Welcome back to my 600-part series Taking Responsibility for My Own Unhappiness, in which all the bloggery rules regarding brevity and oversharing are unceremoniously broken. But hey, blog critics: all you have to do is read an essay by Michel de Montaigne to know that this kind of writing is as old as the 16th century. Nothing new that can be blamed on the advent of the internets. So, if you like this sort of thing, let’s go and look at my navel. If you don’t…bye-bye!
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This week an older woman friend, who represents for me that unconditionally loving, Divine-mother figure we all secretly long for, was trying to recall the ending lines from David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness.” She intended to cite them in reference to the distress I was feeling at my job.
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
What she had meant to communicate, she explained once we had found them, was actually something more along the lines of anything or anyone that makes you feel small is too small for you. I had been brimming with practical suggestions regarding the latest problem at work, but my immediate superiors seemed to be more or less ignoring my impassioned input. I even got into an argument with one of my managers, who was quick to put me back in my “place.” So I did feel minimized. And angry. I fretted that if I were in her shoes, I would be doing things quite differently. I started playing armchair CEO, mentally cataloguing all the things I thought she and the rest of the management were doing wrong. Believe me, they were legion.
Until, that is, I had the thought — so what if I were in charge here? With the multitude of responsibilities that entails? Would I really be prepared to take it all on? Would I want to? Would I put in long hours, and sacrifice my evenings and weekends, my sleepy Saturday afternoons writing at the coffeehouse? I really went there for a minute and imagined it. And I had to admit to myself, with brutal honesty: I am, in all probability, too lazy to manage a company. I love my down time and my freedom. I like being able to leave my responsibilities at the door. And as much as I dislike being bossed, I don’t really want to boss anyone else, either.
With those thoughts, my righteous indignation and bitter grievances dissipated like a vapor. Telling the whole truth can do that.
Why was I complaining? I had in all likelihood dodged a bullet, by my own admission.
It was a revelation.
**
But this same sort of radical truth-telling was long overdue in another area of my life that is even more fraught with stressful feelings and grievances and always has been. The first admission led naturally to the second — that I am likewise unprepared (and dishonest) when it comes to a certain kind of relationship I generally don’t have to manage, either. This particular brand of unpreparedness isn’t much talked about, but I suspect it may be more widespread than anyone thinks. Of course, I can only speak for myself, and project upon famous dead people who aren’t around to defend themselves.
But let me back up and tell you a story I could call “Playing Chicken with Damien Moreau.” (That’s not his real name; all names on this blog have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty.) Damien was a young man Destined for Greatness at my gargantuan and cutthroat Boston-area high school. Before graduation he was already a playwright, actor, director, award-winning writer, and world traveler, a Harvard-bound skate punk who spoke three languages and penned spare, melancholy prose. I had never paid much attention to this skinny kid with a Gallic nose until we shared a homeroom senior year. I can’t even tell you what first happened to plunge me into a life-altering, poetry-inducing infatuated madness (an obsession I have to credit for honing my writing skills) other than a taste of his dark, Beat-influenced, existentialist universe, following closely upon the loss of my sunny Christian one. Damien visited extremes that none of the good churchgoing boys I’d ever known would dare set foot in. (Since then I’ve always seemed to fall hardest for men who, like Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs, are as prodigious in their breadth of spirit as they are in their iniquities. But I could write a whole other post on that.) His ideas, perspectives, and behaviors were edgy, anarchic, and colored by a postmodern bleakness. He became my new hero, and the arbiter of everything worth knowing.
In short, I made a god of him.
And wrote a sort of prayer, of both praise and supplication, in pencil, on college-ruled paper, which I passed to him after English class. My heart was hammering wildly in my throat. The effect of this act on my digestion was so dramatic that I skipped the rest of my classes that day, lying on the couch in the literary magazine office one door down from the girls’ room. I had never felt more exhiliratingly alive, or more excruciatingly vulnerable. I was so terrified by what I’d done that I couldn’t even imagine encountering Damien again.
He didn’t come to homeroom the next morning. Or the next. When he finally appeared in English class, just before the bell, I could barely look at him, and felt as if I would faint. When I did dare to glance his way, and caught his eye, he gave me a sort of Mona Lisa smile. I felt a current like a thunderbolt pass through my entire body. Still viscerally terrified, but jazzed and emboldened by the electric jolt, I caught up to him after class and asked him what he thought about my note. “I don’t know…I don’t know…” he muttered, hurrying away, not looking at me. “I am not competent.”
Which was a hell of a thing for Damien Moreau to say. (Not to mention an exceedingly gracious thing, especially seeing as he happened to be the highly ungracious age of seventeen. Bless his punk little heart.)
What I could never quite admit to myself is that in addition to a gigantic letdown, I felt relief. It really was something like a game of Chicken, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. There I was, rushing headlong like a headbanger’s Camaro toward poor ambushed Damien, propelled recklessly by my 275-horsepower adolescent passion, yet with a dread fear of actually colliding. And he swerved out of the way first. He got to be the “chicken,” and I got to walk away feeling like the crazy-brave one.
But what would I have done if he hadn’t “swerved?”
**
No, Damien wasn’t the only one who felt incompetent. Let me let you in on a little secret: I have never, in the throes of overpowering emotion from the inside or overwhelming stimulation from the outside, felt like I knew what the hell I was doing or should do. In my last post I mentioned High Autonomic Reactivity (HAR), a nervous phenomenon that, as Dr. Hyatt explains it, makes sense of most of my life. I have no idea how widespread it is, whether I’m a freak or whether other people just don’t talk about it.
I was the kid who spent the first two weeks of nursery school under the crafts table. I’m not kidding. When the world is too much with me, I retreat. I hide in my apartment the way Emily Dickinson hid in her upstairs room. And once in a while, when life actually bothers to confront me with an opportunity I say I want more than anything, I back down. I swerve. I completely understand what biographers are talking about when they write about the reclusive Dickinson’s “retiring nature,” and I think I know why Kierkegaard invented theoretical obstacles to make marriage with his beloved Regine impossible. These were highly sensitive people, bundles of walking nerves who felt everything painfully deeply, and simply living in the world was difficult and frightening enough without the added challenge of navigating a passionate confrontation that made them feel even more vulnerable. Perhaps for them, as for me, it was just too much. I’ve shed tears almost every time I’ve read the Dickinson poem that begins
I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf
because I have so often felt that “I can’t do this, it’s real Life,” in all its terrifying unpredictability, unfamiliarity, and ability to flatten me, and that it’s always been and will always be “over there.” But only when the strongest emotions are involved.
My life coach friend marvels about how the majority of his female clients have gotten into relationships with men mainly for economic reasons. (See “The Inner Bag Lady” for an exploration of why this may be so.) There’s none of this scary stark-nakedness; they “take off their clothes/to reveal other clothes,” to borrow a brilliant line from Margaret Atwood, and complete what is first and foremost a business transaction. Call it an even trade of goods and services. I get that; I’ve had “transactions” of my own that never touched me, that never much threatened or excited me in any way. But I don’t consider them “Life,” either, even if to the outside world there was an appearance of something happening. Ultimately I always resisted settling for anything or anyone that didn’t “bring me alive” — I would rather soldier on alone than be a unenthusiastic kept woman — but when I think of that David Whyte poem, I wonder if my metaphorical eyes are bigger than my metaphorical stomach. In other words: what if my problem is that I’m too small for what brings me alive? What if I’m constitutionally incapable of the fortitude it would require to reach behind that shelf and yank Life out by the good parts, in those moments of abject fear?
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” wrote Anaïs Nin, and she knew what she was talking about. As with my job, I can moan and groan about the way things are, but how honest is that? I know how much I like my lazy time, just like I know how downright inadequate I feel to the demands of sustained contact and engagement with anyone who without effort dismantles my wobbly defenses and exposes the child under the table. Put up or shut up, right? If I’m not up for the big leagues, I should reconcile myself with my solitary upstairs room, or else arrange a less risky transaction that may buy me some moderate gratifications and at least the semblance of less loneliness. In the end, the responsibility is no one’s but mine.
I must mention, in my defense, that this under-the-table toddler did leave home for good at nineteen, endured wild frat parties full of predatory upperclassmen, moved two thousand miles from home to a city where she knew no one, ventured into downtown clubs and dive bars late at night and alone to hear bands being covered by a certain local music critic, traveled to Italy by herself, and wrote a lot of poorly received love letters. She approached men she considered totally out of her league. And she was terrified the entire time. (Beat that, Emily!)
And yet, when it comes to the things I claim I want most…it was not so very long ago that I sat on a sofa in a coffeehouse beside someone whose presence and proximity made my knees quake. He was talking about a book by Rilke I had given him, and how it had made him wonder if he really deserved love. I gazed mutely at him, this radiant, messy Karamazov of a man, who was rarely absent from my thoughts or my half-assed agnostic prayers, to whom I would have happily given all my earthly goods and possibly a kidney. Did he deserve love? The boundary gate had just been thrown wide open. Confronted abruptly with an unmapped frontier, where the very next moment could mean being lost in unknown and unpredictable territory, my brain froze; my tongue seemed to stick in my mouth and refused to work. Eventually I managed to blurt out some forgettable inanity. Then we were interrupted by another friend. Later, I would write my courage often fails me at pivotal moments. I had swerved. I had Chickened out, yet again.
Next time, next time, I reassured myself, betting on that future that never materializes.
Can’t you see it? It’s over there, behind the shelf.
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