Stalled out. Like Dylan stuck inside of Mobile with his Memphis blues again.
I’ve been stymied on my current Matador assignment, which isn’t even as challenging as the last one, for three weeks now. I have no ganas, to borrow from the Spanish. No drive.
My best work buddy has been gone for over a month; his energizing and invigorating “influence” has dissipated. And the winds of initial triumph died out of my sails after I got into a heated but futile argument on my essay thread at that site for ex-Christians. The initial response, if you recall, was overwhelmingly positive; it felt like a homecoming. I was excited to think I’d finally found a community where I could build up a readership before trying to break out into the larger world. But the exchanges I got into with a few of the commentariat turned that first sweet taste to bitter.
**
“At some point you just have to let your baby go,” offered one of my gay boyfriends, Danny (not to be confused with Dan), a designer/musician who supervises me at the political campaign. “You have to release it into the world and let it stand on its own, like you would a literal child.”
My biggest misstep, he suggested, lay in getting too involved in the comment thread and trying to micromanage its goings-on, especially when it turned in a direction I didn’t like. There were going to be haters everywhere, he reminded me, probably far worse than what I’d find on what is generally a supportive site for people who have left their faith. Besides, they weren’t even reacting negatively to my essay — they were reacting to another commenter I was more or less trying to defend.
He’s right, regardless: I’ve got to learn to publish, and then just let things stand, the way the pros do. No matter how tempted I am to jump into the fray.
**
This isn’t a problem for the time being, however, since I don’t feel like writing much of anything. I’m as listless now as I was jazzed before.
I did nudge myself to start a couple of other “projects,” while my influential buddy is on hiatus. For one, I subscribed to Match.com for exactly one month.
I’ve had a basic profile on there for a long time, and they kept offering me discounts and sending me alerts like “Member X just winked at you!” and “You have 1 new unread email!” It always bothered me whenever someone sent me a message I couldn’t read, but you have to be a subscriber to read messages. I used to see those alerts and think – what if The One is desperately trying to reach me? How will I connect with him if I don’t join?
Well, now I can see all two of those enticing messages. Unfortunately, one email sender was not only physically less than inspiring, but borderline illiterate, and the other had a hidden profile I couldn’t even look at. Half the “winks” I’ve gotten so far are from these “hidden” profiles. WTF, guys? Why wink at me if I can’t see you? Are you a man, or are you a bot?
At any rate, this endeavor is only a test. An experiment I decided to undertake in the absence of my all too inspiring friend. I call it Operation Last Ditch.
Part Two of Operation Last Ditch is a one-week trial of Arielle Ford’s “Soulmate Secret” course. I can cancel at any time during the first week and pay only a dollar. (She’s an affiliate partner of our old Calling in the One friend Katherine Woodward Thomas.) I figured, one buck, why the hell not?
**
This time, I don’t have any expectations. If you remember, the free dating site I tried over a period of a year never turned up anyone who “stuck” except one freakishly tall, wife-beating Polish chemist with a racist streak. The Salon.com personals and free promotional weekends on Match and Chemistry got me a handful of mildly interesting emails, a couple of fascinating but disappearing prospects, and one wildly disappointing date.
This is really just my baldfaced challenge to the universe or Fate (or whatever forces may or may not have anything to do with what happens): if I’m not “supposed to be” coveting my neighbor’s husband, if he’s not The One, if telling him I love him is a huge mistake, well, this is my good faith effort to throw open the doors and say BRING IT.
This much is certain: whoever that One may be, I’m not going to grovel or kowtow to snag him. My current profile, unlike so many of my past profiles, doesn’t attempt to be cute, charming, or coy; it doesn’t beg to be liked, because now I know at least one fully desirable man who likes the unscripted and unrevised version of me. And I’ll no longer settle for less. What I wrote is unapologetically feminist and says explicitly: I’ve finally learned how to be happy, after decades of not being, and I’m not going to let any man change that!
If that alienates 99 percent of the men on Match, so the fuck what? I’m letting it all hang out, just to see if anyone even halfway interesting and attractive bites. That’s why I’m calling it Operation Last Ditch. I figured I’d cover all the bases, put myself out there, “as is,” before I have one more opportunity to take the kamikaze plunge almost no one approves of and declare my incurable and anarchic love to my otherwise committed buddy, come what may.
In other words, I’m open to the possibility that there could be someone else, but he’d better fucking show up now.
**
Maybe the so-called Law of Attraction doesn’t work like that, but it seems to have worked for me in at least one other case. After I’d found myself wishing I had the means to do something interesting and sexy with my hair, a fellow employee who goes to cosmetology school started canvassing for hair models. So I wound up going to the Aveda Institute and having my hair given high-contrast, blonde-on-top-of-blackish-brown highlights by a student – for free.
It looks pretty hot. I haven’t looked this good since Francois the Gypsy did my hair. And it’s just in time for my re-introduction into the online dating world.
I can’t help but wonder how Dan would like it, though. He seems to like me plenty already without chemical enhancements.
**
The day before he went on leave, I overheard part of his conversation with one of our directors. She was asking him a lot of questions about his wife, his wife’s background and career, and his school and career plans. As they talked, an entire edifice rose up from the words, an impenetrable fortress of consensus about what is and what should be — the conventions of homeownership, traditional occupations and matrimony fortified as if by walls of iron. The imposing solidity of it all was dispiriting; beside it I, and my unorthodox little feelings and aspirations, felt utterly irrelevant.
Where I come from, that’s how it’s supposed to be: you find one thing — a vocational trajectory, a person, a belief system — and stick with it. For good. No matter what. Dig yourself into an embankment of permanence, and hunker down for the long haul. (For people so sure their true home exists in the hereafter, they sure do like their security in the here and now.)
Suddenly I heard Ben Zander’s voice in my head, like a bugle call out of nowhere. It’s all invented.
Zander, as I’ve mentioned before, waxes philosophical in The Art of Possibility about how the human brain filters and constructs experience. “The meanings our minds construct may be widely shared and sustaining for us, but they may have little to do with the world itself. Furthermore, how would we know?” He illustrates how we mentally “box ourselves in” with the puzzle of the nine dots, which I reproduced in this post.
He goes on to say
When you bring to mind it’s all invented, you remember that it’s all a story you tell – not just some of it, but all of it. And remember, too, that every story you tell is founded on a network of hidden assumptions. If you learn to notice and distinguish these stories, you will be able to break through the barriers of any “box” that contains unwanted conditions and create other conditions or narratives that support the life you envision for yourself and those around you.
It’s all invented. The stories we tell about whom we’re supposed to love, and when, and how much…how things are supposed to be, and happen, and continue, forever and ever amen…even Katherine’s stories in Calling in the One…they’re all just constructions. I’m sure Katherine discovered this when impermanence crashed her own Happily Ever After. But even she’s moved on now. She’s seeing someone else. She’s not some shattered mess still weeping on her bedroom floor, clinging to the coattails of a vanished reality.
Maybe I’ll find someone this time on Match. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe there’s someone out there, some guy from the neighborhood, who has loved Mai his whole life, and is dying for another chance, is just waiting to catch her if she falls. When I was debating quitting a job that was draining the life out of me, someone told me that there was someone out there who would love to have my position. By holding on, I was preventing that candidate from having it.
This is a metaphor. Furthermore, how would we know?
**
Just to recap my current social life for everyone: besides hanging out at a popular coffeehouse all the damn time (where I’ve met a number of friends, including Reginald, who is sitting next to me as I write), I go to my friends’ parties. I attend political protests and rallies. I go to Couchsurfing meetups. I attend cover-free music jams. I go to author events. I help my jewelry-maker friend at her various trade shows. I don’t barhop, but I’m obviously not hiding under a rock. I’ve been followed around the bar at a friend’s party by a weird, frizzy-haired old man named Ralph. I’ve let a beefy Couchsurfer fireman from Florida buy me a beer. I’ve been chatted up by MILF-loving twenty-five-year-olds. I’ve dodged Eli, made peace with David, and run into Padraic, who managed to convince me within a period of thirty minutes that not getting involved with him was an excellent idea.
So far none of the guys from Match I’ve emailed have responded. At all. That’s always a little rough on the self-esteem. I’ve responded to IMs from a few (mostly older) men from out of state who didn’t interest me, just to be polite. I’ve even had a happy hour drink with a painfully bug-eyed English professor from Nebraska who had “favorited” me sometime before I subscribed. Within the first ten minutes of our date, I was already daydreaming about what I’d make for dinner. He was pleasant enough, but the chemistry was completely nil. And if someone doesn’t appeal to me physically, there has got to be chemistry.
A man you find downright handsome, with whom you have crackling chemistry, is a very tough act to follow.
**
“You’re doing everything right,” says my best friend from college. She knows I’ve been above-board in all my dealings so far, trying to respect existing boundaries, trying to meet other people. Trying to color inside the lines. Trying to do what everyone else wants me to do, and be a good girl.
But – as she points out – I’m also being true to myself, because I wholeheartedly acknowledge that I love Dan. If I said I didn’t, or pretended I didn’t, I’d be a liar. I may not have done anything about it at this point, but I’m not denying it.
And I’m exhausting every avenue I can think of before acting. Who (other than a fetishist) craves humiliation? Conversely, what ethical person aspires to be a homewrecker? As I said before (talking about the “magnet”), it feels bigger than both of us. Yes, I can hear your collective eyeroll. Why believe any of the rantings of The Girl Who Cried Love? I can scarcely believe them myself.
Clicking through motley Match profiles like apparel in the L.L. Bean catalog, I feel homesick for Dan. Yes, I said homesick. Like I just want to go back to Kansas, but I’m trying to sell myself on Oz, because it looks impossible that I’ll ever get back to Kansas.
Maybe I should call this Operation Consolation Prize.
**
Speaking of varieties of sickness, my physical issues have returned with a vengeance in the past few weeks. Add to my raging acid reflux a lovely hiatal hernia — a gastric phenomenon naturopaths attribute to emotional tension in the solar plexus. I can barely eat. Maybe I’ll finally lose the spare tire, but it doesn’t feel good. My skin is drier than the Mojave: I’m breaking out in dermatitis all over, and my lips are cracking, while my face has erupted with tiny zits. It’s like some kind of full-body revolt, the likes of which I typically only see while under dire stress.
Honestly, I don’t think I can keep stuffing it anymore. Stuffing conflict, stuffing feelings, stuffing confrontations – including confrontations that could change my life. Stuffing my appetite for vocation and adventure, because I may fail and wind up homeless. Stuffing what I think I know, from some wholly unreasonable place in my being, because it’s both too wonderful and too terrible to be true, and everyone will scoff, squirm, or judge me for it. Or else watch me fall on my face and say, “I told you so.”
**
The argument on my aforementioned essay’s comments thread originated out of the collision of one commenter’s faith with violent antipathy toward that faith. I always identify more with the skeptics, myself, because even when I was a believer, I was riddled with doubt. I’m still riddled with doubt about most things. I barely even trust myself these days, which I’m sure has contributed to my paralysis in every area of life. I seldom know what to do, what information to act upon. I postpone decisions in order to gather more data. I never gather enough data.
But maybe after all is said and done, this is faith, in its essence: taking a chance on something other people find ridiculous and/or indefensible, simply because you have a deeply felt sense, an intuition, of its truth – an intuition you can’t impart to others, no matter how hard you try.
I have never had a faith like that before. I have never had cause for a faith like that before.
**
I zone out listening to one of Arielle’s Week One recordings. It’s all ground that Katherine has covered before in detail. I start checking my Facebook and email, doing other things.
What brings me abruptly back is when she begins talking about how we can’t rush the natural order of things — that while we’re sitting around impatiently, waiting and working on ourselves, our Person may be in the process of moving cross-country…or getting a divorce.
Having not chosen their soulmate the first time.
**
There is a famous short film of driving through Paris at dawn, C’etait un Rendezvous, which the Scottish pop band Snow Patrol uses in their video “Open Your Eyes.” The seamless blending of film and song speaks to a wanderlust Dan and I both share, and I can’t stop watching it tonight. The ending makes me cry, every single time.
It ends with the same lyrics that began it: All this feels strange and untrue/and I won’t waste a minute without you.
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