What the Hell is This?

“The soul would rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else’s.” — David Whyte

The first time I ever read that line it made me choke back tears.

I came across it again the other day, and it hit even harder, thanks to the seed of self-doubt a friend of a friend had sown in me with an offhand but devastating comment.
**

In hindsight, what he said was probably as insulting a thing as you can say to a member of the opposite sex, short of ridiculing their physical characteristics.

Some background: François is an artist and hairstylist who blows into town occasionally; he used to be involved with my friend Natalie, and they’re still friends. He will typically stay with her and do her friends’ hair for a small fee. François is unusual, to put it mildly. He has a fondness for black vinyl, hair extensions, and makeup reminiscent of ancient Egypt. His father was Moroccan and his mother was a French model. He has traveled and lived like a gypsy, and seems to revel in looking and being exotic.

So there I am at Natalie’s with François, and they’re talking about the ongoing dramas of Natalie’s love life. Then François turns his keen gaze on me. “So what about you?” he presses. “Anything going on?” François has done my hair before, but I’ve always managed to steer him clear and afar of such topics.

“N-Nothing at the moment,” I stammer, caught off guard.

He then observes that I usually have nothing to say regarding these matters, which is true, and concludes, “I think you must be asexual or something.” He goes on about how he and Natalie are the kind of people who have to have it all the time, et cetera, blah blah blah, only I’m not really listening now because I’m reeling like someone who has just had her injured foot stomped upon repeatedly. After the kind of ordeals a gal like me has gone through just to reach home plate (see my migraine post), this is not what I want to have said about me by anyone, including a guy who deliberately looks like he just fell off the circus caravan.

Only later do I realize not only just how rude his comment was (French bluntness?), but perhaps how effective my powers of deflection have become after twenty-five years of careful practice.

By deflection, I mean that I put up, consciously, a sort of energetic wall as soon as I met François. Not an interpersonal wall (I’ve been exceedingly friendly and forthcoming otherwise) but a specifically sexual one. I may have projected those boundaries so convincingly that he concluded there was “no there there.” I suspect that women reading this will know what I’m talking about.

**
You see, those of us who live in even an semi-urban environment discover by the age of fifteen or so that once we go out on the street, we become objects for public commentary and assessment. And I don’t mean just leers and catcalls, but also evaluations of our weight, age, and other perceived shortcomings. (The book Passing By catalogued this phenomenon very well; I’m sure there are others.) Every city-dweller with a va-jay-jay has experienced this to some extent. So far, most of the attention I’ve received in my lifetime has been “positive” — if by “positive” you mean I-hope-I-don’t-get-followed-by-this-guy-and-raped-in-an-alley. Because that’s what we women all fear, when some strange character starts shit-talking us on the sidewalk. It’s the flip side of trying to make ourselves as attractive as possible to you guys; every unhinged and unwashed lurker out there takes it as a personal invitation. One of the gifts of age may be the ebbing of these kinds of attentions. (Sadly, I fear the wanted ones will be among its losses.)

I’ve lived alone in urban areas for half my life, and I learned early on that if I wanted to go anywhere and do anything at all, unescorted, I would have to develop and project a very strong shield. So I did. I learned to navigate that thin line dividing personable (friendly, giving directions and spare change) and available (open, engaging in further conversation). It also turned out to be a valuable skill when deflecting any kind of unwelcome attention, at clubs or coffeehouses or in dealing with customers at work — as well as when confronted by over-the-top characters like François, who look like they want to bowl women over, visually or otherwise. Unsure whether or not he might be some vaguely devious or manipulative “sorcerer of seduction” like the infamous (and equally eyelinered) Mystery, I wasn’t about to let that highly cultivated guard of mine down. I still chattered away in his chair like a chickadee, and we had a pretty good time covering a variety of subjects, but my invisible boundary held firm. (I now know that he means no harm and is essentially trustworthy, but I still have no desire to go there.)

His pronouncement, I guess, could be taken as a confirmation of my mastery at this skill. Still, it made me wonder for a minute if that’s truly how others see me, and how it is that I could be perceived in a way so contrary to my core being. Such a bind to be in, as a female! Self-protection means self-misrepresentation. (I know this is no less true for males, of course, in a wholly different way; you guys learn by the third grade to guard against coming off as a “pussy” and to adhere to confusing unwritten and arbitrary rules about what it means to “man up” in a brutally hierarchical world. But that’s fodder for a whole other post.)

I do let the wall completely down in some contexts, even with strangers, like when getting a massage. In contrast to the aforementioned experience, one male massage therapist who gave me a hot stone massage threw all protocol and professionalism to the wind and asked me to dinner afterwards. (I went, but insisted on going dutch.) At least this experience seems to provide objective evidence that I’m not somehow energetically frigid! Perhaps the opposite. (I could tell that this guy was really getting into it while I was on the table, but I thought he just loved his work.) So there, François.

But he was completely right that I don’t talk much. I’m as tight-lipped as David Fisher before he came out of the closet. I protect what’s in my heart, because there are always too many people who want me to succeed at a life other than my own. Always. Much like concerned parents might want their child to be an affluent lawyer in an established practice rather than a precariously funded artist with no health insurance.

Nevertheless I really would rather fail at my own life than succeed at someone else’s.

**

Sitting on a picnic table in my city’s “gay” park the other day, where the cruisers cruise the loop with house music blasting, I watched male couples walking their small barky dogs through drifts of orange leaves. This comforted me indescribably. I’ve always felt a sort of soul-affinity for gays and lesbians, perennially forced to endure, as they have been, a massive collective misunderstanding of who they are and how they love. My childhood friend Garth was told by his gentle Christian parents that they would pay for him to go to one of those special “conversion” counselors who could “fix” him. He politely declined. The choice to listen to yourself rather than the chorus of opinions around you is not an easy one, especially when they’re telling you that there’s something wrong with you, that you can’t be trusted — so trust them! Live the way they want, do as they do, and everything will work out just fine. (Only, maybe, when you actually look at what they’re doing, at their own lives…you start to see that they may not be the best judges after all.)

No doubt many other women would chide me for the ostensibly “golden opportunities” I’ve let pass, if I were to talk about them. It’s not like they don’t happen. Just last week I was chatted up pointedly and at length by an occasional visitor to our studio who prompts female staff and students alike to whisper to me “Who’s that???” I realized mid-conversation that there was not even a spark of amorous interest in me toward this very pleasant and conventionally good-looking young man five to ten years my junior. That’s the gospel truth. And I’m not of the school that says you can readily manufacture such things out of sheer willpower or wishful thinking (although at times I’ve tried). The quality of beauty that moves me to the root of my being isn’t found in the proportional alignment of features or even in the geometrics of a perfectly developed torso. It’s that lamp that burns inside some men, like Kerouac’s famed roman candles, and imbues their entire presence with a subtle lambency. You can literally see that the harsh process of socialization and domestication hasn’t succeeded in snuffing the spirited, curious, radiant beings they were as children.

But this is a right-brained observation, and most of our Western dialogue about matters of the heart comes from the left. (Forgive me, I’ve been reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s new book about her stroke; maybe I’ll write more on it next week.) This may be the only area of my life where I come from the other hemisphere. Popular gurus like John Gray are big on lists, steps, evaluations, and strategies to help you protect your vulnerability and winnow out the chaff in order to get your needs met; the lesser known John Welwood, whom I prefer, says things like

As earthly creatures continually subject to relative disappointment, pain, and loss, we cannot avoid feeling vulnerable. Yet as an open channel through which great love enters this world, the human heart remains invincible. Being wholly and genuinely human means standing firmly planted in both dimensions, celebrating that we are both vulnerable and indestructible at the same time. Here at this crossroads where yes and no, limitless love and human limitation, intersect, we discover the essential human calling: progressively unveiling the sun in our heart, that it may embrace the whole of ourselves and the whole of creation within the sphere of its radiant warmth.

I remember having an “aha” moment with my Buddhist counselor years ago, observing “Everyone equates relationship with love. But relationship isn’t necessarily love, and love isn’t necessarily relationship.”

I thought I was here on the planet for relationship, from the time I chased my cousin Nate around the coffee table at two years old through all the times I heard the erroneous prediction from men “You’ll find someone else,” but lately I’m more inclined to think I came here to grow in my capacity for unconditional love.

**

When responding to others from the expansive (or right brain) side of ourselves results in disappointment or difficulty or pain, our usual solution is to let the left brain take over and do damage control, criticizing us all the way for being a moron and brainstorming ways to avoid this in the future. But what if we trusted the legitimacy of our initial spontaneous overflow and kept ourselves open? What if we refused to talk ourselves out of that place of generosity and openness when things didn’t go the way we wanted?

Oftentimes what I’ve wound up colliding with are my own oldest wounds and other obstacles that have caused me to view others through the prism of unfinished business and unmet needs. (Byron Katie’s Four Questions are a great tool for unpacking such unconscious projections.) Sometimes all I’m left with in the end is that radiant warmth, that deep, breathless, astonished appreciation, that fierce ache in the ribs for the greatest possible good — of the other. Completely independently of me and my own preferences. Unconditional. (And thus far, each and every one has continued on independently of me and my own preferences. But then again, we all do that eventually, don’t we?)

Since I left the born-agains, I’ve found no other spiritual practice (including yoga) that likewise orients me in the world — but perhaps this is my spiritual practice.

In light of all of this, my soul may not be a failure at its own life, after all. It may look like it, by left-brained standards, in lacking a safe haven of publicly acknowledged reciprocity blessed by regular sexual contact and a recognizable definition. And as a limited and destructible human being, I do miss that comfort. I miss having certain needs met (by someone other than myself). I get lonely. I get tired. I yearn for communion, as we all do, as Rumi and Hafiz have expressed so beautifully in their poetry. I feel like a freak, and then I’m susceptible to being hurt by comments like the one made by François.

But ever since walking out on church, I made a commitment to my own soul. I go where it leads me, and not where other people think I should go. One thing it’s shown me is that love isn’t “out there,” it’s in here. When I transcend my injuries, my fears, and my incessantly scheming left brain, it can, on occasion, fill me up from the inside out.

Someday I may be so evolved that it won’t be just specific individuals who inspire it.

I’m not there yet, however.