, and you practice your newfound principles in all of your interactions.
The only real and deep and lasting and meaningful change comes from having some level of a spiritual awakening or an awakening of our conscience–what’s best in us–and then living those new insights and principles and sharing what you’ve learned and realized with others.
Thank you for reading and for commenting, P2G, and continued success in growing in love and insight.
Warmest regards,
John
I really hope and pray that I’m at that point now. I know that looking back I will see how minimal the growth was at this point (because I know there will be much much more); however, I am making the right choices day by day, and moving slowly in the right direction. A spiritual awakening is the reason I am already as far as I am…I couldn’t have gotten out the other side in the “affair fog” without God’s orchestrating the circumstances.
Having an awakening of and a dramatic growth spurt in one’s conscience and one’s level of moral reasoning is basically the gold standard—the first and last proof—of the genuineness of a person having had a real spiritual awakening.
No birth of conscience, no real spiritual awakening.
Know a dramatic birth of conscience, know a real spiritual awakening.
The two go together like hand and glove, like sunlight and a shadow.
The light of a true spiritual awakening is what allows us to see our own shadow and darkness and moral failings and allows us to make real changes, have a real change of heart and life direction (“metanoia”), and to take actual corrective and reparative actions, to show genuine and deep remorse and sorrow for what we’ve done, and to not cut corners on this or do any of this on the cheap.
That is the ultimate act of contriteness—that we actually do some real repair work—earn back the trust, to make real amends, and to be meticulous in doing this. And to continue refining and developing your conscience.
There’s no real personal growth without an increase not just of consciousness or awareness, but also conscience or level of moral reasoning—an improved ability to see ourselves objectively, honestly, without bias and distortions and deception, an improved ability to see through our own bs and to control our own selfish impulses.
Moral development and real personal growth and real spiritual awakenings all go hand in hand. No exceptions. And no shortcuts and or avoiding this.
That’s what “making a change” is all about.
All other changes are merely superficial and peripheral and very very temporary.
Keep nourishing your conscience, Persuaded2Go, keep developing that part of yourself; when it’s healthy and working properly, it’s what’s best in us as human beings–look at the words and works of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Thoreau, Albert Schweitzer–their words and lives were clarion calls–wake up calls–to our conscience. That’s so much of what waking up and personal growth actually IS–activating our conscience–especially so that the scales fall from our eyes (Saul/St. Paul) and we can look at ourselves clearly!
Warmest regards, P2g,
John
I really do see more and more every day. As I do, I am letting go more and more. My sadness comes from having my identity wrapped up in what I had left, and what I was holding on to…my blog. my kickboxing.
Once those things are out of my life, I may very well be rid of the OM for good, but I will have nothing left with which to identify myself or get support. Sounds whiny. I know I will survive. If only I am truly empty, I can be filled. I get it with my head, I see it with my eyes, and I am willing to walk to lonely road to recovery. I’m just not sure how I can do it without totally losing myself, who I am.
I will do it. But it won’t be easy.
Take up tennis; it’s incredibly challenging, and can be a great workout, and the lessons it has to teach about learning in general and managing oneself emotionally, transcend the sport. Plus it’s an incredibly intellectually engaging sport, very cerebral; so it’s like chess on a treadmill, but only better!
And who you are–who any of us is–is much more than the self we normally take ourselves to be. Sometimes we have to let go of who we think we are and give up our attachment to that idea we have of ourselves and self-image in order to grow into an even truer and larger and healthier version of ourselves. (–Until the time comes to do it all again and grow even more!)
And pain and doubt and loneliness are often all part of the process. . . . Much of life is like that, dying every day to ourselves, only to be born again, bigger and badder (in a good way; a more badass way
I know whereof I speak; I am dying as well today, and I am also alone in all of this.
“The Swan” – Rilke
This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.
Best wishes. Warmly,
John
VERY COOL!!! Thanks for sharing that!!! I quoted you on my post today
Your warm encouragement is like a cold shower after a run…!!
My husband & I have often thought of taking up tennis together. I would really like to try it. He is a tad concerned about the sharp turns on his bad knee, but maybe if we got him a brace??
You are very welcome, P2G!
And, yes, a brace or even a wrap (Ace Bandage) should help!
Warmest regards as always!
John
Glad to have a little extra time online so I could find this post. Reading was really something beautiful.
Thank you for reading, Laura; and thank you for the kind words.
I am in pain (read the comments). I came home to an empty house again a month again. Blindside # 3. Yippee!
How are your world travels? Where in the world is RisingOnTheRoad now (I haven’t visited your blog in about a week or so; sorry about that!)
So how are you? How is life? I hope you are well.
Warm regards, Laura,
John
Oh I am sorry John, it sounds like a very difficult and painful time.
I’m in Peru right now, feeling a bit under the weather but nothing too serious.
Thinking of you and hoping for gentler times for you. x
WoW! reading through the conversations, I think the mirror neurons in my brain began firing, it was as If I had somehow lived through this relationship, I almost began crying as I could here the pain inside your posts and I had to stop myself getting too deeply affected. I feel for you John and Jennifer both. I pray that you find a healing and restoration that helps you integrate all you have gone through to become truly great human beings. And I hope I can carry the depth I have heard in these most affecting and intimate of conversations in making me a better human aware of the consequences of loving another and how deeply it carries on into other lives and hearts. Thankyou for sharing what is usually such a hidden and private moment, it must not have been easy, but I will always remember this now.
Thank you. Profoundly, deeply, thank you. I write this to you welling up, with tears in my eyes and gratitude in my heart.
This is why I wrote what I wrote in these comments and why I have put it all out there—so that it might be of some value to someone. And I’m not going to live like a coward and hide what I think. I’m not going to live like a coward, period. One of my favorite movies is “Fearless” (with Jeff Bridges; directed by Peter Weir, who also directed “Dead Poets Society”). And one of my favorite scenes in that movie is when Jeff Bridges’ character is in a meeting in an office and he is becoming overwhelmed by the minutia and dishonesty of it, and so he runs up the stairs to the top of the building—it’s a tall building in downtown San Francisco—and, in fear and trembling, forces himself to go to the ledge and stand on it and face his fears, “oh, fuck, what am I doing? . . . I will not live as a coward.” Eventually he flushes his fears and he finds his fearlessness again and he sounds his barbaric yalp from one of the rooftops of the modern world. Sublime and inspiring stuff, to say the least.
I will not live as a coward.
I will not live as a coward!
Honesty, transparency, require courage, create courage, create greater honesty, create a virtuous or positive cycle.
There’s no other way to live. There’s no other way of living that is worthwhile except to be as honest and open as possible and to be as courageous and loving and eyes-wide-open as possible too.
So don’t hope to carry the depth. Do it. Carry the depth. Be the depth. Write deeply, think deeply, feel deeply. Be deep. The world is already overpopulated with ungrateful exploitative surface-skimmers. Life needs more people willing to dive into its depths (which is where life gives out its secrets, as Rilke reminds us!)
Warmest regards, and thank you for reading and commenting,
John
I will reply here because I cannot reply to John’s reply to my reply (you get it) above. And because, rezatoreality, I cried so hard when I read your comment. I am in pain. It hurts like absolute fucking hell. I do hope for healing too. I do more than hope for it. Every day, I lay in the grass or watch my kids play and try to find Joy. Some little Joy because these past few years have been heartwrenching for both John and I.
And to John.
I wrote all of this today before I saw your latest post, and it seems even more appropriate now.
Everyday I expect to wake up and read your blog and see some new unsavory thing written about me. I am terrified that some secret that I have been trying to hide for so long will have been revealed by you for everyone to see. And you are right, I am a coward because I do not want to face the shame and humiliation and guilt that I carry around with me like a 10 ton sack. What I wanted was to find someone, one person, who I could unburden myself to, who could handle it, and who would Love me anyway. But I don’t even think I knew that going into this.
Going into this I thought I just wanted to find Love. Whatever I thought that was at the time. I wanted to grow spiritually, even though what I thought that meant then is not at all what I think now. I probably wanted some transcendent la la land, rainbows, fairies and unicorns in our yard and small woodland creatures whistling tunes whilst they tidied up our house.
I quoted this passage from Siddhartha to you way early in our correspondence:
Vasudeva listened with great attention. Listening carefully, he let
everything enter his mind, birthplace and childhood, all that learning,
all that searching, all joy, all distress. This was among the
ferryman’s virtues one of the greatest: like only a few, he knew how
to listen. Without him having spoken a word, the speaker sensed how
Vasudeva let his words enter his mind, quiet, open, waiting, how he
did not lose a single one, awaited not a single one with impatience,
did not add his praise or rebuke, was just listening. Siddhartha felt,
what a happy fortune it is, to confess to such a listener, to bury in
his heart his own life, his own search, his own suffering.
___________________
I just wanted that so desperately. To be able to confess, to bury my life, my search, my suffering in someone else’s heart. And I didn’t want to just be heard, I wanted to listen. And I most definitely thought that I was ready for that type of a relationship – I do that …. bite off way more than I can chew, overpromise, act impulsively, leap before I look. And it was a clumsy, disastrous, heart-wrenching, eviscerating, gutting mess. My already aching heart got ripped open to so much fresh, raw, disorienting pain.
And why was my heart aching? Because I lived through (what seemed like the closest thing to hell in my mind) growing up, I failed out of college, I was unfaithful in my relationships, I got raped when I was 20 because I drank too much one night and put myself in a bad situation, I left good jobs, and I smoked marijuana while I was pregnant, I cheated on my husband 10 months before he dropped dead in front of me while he and I were high on drugs. I have had two abortions. And I was and am ASHAMED!!! I felt like I was horrible person and I wanted to be able to confess to someone and have them tell me it was okay. That they LOVED me anyway and that I could let that shit go and become this fantastic, mature, incredible spiritual warrior princess who had faced her demons head on and slain them. But that is not what happened, is it?
No. I freaked out and pulled away. I told you I would come to meet you in person and I would chicken out. I wouldn’t answer my phone. I went away one weekend and I slept with my ex. Then I finally came to meet you in person and all this damage had already been done. Before we had even met!! And all of this while you were in the very last stages of watching your mother die of a horrific cancer.
But I still wanted to try. I wanted so bad to get you to forgive me so I could feel some relief. So I moved out there.
And nothing I have ever read or experienced could have prepared me for you. You are overwhelming, unsettling, intense and passionate. You are a white bull!! And you warned me, you did. You told me that if I saw myself with any clarity it may be too frightening and dizzying and stressful. And you were right; I am part of the legion of mere mortals. Because I was overwhelmed by my inadequate hothouse coping skills and underdeveloped prefrontal cortex and undisciplined limbic system.
And I made a series of bad choices, and manipulative ploys, and I have told you lies. All because I didn’t think you would Love me if you knew I wasn’t perfect. No I was not differentiated. I wanted to be validated by you. And when I didn’t get what I wanted, I hurt you badly.
And then you would hurt me too. Badly.
Remember I sent you this passage from my Atlantis book – because I truly wanted and believed that I could inhabit a relationship based on Unselfish Love.
____________
“Getting back to relationships, you touched upon the subject of what the signs were of selfishly, or Unselfishly Loving in a relationship, but can you tell me more about that, specifically, how you can tell if you are loving selfishly in a relationship?”
“It is a very important thing to learn. One of the ways you can identify selfish love is, as I mentioned earlier, when you do a self-examination of your motives, and you find that your actions, or feelings of ‘love’ are because you get something, some kind of energy or attention from the ‘loved one’. This is what most people call love. Here is a common phrase that makes a good example. Perhaps this will help clarify. ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.’ You’ve heard that, yes?”
I nodded.
“That kind of love is conditional. It will only give if it is getting what it wants. That’s what most relationships are built upon, that mutual agreement to give to each others’ selves. Here’s another one you must have heard before, ‘It must be give and take’. No. It must be ‘give and give’ in order to work, because if it’s ‘give and take’, what happens when both feel they should be taking at the same time and think the other should be giving? And that happens all the time. Relationships like that don’t last; they are disintegrating and full of turmoil, for each self wants and fears, and when it doesn’t get what it wants or is confronted with its fears and dislikes, problems start.
“When people enter relationships like that, everything is perfume and roses for a while (‘honeymoon period’ phenomenon) because the selves are each getting so much energy, so much self-gratification. But after awhile, one of the partners in the relationship always falls short, and doesn’t give as much as the other wants – then negativity begins to snowball in a familiar cycle. One partner feels slighted and says or does something to hurt the other. Then the other reciprocates and hurts back. This negativity builds strength and momentum each time it goes back and forth. The relationship is damaged. Sometimes the damage can’t ever be repaired and becomes just another coffin nail in the relationship’s eventual death. It can be no other way in selfishly based relationships – Universal Law is in effect here. Only in Unselfish Love is peace found, both for the giver, and the receiver.
“If you have true Love for someone or something, Unselfish Love, you want the object of your Love to be healthy and happy and to grow, regardless of the consequences to you. When your love is selfishly based, you care more about what you want, and really care very little about the ‘loved one’, if you care at all.”
___________________
And that we certainly did do …. Let the negativity snowball in a familiar cycle. You will say that I was perpetually beating the site out of you, but you bit back JB.
Remember this email I wrote to you ….
_________________
“I know I wrote to you that “I always knew that to transcend my selfish pseudo self I would have to be confronted with what I really am by a true mirror. So since 2004, I have prayed – telling the universe that I was ready to ‘go for it’, that I want whatever I need to change and become one with God – that I was ready to be purified. That I was ready to give up this selfishness and self centered way of being in the world. That I was truly willing, receptive and humble and ready to make that commitment to myself and my growth.”
As you said to me …. “When we see things widely and accurately and realistically we become part of the solution; when we see things incorrectly or too narrowly or unrealistically, we likely make matters worse. When we see things for what they are and what WE are, we become part of the solution; when we see things too romantically or too fantastically or aberrantly, we miss the mark and become part of the problem.”
I just didnt really realize until today how vile and disgusting and worthless I actually was. How less than human I am. How utterly grotesque and useless my life is. I cause so much damage all over the place — because damage is what I am. You are so right about me. You got my number. I have been nauseous this entire day — sick to my stomach at myself. I always thought I had at least some redeeming value. But what I am does not deserve to be redeemed. It just hit me all at once.
The best I can do from here on out is try to be as harmless as possible. And stop trying to get anyone to fucking love me. I have just been running around hoping someone would love me enough — enough for me to actually love myself. Just pure selfishness. I am not Loving. You nailed me… (when you wrote this to me)
You’re a selfish, self-absorbed, blind little flighty cancer, a tumor on the skin of humankind. You can’t even predict where you’ll be in two days, so you can’t know that you’ll love me the rest of your life, unless your life will be over in 48 hours. None of what you say tracks. You can’t chart yourself with any reliability or predictability two days in advance (“I’m letting you know I’m moving back to XXXXX.” — I knew you didn’t have it in you. I was rooting for you, but I knew there was no way. You had already shown yourself, and it was so sad to see–so much potential wasted. No self, no self-discipline, no real intention or sincerity, just a flibbertigibbety wad of chaos and frazzled disorganization. “I’m letting you know that I will be flying back Thursday to come see you and be with you.” — I never believed it. I just played along to see how long you would try to maintain your self-deceptive bullshit.)
Love is not a feeling, it is a virtue, it is the sum and flowering of many, many virtues. Love is a verb, it is an act—and not a feeling you act out on when it’s present and then act contrary to when it’s absent. Love is not capricious and erratic; love is constant and true. Love cares immensely and impeccably about the well-being and growth and health of the beloved. Love wants the beloved’s good–to be good, to amount to something, to be true and strong and decent and godly. Love wants this most of all–godliness–in oneself and in the other. And love works consistently toward this. Love is not selfish, petty, inconsistent, or erratic. Love is not a chaotic and an ever-changing mark. Love is patient, love is kind, love is diligent, attentive, mindful, aware. Love wants goodness, seeks goodness, seeks to engender goodness and nobility and wisdom and openness and growth. Love is not dishonest, cowardly, timid, frightened, deceptive, deceitful, jealous, envious, parasitic, self-protective. Love does not seek short-cuts or try to avoid real work and making amends. Love is not incongruent. Love is not a feeling. Love seeks the truth, craves the truth, seeks first to understand, seeks the good. Love trusts, hopes, perseveres, endures, bears, isn’t resentful, petty, malignant, inconsistent, chaotic, undisciplined, does not put oneself routinely first, self-protect, make excuses, speed-read, not think deeply about things and not let things penetrate her core. Love slows down and self-analyzes and self-confronts and internalizes things, Love lets thing become blood, become marrow, take root in one’s core or soul.
Love is not flighty, flibbertigibbety, does not seek flights of fancy and act out irresponsibly and make excuses and blame one’s childhood. Love does not quote and quote and quote and substitute other’s peoples thinking and life experience for one’s own and uncritically digest mass quantities of anxious, flighty poorly-differentiated information, so much so that one gets lost in it all and has no self, no real and authentic “I,” but rather is just an amorphous formless chameleon, standing for nothing, falling for anything, saying anything in order to grease others into paying attention and conning them into giving her what she wants at that particular moment. Love does not routinely omit big and crucial pieces of information, fuck over one’s children and make them collateral damage, sleep with some fucking soulless louse, whine about being unfulfilled, act like a selfish petty little clod, and hide behind quotations from “The Little Prince” so that one can avoid taking on solid form and stating what (if anything) one REALLY believes and stands for (which may well be nothing other than one’s own safety, pettiness, fears and walls, and comfort and self-preservation of all of one’s nonsense. . . ..
Welcome to your life–a living loveless self-made hell. You are smack dab in a loveless hell of your own creation. You had an out. The universe answered your prayers (maybe you never really prayed or cared). But you stuck your nose up, got fussy, and refused the gift. I know one thing: you never loved me, Jen. Love NEVER treats another person the way you have treated me. Hate does. A hideous lack of differentiation and principles and conscience does. Some sort of mental illness does. But not Love. You haven’t the faintest idea what love is. You don’t love me and you never did. And you don’t love your children–you berate them and are often borderline cruel to them, and you are just over-indulging your son and making him into a spoiled whiny wimpy momma’s boy. So don’t talk about love, because you have no idea what Love actually is and no real and sincere interest in even learning about it. You just want to learn what new-age namby-pamby pseudo-spiritual Sedona-like love is. You just want your self-indulgent fantasies and to flutter around in your beads and your turquoise spreading your malignant rat-poison toxic version of love. You are a very simple creature. A perpetual addict, addicted to your own fears and ego and walls, and to the path of least resistance. You just do whatever you feel like, whenever you feel like it; you just do whatever feels good, damn foresight and damn the consequences to self and others (those you “love”). Without any core self of your own, your love is forever damned not to be love but a toxin.
But without a real self or authentic “I” of your own, you lack the integrity and honesty to admit any of this. So for you love is whatever your flighty warped little mind wants it to be. . . . “i’m loving because i feel loving and think i’m loving and my vocation in life is to be loving and to spread my pernicious little rat poison ideas about love and life and fantasyland to all of the little stupid people everywhere who will fall for my selfish poorly differentiated bullshit.” Et cetera, et cetera . . . .yadda yadda yadda . . . .
Impenetrable, unbreakable, unreachable, insincere, incongruent, dis-integrated, and worst of all, irredeemably and irrevocably lost . . . a 0 out of 10 on the Bowen scale.
That’s what you’re on the verge of if it hasn’t happened already.
Grow a pair. Quit being a namby-pamby little pussy and mindlessly wasting your one life and fucking up your children and their lives in the process. They deserve better from you, and so do you, and so does the world — we all deserve better out of you. And you know what? You had it; you had your chance. And you fucking crashed into the ground with your unconscionable and repeated selfishness and craziness. You are not your past, though you seem hell-bent on repeating it and forcing any fucking idiot foolish enough to try to love you and be good to you into resembling some variation of a villain from your past–your dad, your step-dad, your mom. . . .Who fucking knows . . . .
Sleep well — and I don’t mean tonight or tomorrow night, Jen; I mean sleep walk well through the rest of your fucking days and nights like all the other soul-dead lemmings around you, and try not to actually accidentally internalize anything that might actually wake you up and jar you from your soulless selfish stupor. What you are at your core is a coward and a liar and a quitter . . . that’s what spending too much time on the path of least resistance and reading new-age soft-minded fused bullshit does to a soul . . . it convinces the poor sod that their malignant warped ego is God and something holy. . . .
You want to be your wounds, Jen, and to become like what wounded you; that’s who you are; that’s your identity; that’s your self; your ego — your wounds, your pains, and those patterns. You don’t really seem interested in becoming the healthier version of yourself that still exists beneath all of that, the person you’d be had you been loved, had you not been mistreated and abused, the person you’d be if you’d transcend your past and your conditioning, the person you’d be if you were you to actually learn how to love and be loved now in a psychologically and limbically consistent and mature way, a way full of character and self-awareness and control of your own anger and hurt feelings, a way where your stress was much better managed and dampened, a way that was full of real perspective. . . .
So my prayer has been answered. I got my mirror. I just dont see anything in it of value. The universe sent you at least to stop me from doing any more damage. I certainly wont try and bury my pain by getting fucked by any more soulless louses. So at least my girls dont have to have a mother who prostitutes what little pseudo-self she has for a bit of warmth and affection. And I can no longer feign ignorance to what I am. A horrific cretin. A fucking piece of shit that was more interested in trying to get Love from a man whose Mother was dying in front of his eyes, than trying to be there for him. I dont deserve you. And I release you – whatever fucking hooks I had in you, I am unhooking them. You are free from me and the filth that I am. I am sincerely sorry for the cancer that I did infect you with. You really tried for me – you really are a saint John. And you succeeded in giving what was needed a painful and necessary wake up call to me of repulsive, wretched, nefarious, capricious, obscene fucking nightmare that I am. I am awake now – in the nightmare of what I am. I will not harm another by exposing them to this. — Jennifer“
__________________________________________________________________
Where is the Love in any of this? Where has it gone?? All that seems to be left is so much hurt and pain and anger and damage. And that email was from 2 years ago. And it’s just been the same – round and round. Worse and worse. Over and over. I did want for us to have a Sacred Relationship, like Tom Kenyon described.
________________
“Many of us do relationships the way we play poker. We do everything possible to get the upper hand. And if that fails, we bluff. We pretend to hold cards we don’t have. We cheat. We lie.
And while this is the model for many a relationship in our post modern era, it is not the model for Sacred Relationship as described in the Manuscript.
Let me be very up front here. Sacred Relationship is not for everyone. In fact, I suspect that there are far fewer persons capable or even willing to undertake it than there are those who prefer to play emotional card games.
This type of relationship demands utmost honesty both with oneself and with one’s partner. Instead of hiding our cards, we lay them all out on the table. All our hopes, all our fears, all our petty and jealous thoughts, all our conniving: all of it gets laid out in the clear light of awareness for our partner to see. And he or she must do the same. It will not work if there are back doors unlocked with mental escape in mind. It will not work if both partners are not absolutely impeccably honest with each other.
In the alchemical work of Sacred Relationship, we voluntarily put ourselves back in the foundry. The heat that arises between two people when their neuroses rub against each other can get quite intense. If both people can find the courage to be radically honest with themselves and with each other in these searing moments, the psychological alloys can be altered. A new type of aliveness then enters the relationship fueled by the energy of psychological truth.
The thing is–most of us will do almost anything to avoid psychological heat. When we get uncomfortable, many of us get the hell out of Dodge. Now for some of us this means literally packing up and getting out of town, or at least out of sight. For some of us it means that we are physically present, but no longer emotionally present. We numb up. We become automatons. We move and talk, almost like normal, but we have retreated far, far inside. Others of us numb ourselves with alcohol or drugs. And some of us do it with television. We humans are, after all, quite clever and creative. We can find all sorts of ways to avoid facing ourselves. In fact, they are far too numerous for me to list here. But I suspect you get the idea. I guess the real question here is this–what do you do when things get psychologically too hot for your taste? What do you do when you are on the verge of feeling something that you don’t want to feel?
It takes courage and fortitude to stay in the foundry when the heat begins to weaken the stability of one’s self-perceived image. Few of us care to look foolish, scared, petty or jealous. And we will often go through elaborate means to hide these feelings from ourselves or others.
But in Sacred Relationship these things invariably float to the surface like mud that has been stirred up from the bottom of a barrel. The thing is to realize that this does not mean you are doing it (Sacred Relationship) wrong; it means that you are probably doing it right. . . . [T]he power of the alchemy extrudes, or pushes out, the dross. This can be fascinating when the dross is being pushed out of your partner, but it is truly horrific when it extrudes out of you.
What makes Sacred Relationship sacred is that it is truly a holy way of being. The root of the word holy actually means to make whole. So… when we do something that creates wholeness (in this case psychological wholeness), we are engaged in a sacred or holy act. “
______________________
And I jumped, I ran away. It got way too hot in the kitchen. Or maybe I got my ass scrambled and fried in the kitchen.
And you kept back doors open too … Megan, Heather, Debra, Anna, Holly, Tama, Vicki, Amy, Andi, Angela, Beth, Carrie, Cindy… you get the point, ya?
And I know you really, really, really think that every bit of this is my fault. And I accept that. I take 100% responsibility for destroying everything that could have been good and real and wonderful and amazing between us.
And I just want to take whatever good we had between us and heal. And God, I want that for you too.
So, I have confessed here on your blog. All of my deepest darkest most hideous secrets. All of those things I have been trying so hard to keep from ever being exposed. Because I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of pride.
I am standing on top of the tallest building in the world and I am jumping off. Now its out there. I have done all of these things. And there are other things that I am sure you could add to the list.
If I am not naked enough, you could post some photos or videos you have of me.
And there are other things too that I do or want to do that I could add to the list of things I would rather keep hidden away. I don’t always wash my hands after I pee. I pick my nose without a tissue. I want to kiss a woman. I haven’t spoken to my brother or my sister-in-law and seen my nephews in almost a year because we had a really bad fight over something really stupid. I don’t want to get a job if it means leaving my kids. I don’t want to have to send my kids to school because I don’t think they learn anything of value there. I believe in aliens. And Fairies. And Magic. I read really weird books and think totally strange thoughts. And yes, I did pawn your poems as my own. You even write some for me – remember?
If those aren’t enough “I” statements for you, here are two more:
I am not ashamed.
I am free.
Namaste, as always, my dear.
Jennifer
“There is a secret medicine
given only to those who hurt so hard
they can’t hope anymore.
The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.
Look as long as you can at the friend you love,
no matter whether if that friend is moving away from you
or coming back.”
~ by Hafiz, Sufi poet and Saint…..
Only a deep love can open out so much of the best and the worst of who we are, yes, I agree we can refine Loving, by consciously working on who we, Love sublimates, and becomes a dynamic process of growing if we open out to it as a process rather than as a fantasy to be captured by. But this level of working in Love is ideal and rare, most of us, do not reach this dynamism in ourselves, let alone in coherence with another person. But although there is an ideal that Love can progress towards, the other states of it, the reality of mirroring it causes every time two people feel for another, the things it brings out in us, our hopes, our fears, our idiosyncrasies tied to the constant struggle of who we are and the better person want to become. No matter what form it takes, sublime or profane, even as an outright “lie”, this act rests at the foundation of our longing to know ourselves. Consciously in more advanced souls, and unconsciously for most of us.
But it is a process that will always be unavoidable, we will always want to be loved to find that thing, person or Being, that lets us explore our selves both in our murkiest shadows and our best and most amazing light….we cannot stop needing that, wanting that, even in our decrepit wretchedness and selfishness, we will always long for it. The only choice we have is to either repeat the cycles of fantasy that delude us, or on the other extreme totally give up hope in becoming better through it, both are cop-outs. But everybody has a different pace to their evolution in love, if you try to force too much it has the same effect as not giving anything at all. There is a delicate balance and wisdom, which lies in weighing up everybody’s capacity of loving; in where, in what place and in what dimension that love must take form in order to lead or each towards their betterment. Yes, it is no easy matter, I have been greatly misjudged and made my own misjudgments in that regards. But I have come to realize I cannot force anyone to be in my image, on my level, I can only help myself and another to take a step however big or small towards something greater. Relative to many others I may know how to love more deeply, but I am sure that there are many other people, more spiritually adept and better than I, that love much more truly than me, so I must be humble in both my search for and giving of love….. Anyway I really feel for you both John and Jennifer, because I can see my own self, my own broken heartedness and the longing to struggle to become better in all of this in this crazy, amazing and reality blinding truth we call Love.
Namaste and best wishes for you both…
Thank you for all you have written here. I still Love despite all of this pain. I still Love myself. I still Love John.
And if we can define Loving another as John does above:
“I have loved another person very deeply—I let someone else very deep into my heart and soul and mind, I exposed myself, I allowed myself to be vulnerable—very vulnerable—I allowed myself to be hurt (a few times). And I believe I “lived the questions” very well in that relationship (much longer than most people would). I believe I went the extra mile two or three or four or five times for her—and these were some of the toughest miles I’ve ever had to go—I was bruised and battered and heartbroken.”
then, YES, YES – I have Loved. I Loved him – whether he thinks he was ever really Loved by me or not. I KNOW that I LOVED.
And of course, the ending of this relationship is never what I wanted or expected – but I also KNOW deeply that I have changed because of knowing him and mostly from discovering so much about myself through my encounter with him. And no one ever wants things to end, but things do end. I KNOW this. And sometimes they end in a hospital bed, and sometimes they end while you are standing in your living room, and sometimes they end while you are out at work. There is never truly an ending that is easy or pain-free.
And I just want to honor what he and I shared – and not let the way it ended define and re-write it all.
He loves this quote … “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.” – CS Lewis and it applies.
We LOVED each other deeply which is what makes this all the more painful. So to see him write that he has never been Loved is so confusing. Was he loved at 19 by a girl he dated for two weeks? Loved the way he describes here …. as in REALLY LOVED?
And even though I am not going to allow what he writes here to define my experience, it makes me sad. I don’t want to heal to scab over the pain or to push it out of my mind, I want to let this pain do its work on me.
I have learned, I have grown and I have LOVED. And although I am alone in the woods, taking everything moment by moment, I too still hope to one day LOVE this deeply and deeper still again.
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
It’s very easy and very realistic for me to recognize that what you gave to me and did to me was not love.
Love is as love does. The proof is our actions; not words. And your actions here, with Tom, Thomas, Michael, Stanley, are the behaviors of someone who has no idea what love is and isn’t. You think love is a feeling. It’s NOT! That’s self-indulgent, narcissistic, all about you. Real Love is about how you honor and care for and treat/act towards another human being. And in this relationship you have acted unloving–lying, stealing, deceiving, manipulating, exploiting, using. You haven’t taken on what’s worst in yourself, gone the extra mile, been honest, open, transparent; you haven’t invested of yourself; you haven’t taken responsibility for caring for and nurturing this relationship; you never took ownership of it. You were always just a troubled guest wandering in and out my life whenever it suited you. You weren’t playing for keeps, you playing for fun; you were trying me on constantly, like an accessory; you playing at love, playing house with me, playing at having a relationship, playing at being a partner. There was no sincerity or seriousness about it on your part. You treated this frivolously, capriciously, ungratefully, wantonly.
And there’s no love in that. You treated me and what we had like you treat most things in your life. You use and abuse and then discard them and move on.
That is your legacy; that is your pattern; that is who you are.
You don’t take responsibility, you don’t invest yourself, you don’t take ownership, you don’t tend to the baobobs or water the grass or till the soil. It’s all about the easiest side of the easy with you. Do as little as possible, give as little as possible, and take as much as you can, and then move on to somewhere else where the grass is greener and someone else has taken care of the grass. And then you will beat the heck out of that grass, neglect it; not love it and nurture it and be good to it, but use it and abuse it and then leave it for good while the grass is at work.
Is that really what’s true?—that I kept my options open with all of these other women?? Really?? Is that really what happened?
Be a little bit more honest about what you did that preceded it? All of the jerking around, playing with my affections, the come here go away, I love you more than anyone ever—I can’t believe I’ve found you, and then the callous disregard, the empty look a few days later.
Love? Love isn’t what we say, it’s how we treat another human being. Period.
So feel free to retreat to fantasyland and think that you actually loved me. You never have. And you’re still not. You’re still trapped inside your own mind, playing games with reality, playing fast and loose with the facts, with reality, and doing so with impunity.
The reality is that it takes a lot to get me to the point where I actually say “That’s it, that’s enough, you’ve effed with me and my feelings and my heart and my life enough, I’m not going to just take your shit any more” and I stop just taking it, being your emotional karma dump/sump pump, turning the other cheek and giving you a lot leeway, and instead I actually hold my ground and fight back.
Yes, I did that probably 7 or 8 times in the relationship. And you drop kicked me in the heart how many times? 100? 200?
But that’s what you get fixated on—that I had the nerve to in some way fight back. How dare I! Yes, jen, other people have limits; I have limits; I’m not a god.
And you still don’t get/see/recognize how much you were fucking with me, playing with me, yanking me around, saying one thing but doing another, and what that does to another person.
You still refuse to see any of this.
That’s what I mean by where in the eff is your conscience woman?! Did you leave it here? Is it beneath the floorboards? In the attic?
You just don’t get it. You call what you gave me love and you have to, because to call it what it is and to see if for what it is would be overwhelming, make you feel so bad, so guilty, and those feelings are not permitted
And there has never been any attempt at repair work from your end in this. It’s always discard and move on. That’s NOT Love.
Your email/post from this morning was pretty honest, I will admit that; but it is still very incomplete. It still doesn’t acknowledge or recognize what it was like to be on the other end of this with.
So you still don’t get it.
You say you’ve changed and grown and seen all of these things about yourself, but you’re still saying the same things and doing the same things that you did 2 yrs ago, 3 yrs ago, 5 yrs ago, 10 yrs ago—but with perhaps a bit more drama and excess. You’re not becoming tamer and milder in your ways, but more aggressive, more dramatic in the lengths you’re willing to go to play out your patterns, you personal psychodramas.
Jen, you still just don’t get what it’s like to be on the receiving end of what you do to others and what you put them through. Makes sense, neither your mom or dad have any idea what it was like to be you and to have them do to you what they did. So empathy, looking at oneself honestly and objectively—these are things that you’ve never had done for you or demonstrated to you by the two people who should have. Instead your mom and dad blithely go about their lives as if they didn’t fuck you and your brothers over on a regular basis growing up.
So take your eyes out of your head and put them somewhere high above yourself and look at what it’s like for another person to try and love you and to try and metabolize the hell you put them through. Look at it. Look at everything you did and said to me before I wrote that email. Look at it. Do you remember it? What you said to me? What you were promising me? What you said you wanted from me, for us? Remember all of the phone calls and emails and intimate moments and how giddy and open I was to you those first 9 days we were together? Remember all of that? My only agenda was to love you, to be good to you, to love and be a family with you and the kids. Meanwhile you had been telling me one thing and your family another.
And you can’t do that with impunity. It always has an effect, a consequence. You are seeding a situation, planting your own (and other’s) karma/consequences.
And so times all of that by 50—by 50 more times of the same, by 50 more times when you said or promised this and then didn’t come through when you said you were. It matters. It has an effect. It creates consequences—yes, consequences that you want to talk and negotiate your way out of—but you can’t talk you way out of what you act yourself into.
And you still won’t step into someone else’s shoes and recognize what this was like—how it felt to be yanked around like that. Maybe it was normal your world—or maybe not; maybe it’s been done to you a ton of times growing up, and so it’s no big deal—but it’s not normal in my world. I try to be really good about keeping my word. I don’t always succeed, but I am a world away from throwing it around capriciously and cavalierly. I don’t like over-promising and under-delivering. My conscience won’t let me get away with that.
And I had been waiting for someone like you, Jen, YOU, I knew what I was looking for–the caliber of conversation, the depth of it, the resonance, and the passion, and so on, and you certainly seemed to be her or really close to her. And so I was going to do this, work towards creating and building something extraordinary with you. And then the inconsistencies started, then the lies. And i thought she’s had a tough go of it, cut her some slack, really try to understand what that must have been like for her. And I did. I tried. I gave you much more latitude than I would have given someone with a less traumatic past. But that doesn’t mean that I still don’t have limits and that if I get yanked around enough, and told I’m in, no wait, I’m out, I can’t; no I’m in and I’m going to love you more than anyone else ever has (Great! Because guess what, I had planned the same for you!)
So take your eyes out of your own head and look at this from above, or look at yourself with the same scrutiny and distrust that you look at me. Or look at yourself the way one looks at distant things. (That’s not just love; it’s what a conscience helps us to do!)
That’s the *real* journey. Not running away again and again from life and love and back to the woods of NY. But seeing the same situation—your life, and most importantly your actions here with me these past few years—through new eyes, through different eyes, through a set of eyes that aren’t so invested in only one (your) side of things.
And you and I both know about your walls, Jen. You’ve told me about them….how that when they go up nothing is getting in or out; you’re trapped deep behind them and bluster or sunshine, nothing is coming in — although you like to hold the carrot out and think that sunshine would work; it doesn’t; Jesus couldn’t get through your walls; nor could God himself. That’s the thing about free will, whether you believe in it or not: we have to participate in our own redemption (“Dead Man Walking“–definitely a movie to watch again and again; much more realistic than “Good Will Hunting“–that was an effin’ fairy tale; real change doesn’t happen when you fall in love and have a good cry with your therapist–that’s just the beginning; the sequel would have looked like “Blue Valentine”–Will effin Skylar over again and again and again and constantly testing her, making her jump through his hoops, putting her through the wringer, pushing her away, et cetera). We have to participate in our own healing and growth. We have to actively participate in our own redemption. And that means telling the complete truth about ourself, seeing the truth about ourself–100%, no softeners, no distortions, no cutting corners, sparing no expense.
Then–then–there might be a real change of heart and thinking–a real metanoia!
. . . . . . . . .
Generally when people love each other, they want to celebrate each other and that they’ve found each other, and be not just be good but be great to each other, treat each other exceptionally, impeccably, treat each other like the precious jewel that he or she is, dote a little over the other, and not be callous or careless with another’s heart or affections or tenderness and be careless with one’s words.
And, so, yes, I have said things that maybe I wouldn’t have in hindsight, but I said them because they were (and are) things that if they were said to me *would* mean something and *would* stop me in my tracks and wake me up. But you’re not me, but ….my words *have seemed* to have had a similar effect on you (reading them) as they have had on me (writing them). And thus the confusion.
Do you think that I know for a moment what it was like to have been you and to have gone through what you’ve gone through? No. I know what it’s like to have been me now, or maybe when I was younger, and what it might have been like for me then or now to have been subjected to that. And then I have to extrapolate from that. And I have tried.
That is the very basic basis of moral behavior (and yes there is some narcissism built into this, but it’s unavoidable, really; everyone starts out at basically 0, as completely narcissistic, id, thinking they’re the center of the world)—but the very basics of moral behavior is this: not doing (refraining, inhibiting ourselves from doing) to others what we wouldn’t want done to us; and acting proactively towards others in a way we would want to be treated (be the change we wish to see).
And I have done that, always, with you. And so with what I said or did or wrote to you, *I* certainly would have gotten the message and not just the pain. The wake up call would have worked. I would have looked at myself, rethought what I was doing, taken a tough and honest look at myself.
But again, that’s me. And you are not me. You and I are not one, we are not the same—speculative nonsensical new age hooey and metaphysics aside.
So all of those things you admitted to and opened up about in your comment, those are still the easy things because they’re more objective in nature, and we can’t play games as easily with them. But the other stuff—the lack of impeccability with your words, the lack of harmony between your words and actions, the running away, the getting mad at me and imploding this thing again and again–being honest about that, about how those seeds have sown distrust and karma/consequences that makes it easier for you to throw this all in the scrap heap and run away to NY and be deeply saddened, rather than actually have a conscience (always the more difficult and emotionally costly, but oh so ennobling route) and stay and work through what’s come up (you’re still behind you wall, nice and safe and secure; you’re not in the alchemy), make you amends, really feel someone else’s pain (like I feel yours), really feel contrite and sorry, really make a change and do some reparative restorative actions, make ongoing fearless and searching and honest moral inventories; that you have not done. And that is what a conscience is designed to do.
So every time you came back, there was less and less trust because there was never any repair work on your part. That’s part of the illness.
When, in any of your relationships, Jen, have you ever acknowledge the damage you’ve done and tried to repair it?
And when have you ever treated them like living breathing things that you are responsible for nurturing, caring for, attending to, not neglecting, using? When have you tried to deliberately help heal them, undo the bad things you’ve done, repair the damage, not just forgive yourself for your sake (often the most selfish type of forgiveness there is because it’s all about you, it’s not about doing the right thing and repairing the poison you’ve set loose) and tried to become a person worthy of being trusted?
When has developing/attending to your own conscience amd character been anything than just another possible version of you that you try on for a week or two, relish for a while, and then grow bored and dissatisfied with, get acclimated to, and then set it aside and give up on and move onto another incarnation of Jen?? You go from this to that to that and then back to this. Ohio with John, then run awya back to NY mountains near mom. You’ve never left home. Maybe you’re still looking for a home. So maybe like J in shadowlands, you’re wandering into all these houses and relationships looking for a home. Maybe you have no home w/in you & you didnt have one as a child, & so you are homeless in the worst and saddest possible way.
Well, guess what, I’m homeless too. When my parents split, one of them moved 2500 miles away!
But I was making a home with you (and the kids.
And you had/have a home with me.
Maybe not the perfect home, maybe not the 100% all-accepting home, but a really really swell home if you were to actually try and make something of it, invest yourself a bit, ask not always what I can do for you but what you can do to make the house more of a home–a more loving, trusting, warm abode.
It was all there. For you to make either a heaven of or to make something hellish of.
And so whatever this is is on you.
This is not my pattern, my history? My track record, to make something hellish out of something that starts out with so much promise, beauty, warmth, goodwill, potential.
Bukowski – “The Crunch”
too much too little
too fat
too thin
or nobody.
laughter or
tears
haters
lovers
strangers with faces like
the backs of
thumb tacks
armies running through
streets of blood
waving winebottles
bayoneting and fucking
virgins.
an old guy in a cheap room
with a photograph of M. Monroe.
there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock
people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.
people just are not good to each other
one on one.
the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.
we are afraid.
our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners
it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
people are not good to each other.
I suppose they never will be.
I don’t ask them to be.
but sometimes I think about
it.
the beads will swing
the clouds will cloud
and the killer will behead the child
like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone.
too much
too little
too fat
too thin
or nobody
more haters than lovers.
people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.
meanwhile I look at young girls
stems
flowers of chance.
there must be a way.
surely there must be a way that we have not yet
though of.
who put this brain inside of me?
it cries
it demands
it says that there is a chance.
it will not say
“no.”
. . . . . .
You talk a lot about feeling guilt and shame and crying but you don’t show the real proof of it—the remorse—the I need to make this situation right and make amends for the harm I’ve caused.
If I had treated another human being the way you have me *and* I claimed to have felt guilty and ashamed about what had happened (read: what *I* had done—that’s the missing I statement—taking full responsibility for what you have done, how you showed up to this, how you treated me, and not hiding behind the lie of “but I loved him”—you didn’t. Love is as love does; what you did was a far cry from loving me. Love means to want the best for another and to actively work and behave in that direction. And when you don’t, you say sorry, make your amends, and then don’t do it again. Love means dealing with what’s worst and weakest in yourself. You haven’t done that either; you’re barely even willing to acknowledge the first outermost layer of it), then you can be darn sure that my behavior would change… I wouldn’t just get the pain, I’d get the effin’ message….the light-bulb would go on and I’d get it. And I’d get down on my knees and not just ask/beg crawl for forgiveness, I’d actively work for it….i would get the message: What effin’ right do I have to treat another human being the way I did? What right to I have to lie to her, use her, manipulate her, toy with her, say how deeply I love her and then contradict that 4 days later because I was feeling resentful, petty, angry, ungrateful, entitled, bored?? What effing right would I have to act with such utter and completely callous disregard and license towards another human being?? Who the eff do I think that I am?? What effin excuse could I make for my bad behavior and con myself into believing?? What excuse could I make that wouldn’t just serve to warp and twist and malign myself and my soul even more? You talk a lot about guilt and shame, but ultimately it’s just talk, words, and so you aren’t really getting it—you’re not having a moment of clarity and conscience, a moment of real change and illumination, an out of body experience where you see yourself as you are and what you’ve done and planted for what it is.
You still *don’t* know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of your “love” and your actions. You just don’t get it!
And so all of this writing that you’re doing is all just an abstract exercise to make yourself feel better about what you’ve done, how you’ve acted, what you’re doing now. You’re not interested in the truth, in reality; you just want to feel less bad about what you’ve done, less guilty, less ashamed.
So tell me, Jen, how would you have felt had you come home 4 years ago and Tom had left you and taken the kids and left a “Gone with the wind” dvd on your pillow on your marital bed???
How would that have felt?
An empty house. A complete blindside.
How devastated would you feel? How hurt? How eviscerated?
And how “loved” would you feel?
And if a month or two later he wrote to you or posted on your blog about how much he loved you and how he hoped you would forgive him?
How would that feel? A little ripe, to say the least? What monster cajones that person would have! What a jumbo super-sized set of balls that person would have. The audacity.
And what if had he come back to you a month later: what would you have wanted and expected and thought he would do or ought to do?
Would you trust him again effortlessly?
Would you hope that he would be an upright person and do the right things to help repair the damage?
Jen, you have very good impression management skills. You’re very good at trying to manipulates others’ opinions of you. At trying to get them to sympathize with you so that you then can believe that what you did wasn’t heinous and unloving. You are very good at presenting yourself in a way that elicits sympathy from others—I mean, who can’t sympathize with what you’ve written, with what you’ve gone through?
But—but—where is that same way of looking at others and what *YOU* do to others and the wringers you put them through and how cavalierly and poorly you treat them and deceive them and beguile them?? Where is that?
Because it requires a conscience to see that.
A conscience does not allow us to play favorites with ourselves or benefit at another’s expense or not see our part in things. The more we have an active and healthy conscience and inner quality control expert, then the more we focus on always doing our best irrespective of our mood or how we feel.
Do you know what it means to care for and love another human being? Do you research that, read up on it, study it, take it upon yourself like a burden and a task and an apprenticeship? Do you write about it, think about it, reflect on it, contemplate it?–what type of person do I need to become, how do I need to act consistently, in order to love and care for another?
So how do you know I’m loving you right now, still, Jen? Because I’m telling you the truth; I’m not validating your lies or half-truths—the story you’re trying to tell yourself where you don’t look at what you have done and acknowledge it, and where you try to muddy things by focusing on the few times that I didn’t take your shit perfectly and I dared to stand up for myself and fight back.
Where’s your effin conscience??
You didn’t love me, you never have; you’ve used me as entertainment, as a mood-enhancer, as free room and board (yes, remember that exchange with Michael back in Sept? And remember not paying your fair share in April and May and instead using that money to clear up your credit score—using me to clear your name. Where’s your effin’ conscience, Jen?? Hmmm? Where??)
“I am not ashamed.
I am free.”
Only because you’re afraid to see yourself and reality for what it is. If I had done what you have done here and treated you the way you treated me, I would positively hate myself, loathe myself, feel so unbelievably ashamed.
I would feel so bad about myself and so much regret for what I had done to this other person. The last thing I would ever write would be something like: “I am not ashamed; I am free.”
If I were to write that, then I would know that I’m fucked. That was I no longer dealing with reality.
Namaste, Jen, from my soul to yours,
John
Jen then wrote to RezatoReality (and I don’t know where Jen’s comment disappeared to):
Thank you for all you have written here. I still Love despite all of this pain. I still Love myself. I still Love John.
And if we can define Loving another as John does above:
“I have loved another person very deeply—I let someone else very deep into my heart and soul and mind, I exposed myself, I allowed myself to be vulnerable—very vulnerable—I allowed myself to be hurt (a few times). And I believe I “lived the questions” very well in that relationship (much longer than most people would). I believe I went the extra mile two or three or four or five times for her—and these were some of the toughest miles I’ve ever had to go—I was bruised and battered and heartbroken.”
then, YES, YES – I have Loved. I Loved him – whether he thinks he was ever really Loved by me or not. I KNOW that I LOVED.
And of course, the ending of this relationship is never what I wanted or expected – but I also KNOW deeply that I have changed because of knowing him and mostly from discovering so much about myself through my encounter with him. And no one ever wants things to end, but things do end. I KNOW this. And sometimes they end in a hospital bed, and sometimes they end while you are standing in your living room, and sometimes they end while you are out at work. There is never truly an ending that is easy or pain-free.
And I just want to honor what he and I shared – and not let the way it ended define and re-write it all.
He loves this quote … “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.” – CS Lewis and it applies.
We LOVED each other deeply which is what makes this all the more painful. So to see him write that he has never been Loved is so confusing. Was he loved at 19 by a girl he dated for two weeks? Loved the way he describes here …. as in REALLY LOVED?
And even though I am not going to allow what he writes here to define my experience, it makes me sad. I don’t want to heal to scab over the pain or to push it out of my mind, I want to let this pain do its work on me.
I have learned, I have grown and I have LOVED. And although I am alone in the woods, taking everything moment by moment, I too still hope to one day LOVE this deeply and deeper still again.
“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
. . . . .
To which I responded:
It’s very easy and very realistic for me to recognize that what you gave to me and did to me was not love.
Love is as love does. The proof is our actions; not words. And your actions here, with Tom, Thomas, Michael, Stanley, are the behaviors of someone who has no idea what love is and isn’t. You think love is a feeling. It’s NOT! That’s self-indulgent, narcissistic, all about you. Real Love is about how you honor and care for and treat/act towards another human being. And in this relationship you have acted unloving–lying, stealing, deceiving, manipulating, exploiting, using. You haven’t taken on what’s worst in yourself, gone the extra mile, been honest, open, transparent; you haven’t invested of yourself; you haven’t taken responsibility for caring for and nurturing this relationship; you never took ownership of it. You were always just a troubled guest wandering in and out my life whenever it suited you. You weren’t playing for keeps, you playing for fun; you were trying me on constantly, like an accessory; you playing at love, playing house with me, playing at having a relationship, playing at being a partner. There was no sincerity or seriousness about it on your part. You treated this frivolously, capriciously, ungratefully, wantonly.
And there’s no love in that. You treated me and what we had like you treat most things in your life. You use and abuse and then discard them and move on.
That is your legacy; that is your pattern; that is who you are.
You don’t take responsibility, you don’t invest yourself, you don’t take ownership, you don’t tend to the baobobs or water the grass or till the soil. It’s all about the easiest side of the easy with you. Do as little as possible, give as little as possible, and take as much as you can, and then move on to somewhere else where the grass is greener and someone else has taken care of the grass. And then you will beat the heck out of that grass, neglect it; not love it and nurture it and be good to it, but use it and abuse it and then leave it for good while the grass is at work.
I may not get it. I do not know what it was like to be on the other end of this. I don’t know. I am trying to know. I am wrestling with it. I am thinking on these things that you say here. I am trying every bit of it on for size. But I am not going to say that I know because I don’t. A little humility might help you to admit that perhaps it is possible you do not know what it is like on my end either.
Maybe I am not fully able to step into your shoes and know. I try. I do try and step into your shoes and see it your way. And I have given you a lot of leeway too. I have consistently forgiven you for doing some and saying some absolutely horrific shit. I have given you a pass because I knew you were acting out of the worst in you. And you want to say you had to be pushed so hard to get there, but you got there, and I always let you back in. Bar maybe one or two nights when you would be knocking at my bedroom window for all hours. Nights maybe when you said you were out with your Aunt for dinner but you were really on a date with someone else. And I am not going to turn around and try to say you’re all bad—look at everything you did to me. I am just asking you to be fair too. I did shit. I left. I told you to get out of my life. I would tell you I never wanted to see you again. And you did things too. You slept with another woman who you met while we were broken up. You slept with her after we got back together though. And then you lied to me about it. Because you didn’t want to lose the traction we were gaining. Come on. You did damage too.
You are not me and we didn’t have the same childhood, or adolescence, or experiences at all. Not even close. Not in the same galaxy. And that has never really occurred to me before.
It all dawned on me tonight as I have sat here for the past many hours responding to your post line by line. And realizing how really very different you and I have interpreted and responded and reacted to what has gone on between us.
I went to CS Lewis’ essay on Morality and Psychoanalysis from Chapter 14 of Mere Christianity.
“The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.
When a person makes a choice—a moral or significant life choice—two things are involved.
One is the actual act of choosing.
The other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and which are the “raw material” of his choice.
Now this raw material may be of two kinds.
Either it may be what we would call normal: it may consist of the sorts of thoughts and feelings and impulses that are more or less common to all men.
Or else it may abnormal: it may consist of quite unnatural feelings and impulses and thought patterns due to things that have gone wrong in his upbringing or his subconscious.
What therapy endeavors to do is to remove the abnormal feelings, impulses, and thought patterns and reactions; that is, give the person better raw material for his acts of choice.
Bad raw psychological material is not a sin but is a disease or a deformity; it does not need to be repented of, but cured or healed.
If or when therapy heals or cures a person of his irrational, exaggerated fears and anxieties and aversion, and puts the person back into the position of having only the ordinary natural range of fears that any average person has, it is just then that the psychological issues are over and the moral problem begins—of subduing natural fears and urges and temptations by moral efforts in order to become a braver and better person.
Because however much you improve a person’s raw material, you have still got something else remaining: the real, free choice of the person on the material presented to him to either put his own advantage first, last, or on even regard with others.
And this free choice is the only thing that morality is concerned with.
And this is very important to understand.
Because human beings judge one another by their external actions.
God judges them by their moral choices.
For example, when a person who has been abused from his youth and taught that anger and cruelty are the right ways of responding, instead does some tiny kindness or refrains from some cruelty or lashing out and instead risks feeling vulnerable and defenseless, it is quite possible in God’s eyes that he has shown more courage than you or I if we had given up our very life for a friend.
It is well to put this another way.
Some of us who seem to be quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of our own good heredity and good fortune and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends.
Can we be quite certain of how we would have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit and bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler?
That is why Christians are told not to judge until they have accounted for and removed the wooden beam from their own eyes.
We see only the results which a person’s choices make out of his raw material.
But God does not judge a person on the raw material at all, only on what he has done with it.
Most of a person’s psychological make-up is probably due to his body. When his body dies, all of that will fall off of him, and the real central person, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will finally be revealed and stand naked and alone.
All sorts of nice things which we took to be part of ourselves, but were really just due to good digestion, good heredity, good upbringing, will fall off of us. And all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health or bad upbringing will fall off others.
We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he or she really was.
And there will be surprises.
People often mistakenly think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.”
But I do not think that that is the best way of looking at it.
I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before.
And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.
To be the one kind of creature is heaven: That is, it is joy, and peace, and knowledge, and power.
To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.
Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”
I am not trying to make a war with you. I am not trying to hurt you. And maybe the choices that come up for you in situations are far different than the ones that come up for me. I only think I am now beginning to face a moral issue because this has been psychological issue for me that has only come to light through this relationship and through knowing you.
I did things that I thought were fine and I would only feel terrible because you would get so angry and upset. And I would want to make it better, and I would try. But you and I are working with very different raw materials.
Maybe I keep making bad choices that seem like the best choices from what is available to me. I have to concede that it is very possible that is the case. But I am trying, I am here right now at 3:00am trying.
Trying to understand what you are saying, to hear, to see myself, to really, really understand so that I do not make the same mistake again. Because that will be the only amends that will ever count. And these are not just words to me, even though I have fallen short so many times.
“Why do we fall sir? So we may learn to pick ourselves up?” – Batman Begins
And perhaps you are misreading what I meant when I said that I was not ashamed; that I was free, because I meant it in the sense of being free from the burden of having to run and hide from this suffering and shame… and that in admitting my shame, I was no longer ashamed.
“There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere, and usually gets stronger. And there is the suffering you face directly, and in doing so become free.” – Ajahn Chah
Well maybe that is what I am doing. Looking at this from a distance. From the woods of NY. Letting my limbic system cool off and trying to get some real perspective. And trying to be compassionate towards you (and myself). Is it possible that you can admit that even though it pains you that I left, that perhaps this is what I needed to do?
And for the record, I have changed. And it is because of you. You have had a deep and dramatic and profound effect on me. But you seem to believe that I am not a better person because I am not there. I am not there because I am a better person and I do not want to live like this anymore.
I am not throwing anything in the scrap heap. Here I am, writing this to you – (even though I am way behind on my homework) – because this is much more essential.
And you think I am safe behind my walls. What walls? Because you’re there and I’m here. Perhaps this is the way for us to do the work we need to do. Does that mean that we cannot Love one another? Can you not Love me because I am here and you are there?
I have bared my soul here. And do you think for one second I do not feel the intense pain of all this? You know that is not true. Why do you write those things when we have sat on your sofa or in our bed and I have sobbed in your arms because I feel these things so deeply? I may go so far as to say that I feel things many times more deeply than other people (of course that is highly speculative, but I would take a gamble and say I’m right). Maybe I don’t feel your pain, and maybe you don’t feel mine??
As I sit here and contemplate all of this, I can honestly say that you are right. I never did fully bond to you. And yes that is because of me and my upbringing and my baggage. And I am sorry that I did not recognize that. And that I haven’t overcome it. And that you couldn’t get through my walls. And you may not have meant it and I am not trying to put it on you – as if I am abdicating responsibility – but your actions did not help. And yes it was my job to deal with my shit before I got into the relationship, but I didn’t even know about my shit until I met you and had it illuminated so unpleasantly. But I never felt safe enough to relax with you. And that is most likely my fault. I probably have a highly oversensitive amygdala, and that is not the thing to have when trying to tame a white bull. And this has been ugly.
And my head and my heart need(ed) a break.
“To love without knowing how to love, wounds the person we love.” – Thích Nhất Hạnh
“I am a passionate seeker after truth which is but another name for God.” – Gandhi
“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs. What does a life of total dedication to the truth and reality mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination…. To know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner.” – M. Scott Peck
“Only the best in us talks about the worst in us, because the worst in us lies about itself and its own existence.” – David Schnarch
“But I never felt safe enough to relax with you. And that is most likely my fault.”
Feelings aren’t facts, Jen; sometimes you have to act differently from the way you are feeling in order to change your feelings. That’s where thinking, discernment, real Love come in; they allow you to examine yourself and your feelings and to make a wise decision—to either act on them or act against them.
You should have relaxed with me; I am a very good and loving human being; you happened upon a truly decent and loving man when you met me. You were safe with me (so long as you didn’t totally kick the shit out of me emotionally; which you did do on several occasions.)
“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh
“And trying to be compassionate towards you (and myself). Is it possible that you can admit that even though it pains you that I left, that perhaps this is what I needed to do?”
Sure, I can consider that possibility. But can you consider the opposite? is it possible for you to admit that what you said/wrote there is complete bullshit and doesn’t stem from what’s best in you but from what’s worst in you? Can you consider that? Can you consider that what you said/wrote above is a rationalization and part of a deeply embedded pattern you have—something you have acted out on again and again, not only with me, but with Tom and Stanley as well—that you might have said much the same thing to them as you just said/wrote to me?
It’s not all about you, Jen; when you love someone it’s not all about you; it’s about them as well, and it’s about truth, goodness, taking care of and being good to another in addition to oneself, it’s about having a sense of responsibility and ownership/stewardship; it’s not about your benefit at my and or other’s expense.
And there are many ways to cool off your limbic system that don’t sow future pain for yourself and those you claim to love. There are many ways of cooling off your limbic system other than breaking up a family and partnership again and again.
Think about it.
“As I sit here and contemplate all of this, I can honestly say that you are right. I never did fully bond to you. And yes that is because of me and my upbringing and my baggage. And I am sorry that I did not recognize that. And that I haven’t overcome it. And that you couldn’t get through my walls. And you may not have meant it and I am not trying to put it on you – as if I am abdicating responsibility – but your actions did not help.”
But that is the effect of what you are saying—you are letting yourself off the hook. Whatever I did that was bad or hurtful to you was in the face of you hurting me and doing cruel and cold things to me again and again—and you still refuse to see that, Jen. You are refusing to see that.
Think about it, Jen . . . if I was acting out on my past and dumping my shit, my baggage, on you, mistreating you, using and abusing you emotionally, fucking with your heart and your affections, saying one thing and doing another, opening myself way up to you and then pushing you away, telling you all of these wonderful things about you that you longed to hear and how much I loved you and how I was going to love you like you deserved to be loved, and then with little explanation or provocation I would push you away, turn ice cold on you, talk about how I wasn’t happy here with you anymore and that I wanted to move to Ecuador with the kids—if I had done all of this and more—because this is just the tip of the iceberg—and then I were to say/write to you, “Jen, you’re right, I never did fully bond to you; you never really were real to me; and it’s because of my upbringing and my baggage—that’s why I did all of those deeply hurtful things to you. But, Jen, when you fought back, when you kept some options open for yourself because you couldn’t depend on me to really be back whenever I came back because every other time I came back I eventually left you or broke it off with you—whenever you did those things, your actions didn’t help”—that would come across as a bit thin, wouldn’t it, Jen? It would be a half-assed apology and a half-assed realization that I was having. I would still be cutting corners, I would still be deceiving myself, I would still be playing fast and loose with reality and the truth, I would still be trying to spare myself some expense (some guilt, some shame) emotionally.
If I had treated you the way you have and had treated me, and I really got it, I really realized it, the only things I would say to you would be, OH MY GOD, I am soooooooooooooooooo sorry, I have been such a shit to you. I did so many mean and cruel and cold things to you; I kicked the shit out of you emotionally, I used you, I fucked with you, I did so much damage. And you still took me back all of those times??? Why? And you only fought back those few times? You’re an effing saint! You must really love me. You must really deeply care about me and the kids. I hit the lottery when I found you. I am such a sod. Why did I do this to you?!
A light bulb would go on over my head—a giant million watt light bulb—the scales would fall from my eyes, and I would say something like whereas once I was blind, now I see—I see myself now finally in the same way I look at distant things, as only one thing among many, and I feel my heart being healed. I no longer see myself with bias, blinders, as a child sees oneself; I see myself the way a real adult sees oneself—objectively, fairly, honestly, courageously.
“Love seeks one thing only—the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. To love another is to will what is really good for him or her. And such love must be based on truth. A love that sees no distinction between good and evil, but loves blindly and merely for the sake of loving (or of a feeling), is hatred, rather than love. To love blindly in this way is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of our own heart and soul. Love cannot be love unless it seeks the good of the one loved. But since (blind) love cares nothing for the truth and never considers that it may go astray, it proves itself to be selfish and self-indulgent. It is not interested in the truth, but only in itself. It proclaims itself content with the exercise of love for its own sake, without any consideration of the good or bad effects of loving. It is clear, then, that to love others well we must first love the truth.” – Thomas Merton, “No Man Is an Island,” pp. 5-6 (my abridgment).
“To love without knowing how to love, wounds the person we love.” – Thích Nhất Hạnh
“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs. What does a life of total dedication to the truth and reality mean? It means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination…. To know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner.” – M. Scott Peck
“I am a passionate seeker after truth which is but another name for God.” – Gandhi
“Can you not Love me because I am here and you are there?”
What do you think I’m doing, Jen? Venting? Venting for my own benefit? . . .
Think about it.
How do you know I’m telling you the truth? Because you won’t like what you hear and because when you look at yourself in the mirror and you’re trying all of this on, it will sting in the way that truth so often does. There is no easy or painless way of opening our eyes. It’s a painful process, which is why so few people do it. If it were easy, everyone would do it. But it’s not easy. Or painless. It’s the single most difficult thing for anyone to do—to see themselves as they are; see through their own bullshit and self-deception and bias and layer upon layer of neurosis. It—learning to see ourselves like this—is the hero’s journey. And it’s the only journey worth taking.
“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self.” – Thomas Merton
Stay in the Spiritual Fire
Let it cook you
Be a fully-baked loaf
And lord of the table.
You’ve been a source of pain,
Now you’ll be a source of delight.
– Rumi
The only thing I’m interested in is helping your conscience, Jen, your conscience—that’s what will ultimately allow you to escape from the prison you’re in and that you keep making for yourself.
Namaste my darling,
John
Wow! Bravo, take a bow. Standing ovation. And the crowd goes wild. You almost had me on that one, JB. I got to the end of that and I really thought I was terrible. And that little stroke, that little my darling … I am only doing this because I love you. Are you deliberately this manipulative? Fantastic use of alternating kindness and threat to produce disequilibrium. You talk about the blank look I would get and how I would go numb and check out and want to leave …. I believe it is called battering fatigue.
But one or two or ten little problems with your explanation here … the first is that behavior is a function of both a person’s personality and her situation. But people always seem to attribute cause to a person’s personality, not the constraints of the environment. It’s called the fundamental attribution error. When we are playing the role of observer, which is largely when we look at others, we make this fundamental attribution error. When we are thinking about ourselves, however, we will tend to make situational attributions.
You say to me “But that is the effect of what you are saying—you are letting yourself off the hook. Whatever I did that was bad or hurtful to you was in the face of you hurting me and doing cruel and cold things to me again and again—and you still refuse to see that, Jen. You are refusing to see that.”
That is exactly what you are doing. You are excusing your behavior on the basis of the situation and trying to condemn my actions by affirming the consequent. Peppered gingerly with ad hominem assaults.
You are trying to make the case that because I have had rocky relationships with Tom and Stanley, it must be because I have a “deeply embedded pattern” (of what you do not define very clearly).
I was 17 when I dated Stanley. And we lived an hour away from each other. And he was 24. And I didn’t have a job or money or means to go and visit him. And I was a silly kid. I cheated on him, he cheated on me. We eventually broke up. Before I was even 20 years old. Personality or context? Deeply embedded pattern or normal adolescent relationship?
And as for Tom – we got married when I was 21 years old!! Had a baby at 22. Bought a house at 23. Had another baby at 24. And all the while I was the only one working and bringing in any income. And yes – that relationship was rocky as hell – a god damned rollercoaster in fact. Personality or context? Deeply embedded pattern or immature kids in a grown up situation with really bad coping skills and poor role models?
I notice you left Thomas and Michael out of this latest round. But I think it goes without saying that I can clearly delineate how context in both of those relationships was a major factor in the turmoil. And for the record, I am still friends with all my exes. Tom and I are fixing up a car together right now and Michael is coming to visit with me and the kids next month.
And if you would like to go through your relationships we can do that too. But you have a very strong tendency to blame your previous partners for some lack of principles, character, intellectual prowess or as suffering from some form of neuroticism. Because they all eventually leave you. One has a restraining order against you. Another does not speak to you at all. And the third – who is supposedly your best friend – hasn’t called you once in the past how many months?? That is your pattern. Or is it their pattern? The pattern of the Lilliputians who are all too weak and wounded for the Giant that you are??
Given a powerful and engaging situation, people often react to it in a uniformly similar fashion, regardless of personality differences. Isn’t that what the Freud quote you shared above was all about (the one about hunger). And despite the differences between these other women and myself – we all seem to have acted uniformly in reaction to you. And these are just the ones who have hung around for more than one or two dates.
You write to me that “sometimes you have to act differently from the way you are feeling in order to change your feelings. That’s where thinking, discernment, real Love come in; they allow you to examine yourself and your feelings and to make a wise decision—to either act on them or act against them.”
Oh, the old “feelings aren’t facts”. No, feelings aren’t facts and facts aren’t feelings but both have important information and so I tend to consult both. And based on the ”facts” that you very logically laid out, I acted against my feelings many times. Every time I came back!! I looked past what you had done or said and tried to see deeper and consider the context and so forth and then change my feelings accordingly.
Because your slick talking sophistry is very convincing!! Like in the above statement where you pair “changing one’s feelings” with “thinking, discernment, and real Love”. Quite clever. Oh, I get it … if I want to really Love someone than I better disregard my hurt feelings over him spending this weekend with Megan because the fact is that he didn’t know if I was really going to move back to Ohio, when he decided to take up with her. And even though he had been convincing me that the only way to ever make amends for not staying with him at Christmas while his Mom was dying (which was the first Christmas without my husband and my children’s father) was to move to Ohio. And I was not full steam ahead on board with doing that. Oh, how uncommitted I was. How wishy-washy I am?
Clearly my thinking and discernment are impaired because I “felt” hurt that at being called a 2 year old brain dead retard, when the FACT was that you had only said I “argued” like a 2 year old brain dead retard. And as such I should not be offended.
And you do it again later when you give me the list of things a “real adult” would do and how a “real adult” would act. Very slick indeed. Oh so if I want to be a “real adult” I better get down on my knees and beg and grovel and ask for your forgiveness. Where do I sign up?
And you say to me “How do you know I’m telling you the truth? Because you won’t like what you hear and because when you look at yourself in the mirror and you’re trying all of this on, it will sting in the way that truth so often does. There is no easy or painless way of opening our eyes. It’s a painful process, which is why so few people do it. It’s the single most difficult thing for anyone to do—to see themselves as they are; see through their own bullshit and self-deception and bias and layer upon layer of neurosis.”
Is that why you don’t do it JB? You haven’t considered one thing I have said in any of these responses. You have a well prepared defense for everything. You have some very “deeply embedded patterns”. You have been on the same soapbox since 1997. I know, I know since you had your spiritual awakening. Your figure ground reversal. Your metanoia.
“Yes, your “appreciation of yourself” blinds you. It is the biggest obstacle to a new life. You must be able to get over this obstacle, this threshold, before going further. This test divides men into two kinds: the “wheat” and the “chaff.” No matter how intelligent, how gifted, how brilliant a man may be, if he does not change his appreciation of himself, there will be no hope for an inner development, for a work toward self-knowledge, for a true becoming. He will remain such as he is all his life. The first requirement, the first condition, the first test for one who wishes to work on himself is to change his appreciation of himself. He must not imagine, not simply believe or think, but see things in himself which he has never seen before, see them actually. His appreciation will never be able to change as long as he sees nothing in himself. And in order to see, he must learn to see; this is the first initiation of man into self-knowledge.
We think too highly of ourselves. We do not respect ourselves. In order to respect myself, I have to recognize a part in myself which is above the other parts, and my attitude toward this part should bear witness to the respect that I have for it. In this way I shall respect myself. And my relations with others will be governed by the same respect.
Try for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life. That this lying rules you to such an extent that you cannot control it any more. You are the prey of lying. You lie, everywhere. Your relations with others—lies. The upbringing you give, the conventions—lies. Your teaching—lies. Your theories, your art—lies. Your social life, your family life—lies. And what you think of yourself—lies also.
But you never stop yourself in what you are doing or in what you are saying because you believe in yourself. You must stop inwardly and observe. Observe without preconceptions, accepting for a time this idea of lying. And if you observe in this way, paying with yourself, without self-pity, giving up all your supposed riches for a moment of reality, perhaps you will suddenly see something you have never before seen in yourself until this day. You will see that you are different from what you think you are.”
– My abridgment of First Initiation by Jeanne de Salzmann
You are just straight up abusive. You say “You should have relaxed with me; I am a very good and loving human being; you happened upon a truly decent and loving man when you met me. You were safe with me (so long as you didn’t totally kick the shit out of me emotionally; which you did do on several occasions.)”
So I guess I was “kicking the shit out of you emotionally” when I wouldn’t give you my email password and you put your fist through my laptop and broke your hand? Uh huh. I know, I know I am supposed to be transparent and I behaved my way into that consequence. That was one of the 7 or 8 times to my 100 or 200 that I pushed you into reacting, right?
Yes, it’s my fault. It’s all my fault. Help me John to escape from the prison I’m in. Only you can help me to become a “real adult” and to learn to think and be discerning and to REALLY LOVE.
Ah, welcome back, there’s the angry woman I know so well—the one who lies and plays fast and loose with the facts. Very nice to see you again.
“You talk about the blank look I would get and how I would go numb and check out and want to leave …. I believe it is called battering fatigue.”
Yes, you told me you did that throughout your marriage with Tom, and that you did it with Michael as well. Yes, a pattern, Jen.
“So I guess I was “kicking the shit out of you emotionally” when I wouldn’t give you my email password and you put your fist through my laptop and broke your hand?”
Yes, Jen, you were. You won’t talk about all of the things that *you* did in the 2 weeks preceding that. You have to ignore 95% of reality—95% of what you said and did—in order to write what you wrote above and actually believe it and think that you are actually making a case for me being a bad guy and abusive and a bully and you being an innocent victim.
You’re lying, Jen, to yourself, to me, to the world, through all of what you’re omitting—which is A LOT—you are omitting so many relevant facts, so many relevant things that you said and did
I wonder if you even remember those things?
Do you?
Do you have any idea of what you actually do and say? You seem to have total recall when it comes to what others say and do and write, but what about in regards to yourself and what Jennifer says and does and writes? Does any of that matter? From the excerpt above, it doesn’t seem to matter—as if there’s nothing you could have done or said that would warrant someone getting so angry that he put his fist through your laptop—that there is absolutely no justification possible for it. Ever. Period.
So do you have any idea, any recall of the two to three weeks, even the month, preceding my putting my fist through your laptop?
Do you remember giving your word? Do you remember the agreement *you* offered and made?
Yes, you also told me you could not be trusted. But you gave me your passwords, you wanted to; that was your way of trying to rebuild trust and establish some transparency. You spoke about how you are just like your grandma and hide yourself when you’re in a relationship and how you didn’t want to live like her. Do you remember that? You wanted to “try” to be transparent and open. But then you changed your passwords, started playing your games again, hiding parts of yourself. Of course, you’ll say that I cause that. That it was because you also went onto my computer, read my emails, saw who I had been talking to over that summer after you had left me and the other times you had bailed on me, broken up with me, etc. And you got hurt by what you saw and read. You felt replaceable (you’re not). How dare I try to move on! How dare I try to get over you! Meanwhile, you had run back to NY again and had taken up with Tom, the car fixer-upper, the guy who is an alcoholic, can’t think straight to save his life, can’t hold a job, breaks his fist on his car in front of his wife, has three drunk driving arrests, has done time in jail. (I love that he’s now the next stand in daddy figure for the kids; great choice). And . . . . drum roll please, you slept with him? You make another go of it with him because you’re lonely and he’s available. Bravo, talk about a great choice.
And never mind the email exchange you had with Michael during that time (early Sept). Talk about using someone and being an exploiter.
Again, Jen, you don’t get it. You don’t see how fast and loose you play with reality, how when you tell your stories and do your abridgments, you leave out the relevant details—the stuff that you did—and you focus on the stuff that I did that was bad or over the top or hurtful to you—but you sanitize the narrative of all that you did and said. Yyou lie by omission, Jen, you lie by distortion. Such is your inner life. Such is how much the truth hurts you. You quote de Salzmann—some pretty powerful stuff—but you refuse to see the obvious—that she’s talking about you. I know what happened—I lived through it—both what I did and all that you did that preceded it. I am a very fair narrator. You?—not so much—you lie—to yourself, to the world—you don’t seem to be able to handle the truth, Jen, you don’t seem to be able to face reality—the reality of who you are, what you say, what you, all of the bad and manipulative and dishonest and deceitful things you say and do in a relationship. You want it all excused—truncated—edited out—excused from the record—because you were abused, because you had a tremendously tough go of it, because you have PTSD, BPD, AsPD, et cetera. . . .
“Try for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life. That this lying rules you to such an extent that you cannot control it any more. You are the prey of lying. You lie, everywhere. Your relations with others—lies. The upbringing you give, the conventions—lies. Your teaching—lies. Your theories, your art—lies. Your social life, your family life—lies. And what you think of yourself—lies also.
But you never stop yourself in what you are doing or in what you are saying because you believe in yourself. You must stop inwardly and observe. Observe without preconceptions, accepting for a time this idea of lying. And if you observe in this way, paying with yourself, without self-pity, giving up all your supposed riches for a moment of reality, perhaps you will suddenly see something you have never before seen in yourself until this day. You will see that you are different from what you think you are.”
How would you even know if this applies to you or not, Jen? What is the truth, Jen? You clearly didn’t write about it in your last comment. You truncated your part and again focused on what I did—the last event in a long chain of events—and you neglect, ignore, refuse to see all the things that you did prior to that. You really have no idea.
“if I want to really Love someone than I better disregard my hurt feelings over him spending this weekend with Megan because the fact is that he didn’t know if I was really going to move back to Ohio, when he decided to take up with her. And even though he had been convincing me that the only way to ever make amends for not staying with him at Christmas while his Mom was dying (which was the first Christmas without my husband and my children’s father) was to move to Ohio. And I was not full steam ahead on board with doing that. Oh, how uncommitted I was. How wishy-washy I am?”
Uhm, apparently you are going to be quite content to ignore everything you wrote and said to me. That’s the only way this very slanted and truncated and selective version of the facts you present here might even possibly fly.
Again, you have to ignore 95% of reality—95% of what you said and did—in order to write what you wrote above and actually believe it and think that you are actually making a case for me being a bad guy and you being an innocent victim.
I’m not going to list detail by detail, blow by blow everything you did that precede what happened. You have to see it for yourself. I know what I did, I know what preceded it, I know what my intentions always were and still are with you. I saw what you did very clearly. I didn’t come into this relationship trying to be anything but good—but my best—to you and the kids. That was always my intention and still is. But you have never had that same intention towards me. You never wanted to be your best, do your best. You self-protected at the first sign of trouble—or the first imagining of it. Me? I self-protected after about the 50th sign of trouble, after you had lied and effed with me and kicked me in the heart again and again and again.
And the fact that you can’t even admit that possibility—that you can’t even consider it—that you can’t even consider the possibility that you have to abridge 95% of what you have said and done to even write a comment like your last one and try to paint me in a bad light and yourself in a sympathetic light, should tell you something. It should tell you something about your grasp of the facts—your willingness to grasp the facts, to be honest, to really look at yourself. . . .
Try for a moment to accept the idea that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life. That this lying rules you to such an extent that you cannot control it any more. You are the prey of lying. You lie, everywhere. Your relations with others—lies. The account of your upbringing that you give—lies. Your teaching—lies. Your theories, your art—lies. Your social life, your family life—lies. And what you think of yourself—lies also.
But you never stop yourself in what you are doing or in what you are saying because you believe in yourself. You never doubt or suspect yourself. You must stop inwardly and observe. Observe without preconceptions, accepting for a time this idea of lying. And if you observe in this way, paying with yourself, without self-pity, giving up all your supposed riches for a moment of reality, perhaps you will suddenly see something you have never before seen in yourself until this day. You will see that you are different from what you think you are. You will see that you are two. One who is not, but takes the place and plays the role of the other. And one who is, yet so weak, so insubstantial, that he no sooner appears than he immediately disappears. He cannot endure lies. The least lie makes him faint away. He does not struggle, he does not resist, he is defeated in advance. Learn to look until you have seen the difference between your two natures, until you have seen the lies, the deception in yourself. When you have seen your two natures, that day, in yourself, the truth will be born. And *YOU* will finally be born.
In order to see oneself in this way, one must first *learn* to see.
This is the first initiation into genuine self-knowledge.
In order to see ourselves realistically, we must see all the ways in which we habitually over-estimate and over-appreciate and dupe ourselves.
But you will see that to do this is not easy. It is not cheap. You must pay dearly for this.
For bad payers, for lazy people, for parasites, there is no hope.
You must pay, pay a lot, pay immediately, and pay in advance. You must pay with yourself; you must pay emotionally up front; you must pay with sincere, honest, conscientious, disinterested efforts.
And the more you are willing and prepared to pay without economizing, without cutting corners, without cheating, without falsifications, the more you will receive.
Because from that moment on you will become acquainted with your nature. You will begin seeing all of the tricks, all the dishonesties that your nature resorts to in order to avoid paying with real cash, real effort, real expenditure, real sacrifice, real cost to oneself. Because up till now, you like to cheat, you like to cut corners; you like to try and pay with your readymade theories, your stories, your convenient beliefs, your prejudices and conventions, your “I like” and “I don’t like”; you like to bargain, pretend, offer counterfeit money.
Objective thought is a look from Above. A look that is free, that can see. Without this look upon me, seeing myself in this way, my life is the life of a blind person who goes her own way, driven by impulse, not knowing either why or how. Without this look upon me, I cannot know that I exist.
I have within me the power to rise above myself and to see myself freely—and to be seen. My thinking has the power to be free. (http://fullcatastropheliving.wordpress.com/category/jeanne-de-salzmann/)
Jen, you muddied the waters in your last email by editing out 95% of what you said and did that was relevant. Talk about taking something out of context, or not giving it the context it deserved. You definitely demonstrated that. That’s what I mean when I say that you tend to play fast and loose with reality, with the facts—you focus on what the other did—that’s your post hoc justification—and you ignore everything that you did that was relevant or germane before.
What you seem to be saying/demonstrating, Jen, is that in times of anger and extreme emotion, having a conscience and being honest are optional. That angers gives you license to be dishonest, that anger gives you license to ignore your own relevant preceding behaviors and to instead be a dishonest/unreliable narrator and give a very false account of what happened, the events that transpired.
Go back to the beginning—go back to Nov. & Dec. of 2009 and Jan and Feb of 2010 and talk about what really happened. Talk as honestly as you can about what you *said* and did and why you said and did it, and spare yourself no expense; and also talk as honestly as you can about what I said and did and why, and spare me no expense either (not that you would
Let’s see if we can start there.
Namaste, Jen, namaste as always,
John
And you are correct, Megan, Anna, Heather, Jenell all treat me as if I’m dead. Why? Because of me? Because of something I did, something I said? Should I take it personally? Should I take their banishment, their ostricizing, personally, as proof of my badness, arrogance, asshole-ishness? Or should I soften myself to keep a woman around who maybe isn’t really a woman but is more of an emotional child in an adult body and who is just going to bail out anyway when the going gets tough? Is that what I should do? Should I stop dreaming that there is a woman someone out there who has her shit together enough to deal with reality and who is actually be attracted to me and finds me interesting and can actually face reality in the eye and so therefore she won’t be intimidated or frightened by lil’ ol’ me and my possible depth, passion, and intensity? Should I lower my standards, give up, run away? Should I play small? Should I shrink so that you and others won’t feel insecure around me?
What should I do? Accept the world’s verdict? Dummy myself down? What should I do in world that is constantly trying to change me? Should I listen to the world? Should I listen to majority’s opinion even though it seems wrong? Should I listen to Emerson?—“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” Should I look at myself and see if I am indeed crooked, if what I stand for is wrong, if I do put principles ahead of people—and if/is doing that wrong?
And you’re right, Jen. Everyone leaves me. Even that asshole that Jack Nicholson played in “As Good As it Gets” apparently found love. Even serial killers on death row find love. But not me. No sirree, Bobby. (The self-loathing is strong in me this morning, apparently.) If I died, no one would know about it for weeks. And you wouldn’t show up to my funeral. Maybe only other Jen would. And what would she say–that she’s been changed for the better for having known me? I doubt it. You’re right, Jen, I don’t have any friends. I try to be friendly, to be a friend; I’d really like to meet people/someone who likes to talk about life, love, philosophy, poetry, psychology, whose soul thrills to these topics as much as my own does. I’m like Dell Griffith—an asshole version of him—Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsey without the wealth and dashing good looks and the possibility of making someone into a star. I’m obscure, off the beaten path; an invisible man basically. No one who really truly cares about me, who I am, how I’m doing. No one asks. You don’t care—except superficially and from a distance. If you cared you’d be here, plain and simple; but you care more about yourself and all of the fears and randomness you have in your head. You have no idea what’s in my heart for you, how much I care about you and the kids and only want the best for all of you—and, yes, I selfishly and arrogantly and self-righteously think/thought that was me. So does that implicate me? Does all of that make me the asshole? I am therefore a confirmed jerk, the one at fault, in all of this?—I am why people leave me. It has nothing to do with them; it’s all me. Is that how I should look at it?
Maybe. I do have to consider it—simultaneously examine the examiner and those around me.
Even though you’ve looked into my eyes and heart and told me it wasn’t me, it wasn’t my fault. At one time you believed this, but now you don’t. In Jan you read through all of those emails from Megan and Anna and Heather, et cetera, and you saw them quite differently than you’re seeing them–and me–now. Now, you are angry as hell with me, and so you are content to join in the turning away. But you have to see me in this way in order to justify what you’re doing to me, to us–what you’ve done. In inexcusable–but not if I’m an asshole and all of these other brave and mature women were right about me. So now you’re standing with them. You need to believe that I’m an asshole in order to do what you’re doing. Otherwise, you’d have to admit that maybe you were wrong, maybe you are acting without love, without conscience, from what’s wounded in you. You’d have to really look at yourself, question yourself, see yourself differently, admit that you did some very bad things to me, hurt me badly, again and again, and without me “deserving it.” But you won’t let yourself see yourself in that way; your conscience is silent; there’s too much noise, too much commotion; you can’t hear it.
So should I take your actions now as your last words on this—your final verdict on me?—I, Johnny K, am an asshole. That’s the world’s verdict, including yours, Jen. I’m easier—much easier—to live without than to live with. That’s what the world says. So I should stop being myself. Stop focusing on truth, reality, love, goodness, conscience, nobility of the soul, and I should start talking about fun and comforting things like fairies, vampires, woodland creatures, unicorns, reinvent myself as a much more tenderhearted hearts & flowers yoga guru, love and light, Jen, love and light!
Yes, that’s what the world needs more of—another nambypamby avoidant escapist. Where do I sign up?
And you’re right about other Jen, my supposed best friend. I haven’t heard from her aside from a few perfunctory txt messages. —And I remember when she and I met how upset she was with her previous boyfriend because after they broke up, he would hardly give her the time of day. Funny, how things change—funny how now she’s doing to me what she didn’t like done unto her.
People are like that. Still you try to love them anyway—be honest, good to them, kind when you can, truthful, understanding, forbearing. And I fail at this all the time. I do get angry sometimes—I don’t think I get angry very often, but according to you, I apparently am about to loose it constantly! Of course, you’re not exactly the truest mirror or giver of feedback; you seem to hit on the truth when you’re being honest with yourself and open; but not when you’re being angry and ungrateful and resentful. You’re not seeing your part in all of this, you’re not even trying to; you’re not writing emails/comments like this where you even attempt to see both sides. You see me as angry when you’re angry, and so that may well be projection more than fact. But I’m just spit-balling things here; work with me.
And so am I hurt by all of the real abandonment I have experienced? Of course I am. Deeply hurt. I can’t believe the world is like this. I can’t believe that so many people I meet are like this. I don’t want to go through it/this again. But what’s the alternative? Give up? See the above blog entry, read Lewis’s words. Love anything or anyone and they will either die, betray you, run on you, fail you in some way. It’s inevitable. So do I still dream of a world where people are—or where at least one woman is—just a bit more resilient, stronger, more honest, leading more examined lives, and able to stay in the foundry? Of course I do. There’s a lid for every pot. Even serial killers and death row inmates can find love, why not me? Am I really that bad???
I am such a dreamer as well as a realist.
And I also know who and what I’m dealing with. Apathy is a solution. Most people live in the shallows. You say it all the time. I’m sure you’ll figure that out again in the coming weeks and months. Who reads “The Road Less Traveled” “The Denial of Death” “The Art of Loving” “Passionate Marriage” any more and really buys into that tougher-minded approach to life? I read to know I’m not alone. I read in part to become a better person, to grow, to learn, to deepen, to ripen. I’m a dinosaur, a man out of time. Really, I am. That is the world’s message to me. And, okay, world, I got it, loud and clear! But you know what, I still refuse to read what other people read—Hunger Games, 50 Shades of Grey. Twilight, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; I refuse to waste my time and my life reading inane books when there are much more deserving and insightful books to read. Life is too short to dissipate it on frivolous books.
So maybe I haven’t got the message at all.
We are what we read. I read assholes, so therefore I am a confirmed asshole. Most people read Stephen King or Dragon Tattoo or Twilight—most people read for escape—and so they become escapist. They don’t read in order to become better able to deal with life, death, reality, truth; they read to numb and distract themselves from these things. They can handle the tannins of red wine, but not me. Ironic. As for me, I read the tough-minded stuff because it’s full of truth, wisdom, insight, reality. And it makes me a better person, a better friend. You may think that I am the biggest asshole right now, but I guarantee you when the shit goes down in your life, when you’re experiencing an actual loss or catastrophe, you are going to want me by your side. I WILL understand, I WILL be able to feel your pain then, I would be a rock for you through all of that. Then you will know in no uncertain terms what I’m made of, what I stand for, what I believe in. And you already know this. You already know how I have looked after you when you were sick, hurt, sprained your ankle. You already know how well I take care of you and try to; how deeply I love you. And my mom knew this as well–what I was made of, how understanding I am, how truly compassionate, how deep and stable and durable I am. She got it. I went through her cancer with her, every step of the way, listening to her, fighting for her, trying to get her into a clinical trial when red tape was preventing it, asking the right questions, the tough questions, of her doctors, being an advocate for her. And I was still soft, holding my mom, holding her hand, sitting gently beside in the various and numerous waiting rooms. And in late May of ’09, when the test results came back that showed that the cancer (metastatic melanoma) had exploded in her like a grenade—new tumors everywhere—I was the one who got the results, talked to the doctors, tried to find out what possibilities/options were remaining. Then I took the afternoon off of work, went to my mom’s house to meet my mom after work, held her in my arms and tried to give her the bad news as compassionately as possible: “Mom, I love you, I want to talk to you about the test results.” “What is it John? Is it bad!?” Mom, I love you. They aren’t going to operate. They did find some new tumors.” “How many, John!?!?! More than 10!???” Pause, “Yes, Mom.” “More than 20?” “Something like that.” “Is this one on the back of my head?” “It is, but it’s on the outside of your skull, it’s not in the brain, so that is a good thing.” “Am I dying?” “I don’t know mom. We’re going to see the doctor tomorrow and we’ll talk options over with him, but he’s likely going to recommend chemo.” I already knew what the odds were—not good. When melanoma metastasizes most people (over 95%) are dead within a year. But baby steps—this was my mom and her own mortality—this wasn’t abstract, this was actual—the thing for which all else in life is merely either preparation for or a distraction from. So baby steps. And so I sat there with her on her couch (the futon couch in what I now call Ryan’s room) and held her for the next hour and answered questions. And I did all of this on my own while my sister and brother and aunt were basically living in denial, thinking their positive thoughts, hoping for the best, or just plain not getting it. (Yes,my aunt visited a lot, cooked meals, helped take my mom to some appts, but my aunt was living in denial, being optimistic.) Well I got it. I did the research. And I got it because I had learned to start looking reality square in the eye 15 years ago—yes, my metanoia—that period when my mind kicked things into a much higher gear and started working properly and I started running with the likes of Fromm, Peck, Rilke, Nietzsche—my soul mates—yes, where there’s not much real give and take (thanks, Good Will hunting, for that reminder!)
And so I was able to stay up with my mom most of the night many nights the last 10 days of her life. Sometimes I fell asleep on the floor in her room, sometimes in a chair by her bed. But I would sit beside her, listening to her, telling her she was the best mom in the world, thanking her for being my mommy, telling her that I loved, all the while trying to wrap my little mind around the idea that in a few days she would no longer be there for me. There would be that clean break—BC and AD—life before my mom died, and life after she died.
So clearly I’m an asshole.
And you want to talk about Megan?—When her Grandma died I knew what she was going through—the panic attacks, the anxiety, the fear of even leaving her own condo for fear of a panic attack. I got that. And you didn’t understand why I could just “dump” her and break off my relationship again with her. No way. I would never have forgiven myself for leaving another human being when she was in a situation like that. Even if it meant losing you. I had hoped you would get it, understand why I was doing what I was doing. She’s a human being. I don’t use people. (Do you remember that scene in “A Time to Kill” where Ashley Judd’s character finally “gets it” after she’s been so tough on her husband and so un-understanding about why he is so consumed by the case he’s on—she finally gets it. That is what I have always wanted—not just that scene at the end of “As Good As it Gets,” but that scene in “A Time to Kill” as well as the end of “Dead Man Walking” and “Fearless” (w/Jeff Bridges) and “Phenomenon.” Yes, I want a lot. You said you did to. And you were right about that. But in a way I could never expect or anticipate.)
You think I’m an asshole. Okay, that’s now and you’re angry as hell with me now. Maybe you’re seeing me very clearly now; or maybe you’re seeing me in the way you need to see me in order to justify what you’re doing and what you’ve done.
Most of the people I read and run with intellectually haven’t had a lot of positive things to say about we humans as a whole. Jesus first and foremost; he was very tough-minded at times, boy o boy did he skewer mankind—or at least certain parts of mankind. And Aristotle? He recognized that most people are not capable of genuine friendship—of really getting over themselves and being there for another—because friendship is a function or fruit of trying to lead a virtuous life—one dedicated to conscience, truth, principle, courage, wisdom, self-overcoming, honesty, uprightness. Perhaps I am no better. Perhaps I am not as virtuous and dedicated to goodness as I would like to think.
Anyways, the list goes on—Rilke, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Merton, Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr, Thoreau, Emerson, Kierkeagaard, Hammarskjold, Schopenhauer, Krishnamurti, Rumi, Machiavelli, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, if you read between the lines—and in some cases you don’t need to—their view of human nature isn’t a rosy one. They see us for what we are. And in part because I have understood them—and in part because of what I have lived through and experienced—I also can see us for what we are—the good, the bad, the ugly. It’s why I’m quite disposable, expendable, easier to live without than to live with for the vast majority.
So you made your point. I’m an asshole and need to change quickly if I don’t want to die alone and unloved.
Namaste, as alaways, Jen,
John
You know when you are displaying your jadedness in all its magnificence and raw white-bull power it’s pretty sexy, intense and invigorating. So no, do not change. And I never asked you to. You knew that this was what I LOVED and still LOVE about you. I never asked you to play down, just soften up.
And when we first began talking, you had been dealing with this for almost 10 years. This perception you had about people. You had been on dating websites for 4 or 5 years and looking for something deep and real for a very long time … you wrote this to me:
Thank you so very very much my love. I am honored. Not to mention, I love your poem (and you. You first, and your poem second, as a momentary embodiment of your soul. But you, first, as the ongoing embodiment of your soul and of so much of what I have longed for and wanted and never really thought possible). After all, it is mutual, you know! I too am to be a canyon for your deepest oceanic love.
It’s just that I felt ready for all of this 10 years ago! I don’t know if I needed the last ten years of seasoning and being cooked in order to be ready for you and for Love, or that I need to learn patience and self-control while life prepped a partner for me. Either way, I’ve sensed and considered myself to have been ready for an unprecedented Love for years.
The last ten years have been me wandering out in the dark, out amongst the people, seeing how desolate and barren this world is and can be, how hostile or even dead and sound asleep this world is to the soul and the deeper currents and possibilities of the human heart and psyche, how closed off and afraid people are of anything truly sublime and transcendent and wonderful.
And so maybe these ten years have made me appreciate even more what Love can be.
Or maybe I (my soul) had other work to do. Maybe I had to survive all of these inner winters to become strong enough for you. Or maybe they were needed to prepare my inner writer and psychologist and philosopher, and seed and fertilize this massive work I sense gathering in me and that I need to contribute to the world. Maybe I still had to differentiate and lessen some of my own dependencies and become more aware and cognizant of still others. Maybe I was still preparing the ground for you or being prepped for you. Either way, I’m glad you’re finally here (well, almost! Next Thurs!!
and that we can finally get on with it already and start bringing out even more of the best of each other and, even more importantly, bringing out the best of ourselves. I soooo look forward to it and to loving the shit out of you everyday, heart and mind, body and soul, in so many ways. I just hope you can stand all of the affection and love that I have bottled up over the years for you and that will be coming your way!—warm, intense, passionate, sticky sweet gooey love, warm wave after wave of love after love after love, love upon love stacked almost perfectly (it can’t be perfect can it? We’ll still need some reason to grow 
all the way up to the stars, the type of love that is dreamt and written about, the type of love that makes other people stop and stare and point it out to each other when they see us it public, the type of love that both inspires people and makes them feel so bad about how little love they have.
Can you stand it, my love? The thought of so much sheer delight coming your way, coming our way—not that anyone here can make anyone happy, but let’s be honest, some interactions seem fated to have a greater capacity and capaciousness for happiness—two containers so wide and deep, so rich and overflowing, exuding their joy.
I can’t wait!
I love you sweets! Namaste my love
John
To which I responded…
_______________
I never asked you to play down. But I buckled. I faltered. I did. And at the time I never really knew how much those vacillations were hurting you. Because I had no idea how deeply you had been longing to find someone, to find me. I know NOW, three years later and all this time of getting to know you as much as I have. And especially tonight as I have sat here and read 200 of the 400 pages of letters between us, I see. I see NOW how much I hurt you then. I am sorry. And I could explain to you why, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what was going on with me at deeper levels, but I do not want to take anything away from the fact that I am sorry.
Because I can sit here and see it through your eyes now. Fresh eyes, new eyes. Not eyes that are filled with excuses and justifications, but eyes that are filled with compassion. Because I Know too what it is like, to be longing so deeply to connect with another human being. And not to talk about vampires and fairies and unicorns and woodland creatures. I know what it is like to walk through the world and feel that nobody gets you.
And here I came full speed into your life after you having been searching for so long for someone else who was so much like you in so many ways (which I am – less ten years of course) and I am so excited to find someone to talk to who I feel really, really gets me and who I can share so much with. And you are excited about that too. And we are talking and pouring our hearts out and then I would disappear, pull back, get scared, wall up. And it was not as little of a thing to you as it seemed to be to me. Because you had been waiting ten years for this and all of a sudden it was being ripped away from you with no reason, no explanation and with no consideration of the fact that you were left wondering what the hell you did or said. Wondering if this was how it would always be between us? Second guessing all that we had shared.
Especially when I was writing things like this to you ….
My Dearest Darling Beloved,
I really have gone over and over this in my head today. And as
unpopular as it is, we must stand in Truth at all times. This is my
response to Mom’s email. We can chat about it later My Little Prince.
I hope you are having a super fantatsic terrific day. I LOVE YOU
soooooooooooooooooooooooooo much.
ALL MY LOVE TO YOU,
Jennifer
And then I wouldn’t show up. I wouldn’t get on the plane and come out there. Because I didn’t want to? No, of course not. And you should know that now. I would hope you would be able to go back through everything that happened between us then with fresh eyes. With a new compassion for me, knowing me as you know me now with all of my fears and insecurities. Do you know I was trying my very best at that time?
Do you know that I was scared? Guilty? Ashamed? That I thought if you knew certain things about me that you wouldn’t Love me … like the abortion, or that I had cheated on my husband, or that I had no savings because I was so financially irresponsible. And since you have seen how badly I handle stress, confrontation, my shame in the 2 and half years since –can you now maybe understand why I pulled back? Just as I can now see why my pulling back hurt you so much.
You are the last person in the world I ever wanted to hurt. Don’t you know that?
And you wrote this back to me …
Good morning my deeply dearly beloved spiritual warrior princess / white tigress
How are you this morning? I am floating as always in your presence—this presence or inner sense I have of you. That someone like you actually exists—that alone is incomprehensible to me. That I have found you and you me—that our paths have crossed, that our lives are about to become intertwined so beautifully—that is even all the more incomprehensible to me.
To say I am feeling blessed and fortunate and bewildered by it all would be an understatement to say the least.
So thank you for being you, Jen, all of you.
So, obviously to say I’m looking forward to Thursday evening would be another understatement—a vast understatement!
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
—And now, I just paused to check my email, and lo and behold, my lovely little darling, you beat me to the pass—an email to me from you before I could send this one to you! and not just any old email, a beautiful email of you loving me as I’ve never been loved before, as I’ve never experienced or known it or even dreamt it was possible! Again, I so want to be in your presence—not as a beggar—though I fear at times that will be what I am—the least of me wanting to be loved, to feel loved (yes, feel loved) like I’ve never known it—to feel radically, deeply, thoroughly accepted, adored, cherished, wanted—hungered over!—look what you’ve done to this man! I am completely aroused as I am writing this to you—physically, limbically, intellectually—heart, mind, body, soul, even my soul—it too is inflamed for you, burns white hot for you.
Yes, I get it, I get all of those sayings that people in love utter. Why they turn to so many tried and true analogies and figures of expression—the beloved is like oxygen, like food, like manna, an angel, something divine. I get it. I so get it. because it’s all true, Jen—I hunger for you, thirst for you, burn for you, want you in every way imaginable, want to warm myself in your presence, permeate you, be filled by you, consumed by you, and all the rest of it. I get it. And it’s all true. And it grows in me more each day. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to go out in public—it will be such a sickening shameful display of utter adoration and love. Some might get it—ah, you two, we know exactly how you’re feeling. (Maybe not exactly; but we won’t correct them. They’ll be in the ballpark of how we feel, except they probably didn’t have such a long and winding and arduous and mountainous journey to meet their beloved.) And so many other people will feel so bad—so bad for how they’ve settled, for commonness of what they have, for having so little within them and so little love coming to them. I know whereof I speak: for I was once was a person such as this, many years ago. I was not bitter. I was just unloved, unwanted, and I didn’t know why—other than to blame others—they couldn’t handle me, I was too much. I wasn’t a bad person. I was just different. I was alone. Like that quote from C. S. Lewis on “friendship”—I had this burden, this immense inner life, this inner reservoir of liveliness, truth, “soul,” depth—all of these thoughts and no one to share them with, no one to play ball with me. I was alone. Like Federer or Nadal amongst a people who had never played tennis before—what an agony to be built for this level of relationship or interaction—or communion!—to be built and readied to make art out of one’s entire life—and not have anyone similar and equal to share it with. Not to be able to connect so completely with anyone. To just walk about through the land of others as a stranger, a foreigner, an alien, to feel so elusive, feeling like you’re sandbagging, holding back—which you are—because every time you’ve even shared just a little it’s gone badly, been ignored, overlooked, undervalued, been used against you (yes, this sun has chosen upon whom to shine; I am not yet truly like the sun—so capacious that I shine freely and indiscriminately on everyone. Call it survival. Call it practicality. Call it the economics of saintliness. I have always felt utterly alone in all of this—a true long dark night of the soul. Is it ending now? Is it finally ending now??) But I never gave up. I kept on being me—just perhaps a slightly more vanilla and water-down form of me, so as not to scare people and come to economic ruin, to complete financial collapse—yes, I’ve had to be practical (“had” to? chosen to? the latter is more likely and more honest). My clientele votes with their wallet. My livelihood depends on word of mouth. I wasn’t ready to go full-Walden. My destiny is still here, amongst the people—who they are, who they aren’t, who they are capable of being—all of this fuels me, activates me, drives me deeper into myself—not to escape, but to deepen myself, to make myself more vital, potent, insightful, discerning, penetrating—the man you now totally and completely adore and love and are falling for like no other
But none of this has been without compensation—so many beautiful photographs—paid for by my playing down, toning myself down. A fair price for my soul? I don’t feel like it’s been like that—a question of my soul. My soul was going to come out and develop and deepen itself one way or another. If not in a divine-like relationship of deep and life-altering communion, then my soul would work on itself in private, in my writings, in my thoughts, in my reading and study and contemplation. And in my teaching tennis—I have learned so much about how to teach, how people learn, how to deal with and disarm so many resistances—not all, but many (and there is still so much more to learn!). I’ve learned humor, how to measure out my intensity, and on and on. And then there’s my photography—finally, something that got me outside of myself and did so tangibly. There was how I saw things and wanted things to look, and then there was the hard fact of how the camera saw things, how it looked on film or on the computer screen. And then there was the middleman of PhotoShop to help me join and reconcile my vision with reality. But there were also plenty of times that camera taught me—showed me the unexpected, showed me what I wasn’t seeing, what I couldn’t see. So I was learning to see with another’s eyes for the first time in a long time, and this seeing had an absolute quality to it—it was the mangled manipulative could-I-ever-really-be-sure type seeing that we run into with others. This was fact, cold hard fact. This is how the camera saw things, and these were/are the variables (aperture, exposure time/shudder speed, lens, filter, flash, white-balance) you can toggle and tinker with in order to change within a certain range what you see. But I learned that the camera definitely has its own unique point of view, a way of seeing that is different from my own, that is not me. I finally found something that got me out of my head!
And so that indeed is/was a needed compensation for playing down, for biding my time, for picking my battles, for being “practical.”
. . . . . . . . .
I just paused again to check my email, and, voilà, a new email from you. your emails are like my own children to me—I love them all equally but differently—how can I put one above the rest—all are infused with you, my love, with your heart and soul and mind. how I can put one above another?
And, yes, we are writing simultaneously and unbeknownst to each other, on precisely the same theme—
Love. Our desire to connect, but our long lonely road of longing, of not being able to find someone at our own level with whom we can connect.
But that search is over, babe; it is over. There will be my time before you—the dark night of my soul, my lonely wandering years. And then there will be my time after we’ve met, after you’ve come into my life—which will be the rest of my days. It will just be like that day in late August of 1997 when I awoke one morning and my brain just kicked in, turned on massively, when I felt my life begin.
Now I feel it happening again—except this time with another person—with you—someone so much more than I could have ever dreamt or imagined!
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness, the dancing.
I feel like I’ve waited a long time—with a little hope, with enough hope to sustain me and convince me to hold out for more than something ordinary. But I could have never predicted or imagine or drawn up you!
And, yes, my dearest darling, I love that passage from Rilke—
Only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening on your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.
And you realize that that echoes the passage from Rumi that I read to you last night while you were blossoming into another full-blown orgasm—
Let bodily needs dwindle
and soul decisions increase.
As you diminish what you give your physical self,
your spiritual eye will begin to open.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I started writing all of this to tell you (a) how much I love you and plan to love you and desire to be loved by you, and how overwhelmingly grateful I am that you are in my life and will soon be next to me completely.
And because (b) I was going to write a bit about what your mom sent to you and what you wrote to her. Because what you wrote deserves a response. It’s important. I love how you think. And I long to get all thinky and intellectually gooey with you as often as I can. So much (all?) of who we are and have become is a product of what we’ve thought (yes, all of it, perhaps). So I always want to feel that you have been completely listened to and attended to by me in that way as well—that I value you your mind, your big beautiful gorgeous mind teeming with all its thinkiness and thoughts. I want you to feel completely valued and loved and cherished and accepted for that part of yourself. And I so want that level of intellectual communion to be a large part of the bedrock of our relationship—a place where we can always meet and commune and be intimate—in the intimacy of our minds and our thoughts.
So I will write or talk to you at some point about what you wrote—for I have a sense that it will be an ongoing source of discussion and deepening for both of us—how best to reach others given who we are and who we are becoming. As Zen master Einstein put it (he’s not really a Zen master; I just call him one for so much of what he says is Zen):
“The real difficulty—the difficulty that has baffled the sages of all times, is this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the emotional life of man, that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic forces in the individual?” (Albert Einstein, “Out of My Later Years,” pg. 17.)
And he’s completely right. This is something that you and I will debate and puzzle over and discuss and commune over for years: How do we reach others? How do we teach them how beautiful and courageous they really are and can be? How do we best and most effectively treat them like they are capable of becoming? How do we love others and help them acquire a taste for truth and wisdom and objectivity and inner depth and inner life? How do we help wake others up to the inner journey? How do we help others grow? How do we meet them where they are and help lead them to themselves—or help let themselves lead themselves to themselves (what a phrasing, John, lol!) and get out of their own way.
Love—all the love I have—and all that I am developing and growing—always, my dearest Jen,
your John
Ps. I am envious as heck about your ability to pick just the perfect quotes. I have never met my equal or my better. I think you are my better, my dear—your quotes sing and come to life in what you write
__________
And then I check out for a few days to write and process and you sent me this:
Hey Jen, I hope you are feeling better. I tried to call you several times yesterday (at 5:00, 9:45 [M said you were on the phone with Jaime] and 10:45 [M said you were putting R to bed]), and I even sent you a brief email mid-afternoon.
I hope and trust you are well. Something seems to have happened in the wake of your overflowing of self and understanding into your book on Thursday. That’s all I can figure. From my place out here, I’ve heard little from you since them and I had become rather fond of the daily morning letter from you my darling confessing your unprecedented love for me. That whole notion of taming another, putting down roots, wanting the other to know how much we care, moving a little closer to each other everyday. Chapter 21 of “The Little Prince.”
Maybe you are stepping back and testing me? Maybe you are just feeling like crap—but you still found time to Skype with Jaime? So I’m not sure what to think. I know I am tired of feelings, of people emoting constantly from their feelings and just saying things that come from this level. I’m looking for consistency, something deeper and more stable, I’m looking for words that come from the entirety of the person and who they are, not just the rush of momentary and passing feelings, not just from a slosh of neurotransmitters, the momentary interplay of two surfaces. I’m looking for—“This is who I am, this is what you can depend on in no uncertain terms from me in terms of my feeling and my actions. I will always love you, strive to be considerate of you, treat you like myself but in another body, yet also learn to love you in a way that makes you feel entirely and unbelievably loved and wanted and valued by me. I will learn to fluently speak both of our love languages. And if I’m going to disappear for awhile or change my level or intensity of communication with you because I need more time and space to think and create, then I’m going to tell you first, not last. And I’m not going to then suddenly spend my time and energies suddenly having time to talk to others but not you, my ultimate and unprecedented beloved and life partner.”
But maybe this is too much to expect or ask for so soon? But to me it’s just a natural and inescapable part of a person meaning what they say, and saying what they mean, being integrated emotionally and rationally, and being impeccable with their word.
Again I hope this finds you well, Jen, my darling, but every time I write one of these, I have the sense I’m writing to a stranger, that you’re still a stranger, unpredictable, and that everything we’ve said and shared has just been an illusion, fantasy, premature, foundationless. I think that’s what I worry most about—how elusive you might be, how quickly you might decide to change your life’s direction. And I’m considering putting so many of my eggs in this basket and trying to build something lasting, healthy, and nurturing with you. One day you’re here, the next you’re gone. And I never know why. Has something serious happened to you? Are you sick? Injured? Hurt? A nervous breakdown? Did you forget about me? What else has possibly come up and put itself between you and me and what I thought we were building.
I know you have 3 kids and don’t have time or energy for a fourth right now. But I’m not being a kid (am I?) I’m not catastrophizing things (am I?) Or is this to be our normal course? I feel you moving toward me, deeply, and in a way that I want and have been waiting for for so long. And then something comes up and any rhythm we have changes—without notice, without warning, without any advance notification or heads up. And I’m left wondering what the fuck am I getting myself into? Can I count on this person? I know she can count on me. But can I ever really count on her? Is this thing going to be one-sided? Where’s the steadfastness? The real roots? The dependability? The considerateness? Am I just going to have to write one of these missives every couple weeks to the supposed love of life, my ultimate life partner? Or am I working too hard to make this work, expecting too much?
I don’t think I am.
I love you. And that means in part my considerateness, Jen, and my trying to really deeply understand you. And that means that I write to you like this. After all, this is the third time, is it not? And I don’t even know what the saying is after the third time. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times and I guess I need to do some serious solid thinking and consider what I’m getting myself into.
Not even a phone call or an email. Just an email about a snowstorm, that you’re feeling a little under the weather, and another unfulfilled promise to talk last night. And no email or txt first thing this morning?
I don’t know what it all means. Or maybe I do, and I just don’t want to listen, not now, not at this point in my life. Maybe I’m more interested in chasing a fantasy and someone I’m conjuring rather than living in reality.
Namaste, my darling Jen,
John
_________
So I see it. I get it. And at that time and to me it wasn’t that big of a deal. I had so much coming up for me and I was writing and processing. But to you, it was. And knowing you the way I know you NOW, I know just how big of a deal it was. But, I didn’t know it then. So I want to say now, that I am sorry I did that then. I am sorry I left you alone like that, especially when you had been waiting for so long.
I was scared. You wanted me to move to Ohio at this point and we had never even met in person. My husband hadn’t even been dead a year yet. My kids and I were trying to get our footing. And here comes the white bull in all his magnificent glory into my china shop.
And you were in Ohio watching your mother die and so full of clarity about not wasting your life and not wanting to wait for tomorrow to live. You wanted me to be there yesterday.
______
Another day without word from you.
Am I reaching you? Are you reachable? Do you know where I am? I want to know where you are? Why must you be silent toward me of all people? Why not speak or send some word?
Maybe this letter will be ill-timed, too much. Maybe I should be more patient. But haven’t I been patient enough—so many years utterly alone. Now that you’re so close I need to be patient even more; and most of all now? I don’t want to burden you, I just want to know you, understand you, listen to your heart, lay across your chest, slip behind your eyes, hear your world from the inside, know you from the inside.
I spent today (Sun) living in yesterday. I have been in complete fascination all day everyday for the past two weeks until today. Today I am at your mercy. You dazzled me. Take my breath away. Nothing less. There has never been anything or anyone in my world so bright and delicate as you. No one. You were the first and the only. You wanted me and now you have me. And now you want me to pass the day alone? How am I to do that? I have let you inside. Your absence feels like death to me. Are you testing me now, at this time in my life, to see how great and many a misery I can live through? I hoped that you would write me ever so few lines to assure me once more that you will never be so unkind to me again as today—a entire day without you, a day without word from you, a day in which the sun was blotted from my sky. Never be so unkind as to deny me an entire day without you. Already, even after just today, I feel myself pulling back, accusing myself—was it all a dream?—a love like the one she was offering doesn’t really exist, it’s just an illusion, the other person will always disappoint you, they can’t be trusted, that’s the story of your life, they’ll leave you, they’ll break and sell out and pull back and always put themselves first in a pinch. You’re expendable, unnecessary, not real. You don’t really matter. You’re not really real to anybody. My greatest fear since I have known you has been the fear that you would want me, win me, and then find all that you have won in me to not be enough. But that suspicion I have managed to dismiss utterly until today, remaining instead awed in—or letting myself be beguiled instead by—the surety of your Love for me, which you have assured me is as much a grace as a delight.
I am trying to reconcile the two, understand how you can be so close to me, want to be so close to me, to be there for me, give me what I’ve never had, and then a few days later, stop all contact with me as if I had done something wrong or caused you pain, as if it were my fault. I am trying to reconcile the two, get to the bottom of the pot, know who I’m really getting myself involved with.
Because right now I feel separated from you as much as possible, more even than if we had never met. Right now, when I need you most, I am supposed to set that aside and instead give you what you need? Anyone else, I feel, you could talk to. And would. But to me, the one who has changed your destiny, you cannot even send the words “Good night” for me to put under my pillow? How I shall be able to bear it—another day without word from you, without love, without sunlight from you? Will it be even worse the next time than now? I cannot tell. I sense myself reluctant, not staying open, not turning the other cheek, not knowing if I can ever come fully back to you. I feel myself trusting you—you who only wanted to good to me!—less. I tell myself I must be patient, not to be rash, not speed to conclusions, give all of this time, and in the meantime, until you are here beside me, if ever you are to be, if ever you actually do make it here, I must think of you as little as possible. No more of this ebbing and flowing, coming towards me and then pulling back—I am not strong enough to be weaned from you, from you—a taste I was just now starting to fully acquire, a taste I was just now allowing myself to fully acquire. I should bear all this I would bear death: for being this far apart from you truly is like being forced to die. Do you not know that you do not even need to take the trouble of writing much to me? Merely sending me a Goodnight, I love you, I am thinking so much of you, of us, would perhaps suffice and let me better purchase needed sleep. Be so kind as to send me every evening we don’t talk and increase our stride and coming togetherness a written Good night. And then early the next day, a Good morning. A loving note from you before bed might be the reason of my sleeping so much better. A brave and revealing note from you first thing in the morning might be the reason of my thinking more clearly and energetically and inspiredly. Be so kind as to be just to me like that, to me who only wants the chance to do right by you and give all his Love to you. If I have done anything to change your destiny for the better, then forget me not most of all on the days when you feel yourself needing to stray, recoup, assimilate, convalesce, consolidate. Remember so kindly the person who has changed your destiny, and you his. Don’t let me just slip from your mind like everyone else has done. Remember me. And let me know you are remembering me.
If you need to pull back, convalesce, recuperate, assimilate, consolidate, keep yourself centered and from being overrun from me, then do so, Jen, in the most loving and respectful and caring way possible, as you would do with your own children, as you would want done unto you.
I have to look at this and think, What if we were married? What if we were living together? Would she still do this? Is she ever going to be able to include me in her decision-making and heart as much as she includes herself? Will she ever be able to love me like that?
Don’t pull back severely and sporadically and unpredictably, Jen, and expect me to just put up with it, be a doormat, and still be just as thrilled about getting to know you and getting involved with you. There are consequences to what you’re doing, Jen, no matter how mindful and aware I am, there are and will still be consequences. And if you’re telling me that you’re coming at this in the absolute (near-absolute) best way you know how, then that has to give me pause regarding how truly loving you are and able you are to commit to anyone or anything outside of yourself.
Honestly, I have no idea what’s going on, how you’re doing, why you’re doing what you’re doing (to someone you claim to love so dearly nonetheless!), if you’re okay, if you’re having a breakdown, if something bad has happened, if you’re ending things with me (and why??).
This doesn’t feel like I’m being loved. It feels like non-love.
And I have no idea if this letter to you will feel to you like you’re being loved.
But at least I’m reachable; at least I’m here and willing to have the conversation. I think I owe that to someone I claim to love.
I’m tired of words and promises. I only want stuff I can bank on, impeccability, behaviors that square with words and promises, I follow-through and consistency, not caprice, emotionally inspired or driven over-promising, emoting, erratic-ness, self-protection, this strong divide between self and other whenever tension or stress flares. I don’t want marital sadism. I want courageous, daring love.
______________
And I truly felt how much I hurt you and I sent you this ….
________________
And then I came out to Ohio to meet you in person finally. Yes, it was this intense between us and we had never even met face to face. And we had such a wonderful time for 9 days. Even though your Mom was very close to death and this was the first Christmas without my husband and the kids’ father, we found Joy. But then, I had to go back to NY because I had already made a commitment to my family that I would be there for Christmas and you were really, really, really upset that I was leaving. And you got angry. And you snapped at me. And that scared me. And it wasn’t anything more than your normal cantankerous self that I know so well by now, maybe I was a bit skittish, but then it frightened me.
And you took my going back home for Christmas as my not being committed to you. And if my recollection of that is different from yours than by all means correct me. So I explained to you in a phone call some more about my childhood. To which you responded ….
Good morning dearest Jen,
THANK YOU so much for taking the chance and opening up to me more about your childhood. That took a lot of courage and has and is really helping me to understand more about you and some of your patterns and reactions and concerns with me.
And thank you thank you thank you for talking with me — for continuing to open up and bare yourself to me.
You are still completely beautiful to me. I don’t see you as damaged and I never say you or your life as a disaster–no matter how many times you said that word or invoked that phrase. You are definitely not a disaster and neither is your life — especially not now, not with me orbiting around it (he just doesn’t let up does he?
Everyday if need be, for as long as it takes I will remind you — and not cease — and let you know that you are beautiful and loveable, and that I am also beautiful and loveable — and trustworthy — that I am different — and very significantly so — from any and everyone you have ever known or met, and I will never let you confuse me (for very long) with anyone in your past or anyone you have ever known or met. I am me — unlike anyone you have ever met. I am that different. And I am that committed and diligent and patient and will work and try that hard — however long and hard I need to. I will not just tell you but show you again and again — and hopefully in ways that your lovely little amygdala and limbic system and neocortex can understand that you are safe with me, that you can relax with me, that you can truly depend on me (as much as it is possible for one finite and fragile being to promise these things to another fragile and fleeting and finite creature) to always have your and my and your children’s best interests at heart and to always be open to trying to better determine and learn what those best interests are.
To me, that is a large part of what I mean by love when I say that I love you, Jen — I am sharing with you my intention, my desire to be a deeply attending to your deeper needs, to help be a source of healing and release for you, to be there for you and even help if you want to rewrite and re-script your past patterns. And of course I am telling that I will show up to you and yours every day at my best, with my full (or near-full) attention — I am human after all and I will days when I am off or have problems of my own to deal with as well — grief, sorrow, work related issues, health, fears, who knows. I am not a god, I am a man, but a man who is deeply committed to being his best and being that for you as well.
Thank you so much my dearest darling for talking with me and opening up to me. That really meant a lot to me and said a lot about you to me and is helping me to better understand where my words are landing and how you might be hearing some of what I am saying — especially when things get heated or tense between us.
I love you darling!
John
_______________________
This is when I thought I had better tell you that I didn’t think I could move to Ohio.
________________________
And you were rightly pissed. But YES, I do give myself a bit of a pass, because I was under tremendous stress. Financially, emotionally, mentally and physically. I was probably at one of the lowest points in my life.
This is when you sent me this email that I referenced in the comment above.
You’re a selfish, self-absorbed, blind little flighty cancer, a tumor on the skin of humankind. You can’t even predict where you’ll be in two days, so you can’t know that you’ll love me the rest of your life, unless your life will be over in 48 hours. None of what you say tracks. You can’t chart yourself with any reliability or predictability two days in advance (“I’m letting you know I’m moving back to Ohio.” I knew you didn’t have it in you. I was rooting for you, but I knew there was no way. You had already shown yourself, and it was so sad to see–so much potential wasted. No self, no discipline, no real intention or sincerity, just a flibbertigibbety wad of chaos and frazzled disorganization. “I’m letting you know that I will be flying back Thursday to come see you and be with you.” I never believed it. I just played along to see how long you would try to maintain your lie.)
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And that email – those series of emails sent me into a very bad tailspin.
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And you said no f’ing way. And how could I blame you really? So I did come back to Ohio. But while we were going back and forth you and Megan had begun dating again. Even though it had been less than a month since I was in Ohio with you. But your Mom had passed in the meantime and you didn’t want to sit around waiting on a girl (Me) who may or may not show up.
And for the record I never asked you to dump her as you say above. I just thought you ought to tell her that I wasn’t back there so that you and I could be friends. You were lying to her about that. She didn’t know that you were staying with me during the week and with her on the weekends.
And I was abundantly understanding, I even wrote this to you while it was happening….
Not to see many thing, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close—the usual word for this instinct of self-defense is “taste.” It commands us to say No not only when Yes would be more selfless, but also to say No as rarely as possible—that is, to separate oneself from anything that would make it necessary to keep saying No. In all of these matters—in the choice of nutrition, of home, of climate, of recreation, of relationship—an instinct of self-preservation issues its commandments. When defensive expenditures, be they ever so small, become the rule and the habit, they entail an extraordinary and entirely superfluous and unnecessary impoverishment. Warding off, not letting things come close, involves an expenditure—let nobody deceive himself about this—energy wasted on negative ends. Having quills is a waste, when one can choose not to have quills but open hands.
—Nietzsche
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I only read this first quote out of the long list you sent over. I had to stop. I was stunned. I (not in the way Nietzsche has expressed it here, of course) came to an almost identical ‘conclusion’ this afternoon. This is essentially what having a reverence for Life is at its core. Opening yourself more and more to Life.
After you phoned me and said you had this great conversation with Megan, I had a moment of fleeting insecurity — visions of rejection and abandonment danced through my head. I felt tight inside. My body was cringing. I explain these ‘feelings’ because they are indicators to me of my internal state when I attune to them. When I fully feel my body, I can observe my reactions with that distance and consciously choose to open to, relax, unfold, uncoil in a way. I can just ‘stop waiting for the hit’ … like Nietzsche says above about defensive expenditures. I can eliminate all of the effort that I am focusing on my defensiveness and redirect it into the Good, the Beauty.
It is like that quote about the space between action and reaction. If we view our bodies as the biological sensory processing machines that they are (the whole body-mind connection … because mind doesn’t ‘live’ in our heads as it were, does it?) then I think we would have a better basis for saying that logic and sense-feeling (not emotion) can be used – one not being superior to the other but both being necessary – as guides and tools to perhaps to navigate the journey.
But I digress … because I want to touch back on what happened next during our conversation and after we hung up. I had to examine my reactions, my authentic feelings about this entire situation – as best as I can with the information I have and trying to not slant my observations in any self serving or self defensive ways. There have been many ways that I think what has happened between us has enhanced and deepened my relationship with myself which in turn will continue to deepen my relationship with You.
So let me try to be a bit more concrete … as you like it. If things had gone according to what we believe would have been ideal terms between us, it may have looked something like me coming back here in November, seeing you, meeting your family perhaps, falling ever more in cathexis, coming back again likely in December and than moving back in January and getting a place, you being ‘my man’ so to speak. I am sure that would have been lovely – but, at least for me, there would have been alot of validation seeking, of reflected sense of self. And I know what We want “Our best self our highest and wisest and deepest self, not the self that we would necessarily choose or intend, but the self that the gods intended.”
And if I were the one doing the intending, I certainly never would have intended that things went down between us the way that they did, that you get back into a relationship with Megan, that I move back here and not have that guarantee of us becoming We. But, it is those very conditions that I find are having the most profound impact on me, that are forcing me to look at this from a perspective that would not have been available in the scenario of my intention. And I have concluded that there is a certain humility that I did not have before. I am so blessed and honored that our paths have crossed in this life. I had this thought and was nearly in tears yesterday thinking about how lucky I am to be here, to be able to have your arms wrapped around me at night (and I was happy with having you on the phone) – to realize that I could have missed out on this brings me to my knees in thanksgiving. That the Gods intended a destiny for me far beyond anything my fearful little self could have ever dreamed possible.
You deserve to know that I am so proud to know You. My being able to ‘see’ you in relation to another person gives me a view of you as something separate from ‘me’ …. and that is not something that was really there before. I am looking at you – not just considering how you make me feel – but looking at you as this unique and beautiful creature. This Man who has so much Love to give, and so much Care for others. And I cannot begin to tell You how much more Love I have for You when I see you for who You are. Not just who You are to me, but who You are to the world.
Those words you said to me last night. “Welcome home” sends little shocks of electricity running through my body, desire pulsating …. look at what you have done to me. My John, I am sitting here on the verge of orgasm just thinking about you. The funniest part is that I thought (like I said to you on the phone about my attempts to ‘relieve’ myself) that having you inside of me would have alleviated this force, extinguished it a bit, but it has only intensified it. Life longing for itself. Opening, opening, opening … and being here, seeing you as much as I have – even in this short space of time – is like this little sliver of light shining into my heart, willing my soul to break out and blossom like a flower in Your Sun.
It is as if it is not orgasm at all. It is so much more than orgasm in the strictest sense. It is not this tension that gets to a point of explosion. It is this deepest longing – not the heights of sexual union, but rather its the depths. It is not about the sex. The sex is just the outward symbol of this yearning to be in union with You. Can you ‘fuck me open’ as Deida put it? Burst this dam in my heart. Can I be a well, for You, to come and draw strength and nourishment from? My soul is pressing so heavily on my heart – willing it to open and remain open – such is the power of my attraction to You. My soul trusts You. My soul desperate to pour
My soul trusts You. My soul desperate to pour this sticky sweet gooey Love into you. You.
“That there should exist one other person in the world towards whom all openness of interchange should establish itself, from whom there should be no concealment; whose body should be as dear to one, in every part, as one’s own; with whom there should be no sense of Mine or Thine, in property or possession; into whose mind one’s thoughts should naturally flow, as it were to know themselves and to receive a new illumination; and between whom and oneself there should be a spontaneous rebound of sympathy in all the joys and sorrows and experiences of life; such is perhaps one of the dearest wishes of the soul.” – E. Carpenter, “Love’s Coming of Age”
And now I have just gone back and read the rest of your email from this morning. I stopped after the line I quoted above (Our best self …) because it hit the button that spun all of this out. And again, the rest of these words you have shared, are felt so deeply by me. And begs me to ask myself … what gifts can this force inside of me Give? Love.
You are the turning point in my Life. And if I forget that, I pray it is for less than a moment and that You would be great enough to forgive me for that error.
I Love You so much John.
I always will.
Jennifer
. . . . . .
So glad you asked on the phone about how I was feeling when you mentioned talking to Megan. I think that is exactly the point I was trying to make below, though clear to me, not explained clearly enough in the email.
Even though I may get a feeling of insecurity rising up in me, I decide what to do with that feeling. Put up my quills or open my hands? Allowing that feeling in, also allows in the question that comes with it. What exactly is it that I am resisting? What is this feeling trying to defend against? What if I open myself fully to that feeling – instead of trying to defend against it? If I use my energy to try and wall that feeling out than I miss the great gift it may be teaching me about myself. What potential possibilities could this situation offer for not only my growth, but your growth, for Megan’s growth, and quite possibly the growth of every person who encounters any one of the three of us for the rest of our entire lives. What could each of us learn if we were fully open in this situation instead of defensively trying to smash life and each other into these tiny boxes of what is possible?
And then I can ruminate on all of the delicious beautiful things that could be if each one of us were fully open Loving aware and awake human beings. What if we were each for the growth of each? That is really Loving. Really Love does not confine itself to obects nearest to it, does it? If it did would that really be Love? If I am to become the embodiment of that Love, what would it look like in this situation? It must be applied across the board. Not just in my own favor. And if it is, then it is in my favor anyway. Because it is furthering the development of what is dearest to my heart — the growth of my own Soul.
Attention is a form of Love. The Love you have shown me is something I have never felt before. Real Love. Deep, compassionate, unselfish Love. What if she needs that too? What if I were in her shoes and that Love was denied to me because of someone else demanding to have their insecurities soothed? What if You Loving her can get her to a place where she can have these very thoughts that I am having right now? What if she can share those thoughts, feelings, ideas with another? What if it leads them to have these thoughts? Is that not the essence of community that I am truly longing for? That I have dreamed of for so long? Why do we have to try and confine our Love?
Not all Love has to be sexual Love. I do believe that there is something sacred about that connection. For me, I think it would follow that that dimension of Loving would have to be limited to monogamy, not out of insecurity but out of choice to explore the depths of sexuality with someone you are deeply and intimately connected to. And my man (You) is going to need to be able to satisfy this deeply passionate woman that I am. And satisfying other women at the same time, probably won’t be humanly possible. (You may disagree, we can talk about it.) That doesn’t mean that You need only to Love me in return. Loving me in that way, perhaps, but confining all the Love that You are is not something I would want to do. The world does not need less Love, it needs more.
Maybe what is most Loving is Loving her in that way? What if You decided you wanted to have that committment with her? I would still want You in my Life. And that is what I think is sort of silly about people trying to ‘own’ someone else. Look at all we are possibly missing out on. What if she was fine with you seeing me, because she just wanted You in her life. And she were really cool with the whole thing. To the point that she and I could meet. And it would not become a case of world’s colliding because no one felt detracted from in any way – we were all really for each other?
Like if you have a show for your photography would I have to skip it in order to not ruffle someone’s insecure feathers? That seems so ridiculous to me. And that is another reason why I said to you that you need to give her that choice. You are assuming that she will break. Maybe you are wrong. Maybe you will help her to uncover a strength she never knew she had. Obviously it has to be approached mindfully, but be open for the gift. Otherwise you are not really living the questions.
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And I also sent you this . . . .
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So I guess at 4:30am and after 30 pages, I am not trying to say you are an asshole. I Loved You. And I still do Love you. And I will always Love you. And if you think I am playing fast and loose and re-writing history, then please show me how.
Specifics Bob, specifics.
I have a conscience JB. And I struggle and I try to do my best. And I make a mess. And I try to do better. Maybe I am taking it too easy on myself. Yes, there is a version of me that comes out when I get stressed, anxious, in a pinch, in a bind, and panicked and that part is what is weakest and worst and what needs to be addressed and tamed and mastered by what’s best in me or something greater than that part of me. And I will take your advice and make sure that I am so aware and mindful of the REALNESS of those people who come into my life forevermore and treat them as the Gods that they potentially are.
And as I wake up this morning, still this is what is most pressing on my mind. This conversation. And I am thinking about how all I ever wanted was this – to be known. To be able to open up to someone who I thought cared enough to listen. And again, maybe you are right – maybe it is very easy for me to be this open from NY (where I control the temperature etc. of the exchange) and maybe that is the legacy of my past.
Because I never found myself able to really be this open with you on the phone or in person. Maybe I do need this extra level of “protection”? Maybe that makes me weak?
But I know what I don’t want is to have shut this part of myself down. And that is what happens. That is what the blank look is all about. And yes, it is battering fatigue and maybe not from you, but from Life itself. From going through Life and feeling like when I open my mouth I am not heard, or I am not accepted, or I am somehow rejected.
And I NEED this like water, like air. I NEED to be able to have this – to write, to be known, to get this stuff that is inside of me out. And this does not happen like this when we are together.
And maybe I NEED this, but you need the other. You want someone who is there. Who can wake up next to you and go grocery shopping and go have dinner with your family and take road trips to California and so forth. I don’t know how to put those two parts together. I don’t know that if I do that, that I will be able to have this. And THIS is what I need. To be able to talk to you like this.
“To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. To you that seems little. To me it suffices. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.
“Conversation is the practice and consummation of friendship. And great conversation requires an absolute running of two souls into one.” –Emerson on Friendship
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