Sometimes that’s a good thing.

**

Tyler Tervooren, another Portlander like Chris Guillebeau who advocates risk-taking and living an unconventional lifestyle, said something (which I can’t find to quote now) to the general effect that being courageous in the everyday choices we make accustoms us to taking risks and being bold in more significant areas of our lives.

It was for this reason that, presented with the option of either taking a permanent, secure job in a toy company’s Internet department for a $30K salary (in a basement with mostly women) or becoming a full-time fundraiser for the anti-corporate underdog in our Democratic primary (in a a diverse and bustling campaign office), which by all accounts would be temporary and hourly, I chose the latter.

The former was a sure thing, but would definitely be stressful and suck precious hours of my life away (underground) for no real purpose. The campaign job was risky, but held promise as well as meaning. It would enable me to advocate for and help elect a real “people’s candidate,” while also possibly providing new connections and leading me in any number of new directions — if I wasn’t automatically out of a job after the primary.

In the midst of this decision, I had my first truly bitter fight with Jeannie. To make a long story short, she believed she was acting in my best interest, while I was shocked at her sudden “bossiness” with me and apparent lack of trust in my gut feelings.

What I derived from this episode, however, was a greater understanding of how Sam must have felt when I “bossed” him and showed little faith in his judgment. I didn’t like it, either.

Choosing the campaign involved a leap of faith. It was an act of trust in the future as well as belief in the candidate, and belief that fortune does in fact favor the brave — belief that my life will only change if I start making choices based not on what is already known and safe, but on what draws me forward and closer to a greater expression of who I am and what I value. It was the same kind of leap I took last year at this time.

As you know, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

**

For the past month I have also been working with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in Sonoma, California. We have weekly hour-long sessions that are meant to correspond to each section of the book. So far I don’t seem to have Called In The One, but I have definitely become more “magnetic” (to borrow from Katherine Thomas) when it comes to the opposite sex. More on that presently.

Beth’s input, along with some of Frank Schaeffer’s well-chosen words in his latest book (Patience With God), helped me deal more effectively with the latest Come-To-Jesus letter from my mom.

Dripping with the catchphrase-laden sentimentality peculiar to born-again Christian women, her missive gushed about how her life with her Heavenly Father/Lover (shudder) was so much more fulfilling than mine. (That incestuous blurring thing BACW do with their version of God I’ve always found unsettling.) It also took for granted, as usual, that her literalist cult had the corner on the “Christian” label and on what God wants.

God has always had a wonderful plan for your life, and has always wanted to reveal it to you. He has given you delightful gifts — tenderness, kindness, mercy — plus all the “smarts” with which He has endowed you. And the life He offers is one which is filled with His loving presence!

Do you still feel that the Christian life is one of rules and regulations legislated by a tyrant God? Not so! It is a life of a loving relationship with the God who designed us and Whose will is only for our good! You may feel your life is full of excitement and adventure, but I assure you “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” A life lived with God is a life of deep satisfaction because it is lived according to the blueprint of the Designer! And instead of being confining, it is a release into freedom, life as it was intended to be!

To top it all off, she sent me a Facebook message later that same week complaining about the words I’d used on someone else’s thread. “I didn’t bring you up to use such crude language,” she scolded.

First a child’s blush, and then a flash of rage, made blood ring in my ears. How dare she? The letter was already presumptuous to the max, but this was beyond the pale.

I took a time-out to cool down rather than going with my first impulse and using language that would have made her sorry she’d said anything at all.

**

Instead, I explored with Beth the critical relationship issues that surface in my dealings with my ever-proselytizing mother. Namely — the inability to stand up for myself; the distasteful bind of being either projected upon in the most saccharine manner (as sugar and spice and everything nice) or dismissed as invalid (stubborn and sinful); invisibility. All of which inspire a sort of primal and inarticulate rage.

To this day, after all, I often allow men with strong personalities to dominate and silence me. I have attracted admirers who idealize me so much I don’t even recognize who the hell they think they’re enamored with. I have chased many highly visible (attention-grabbing and handsome) men to whom I have been essentially invisible.

These relationships are mirrors of what I picked up from my earliest connections. Jeannie and I even discussed how the dynamic of our conflict resembled the dynamic of me vs. my mother and her well-meaning but overbearing Come-To-Jesus letters — just days before the latest one arrived.

So, theoretically, I should be able to apply the remedy where it all began.

Beth had me imagine the part of me that feels this rage as a small child. What does the child want? she asked. How would you take care of this child, as the responsible and mature adult? What would you say to her? What would you say to your mom?

This simple visual aid was remarkably helpful. I found myself feeling angry and protective of the marginalized, silenced, “unacceptable” little girl who was supposed to “be good” at all times and not upset anyone. In my mind’s eye, I picked her up and told her she was just as important as everybody else. I told her I recognized and valued everything she was, whether or not my mother or anyone else judged it to be “good.” I told her to express whatever the fuck she wanted. And I told her I wasn’t going to let my mother talk to her like that anymore.

**

The next day I wrote my response.

The fact that I have no idea which comment you’re talking about only serves to demonstrate that I am finally letting my hair down around here. I’m sure whatever it was could have been a lot worse in your book — I’ve been using language you’d probably call crude since I was a teenager. At forty-two I’m just getting over things like walking on eggshells and self-censoring to the point of nonexistence. I don’t want every part of me that isn’t inoffensive to someone to be invisible…

I can only marvel at the hubris when any human being thinks that they can read the mind of God and outright tell me I am NOT following His wonderful Plan for my life in my own damn time and way. (Oops, guess I cussed again. Somehow, I think God is bothered more by the behavior of the Enron Corporations of the world than by my saying “damn.”) Look, I know it’s just your way of trying to communicate love and concern, but doing it that way is neither welcome nor necessary. Why not just trust that God knows what He’s doing with me? It seems like a lot of hurt, tension, and resentment could be avoided here.

Defensive, my mother backed off somewhat, thanking me for being honest, but she still couldn’t resist throwing out the classic fundamentalist argument:

I don’t pretend to ‘read the mind of God’ other than reading what He says pretty clearly in His Word. I know you feel that Jesus’ words about being The Way, The Truth and The Life sound pretty exclusive — I didn’t say it; He did! I have chosen to believe Him as I would if a doctor told me ‘This is the ONLY medicine which can cure your disease!’ It is not a matter of opinion; either it is the truth or it is not. (Pascal) was willing to trust it as the truth — what was there to lose?

This “because he said so” tautology used to work on the child. C.S. Lewis made something like this argument too, saying that Jesus had to either be the Messiah or akin to the madman who claims he’s a poached egg. (What Lewis et. al. fail to consider, even within their dubious closed arguments, is that we can never know how much the canonized New Testament writings reflect what Jesus, if he really existed, actually said, written as they were after decades of oral tradition within a revisionist religious movement. To say nothing of those heretic Gnostics who didn’t even make the cut!) I replied:

There’s a couple of places we diverge that are irreconcilable, I guess. I don’t believe that I need to be cured, or that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, although I do believe that someone in the first few centuries wrote that a guy named Jesus said the “Way, the Truth, and the Life” thing…

You may or may not remember this, but I took a preceptorial (elective seminar) and wrote a paper on the Pensées at (college). (Pascal) was a fascinating character, but I agree with Franky Schaeffer’s assessment of his famous wager: “Pascal’s wager, wherein one bets in favor of God rather than risking damnation, is one of the stupidest ideas ever articulated. If there is a God, He knows you were just a good betting man splitting the odds – insincere but scared.” There are better reasons than fear to believe in some kind of Divine. On that perhaps we agree.

After that she pretty much shut up about the whole business, and since has stuck to subjects like how the campaign is doing, what’s happening with people we know, and the news.

It felt like some kind of watershed moment.

**

Just as Jeannie taught me what it was like to be on the receiving end of the “bossing” I gave Sam, my mother’s letter taught me something else about myself. Something uncomfortable to look at.

I realized that my mother was trying, time and time again, to persuade me with impassioned and sometimes manipulative pleas to take on her emotional experience when it was definitely not mine.

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: no wonder my carefully-crafted, effusive love letters to nearly a dozen indifferent or ambivalent men over the past twenty years never won them over. I could no more “convert” these guys to my subjective and unshared emotional experience than my mother could convert me to hers. They were probably even less into me than I’m into Jesus…and I wouldn’t or couldn’t accept that.

I flushed, thinking how cloying and annoying my attempts must have seemed. Perhaps as annoying as a subway evangelist handing out tracts.

I guess it’s a hard habit to break.

**

But about that “magnetism”…

I should mention that Ted has been working a few hours a week for the campaign, and that Padraic came over after he found out I was working there. (Ted has since quit the call center, and may be going more full-time until he passes his pharmacy exam.) I must admit, I never fully got over my crush on Ted, that nondescript but intelligent liberal Texan of my own generation. When I met him, he reminded me of a forty-plus version of Sam — hence the attraction. But I gave up on Ted months ago. I really don’t want to suffer over any more men who’ll play with me when I’m the only game around, but run around after other, younger women when I’m not. He still kids around with me, and seems genuinely glad to see me when I’m there…clearly he has a friendly affection for me. So I take our relationship for what it is, no more and no less.

Padraic I take with a grain of salt. I figured him out after a while: if I take a step toward him, he takes a step backward. This dance is time-tested and guaranteed. When he complained that his young ex-girlfriend was “too into” him and wanted to get serious (which is why they broke up) I realized I was being presented with yet another opportunity to play chase-the-carrot. Wisely, I declined. Padraic really does remind me of my brother John. I could have broken my own heart again and run after John one more time…but I wouldn’t have caught him this time, either.

No, I’ve had it with the terminal ambivalence and mixed messages. I deserve better than that.

**

One thing worthy of note, however, is how one of the Big Fish at my new position reacted to me. It caught me completely off guard. This is a national campaign, so it’s populated by local political luminaries who are Big Fish in our small pond.

During my first few days there, I came into contact with one of them repeatedly. A handsome, charismatic figure who knows how to work a room, Matt shook my hand with an oddly dazed look and seemed at a loss for words. I just smiled and nodded. I didn’t burble or effervesce the way most women do in his presence. Mind you, this is a guy at whom multiple eyelids flutter whenever he enters the field office, who gets to rub elbows with impeccably groomed Abercrombie & Fitch princesses at events.

Yet every time he’s had contact with this low-rent, un-svelte, T-shirted fortysomething in chipped librarian frames and holey sneakers, he looks like nothing so much as a dumbfounded adolescent boy alone with the prom queen. I’m tickled to death by this. I know I didn’t put the energy out there, but I feel it in the space between us.

I haven’t told anyone but Beth about this. And now you. No one around here, at least no one who knows local politics, would believe me if I told them. Beth, of course, says it’s a sign that I’m becoming more “magnetic.”

Even Ted, the other day, surprised me: I was standing outside with him and one of the other fundraisers, an ex-Marine in his fifties who had come down to work at our office location “just to see you,” he told me with bald flirtatiousness. Suddenly I felt Ted’s hand resting on my shoulder as he talked to the Marine. It felt weirdly territorial. Then Ted made a humorous remark, and shook the other man’s hand in a conciliatory fashion. The body language honestly seemed like something dogs might do if they were bipeds. Again, I was tickled, especially as it was Ted. At least he didn’t pee on me.

**

There’s really something to this whole let-them-come-to-me business. The best example of all happened when I went down to the call center to pick up my last check.

I would never have expected it to be so effortless, to get what I had been hoping for for weeks. I had by this point pretty much resigned myself to never making significant contact with either of the beautiful newbies mentioned in my last post, as I was (at long last) leaving The Job.

Stopping by various cubicles to bid my farewells, I didn’t see the half-Asian Adonis anywhere. The raven-haired Sir Lancelot, however, was sitting just a few seats down from my friend Jane. Standing there beside her, telling her about the campaign, I noticed he and I were still just missing each other’s glances. Before long, he stood up from his seat and logged out for a break.

As he came toward us, both Jane and the supervisor coming down the row read his subversive T-shirt slogan aloud. Lancelot laughed, stopped, and explained it to us, introducing himself with a firm handshake. His name was Tanner. Actually, Tanner was his surname; Jim was “everybody’s name,” so he went by his last. Close up he was even handsomer, his dark-lashed brown eyes larger and warmer. He had a sexy voice and an easy affability, and I wondered why on earth we hadn’t managed to introduce ourselves earlier.

After a minute of chatting he left us to go outside. I followed suit not long thereafter, not expecting to see him unless I deliberately went up the alley. The designated smoking area was on the other side of the building. I was contemplating whether or not to go that way, and how I might contrive to speak to him again, when the elevator doors opened.

To my surprise, Tanner was sitting right outside the front door. He held it open as I wheeled my bike out. I stopped to chat with him for a few minutes more (and to tell him that this was my last visit to the call center). I found out a bit more about him: he was twenty-seven, currently in his last year of school at the Art Institute, and had been a new recruit in the military — dispatched to the Pentagon — during 9/11. After witnessing censorship and the suppression of information at the site in the immediate aftermath of the attack, his politics did a U-turn and he became something of a 9/11 “truther.”

I tried not to stare as he spoke but couldn’t help myself. Sweet Jesus, what a delectable young radical was he. I wished I could eat him with my eyes. (And so friendly! Who knew!) When at last he turned to go back inside, he wished me luck with the campaign and said he was glad to have met me.

“I’m glad to finally know your name,” I said, starting to wheel my bike away as he pulled the door open. “Now you’re not just the tall handsome one with the tattoos.”

He paused, grinned, and laughed: a pleased laugh, a very sexy laugh. “Thank you!” he purred, with that sultry voice of his. “See you around…”

Oh, I wish, honey.

Nevertheless I couldn’t believe how easy that was.

Maybe he’ll turn up at a rally somewhere.

I’ll share a favorite scene from Chapter One, set during the Becker family’s first summer vacation dinner at the pensione (inexpensive rooming house) in Paraggi, Italy. Mom is in the middle of saying a typical (i.e. very long) grace.

**

In my heart I said, “Please, oh please, don’t let Lucrezia come to our table to ask if we want wine with dinner while Mom is praying!”

Lucrezia was the owner’s daughter. When she cleaned the rooms with her mother they both wore blue housecoats over their day clothes. At night she was the pensione’s waitress. She wore a white apron over her black pleated skirt. Her starched apron strings hung down to the hemline behind. Lucrezia wore her silver crucifix outside of her white blouse when she served us our dinner. It made her look very Roman Catholic.

Lucrezia was standing at our table. “Vino? Rosso–? Bianco–?” she said.

“Please, Lord!” I prayed.

Mom kept right on praying.

“Vino?”

Couldn’t she see we were praying? Would Mom interrupt the prayer and look up?

“We thank Thee for this food and we pray for those who live and work in this pensione that they might come to know Thee as their personal Savior…”

“Vino?”

Mom opened her eyes, looked up sorrowfully, blinked as her eyes adjusted to the light, then smiled ruefully at Lucrezia. Poor girl, she didn’t know the Lord. In fact, here we were praying, and she didn’t even wait until we were done. Probably she didn’t even notice. I guess she thought we were staring at our food while Mom talked to herself with her eyes shut. We had pity for Lucrezia and all the unsaved Italians. Roman Catholics thought they knew the Lord, but they worshipped Mary, not Jesus; they did not trust Him as their personal Savior but tried to merit salvation by works. I knew they were lost, but, just the same, I wished we didn’t have to pray in front of them.

“Vino?” Lucrezia was starting to really wonder what was going on. She tried English. “Wine? Red…White…Yes?” She smiled. Mom smiled too. Mom’s smile was full of compassion.

“No, Lucrezia, no, we won’t be having any alcohol to drink.”

“No wine.”

“No, thank you, we’re Christians, just some water please.”

“Acqua minerale?”

“No, just natural water…acqua naturale.”

It was Lucrezia’s turn to look sorrowful and to smile wistfully. Mom took her smile to be an expression of longing to know the Truth. I knew Lucrezia just felt sorry for people who drank tepid tap water at dinner when a hundred and fifty lira would buy a bottle of Chianti or Orvieto.

When Lucrezia walked away, we bowed our heads to finish our interrupted prayer. “And, Lord, we pray for dear little Lucrezia. We pray that You will give one of us an opportunity to share Your love with her and an opportunity to witness to her. In Jesus’ precious name we pray. Amen.”

I love how Calvin’s mother says “we’re Christians,” in characteristic evangelical insider way, like they and only they own the word — as if “you unsaved pagan Catholics obviously don’t know anything about it.” Schaeffer nails it.

**

I may never accept Jesus as my personal Savior, but I’ve found a Salvador.

Well, Salvador is his name, anyway…a sweet, round, 37-year-old Mexicano divorced father of two who works for a Spanish language network and broadcasts our baseball games on the radio en Español. We met via a free online dating site. I’m not at all sure he’s The One — I’m kind of disinclined to think so — but he possesses just the sort of crazy creative and risk-taking mindset that’s generally been missing among my circle of close friends and associates. Only Meg Ferris, that globetrotting writing coach who showed up at my yard sale last year, hatches anything like the sort of “harebrained” schemes Salvador comes up with — and makes work. This is a man who got himself an interview with George Lucas’s creative team in Los Angeles simply by setting up an attention-grabbing Web site.

He claims to have no expectations about us, and I believe he’s sincere. “Perhaps I am here to help you now,” he said at our lunch meeting, “and then, someday, you will have an answer I need.” Salvador was raised Catholic but has become enamored of Buddhism and Eastern spirituality. He teaches martial arts to kids in his spare time. (I can almost imagine him punctuating his sage observations with “young grasshopper.”)

I’m glad, at any rate, to have found a new friend with his breed of unrepentant cojones. Wasn’t I just saying I had no idea how to break out of the box?

**

A separate foray into the online dating world, this time for a Match.com free trial, has yielded equally interesting results. A gentleman my age, whose photo and profile I had skipped right over while perusing my daily matches, sent me a message. It was so warm, witty, and complimentary, I felt compelled to respond. But first I clicked on his profile to get a better look.

What I read there got me a little scared.

Not creepy scared, but scared in a way that Jason’s and Salvador’s and some of the other guys’ profiles hadn’t, because they essentially gave me a list of interests and what-I’m-looking-fors that more or less fit me or didn’t. (Online dating thus far has been like looking through a catalog and picking out the style and color that suits me best. The list approach, again.)

William’s profile struck a different chord. And not because of his vocabulary or his writing skills, which were excellent. Not because he was a law student focusing on international human rights law. Not because he was nice-looking in a supporting-actor kind of way, or because he’d rather watch a foreign film than climb a fourteener. What came through his carefully chosen words was a good-humored generosity, authenticity, and lack of ego. Here was an educated man who didn’t take himself so deadly seriously, who admitted to not having all the answers or all the confidence in the world, and who felt a strong sense of responsibility toward (and interconnectedness with) other human beings. His sense of humor was not unlike my own. (My best friend of twenty-three years, listening to me read his “In My Own Words” section, exclaimed, “But that’s you!”) I wish I could paraphrase a sentence or two for you here, but he took down his profile when his paid month expired.

After several rounds of increasingly personal email exchanges, William and I chatted amiably on the phone for over an hour. We have yet to meet. He’s leaving for Nigeria on a school-related mission next week and will be gone for three weeks.

I’m almost too freaked out to meet him, to tell you the truth.

Like me, he has deeply conservative parents, who hail from the same state as my mom. And Sam. His trip has become somewhat controversial: the faculty advisor who backed him for this Nigeria project just got fired. (Apparently the University doesn’t want its law students inserting themselves into the affairs of third world countries.) I’m inspired and humbled by his humanitarian passion and commitment, which goes way beyond the often ineffectual rallying and canvassing that wonky political progressives like Eli and I do on weekends, however well-intentioned. Talk about walking the talk.

I think: could he be…? Do I deserve…? I don’t dare finish the sentence.

Suddenly I’m not so sure I’m ready for prime time.

**

On the same day that I read William’s first, flirty message, a yoga friend posts a call on Facebook for interested parties who might like to get coached for free in the “Calling In The One” process. Rebecca has just finished Katherine Woodward Thomas’s relationship-coach training, and some of her friends in the program need “practicum” guinea pigs with whom to complete their certification.

Within 24 hours of responding to Rebecca, I am talking with Beth, a fledgling “Calling In The One” coach in California. Just like that. And for free.

You tell me that’s not one hell of a coincidence, amigos.

After our introductory phone session, however, I find myself awash in ambivalence.

**

At work, a tall, slim young trainee with jet-black hair and tattoo “sleeves” is looking at me. I noticed him his very first day: he resembles a young “Camelot”-era Robert Goulet, at his peak of tastiness, when they were saying he might be the next Elvis, before the cheeseball ’70s moustache and the Greatest Hits 8-tracks. I meet his gaze; he holds it for a provocative moment with his deep-set brown eyes, then looks away. I flush. We exchange furtive glances throughout the shift. One of us seems always to be sneaking a peek at the other through the cheerful, hefty matron sitting between us.

Suddenly the call center seems full of delectable young men again. A lean but muscular half-Asian with creme-caramel skin and huge hazel eyes whose name is really Sam (honestly!) makes me forget to breathe when he goes out of his way to introduce himself in the parking lot. He’s no taller than I am, but he has the torso of Apollo and the face of a Filipino matinee idol. Mama Maria.

I suppose there have been a few lovelies around in the past few months, but these latest afternoon delights are actually giving an eye to this tired old broad. Why, I have no idea. I think I look kind of fat and mousy at the moment. Go figure.

But it all comes surging back, all the forgotten intoxication and hunger. In between calls, somewhere in my graphic imagination, I’m nuzzling the tender brown nape of Apollo’s neck and running my fingers all over his taut, smooth, inconspicuously magnificent body. I’m pulling Young Robert down the stairwell to G3, the parking level where no one ever goes on foot, and pushing him up against the wall, thrusting my tongue between his lips, pressing into him. I get lightheaded with lust; my knees weaken. Not enough blood is getting to my brain or my feet, and…hello, may I please speak with Jane Smith?

**

I talk things out with Jeannie, my closest girlfriend in town. I’m beating myself up and working myself into a state of despair for being “superficial” and apparently losing my newly acquired, less visually-oriented perspective. I don’t have any impulse whatsoever to drag sweet, eager, decidedly stout Salvador, reeking of cologne (I hate cologne), down a stairwell, as swell as he is and as much as he seems to dig me.

I tell Jeannie that I don’t expect the guys who inspire lust in me to be the same ones who are good for me. Probably quite the opposite. But now I’m not sure I’m ready or willing to give up the hunger.

Jeannie, a counselor by trade, gently suggests that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. If I’m not turned on by someone, I shouldn’t force myself just on principle. Sam #1 didn’t elicit from me the same Greek-god comparisons as Sam #2, but we still had an intense, undeniable, potently pheremonal chemistry that made me want to eat him alive. With a spoon. Every day, if possible.

Who says you can’t love the right guy AND feel “the hunger?” she muses.

I start to feel a little more hopeful.

I think it’s great that you’re so sexual, adds Jeannie. I love that about you. Maybe what you need right now is to have a fling. Maybe you want to have a little sumpin’-sumpin’ with one of these youngsters before you get serious and look for something real. Have you talked to Beth about these feelings?

Of course I haven’t. Not yet. It may have been our decision to work together, after all, and the renewed prospect of successfully “Calling In The One,” that triggered this little midlife crisis.

**.

I struggle to complete my “homework” — not for Beth, but for Salvador. His questions for me are: what, exactly, do I want to write? And where do I want to be?

Finally I email him an answer. I don’t know! Frank Schaeffer makes me want to write a novel. But I’m not even sure I can do it; I’ve never managed to write a sustained work of fiction. (Of course, at the time, neither had Schaeffer.) I know I can do something like a personal travelogue competently and love it, and I can meet deadlines when I’m doing expository-type writing, so there’s that…but do I want to live abroad, or just travel? Where on earth do I belong?

“Don’t worry, just be patient, even a tree can’t speed up to grow,” he writes back. “Step by step. You need to relax, be quiet so you can start listening.”

Probably excellent advice all around.

**

My assignment from Beth has me stymied as well. I’m supposed to set an “anchoring” intention for love, in my own words. And answer the question: who would I need to be, to call in the love I desire?

All that comes to mind now, for the latter question, is: Someone else!

Jeannie, who dearly loves me and always sees the absolute best in me (you’re brilliant, you’re beautiful, you’re hilarious, et cetera), genuinely believes that these mouth-watering boys are a viable, if temporary, option, but you and I know that I’m only a legend in my own mind. When it comes to initiating anything with anyone who inspires that kind of unbridled lust, I’ve historically managed to project all of the allure of a skunk at a picnic. Out of dozens of fantasy partners, I’ve managed to snag only two or three (Lord only knows how) and pull them over into the reality of my bedroom.

The clincher of course is that the fantasies — to be brutally honest now — have nearly always proven to be better than the reality. Not to diss anybody, but just because something looks like a Porsche doesn’t mean it drives like one. When your nose is pushed up against the glass like the Little Match Girl, however, whatever’s going on inside is an imagined paradise. In the mating dance I’ve generally been a wallflower with two left feet, so I’m prone to thinking I’m going to miss something somewhere (the greener-grass syndrome) no matter what.

But the fevered imaginations of those who, like me, live too much in their heads can really short-circuit actual experience. (Case in point: the strange phenomenon of fans wanting to literally check out of life on Earth and go live in James Cameron’s Avatar universe.) Not everything is what it appears to be. Jeannie, a fellow vegetarian who makes a lot more money than I do, likes to take us out to the kind of candlelit restaurants that have white tablecloths and $20 entrees, where we’re routinely disappointed by the risotto al funghi. Conversely, we’ll sometimes wind up at a tiny storefront with plastic flowers on the table in a dingy strip mall on one of the ugliest thoroughfares in town, and slurp the best coconut curry soup anyone has ever concocted for a mere $4.95.

If there have been any pleasant surprises along the road of amore, it’s how the physical intimacy with Sam just kept improving. I went from not being sure I wanted to get him naked to wanting to keep him that way all the time.

So maybe what I need to do first and foremost is to let go of the stubborn and thoroughly unfounded belief that I understand anything at all about how this mating business works, and embrace my own unknowing.

Maybe “who I need to be” is just someone with a beginner’s mind.

Match.com and Chemistry.com are still sending me matches daily, but I have a gut feeling I won’t meet “The One” online. My few Web flirtations have fizzled, strangely thwarted by inopportune multiple power outages and Internet problems.

Without any romantic prospects to distract me right now, and becoming increasingly alarmed at my diminishing funds, I’m faced once again with the perennial questions of work, vocation, purpose, and the constraints of survival fear.

**

The Plan fell through. The Plan was to get a certain salaried 30-hrs-a-week state job (with benefits) that would pay well enough to allow me to hire Lisa Brown to take me through her “Live Your Dreams” program. I didn’t land that job, however, after months of testing and jumping through hoops, and now four months later I’m burnt out and underemployed at the call center, sending out resumes willy-nilly to jobs I merely imagine I could tolerate, and watching my last thousand in savings (the European Dream Fund) slip away like sand in an hourglass.

I am in bare-minimum survival mode. I don’t like being in this mode. Lately I’ve been thinking about the mental frameworks we live by (that define what we believe is possible for us), and rereading the Zanders’ book The Art of Possibility. I started to think about the last time I busted through my own internal fear-constraints to enter into an experience that was better than anything I could have imagined.

It was, of course, when I was grappling with my ambivalence about going forward with Sam. I revisited that comments thread and found some wisdom there.

**

Chris the coach had asked me what my hesitation was in going forward, and I did my best to answer.

It’s like being afraid of setting anything in motion, like a chain of dominoes or a snowball rolling downhill. You don’t know what all’s going to happen, or where it’s going to go. What if I’m a disappointment to him? What if he’s a disappointment to me? What if one of us is more smitten? I almost don’t mind being the one “on the bottom,” as my ex-therapist used to put it…I’m just so loath to be the cause of injury to anyone. Or what if it really does turn into something? Am I prepared for that?

I was taking inventory of my every fear of every unwanted outcome — which is the way I typically approach everything I undertake. I learned this early on: my dad for one was sure, with his incessant quizzing, to instill the proper anxiety in me about every possible thing that could ever go wrong. If I missed something, after all, the worst would surely happen, and then not only would I be up a creek, but my stupidity would be a proven and public fact .

My loyal German reader had a parable for me, in response, borrowed from experimental psychologist and “eco-philosopher” Peter Russell:

We are like a person holding on to a piece of rope.

He holds on for dear life, knowing that if he were to let go he would fall to his death. His parents, his teachers, and many others have told him this is so; and when he looks around he can see everyone else doing the same.

Nothing would induce him to let go.

Along comes a wise person. She knows that holding on is unnecessary, that the security it offers is illusory, and only holds you where you are. So she looks for a way to dispel his illusions and help him to be free.

She talks of real security, of deeper joy, of true happiness, of peace of mind. She tells him that he can taste this if he will just release one finger from the rope.

“One finger,” thinks the man; “that’s not too much to risk for a taste of bliss.” So he agrees to take this first initiation.

And he does taste greater joy, happiness, and peace of mind.

But not enough to bring lasting fulfillment.

“Even greater joy, happiness and peace can be yours,” she tells him, “if you will just release a second finger.”

“This,” he tells himself, “is going to be more difficult. Can I do it? Will it be safe? Do I have the courage?” He hesitates, then, flexing his finger, feels how it would be to let go a little more . . . and takes the risk.

He is relieved to find he does not fall; instead he discovers greater happiness and inner peace.

But could more be possible?

“Trust me,” she says. “Have I failed you so far? I know your fears, I know what your mind is telling you — that this is crazy, that it goes against everything you have ever learnt — but please, trust me. Look at me, am I not free? I promise you will be safe, and you will know even greater happiness and contentment.”

“Do I really want happiness and inner peace so much,” he wonders, “that I am prepared to risk all that I hold dear? In principle, yes; but can I be sure that I will be safe, that I will not fall?” With a little coaxing he begins to look at his fears, to consider their basis, and to explore what it is he really wants. Slowly he feels his fingers soften and relax. He knows he can do it. And he knows he must do it. It is only a matter of time until he releases his grip.

And as he does an even greater sense of peace flows through him.

He is now hanging by one finger. Reason tells him he should have fallen a finger or two ago, but he hasn”t. “Is there something wrong with holding on itself?” he asks himself. “Have I been wrong all the time?”

“This one is up to you,” she says. “I can help you no further. Just remember that all your fears are groundless.”

Trusting his quiet inner voice, he gradually releases the last finger.

And nothing happens.

He stays exactly where he is.

Then he realizes why. He has been standing on the ground all along.

And as he looks at the ground, knowing he need never hold on again, he finds true peace of mind.

Somehow this tale eased my misgivings. My friend Russ the Librarian added, “Sometimes it’s best to just let that insecurity go and dive in head-first.” That image, of “diving in,” brought up a memory for me of facing my fear of heights as a teenager:

I’ll never forget the time on a camping trip that I jumped off a bridge (with an inner tube) into a river. My fear of heights had me absolutely paralyzed. The longer I stood there, the harder it was to jump. Finally I just did it…and the fall and the dunk and the bobbing up was exhilarating and fun.

It taught me a lot about my tendency towards overthinking.

**

Benjamin Zander in The Art of Possibility demonstrates the puzzle of the nine dots. The challenge is to connect all nine dots with just four lines, without taking pen from paper.

Most people, of course, see a “box” here, and cannot fathom how to connect the dots within the box with less than five lines. The answer is, of course, to use the white space around the dots (to “think outside the box”) and create an arrow figure.

Says Zander, “The frames our minds create define — and confine — what we perceive to be possible. Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”

If you learn to notice and distinguish (the invented stories you tell), 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. We do not mean that you can just make anything up and have it magically appear. We mean that you can shift the framework to one whose underlying assumptions allow for the conditions you desire.

These are some of the stories I tell myself: I am all alone, with no one to rely on but myself — no one will help me; I am not fit or competent to do more than survive by the skin of my teeth on my own; no one wants or values my talents and gifts; if I run out of money, I will either have to go back and live with my parents (the ONLY ones who will take me in) as a failed Prodigal child, in that insanity-inducing religious environment, or live on the street. (Or kill myself.)

These are all part of a narrative of scarcity and terror, of consistently giving myself (not to mention my so-called friends and loved ones) C’s and D’s, even F’s, in life.

**

“All of the manifestations of the world of measurement,” says Zander,  “the winning and the losing, the gaining of acceptance and the threatened rejection, the raised hopes and the dash into despair — all are based on a single assumption that is hidden from our awareness.”

The assumption is that life is about staying alive and making it through — surviving in a world of scarcity and peril. Even when life is at its best in the measurement world, this assumption is the backdrop for the play, and, like the invisible box around the nine dots, it keeps the universe of possibility out of view…

On the whole, resources are more likely to come to you if in greater abundance when you are generous and inclusive and engage people in your passion for life. There aren’t any guarantees, of course. When you are oriented to abundance, you care less about being in control, and you take more risks…in the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold.

As an alternative to the measurement approach, Zander espouses the practice of “giving an A.” We are so used to being evaluated and compared to others from our earliest years, he explains, that performance anxiety can short-circuit our best efforts and shrink our creative horizons.

Zander’s radical solution, with his own music students, was to grant everyone an A for the year, but require them to write an essay — dated the following May! — explaining what they had done over the course of the year to earn this grade.  This exercise opened the door for the students to envision their best abilities coming forward and developing, rather than causing them to obsess and compete.

Getting feedback later on how the class felt about doing this assignment, Zander heard from one of his more reticent Asian students. The young man’s words reduced me to tears.

In Taiwan, I was Number 68 out of 70 student. I come to Boston and Mr. Zander says I am an A. Very confusing. I walk about, three weeks, very confused. I am Number 68, but Mr. Zander says I am an A student…I am Number 68, but Mr. Zander says I am an A. One day I discover much happier A than Number 68. So I decide I am an A.

As the author says,

Giving an A is a fundamental, paradigmatic shift toward the realization that it’s all invented — the A is invented and the Number 68 is invented, and so are all the judgments in between. Some readers might conclude that our practice is merely an exercise in putting a “positive spin” on a negative opinion, or “thinking the best of someone,” and “letting bygones be bygones.” But that is not it at all. No behavior of the person to whom you assign an A need be whitewashed by that grade, and no action is so bad that behind it you cannot recognize a human being to whom you can speak the truth. You can grant the proverbial ax murderer an A by addressing him as a person who knows he has forfeited his humanity and lost all control, and you can give your sullen, secretive, lazy teenager an A, and she will still at that moment be sleeping the morning away. When she awakes, however, the conversation between you and her will go a little differently because she will have become for you a person whose true nature is to participate — however blocked she may be.

**

The call center is a small, boxed-in universe run by anxious authoritarians who live and breathe the world of measurement; creative deviation from the “call process” is sharply reprimanded, while performance quotas are monitored closely. No wonder I feel like I’m suffocating there. (It occurs to me that Sam’s genius as a leader was that he naturally “granted A’s” to callers and treated them as collaborators rather than misbehaving children.) At the same time, it fully reflects my present desperate survival orientation toward the world: in conditions of scarcity and peril, one takes whatever one can get, no matter how much one is required to give (in opposition to one’s nature, at that) for how little return, even punishment.

I have been in this “starving” mode since I was nineteen and left home for good, feeling that it was all up to me, alone, and that I was, in actuality, hardly up to the daunting task. I imagined a life of washing dishes in restaurant kitchens and other entry-level grunt jobs, making an honest if poor living.

Now that my back and knees and shoulder are giving me trouble I can’t even take care of properly, I can no longer rely on this forty-two-year-old body for physical labor. This, along with my deteriorating condition, frightens me. I never had a backup plan.

To tell you the truth, I always expected I’d be dead by now.

**

A college friend hitting the bottom of the barrel basically tries to drink himself to death, and dozens of people respond immediately. A small army of close friends keeps a vigil at the hospital and then rents a hotel room while others clean house (clearing out bottles). From afar comes a massive outpouring of expressions of love and support. Everyone cares. Everyone wants to help.

Is it sick of me to be envious?

Maybe the problem is that I’m too proud to disintegrate publicly, or to show any real fear or neediness. My mother’s (unhappy, complaining) mother intruded upon every fragile boundary of my adolescent self when her disease forced her to live out the rest of her days in our living room, and from that experience I conceived a lifelong terror of “being a burden” to anyone. I would literally rather die. I usually have to be at my wits’ end to ask for help.

The bottom line here is, I guess, that I don’t believe I have the freedom to fail. I’ve never taken big risks because I’m certain there’s no net beneath me. (Sometimes I’ve wondered what it would have been like to be the young woman whose wealthy parents paid for her entire education and regularly sent large sums of cash when she needed it…or even to be my brother, who lived at home after college and got his first big career break with a man from our church.) It’s all up to me, I have no one to rely on but myself, and I’m not the kind of competent that leads to merit-based success in life.

**

At the end of all this ruminating, I find myself returning to the rope, and jumping off bridges, and the puzzle of the nine dots, and Ben Zander’s A. I stepped out of the box once — I took a genuine risk that genuinely worried me — and I did find, in the end, that I was already standing on the ground. Sam may have been a confused kid who did too many drugs and ultimately left me, but he also left me better off than he found me, because he knew how to give love. I went beyond the nine dots when I fell for a man because of the quality of his heart.

Of course, in this case surviving in the world is what’s at stake. Is there really ground beneath my feet? Are all my assumptions mistaken? Will someone be there to catch me if I risk and fail? Am I so certain to fail? I’ve given myself no better than C’s (and others even lower grades) thus far. What if I believed that others wanted what I have to contribute, and that they were happy to help me? What would that even look like?

And what would I do now?

I’m starting to get nervous about my finances again — I keep telling myself “I’ll work more hours this week,” but when I do manage to drag myself to that circle of hell we refer to as a call center I can hardly wait for a four-hour shift to be over. Jobs that sound at least tolerable and that I’m somewhat qualified to do have been scarce, and the ones to which I’m applying aren’t calling me. I had hoped I’d have something better by now, so that I could re-hire Lisa Brown to help me with my nonexistent writing career. As it is, right now I’m operating at a deficit every month.

What I’ve been most diligent about has been following Katherine Thomas’s book to the very end, and exploring various relationship prospects. You may be surprised to learn that “David” is no longer in the running.

**

What happened was this: I had been so delighted that David was so radically different from my dad and the patronizing men I’ve usually attracted that I failed to notice the huge pursuit imbalance that had been forming. The truth was I was contacting him repeatedly in order to nail down a date. I had initially been the one to reach out to him, and then I had had to prod him several times to make that first date. After that, it took a month (and more than one try on my part) before he suggested a group outing with his friends. A group outing.

So I was beginning to suspect that maybe David just wasn’t all that interested in me. He has a lot of very cute female friends, after all, who are a lot younger than I am and could pass for Suicide Girls, and I had to wonder if he’d keep them waiting for weeks.

Nevertheless, when we finally made it to the bar, and were having a great time with his friends, he cozied up against me in the booth and kept putting a hand on my back. Flushed with alcohol, I had a stong desire (for the first time) to kiss him. I hadn’t felt any such impulse toward him before because his demeanor was so eccentric, but I liked his touch and was starting to find his mannerisms cute. Two of his close friends, a couple, gave us rides home. As we weren’t alone I simply hugged David goodbye. If we had been alone, I doubt I would have been so restrained. I’m glad now that I was.

The next day (Friday) I called him to tell him what a great time I’d had. He suggested we get together again — maybe that weekend? He’d check his schedule and get back to me. I said: Are you sure? I knew he would be busy that week, helping organize a musical event at a local bar. But he said he’d call.

Except that he didn’t. Five days passed. No call, no messages, no nothing. Needless to say, by the following Wednesday I was feeling pretty disappointed, and realizing that I was on the same old merry-go-round I’d been on a million times with mixed-message men from León to Rick. Only this time I wasn’t going to focus on just one “message” (our seeming rapport at the bar) to the exclusion of all others (his repeatedly not calling). I deserved better than that, dammit. Not wanting to phone David yet again, I sent him a message, which I tried to make humorous and non-hostile in tone, but which in effect said: Hey, I’m getting the picture here from your actions that you’re just not that into me. And I don’t want to keep pursuing you if you’re not going to call when you say you will. I wouldn’t want to do that if you were a Nobel prizewinner or George Clooney. So if I’m correct about this, I think it would be best if I skip your upcoming event. I hope we can stay friends either way.

Notice that I left my surmisings open for him to contradict. I really thought he would contradict them. I thought I would at least hear something from him, if nothing more than sheepish agreement. But I heard nothing at all. Not the next day. Not the next week. Not since.

So so much for David.

**

Walking home through air heavy with the perfume of blooming lilacs and apple blossoms, I was reminded of how hung up on Rick I was last May, and how hopefully (and doggedly) I clung to every little bit of inconsistent attention he showed me. Given what happened after that with Sam, it seemed a bit like scavenging for potato chip crumbs from a discarded bag while the catered-banquet truck was coming down the block.

Now it occurred to me that for all I knew, something a million times better was coming down the block. Because I’d already tasted something a million times better than stale potato chip crumbs. And it changed me. Sam couldn’t stay, but he stayed just long enough to shift the entire ground beneath my feet.

I was able to laugh off my disappointment when I framed things thus: David had, after all, been dangerously close to getting the kind of action all boys like. A lot. If things had gone well, I could have been exhausting him the way I had managed to exhaust a 21-year-old. Your loss, kiddo!

**

I have since been asked out by two supervisors (who are now not supposed to date me, per company rules laid down after last summer’s scandal involving a director), one married man, and a slightly unhinged coworker who looks like Teddy Roosevelt and who may or may not be a pathological liar. Not exactly ideal pickin’s…but Ms. Thomas did say there would most likely be a number of “near misses” coming my way, that I might actually find myself challenged to make better choices for myself.

The only such choice that has been at all difficult has been the choice to lay it on the line with David. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, to decide I didn’t want to keep chasing yet another ambivalent guy. Typically I just try to convince myself that what little response I’m getting means a lot more than it does. To paraphrase Lisa Brown, the less love you’ve received in a relationship, the harder it is to let go. Which may explain why it took three years for me to let go of Sonny, and more like three months for me to start to let go of Sam. The mixed-message givers incite us to want to prove our worth to them, even as their behavior reinforces our doubts about it.

**

One night while reading Salon.com, I noticed one of their featured personals ads to the right of an article. I found myself wondering: would the Salon readership be a better pool to explore than the Yahoo one I had waded into a decade ago? My previous foray into online dating had proved inconclusive, but my hippie friend Diana was constantly singing its praises. I went ahead and did a quick search (which is all you can do without membership) of my age range and location.

The first person to come up in the list, a man my age, had a black-and-white photo that was a bit dark, but I swear made him look like Sam Rockwell in one of his mustache-and-soul-patch incarnations. As you might imagine, I stopped. Cold.

I tried to click on the man’s profile, but the site sent me to the signup page. I wound up building a rudimentary profile of my own just so that I could view his. (My introductory blurb was, I thought, funny and literate, if frank, and eschewed the standard shopping-list approach.) After I finished it, I was able to view the man’s full profile, and found his interests and answers to be intriguing and strikingly compatible with my own. To contact him, however, I was required to spend money, and I couldn’t afford to join the site, even for one month. Oh well, I shrugged. So much for that idea.

The next morning I had an email from the site: “Someone wants to see you.” Member X had requested my photo. Member X was the guy I had joined to investigate.

I literally shouted with laughter.

That same day I posted a photo, and filled out the rest of my profile. Then I went to look at the available payment options for sending messages. The cheapest option, hidden away from the membership options in the Help menu, was to buy 2000 credits (enough to send 10 messages) for $10. I decided to do it, and promptly sent the guy a message. “Hey man,” I wrote (literally quoting a Rockwell character), “sweet ‘stache.”

He answered the next morning. “I thought you’d never notice!” he said. “So when am I taking you out for a drink? My treat!” He had changed his profile photo to one in color. When I saw it, I literally broke a sweat. In this one, he more closely resembled Edward Norton…only better.

I found myself head-over-heels in lust with a photograph.

Controlling myself, I insisted on exchanging more information before agreeing to meet, but my fantasies were already running wild. Could Jason be It? Jason was such a hot-guy name — befitting that photo — and he was sounding so cool. He was a sommelier who had worked for an organic-foods market for years and recently transferred here from Austin. He lived in my best friend’s eclectic neighborhood. He was politically liberal and generally non-religious, but took an interest in Buddhism. And he looked like that. I kept pinching myself, and going back to look longingly at his photo. I imagined meeting this attractive contemporary and having the sparks fly as we both realized we’d met The One. Which was something that had really happened for many of Thomas’s clients. Finally I couldn’t stand the wait any longer, and wrote: Okay, let’s meet!

His response was immediate: How about tomorrow night? Name the time and place. I did…and then proceeded to not sleep a wink from excitement. Clearly this man and I were supposed to find each other!

**

I glanced nervously around the bar. It was a place Rick had shown me, a lounge in an old Victorian owned by a Polish family that was long on atmosphere and had a wonderful upstairs patio. I didn’t see anyone who vaguely resembled those photos.

And then I spotted a man who vaguely resembled those photos.

Vaguely. Except that he looked quite a bit older and chunkier, with graying hair, a baggy flannel shirt and a round, avuncular face. He lit up when I introduced myself (in contrast, I tend to photograph poorly). I tried to stifle the disappointment of an addict denied a promised fix.* Understand, it’s not that Jason was unattractive — he actually had beautiful, warm eyes — it’s just that he wasn’t particularly hot, and I had been expecting Edward Norton. He looked his age, kind of like that favorite history teacher you had in high school who had teenagers of his own. I felt a momentary flash of resentment, as if I’d been a victim of false advertising. Those photos were apparently not recent.

I ordered a pineapple martini on his tab, and proceeded to get good and inebriated as we sat on the patio. I enjoyed talking to Jason; we have a lot in common. We talked politics and conscious consumerism and music and travel; he loves Italy, too, and has explored Ireland. He encouraged me, as my artist friend had, to “just go” to Europe and work there illegally if I had to. He loves to read, and I considered how much fun it might be to show him around the semi-famous bookstore where I used to work. He really did have nice eyes.

I thought of how I wasn’t infatuated with Sam until the third month of knowing him, and how madly in love I fell with him…how ravenously eager I became to have sex with him at every available opportunity. I thought of how I had had trouble getting past David’s oddness on the first date, but wanted to make out with him by the second. I knew I was experiencing a major letdown because I had giddily believed I had found that lust-at-first-sight fantasy man who could feed my chronic craving for eye candy. I had built Jason way up in my imagination. Granted, he hadn’t helped me any by posting an out-of-date photo. That was frankly unfair, and seemed somehow dishonest. But if I had met him another way, in his present form, I probably would have warmed up to him pretty quickly, and thought, “Gee, what nice eyes he has.” Maybe eventually I would have found myself wanting to ask him out, as with Ted.

**

Speaking of Ted, I mentioned in my comments thread a couple of posts ago that he had made it clear to a mutual work friend that he prefers younger women. So I had given up on him. One day, however, in the staff kitchen, I witnessed a particularly humiliating incident which Ted’s unfortunate preferences afforded him.

Two of our younger callers, a skinny skaterboy and a slender, platinum-blonde princess who would look completely at home on any given MTV show or spring break video (all eyeliner and spaghetti straps and miniskirts up to here) were conferring quietly in the lounge area. Ted was sitting near them on the other couch. I was eating my lunch at the kitchen table. MTV girl was telling skaterboy about some club or other where she had seen this “old guy” dancing and “totally making a fool of himself.”

Ted, undaunted by her obvious contempt for her elders, asked, “What club was that?”

Apparently he must have tried to chat her up before, because her withering reply to him implied as much. For Ted’s sake I won’t repeat it, but I’ve never heard another woman over the age of eighteen be so directly and unapologetically cruel. In movies, perhaps, or on featherweight TV dramas aimed at teenagers, but not in real life. Poor Ted, stammering and backpedaling, crimsoned from neck to ears. I felt myself blush in sympathy. When he spoke to me shortly thereafter, he had the look in his eye of a bleeding calf. I wanted to say, Look, honey, you can bother me anytime, but I didn’t want to embarrass him further in front of MTV bitch-goddess and her lackey.

Later that week Ted started to say something to me about how long it had been since he’d seen a show at a music venue I like, and I was about to say something, but we were interrupted. I was a little sorry about that, but I’m not at all convinced Ted wants a grown woman, or things to be easy.

**

I came home from my date with Jason (I left things at “Call me”) and upon hitting the pillow was comatose for the next nine hours. Toward the morning, I dreamt that I had locked myself out of a borrowed car, a light brown station wagon like the one my family had owned in the 1980s, and was trying to push it, but accidentally pushed it into a river. As it sank, so did my spirits. How could I have fucked up so badly, on two counts? Everything was ruined.

Suddenly Jason appeared, offering to buy me a meal and console me. Utterly defeated, but comforted by his kindness, I asked him to drive me home instead. He drove me to my parents’ house — the house I grew up in, not my home. Sitting in his car in my parents’ driveway while he chatted outside with my mother, I was overwhelmed with despair, and felt like breaking down and begging him to take me out after all, to take me the hell away from there. Then I woke up.

Maybe my unconscious was trying to warn me about seizing on anyone out of a sense of desperation or defeat. Maybe I’m afraid that saying yes to Jason means that the Prodigal child is at the end of her rope. I don’t know. What a loaded one, Dr. Freud.

**

On waking, I felt a wave of disappointment crest and crash over me, and wondered melancholically if I would ever be able to love another man the way I had loved Sam. This thought made me cry. Eventually I got up, fed myself, bathed and dressed and even put on a little makeup, determining to go to my favorite coffeehouse to write on my laptop and see if anyone interesting showed up. Irrationally, perhaps, I still half believe my Rockwell is out there somewhere, waiting to be found, ready to make up for the fact that I could never have my beautiful older brother. (“Mommy,” I asked my mother at a precocious three years old, “When I grow up, can I marry Johnny?”)

I scanned the whole place from my vantage point at a front table, my back to the open garage-door facade. No one in particular caught my eye. On some days the prospects are as thick as thieves — I’m tripping over men I‘d like to tackle — but not today. After a while I went to get more hot water for my tea. As I stood in line, absently gazing out the open garage door at the patio, I saw our old buddy Eli strolling by on the sidewalk. He glanced inside. I waved my arm. He stopped.

I chortled to myself. Well, there’s some candy for you, baby!

Eli came in to have a cup of coffee with me, since he had some time to kill. His “lady friend,” as he called her, was at the nearby medical clinic having some tests done on her eye. He explained to me that she was already blind in one eye (save for peripheral vision) and that she might be losing her vision in the good one. She had asked him to come with her today. That he had accompanied a brand new “lady friend” in such difficult personal circumstances struck me as unusually caring, and I suddenly remembered him telling me about how he did his best to look after his semi-disabled mother.

But let me just point out a major irony here for a moment. This is Eli we’re talking about here. Beautiful Eli. The young man who completely commanded my attention the very first time I laid eyes on him. Even with his shaggy unwashed hair in a bandanna and nerd-specs on and skin breaking out, he causes me to stare in a trance of near-intoxication. I have to remind myself to keep my head, to peel my eyes away from his intense gaze. You all know I’m well aware that there’s more to relationship compatibility than finding the other person visually compelling, and I had previously ruled him out as anything other than a friend, but Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that he’s an Equal Opportunity Boyfriend, this probably indicates that he’s a far finer person than I previously imagined, and I hope his “lady friend” doesn’t lose what’s left of her sight. But I could not get over the fact that Eli was seeing a woman who might lose her ability to see him.

I for one was damn glad I could see him. We talked for a good hour, catching up — I shared my latest job disappointments, he filled me in on his political organizing — and I kept up the appearance of detachment. But the junkie inside me was soaking up my drug like a thirsty sponge. After he departed to go get his girl, I sat there for some time, substantially cheered up but starting to second-guess myself.

Eli is ten years younger than me. I know he wants to put down roots here, while I want to go abroad. He’s an atheist and a loner and he doesn’t like people. He would probably detest half my friends. And yet…and yet…he’s extremely caring. He does like me. And he may not look like “Johnny,” but he does resemble that kid I had a crush on in my youth group for forever.

To supersitious types like me who can’t quite believe such encounters are only a coincidence, I can only say: what a time for Eli to reappear. Had I not gone for a refill when I did, we would have missed each other. He doesn’t even live within five miles of that coffeehouse. It’s not exactly his usual haunt.

Of course, he’s not currently available: beautiful Eli is dating a visually impaired woman. And I’m trying to talk myself into dating your old history teacher. Who may or may not call again. I opened Thomas’s book at random the other day to read: we must do our best to live 100 percent committed to whatever intentions we set, without being attached to the results we are getting.

Who really knows what’s around the corner?

I guess I’ll continue to wait on that catering truck, anyhow; you can keep your potato chip crumbs.

_______________________________________________

*20/20 cited a scientific study that actually showed that the same area of the brain becomes active viewing beautiful people as becomes active when alcoholics are shown pictures of alcohol or compulsive gamblers are shown pictures of cash.

*

One chapter actually opened up some of that old familiar pain in my chest, but it was a lot duller and more bearable this time. In “Honoring Our Need for Others,” Katherine Woodward Thomas writes

We’ve become so afraid of appearing too needy that many of us have given up a healthy sense of entitlement…we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. It’s appropriate for us to go into a relationship with the intention of caring for the needs of another, with the anticipation that our needs for love, connection, and belonging will be cared for in return. It’s part of what it is to be human.

Back when I was in therapy, and my therapist would occasionally bring up the prospect of real mutuality with some unknown future person, I would feel a vague discomfort and resistance, which we never explored. I assured her that it was more important to me to love than be loved. I could take care of myself. Far be it from me to make demands.

…in our efforts not to appear inappropriately needy, many of us have tried to shut down our needs entirely. The appropriate needs get thrown together with the inappropriate ones and we swallow them all. Yet this, in turn, only creates more hunger because it’s simply not normal for us not to have needs in our relationships with others.

No one likes a clingy type, I thought. (Never mind that I was practically a stalker when it came to a guy named Greg Schulz.) I didn’t sense that any of the men I deemed worth having were interested in giving anything back to me.

Often, when my clients complain that they are too needy, I discover that the people whom they are spending time with are unwilling or unable to provide support, consistency, and love to them. I assure them that it may not necessarily be that they are too needy. Rather, they may be choosing people who, for whatever reason, aren’t taking their needs into consideration. Of course, this then leads us to explore how willing they are to take their own needs seriously.

Ever since leaving home, where belonging came with a stiff price, I had championed rugged self-sufficiency, ignoring how lonely and abandoned I felt underneath. While I was studying philosophy in college, the Stoics had appealed to me; theirs was a worldview conceived by slaves who (for good reason) had despaired of any semblance of control over their circumstances and any expectation of having even their basic needs met. It therefore sprung from an extreme of helplessness, a helplessness much like that of the dogs in Seligman’s experiment who ceased trying to escape their cage. Some followers of Buddhism and certain New-Age spiritualities are not entirely dissimilar when they denounce attachment and try to get rid of suffering by eschewing desires and needs altogether and throwing out the bathwater with the baby still in it.

What gets forgotten here is that we are not slaves. We are not dogs in a cage. There’s a significant difference between being attached to the anticipation of a sunny day off or spaghetti for dinner, and being attached to the need to feel visible. In other words, don’t sweat the small stuff…but it isn’t all small stuff. And not all expectations are unreasonable.

*
Going back through my files, I pulled out an old letter from Dave, who had lived with (my object of worship) Max and (my object of lust) Jacob my last year of college. Dave was like a younger brother to me, and I loved him ardently (probably more than just as a younger brother, but he had one girlfriend all four years). I had felt moved to write a poem about their little three-man household, pouring my heart into the characterization of each one of them, and calling it “Brothers.” I gave a copy to Max when it was finished. A few months after graduation I got a letter from Dave, expressing his appreciation and wonderment at how I had nailed it, and thanking me for creating a lasting portrait of their “family.” He closed by saying

Having no song to offer in return, I would at least like to say this: it is a pity that we are only imperfectly able to return give you back the love you hold for us that allowed you to write this poem. I have often felt this for mys anyway, and I very much wish that someone will find you who can give you back the love you so freely distribute to the world, measure for measure.

With love, Dave

When I first read this, I burst into hiccuping, breathless sobs like a smacked toddler and cried for at least two hours straight. Dave’s kind words seemed to me like kisses in a world of blows. I let loose torrents of suppressed pain.

Now I cried again, but with a lot less pain. This time it didn’t have to be Max or Jacob (or even Dave) — or nothing. Yes indeed, my dear Dave, it’s high time for that someone to find me.

*
Ms. Thomas uses the word “pattern” in her book a lot. For a couple of years, the word “pattern” used in a psychological context aroused an overwhelming and irrational rage in me. I asked Doc specifically not to use it. I hated the word; hated its damning connotations.

What I finally figured out, however, thanks to Lisa Brown’s input, was that this rage had to do with blame and helplessness. The root of my wound, as she helped me understand, had to do with blaming myself for being rejected by my family and peers, while being unable to do anything about it; so the blame implicit in the idea of having entrenched and undesirable psychological “patterns” I should (supposedly) be able to change was only aggravating already overwhelming feelings of helplessness. Put simply, you could say I was reacting violently to feeling blamed for the profound feelings of blameworthiness that have caused me no end of trouble for forever. Coping with and defending against those feelings are what helped set those goddamned “patterns” in motion!

I’ve come to certain conclusions, backed up by Ms. Brown and Ms. Thomas, about what we are and are not responsible for. Yes, it may be conceptually interesting when talking abstractly from a “spiritual” perspective of nonduality (i.e. nothing is ultimately either good or bad) to entertain the notion that a soul chooses its circumstances — that we choose everything that happens to us from birth. This is a popular metaphysical view right now among the yoga set, and one Doc advocated. But this would also mean that (to borrow an example from the book) four-year-old Elizabeth, who gets molested by her father, is somehow ultimately responsible for it. From a psychologist’s perspective, this is just sick. The child already lives in shame and feels responsible; the woman spends her life feeling dirty and unworthy. This variety of New Age fancy may feel superficially empowering for about ten minutes, but it heals nothing. Thomas tells the rest of the story:

I invited Elizabeth, as she is now, an adult woman of forty-one, to imagine that she was looking at herself as a four-year-old girl. I asked her to picture a grown man, her father — a man who, we would hope, would protect and love her — instead trying to have sex with her. “What do you think of this little girl?” I asked. “Would you look at her and say to yourself, ‘What a dirty, dirty little girl. No wonder that man is sexually abusing her.’?”

Elizabeth burst into tears as, for the first time, she actually understood her blamelessness.

What the shame-filled, self-blaming child needs is what Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting needed: that breakthrough moment when his therapist held him tight and said “It’s not your fault” over and over again. I waited years for someone to say that to me.

*

My total break with Doc, still open-ended and without closure, has been troubling me, but I can’t bring myself to call or write him. I expect that I won’t be able to make him understand what happened from my perspective. He has his own interpretation of everything, that some “self” of mine was unjustly making him the bad guy the way some “self” in Sam was making me the bad guy. (Jesus, I hate Voice Dialogue anymore, almost as much as I hate fundamentalism!) I needed Lisa’s paradigm in order to accurately describe what happened. Lisa’s model of the human psyche has critical elements that were missing or underplayed in Doc’s model.

My rage and complete break with Doc really wasn’t all that unlike Sam’s rage and complete break with me and his life here…but not for the reasons Doc gave. I feel it’s safe to say now, thanks to Lisa, that Sam and I both have highly permeable boundaries. We both find it hard to say no, and can be easily manipulated or overcome by more forceful personalities. He probably feels as angry and helpless about the way he rolls over for other people as I do. For people like us, it’s easier to keep people out in the first place than to kick them out once they’ve taken up residence inside our “circle.” When they do get in, sometimes the only remedy seems to be total withdrawal. I had huge problems drawing lines with my family, so now I live 2000 miles away. And the only solution to the inappropriate shaming I was receiving at the studio from my dominating boss seemed to be to cut and run.

Sam badly needed to regain the integrity of his boundaries, and the only way he could do that, he must have concluded, was by cutting everybody off. My own “circle” was pretty compromised by my overdependence on Doc and by the way I often let him dominate with his more forceful personality and views. I knew I was deeply indebted to him for seeing me pro bono, and for giving me CDs and other items, so there was always that baseline imbalance, that feeling that I owed him. On some level, I suppose I was just tired and resentful of accepting his interpretations of my reality, and his last glib comment about Sam’s departure was the straw that broke the camel’s back. After one angry outburst, I stopped calling him, emailing him, or contacting him at all…much the same way Sam did with me.

I’m actually angrier with Doc for the ways he “got in my circle” than I am with Sam for taking such drastic measures to restore his own. But I also know I have to work on strengthening that boundary, and not just suppress the anger that naturally arises when it’s breached. Harriet Goldhor Lerner’s book The Dance of Anger is currently on the table beside Calling in The One. Can’t expect to get better at relationships without getting better at this.

*

Some people do make it easier for you. I take it as an excellent sign that I’ve managed to attract at least one (more) guy who breaks the old…dare I say it…pattern of finding myself with someone with whom it’s a struggle to hold my own.

Recently I was taken out to dinner at my favorite vegetarian restaurant by David, the decidedly nerdy noise musician I reconnected with on Facebook, who, as it turns out, was raised by a military family of Bible-thumping Republicans. At one point during the meal I asked out of curiosity, “So, what do you believe now? Do you subscribe to any particular philosophy or belief system?”

Now a great many of the men I have spent time with for much of my life would have eagerly taken this opening to to hold forth (perhaps with a whiff of condescension) upon the vast stores of their superior knowledge and wisdom as their food grew cold on the plate. I, in turn, would suddenly feel compelled to have a position, and to back it up with a somewhat anxious display of intellect. We might then play dueling egos, and I would probably lose. This could easily have been a first-date Pandora’s box, exposing vast and irreconcilable differences (which I’ve been known to ignore for a pretty face) — something I have grown almost to expect.

A look resembling panic briefly crossed David’s friendly face before he confessed with a shrug, “You know…I like to think that I’m still learning.” The last three words were spoken slowly and emphatically. “I read a lot…I’ve read a lot of philosophy…but I guess I feel like I don’t have it all figured out yet.”

I beamed at him. “Good answer!”

He smiled happily, as if I’d given him a prize. But really, he’d given me one. I was both delighted and floored. Even in the absence of any detectable sexual chemistry, even though he comes across as the oddest of oddballs, I thought: I want you in my life, David LeGrand! Here was a guy with a quality entirely lacking in my overbearing dad and nearly all the men I’d pursued in my life: humility. I could have practically wept with relief. At once I knew I wasn’t going to have to be on the defensive with him, or pretend I had it all figured out myself. David might not turn out to be the love of my life, but I knew at the very least he was someone I wanted to have on my team.

David saw me home, and hugged me goodnight. I giggled when he engulfed me with his six-foot-four frame. I felt small and almost childlike. But he gives a good hug.

*

Another acquaintance from work asked me out immediately after the acrimonious end of his long-term relationship, but I told him I didn’t want to catch anyone on the hard rebound. I’m sure I might have made exceptions (e.g. for Sonny) in the past, but I don’t want to do that now. I don’t want a “transitional relationship” — especially not with someone who lost his shit for a minute after I turned him down. It wasn’t an easy minute, but I felt stronger for guarding my boundaries and vindicated in being cautious.

*

If you recall, last spring at this time I was totally saturating myself with Damien Rice music. Since watching Moon, my celebrity fixation du jour has been the actor Sam Rockwell. I’ve watched every movie of his I could get my hands on, including the obscure indie comedy caper Welcome to Collinwood — a film I heartily recommend. (The more famous Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I watched with another guy you may recall named Sam.) Roger Ebert compared Rockwell to Christopher Walken, christening him the new “go-to guy for weirdness,” but he’s not heebie-jeebies creepy like Walken. When Rockwell plays characters on the slightly skeezy side (Welcome to Collinwood, Heist, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Choke, Matchstick Men), he oozes more sex than menace; you kind of want him to get you dirty. I felt like a pervert years ago when I found his sociopathic rapist/murderer in The Green Mile strangely magnetic, but he stole every scene he was in. Rockwell is capable of being funny and tragic and irresistible and repellent and vulnerable and diffident all at the same time. Just watch him as Chuck Barris, or as Victor Mancini in Choke. He lent complexity to the otherwise simple-minded bandit whose brother accomplishes The Assassination of Jesse James. Conflictedness is his forte. I could watch Rockwell all day. I very nearly have been.

I also pinpointed deeper reasons for my sudden obsession. Not too long ago I read a “fluff” article online about how women tend to choose men who look like their fathers. This happens to be a huge turn-off in my case, but I don’t recall ever being in love with my emotionally blank, odd-looking father the way little girls often are. I was, however, greatly besotted with my charismatic, handsome, much more demonstrative older brother John. In his case, it’s been true: the guys who attract me most powerfully resemble how I remember John at his most beautiful (in his adolescence and early twenties). Rockwell, my contemporary at 41, is no exception. It’s something about his hairline, the shape of his head, those knitted Tommy Lee Jones eyebrows, his deep-set brown eyes, and his prominent nose, not to mention his slim, athletic physique. That signature mole by his mouth makes me ache for every bit of loveliness I can’t quite reach. Even his behind-the-scenes clowning around is not unlike something my hammy big brother would do. Jonah and Sonny both remind me a little of John; the actor who played Nate Fisher reminds me a little of John; the guys who tend to catch my eye at the coffeehouse remind me a little of John. What can I say? He was the ultimate unavailable male: hotter, more successful, and cooler than me, the “winner” in our little brood, and completely out of the question. I started crying at his wedding reception and couldn’t stop until I got on the plane the next day. Jesus may have been my first unrequited love, but John was the second.

A couple of the tacit “agreements” Ms. Thomas’ book helped me identify that I’d been unconsciously keeping with him were: one, that I would never impinge on his spotlight — he would always be the “star” in our family; and two, that I would never love another man more than I loved him. We can all see how these unspoken vows would be self-defeating, but I never spoke them. I’ve just lived by them since we were kids. Prompted by the book, I wrote a fake letter to John releasing myself from this unfair contract. Sometimes a symbolic act is necessary.

Thomas also points out in her chapter on body acceptance (as I may have noted elsewhere) that pursuing men who are like my brother — men who are all the fabulous things I want to be and feel I’m not — is one way of trying to compensate for my own perceived inadequacies. Of course I never quite made it into their “league,” where I would at last (or so I unconsciously believed) be validated as good/successful/hot enough. Yet I don’t have the career of a critically acclaimed writer, or the slender, “perfect” body of a model or actress. Desire gets confounded with identification. I don’t just lust for Rockwell’s offbeat beauty or his juicy behind (which he bares often, thank you Mr. Rockwell!), I lust for his craft and his commitment. He goes out there and does his art, and excels in a wholly unique way; he’s the real deal. He makes weak projects stronger and good projects better. He reminds me that I’m not following my own bliss. I’m his contemporary, and I’ve done diddly-squat.

Some part of me is clamoring for me to do diddly instead of squat.

*

In other news, Padraic has been coming over to my place lately to put a laser device on my chronically injured shoulder. His sister bought it for him — a $3000 piece of European healing technology that supposedly helps cells heal themselves. So far, the results have been nebulous, but it’s given us an excuse to hang out. Being with Padraic, I have got to say, feels like being in an early Woody Allen movie. He has the fast-talking nebbishy monologues down pat, which can be funny…at times. He has a rather unfortunate love of puns. Sometimes it’s hard to get a word in edgewise. Based on what he’s said about past girlfriends, I’m picking up on some ambivalence from him about relationships in general.

That said, he’s been kind to come over and treat me for free. The other day we were talking — I was lying face down with the device on my shoulder, and he was sitting nearby in a chair — when I looked at him, and noticed the way he knitted his eyebrows. I noticed his deep-set brown eyes. Uh oh. I had a sudden heated impulse to launch myself at him and kiss him greedily, and probably much more than that…but I simply let the hormonal rush pass through me. When he hugged me goodbye, I told him that I liked him (was it the hormones talking?) and that maybe we should spend some time together socially…if he was up for it.

“What, are you kidding me?” he said, gesturing at me up and down. “I mean, look at you.”

I giggled, told him he was sweet, and bade him goodbye. It’s probably a bad idea to rush into anything based on a momentary impulse with someone you’re not sure about. But I was humming “I Feel Pretty” all day.

At least I had some interesting company on my comment thread. I must say, I very much appreciate you readers who come and sit in my virtual living room, kick off your shoes, and visit awhile. We’ve certainly had some lively exchanges around here.

It bears mentioning that by its two-year anniversary on March 24, this blog will have gotten nearly 10,000 hits. Not bad for an obscure shadow blog, eh? It never ceases to amuse me how many people click onto this site having searched for things like “what to put up your ass” or “you’re ugly and your mom dresses you funny,” thanks to a few post titles.

**

I hadn’t planned on being house-bound and isolated for so long. This illness put a substantial dent in what I intended to be my social life. I had been all fired up and ready to “get out there and start making connections,” as Lisa Brown put it, with various events and people in mind. Instead I found myself confined to the apartment, stymied, stuffy-headed, sleepy, and bored. I watched some Netflix movies, including “Moon” with Sam Rockwell — possibly the best thing I’d seen all year — and fell madly in love with the offbeat, versatile, wildly underappreciated actor. At moments, he reminded me of another Sam.

**

Over the weekend, a friend posted her Facebook status as “One step forward, two steps back,” and I wound up searching for the video of a Bruce Springsteen song reflecting that same sentiment so I could provide her with the link. As I watched (for the first time) the visual accompaniment to Springsteen’s melancholy and yearning song about love gone wrong, with its interpretive black-and-white footage of bare-skinned caresses in a spray of water, I flushed, feeling a stab of loss, and started to cry a little. The images brought up vivid memories of showering with Sam. (I had never felt comfortable bathing with anyone else before — I was too self-conscious about my body — but I could be so naked with Sam.)

Suddenly I was fiercely missing him, not just his welcoming body but his ineffable sweetness. That was one quality I had heard mentioned over and over again by other women, women from twenty-five to fifty-five, women he had supervised. They adored Sam, and not for any superficial reason like charm but for a certain inherent quality of character. So many lamented to me (knowing or not knowing about us) that he had been their favorite. Women my age and older whom I did enlighten about our relationship didn’t roll their eyes at my cradle-robbing, but nodded approvingly at my good taste. Sam had a way about him, a way of being, that I still find difficult to encapsulate. Attentive, serious, considerate, responsive…and sweet. On the calling floor, or on the bedroom floor, one felt important. One felt visible.

I let the old grief and longing consume me, inhabit me for the rest of the day, without resistance. Walking to dinner at a good friend’s house later, in springlike weather, I passed the corner where Sam and I had said goodbye. And then I realized what I had entirely forgotten: today was Sam’s twenty-second birthday. I wondered if he had been thinking about me too.

**

These past weeks have seemed much like last March, full of impatience with myself — how long am I going to keep putting off my life’s adventures? — until I remember that love is an adventure all its own, and that last spring I had had no inkling that taking a desperation job at the call center would lead to a life-altering love affair with a man almost half my age.

In all honesty, I’ve already met several of the life goals I once scribbled in a notebook, prompted by a book I was reading at the time. I’ve been to Italy. I’ve taught yoga. I’ve had a passionate, sexually satisfying love affair with a man I couldn’t get enough of. It just took me thirty-eight years to get started.

Sometimes it does seem that these things have a timing all their own, and that some inexplicable intelligence (the Universe? My own subconscious?) knows what needs to happen and when. The yoga studio and community intercepted me like a net as I let go of the “safe” job I’d held for fourteen years. Those early days at the studio were happy ones: I met my “ideal” man there, and while he turned out to be less than ideal, he taught me something I needed to learn. And if I had made it to Ireland last spring, as I had so fervently wished, I would never have met the young man who blasted to smithereens my mountainous obstacles to relationship.

**

So perhaps being thwarted in my efforts is to some greater end.

I had intended to do my damndest — before the worst of the cold set in — to get down to a film screening sponsored by a nonprofit owned by one of the activist community’s most eligible bachelors. I’ll call him Jonah, since he spent his early years in the belly of a corporation before becoming the “messenger” he is today. Jonah had clearly noticed me when we first met, but I, feeling intimidated by his abundant competence and virtue (not to mention handsomeness), eventually faded into the wallpaper.

I had been wondering how I might relate to him now — now that comely activists are approaching me unbidden at rallies, now that I can take them or leave them. Would it be easy? Would I be able to talk to him like a regular human being? Could I take him or leave him, too?

The story: Jonah is the founder and head of our local independent media production company. Committed, politically savvy, and unapologetically liberal, this still fairly young man is responsible for many of the grassroots media and educational programs in the city. But before I knew anything about his noble aspirations to serve the common good, I was knocked out of my socks and off my game at first sight.

Not that I had any game to begin with. At a meet-and-greet for the expanding community radio station, I had approached the station’s program director to ask a question. She was chatting with two very attractive men. I introduced myself. The first gentleman was mildly aloof, but Jonah gazed at me steadily with what felt like more than passing interest, and smiled a warm, dazzling smile. I got hot all over. I didn’t know what to do, or how to talk to him. After speaking with the program director for a few minutes, I excused myself.

Maybe Jonah was just as clueless. During later encounters I would wonder whether, for some unknown reason, he had developed an aversion to me, or whether he actually felt some kind of attraction but was less socially astute than his appearance would lead one to expect. Whatever the case, the more I wanted to be noticed by him, the more he seemed to steer clear of me. Yet I never saw him show up anywhere with a companion of either sex. That was a head-scratcher. Maybe he was a perennial loner like me. I’m sure I haven’t made much sense to people either. Hell, I’m only beginning to make sense to myself. At any rate, after a silent-auction fundraiser more than four years ago where I barely managed to speak four words to him all night, I gave up. (I’ll let you in on a little secret, though: when I custom-ordered Sonny from the cosmic catalogue, I used Jonah as my model. Messy hipster hair and all.)

Being too sick to go to the premiere, I sent Jonah an online friend request with a flirty if noncommittal message. (Per his page, he likes women, and he’s looking.) He hasn’t responded, but he hasn’t rejected my request either.

I’m not holding my breath; I know he’s not the only fish in the pond. I’m just casting out lines.

**

I was equally thwarted in my efforts to reconnect with a gentleman I met through my neighborhood political organizing group; I was too runny-nosed and contagious to attend our meeting. I don’t know much about Ben yet, other than that he’s progressive in his politics and went on a meditation retreat in February, but both of these things dispose me favorably toward him. He was very friendly and warm at the party — we shared a joke about Republicans and healthcare reform — I just couldn’t determine his orientation. (He’s skinny and somehow neat in appearance, the way some of my gay boyfriends are skinny and somehow neat in appearance. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.) I like Ben. Ben seemed to like me. His eyes crinkle appealingly when he smiles. Another fish, possibly.

**

Then there’s Padraic Edelman…the Irish Jew. His parents just liked the name Padraic, actually. He’s a co-worker at the call center who has flirted with me sporadically, and gave me his card as an apparent invitation. I wouldn’t mind hanging out with Padraic…he’s a good guy (even if his sense of humor is groan-worthy), and he’s nice-looking in his goateed, bespectacled way…but I wasn’t interested enough (in more-than-friendship) to pursue him by making the first call. I wound up giving him my number instead, saying “My friends can tell you how bad I am about calling them” — which is true. Padraic is roughly my age and moonlights as an “intuitive counselor.” He reads the kind of books we used to shelve in the Metaphysics section at the bookstore, meaning that he’s way more New-Agey than I am, but that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker. I think I prefer the so-called “moonbats” to the Richard-Dawkinsian atheists these days. I’d rather be the dubious and skeptical one around an impassioned (non-evangelical, mind you) believer than be forced to defend my sense of the numinous and mysterious to a strict materialist who wants to convert me. (So my imaginary affair with the YouTube guy would probably never have worked out anyhow.)

At the same time, I’m on the alert for what John Welwood called “spiritual bypass” — the practice of using meditation, mantras, or other religious/spiritual beliefs and methods to gloss over glaring personal and psychological problems. I’ve seen too many people proclaim Love and Light or Victory in Jesus without really dealing with their shit. The pain and conflict goes underground, and all the badness gets projected elsewhere. You wind up with phenomena like those accusations of “negativity” from my old boss at the studio, or supposedly “happy” Christian families with kids who never want to come home, or charismatic yogis who quote Gandhi while wreaking devastation in others’ emotional lives.

**

Also at my job is Ted, a good-natured pharmacist who moved here from Austin, Texas, and whom I favor at least partly because he looks like a fortysomething version of Sam. He’s intelligent, well-informed, and undoubtedly fond of me, even if only as a friend. We often sit together and chat between calls (inspiring the sneers of that emotionally volatile fifyish guy who either dotes excessively upon me or gives me the cold shoulder). Ted intends to move back into his preferred field soon, and I hope we stay in touch. If he asked me out, I’d go in a heartbeat. Maybe it has a lot to do with the resemblance, but I find him easier to think about like that than most of the others (even if Jonah is the obvious rock star). He’s comfortable, in a sexy sort of way, and not overly impressed with his own opinions — which is more appealing than you would imagine.

We’ve had a few near misses (Have you been to this restaurant? Have you seen this movie?) that never led to us making a date. If it happens again, I may say: Hey, Ted, why don’t we…

**

Lastly, I’ve lately reconnected — through my social network — with a guy on whom I’d had a slight crush when we worked together at the bookstore. He’s several years younger than I am and in a band, so our lifestyles may be too different, but you never know. Back in the day he had a live-in girlfriend, so there was no opening for me even if the interest had been there. Recently, however, David has been rather publicly bemoaning his abysmal luck in the dating department.

By way of encouragement — but also to test the waters — I sent him a teasing private message referring to him as “geekalicious.” He responded by virtually <blushing> and asking me if I was busy this weekend, inviting me to a club event featuring several DJs. I told him I’d rather not have to shout at him over loud music, but that I’d love to see him again. Coffee, a drink, a game of pool…“Make me an offer,” I said. (He wound up suggesting brunch. I gave him my number.)

Where did this glib confidence come from? Well, I know where…and I must say I like it. Hot damn. It’s so much easier to talk to men when you can take them or leave them.

**

Obviously there are several persons of interest floating around in my peripheral vision at the moment, I just haven’t had a chance to be around them much lately. Maybe that’s for the best, who knows? Maybe I’m about to meet someone entirely new, the likes of whom I haven’t yet imagined.

Whatever the case, I’m definitely more ready and willing to welcome whomever than I have ever been before. As I said in my previous, personal groundbreaker of a post, I want to love and be loved. And for once, the Beloved doesn’t have a name tag attached. For once, I don’t have some nitpicky and impossible shopping list. For once, I’m not coming from a place of pain, trying to ignore that vortex of unworthiness that used to live in my chest protected by fear and a desperate kind of pride.

I keep stopping and listening, closing my eyes, searching inside to feel that raw, yawning, perennial wound that was so easily inflamed by the mere intimation of rejection in the past, and it just isn’t there. It’s still hard for me to believe that all these years I’ve been protecting an early inner image of my mother. In other words, my extremely painful (and stubborn) refusal to accept the fact that gentleman X (the only man who would do) was not going to love me, kept me from confronting the fact that the very first person I needed to love me (whom I truly could not replace) rejected me in a fundamental way. For decades, I’ve been as unwilling to look at this as I was unwilling to look at my rigid inner hierarchy, that constipated commitment to mostly conditioned ideas about How a Man (or Woman, me) Should Appear, Act, and Be.

But now the monster’s out of the closet…and it looks so small. Not to mention unoriginal, to an almost embarrassing degree. The nice thing about having these all too common dysfunctions was that the particular creative way I coped with and rationalized them made me unique. (I’m sure Chris the coach is somewhere nodding in agreement.) And doesn’t everybody want to be unique? (Ha ha.)

Nevertheless, these days I’d rather be open to receive love, in all its prosaic egalitarianism, like “ordinary” people (those selfish, indiscriminate fools, with their “needs” and their pasty partners!). A taste of the actual brew changed my mind. That homey nectar is far better than the finest wine made from the most cultivated sour grapes.

**

One thing I did do to try to move things forward during my illness was to order a used copy of Calling in ‘the One:’ 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life — a book I never thought I’d read, much less buy, when I first saw it at the bookstore.

Admitting this to you, dear readers, is like admitting that this classics grad reads bodice-rippers or Nicholas Sparks novels. (Which I don’t, but…well, okay, I have been known to flip to the good parts in the bodice-rippers.) The author has appeared on talk shows with women she agreed to help, and then returned with them in a matter of weeks, new partner in tow. Staged? Possibly. Gimmick? Can’t say. Fake? We’ll see.

I’m ready to be her next guinea pig. The book hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll let you know how it is.

Won’t this be fun?

**

So last time, I left off with a personal-development cliffhanger: did she do Lisa Brown‘s visualization exercises regarding her mother? What happened???

Lisa’s exercise was this: first, to recall a time I felt loved and/or appreciated by my mother, and to fully experience all the attendant feelings; second, to recall a time I felt love and/or appreciation toward my mother, and to experience whatever feelings arose around that. My difficulties performing this exercise so far had had to do with that squirmy feeling I get that my mother is trying to smother me.

But I gave it one more try.

I performed the first before going to sleep one night. What I remembered was being rocked in the rocking chair by our fireplace as a child while my mother sang the lullaby Bye Baby Bunting. This made me cry (feeling a sense of loss) until I fell asleep; it was a release at the time, but I awoke with a familiar heavy sadness, and that recurrent physical sensation of having a raw, yawning, ragged hole torn open in my chest.

The second visualization involved playing hooky from Sunday School with my mother at the coffeehouse across the street from our church, while I was still “questioning the faith.” I felt very close to her then. This visualization had a similar effect, making me cry, opening up that sore place.

For an entire week after that, I was awash in feelings of unworthiness and abject unlovability. Which sucked.

**

How exactly do you think my mother rejected me? I queried Lisa via email, after managing to write up and report my results. (She has steadfastly maintained that this is at the root of my difficulties.)

It took a few days for her to reply. “The rejection is the kind where the other person refuses to let you be visible,” she wrote, “to acknowledge who you are and what you want, including space. It’s not the kind where they don’t want you around.”

Your mother is in your circle, and the only way to feel better about her is to assert yourself with her. I assume she punishes you when you do this in some way.

In addition to asserting yourself with your Mom, being successfully self-assertive with all relationships will help. It’s about being you and feeling cherished by others — friends, lover, family. It’s about honesty. As you work on this with everyone, the feelings from the past will heal. Getting acceptance in the present is very important.

Her distinction made a lot of sense. I hadn’t identified that behavior as rejection before. But I was again reminded of Elsa Becker in Frank Schaeffer’s novels, condemning her young son for nearly every natural thought or desire he had. I thought of my mother’s omnipresent frown, her own “anxious hovering readiness to take offense and disapprove,” and the constrictive overall atmosphere at home that made me vow at nineteen never to live under my parents’ roof again. And that’s to say nothing of the smothering.

I could see how the refusal to allow someone to be seen, and appreciated for who they are rather than who you want them to be, was a subtler but no less painful form of rejection. What would it have been like, I wondered, to have been “cherished” in all my profane and curious disorder?

**

I had described for Lisa some of the methods I’d used to try to heal my persistent and at times overwhelming heart-pain on my own — Eckhart Tolle’s meditation on the “pain-body,” for one, as well as various and sundry other solutions offered by the self-help movement — all of which encouraged a kind of emotional self-sufficiency.

Lisa’s answer was about to astonish me.

You’ve done much to heal the rejection pain that you have experienced in your life, and actually are further ahead than you think (and most people with this challenge).

The missing piece is that you need one person in this world that you love and trust completely…preferably a romantic partner. When you feel survival fear, you need to make money to assuage it. When you feel performance anxiety, you need to perform well to feel better. When you feel unlovable, you need to give and receive love in a healthy relationship. The work you are doing will help you attract it, but that’s the main work that needs to be done now for you to heal your fear.

I don’t agree with Tolle. I believe much of the sadness you feel (and love pain) is a longing for love and understanding. This cannot be healed by sitting in a dark room feeling sad. Tolle’s method is how you heal trauma from the past, not a void in the present. The pain is asking you to get out there and make a connection and get the love you need in your life. That’s it. That’s why being with (Sam) took the pain away. The pain is from having an unmet need in your soul.

For some reason her words brought me overwhelming relief. I read on. “If you are waiting to feel 100% lovable before having a loving relationship, you will be waiting a long time.”

I was floored. I read that line again. If you are waiting to feel 100% lovable before having a loving relationship, you will be waiting a long time.

I couldn’t remember ever hearing anyone in the pop psychology, personal development, or spirituality arena uttering such a heresy. What was practically the wallpaper for any discussion about love or relationships was the assumption that you had to be in love with yourself first. No one could love you until you were whole, healed, and happy — all by yourself.

What Lisa seemed to be saying to me was that some wounds could only be completely healed within a loving relationship. I had done virtually all I could on my own. No wonder I felt relieved.

The confidence you seek comes from ‘winning’ – having a loving relationship in reality. As you improve your relationships, you will feel less justified in blaming yourself for everything. A key, of course, is selecting more evolved individuals in the first place. (Sam), for example, was not able to hear the slightest request. He became very afraid and bailed…not good. So he was actually not evolved enough for you. You need someone with more self-esteem.

As you improve your relationships, you will feel less justified in blaming yourself for everything. An inner constriction seemed to loosen as I read. That terrible ache in my chest ebbed. Lisa wasn’t blaming me. Maybe it wasn’t all my fault, after all. Maybe Sam’s own feelings of unworthiness did get in the way. Maybe I didn’t “make” him abandon me.

**

As my loyal German reader pointed out in one comments thread (citing Alice Miller), it’s a pervasive taboo among those of us who grew up in middle-class, educated, ostensibly “Christian” homes — where we were never starved, locked in closets, or beaten (other than the occasional spanking or paddling) — to say that we had something other than entirely loving and supportive homes. It’s seen as outrageously “ungrateful,” and we are “spoiled,” horrible children unduly influenced by the permissive indulgences of modern psychology to make such criticisms. (One need only read some of the comments Amazon.com customers have left about Frank Schaeffer and his books to see what I mean.) Honor thy father and mother means, in practice, that we are bound to absolve them of every shortcoming, and accept that whatever we may have suffered at their hands as children we surely deserved. If they in any way rejected us, then, it is our fault.

“But they did the best they could…” surely most parents do. But to admit that their “best” still damaged our forming psyches, and to accurately identify the damage, is to allow healing to begin for ourselves. You can’t forgive if you remain in denial, or collude with denial.

Since the day I read that email from Lisa, I haven’t experienced that nearly intolerable, gaping “chest wound,” that deep and intractable pain, even in situations where it might otherwise have been triggered. She appears to have been absolutely correct: I have blamed myself for everything — no doubt including, on whatever unconscious level, my earliest experiences of rejection by my mother (and family). I do know I’ve practically spent a lifetime apologizing for my mere existence. Sorry I’m so inadequate, I’ll do my best to make you like me. Every rejection, every criticism has been borderline traumatic. No wonder I’ve never tried to write much of substance for public consumption! This may also be why even the “passive rejection” of which I spoke last time has been so painful.

**

The proof of the effectiveness of accepting Lisa’s diagnosis was in the testing. And in the following weeks, I got tested.

First, a longtime, middle-aged caller, kind of an oddball, who had been doting on me at work for months, began to give me the cold shoulder after I drew a boundary and asserted myself (he had tried to invite himself along on a coffee date with a mutual friend). This upset me far less than I would have expected, and I decided to leave him be. I realized, on more than just an intellectual level, that I didn’t need his approval or his affection in order to be okay…and that, furthermore, I wasn’t going to run after him if he was going to act like a pissy fifth-grader. I had a feeling he would eventually miss me, anyway, and come around.

After that, a new trainee, an artist, a rather short and nondescript fellow in his thirties who had been exceedingly friendly to me at first (which was more than enough to make me notice him — I’ve lately had an almost unfair bias toward “regular” guys), began to outright ignore me. He instead turned his attentions toward a young woman who reminds me of me in my twenties (dressing up and wearing makeup rather badly — in her case, emulating that Amy Winehouse eyeline-like-an-Egyptian fad — when she knows the guy she likes will be around). After his inexplicable failure to acknowledge me, I saw them huddled together, talking and laughing flirtatiously. I felt a mild shock of unexpected letdown, but it was nothing like the overwhelming flush of shame, that feeling of needing to hide myself, that would typically have accompanied such an event. I was pleasantly surprised.

Another person of interest, a compact ex-marine who physically reminded me of Sam, and whose affectionate squeezes I had welcomed, started avoiding me once our religious and political differences came to light. That would have put me off, anyway — but having him reject me first would usually have stung far more than it did.

In all of these instances, the difference was that I felt, on a visceral level (not just rationally recognized), that if this person doesn’t like me, it doesn’t mean that I’m inherently flawed, and that nobody will. A particular man’s reaction to me wasn’t necessarily my fault — and what’s more, it didn’t mean that there was “none for me.” It didn’t mean that there wasn’t enough love to go around, that the Winehouse-girl’s “win” meant my “fail.” What emotional investment had I really made in any of these gentlemen anyhow?

If my brief happiness with Sam taught me anything, it’s that you only need that affirming response from one key person — as Lisa pointed out.

**

No, I don’t need everybody to love me. I don’t even need the ones who thought they liked me to continue liking me, if they decide not to. Lately I have followed up on some hints men already marginally in my life have made about wanting to go out, only to find them lukewarm or passive about it. One gave me his number to call. Another responded feebly and inconclusively to my follow-up email after telling me in person “We should go get some food sometime!”

If I know one thing for sure, it’s that I am no longer going to play the hot pursuer. I’m officially abandoning my old, ineffective habits. I did ask Sam out first…but his feelings toward me had become quite clear by then. He needed me to say something; given his position, he wouldn’t have made that first move. After that, he pretty much took the wheel. Our courtship flowed with an ease previously unknown to me.

**

As I mentioned, I vowed at nineteen that I would never live under my parents’ roof again, never depend on them again, never ask them for further support. There was a profound loneliness attending that drastic choice, and I squared my shoulders under an imaginary yoke, imagining a life of scarcity and hardship (which seems so far to have adhered to my expectations). I felt exceedingly alone in the world, knowing that henceforth I would be the only person I would have to rely upon. At the same time, I knew that I was choosing being myself over belonging. If the choice was to be who I was, alone, or be loved as someone I was not, within my family, I would choose to be who I was.

Now it dawned upon me that this assumption had unconsciously carried over into adulthood, and into every arena of my life. What’s more, I had a chip on my shoulder about it. All those times I had claimed “Men don’t want women who are X,” I had thought that that “X” (e.g. sexually aggressive) was “just how I am,” and I wasn’t about to change my modus operandi — a concession which seemed to me dishonest — for anyone. What I didn’t understand was that it wasn’t about who I was; the problem was that I was operating without an understanding of how boundaries in human relationships really work. I was forgetting empathy. I was forgetting how much I dislike being over-pursued myself!

Once my lone-wolf stance began to soften, my ossified pride began to crumble as well. When you’re a rock, you don’t have needs. You can feel like a superhero, giving your love to weaker humans, asking for nothing in return. I had always scorned that media stereotype of the aging woman growing increasingly desperate for a husband, pathetic in her object-less longing.

But that was before I tasted genuine reciprocity. And before I touched the apparent root of my wound. Affirmed by my experience with Sam, given permission by Lisa, I started to let myself feel the naked yearning for love I had felt in childhood, before I had suppressed it out of shame, or despair, or both.

I started to let myself really feel my loneliness, as well as my envy when confronted with a young couple choosing a spaghetti sauce at the grocery store. It was more than just envy, it was a sense of being left out, of being “outcast from life’s feast,” as James Joyce put it — a feeling as familiar as not being chosen by either kickball team. I let myself experience it now, unmediated, rather than anchored to the context of a particular situation, of wanting and missing a certain fixated-upon person.

**

While engaged in all of this inner upheaval, I happened to watch Sean Penn’s film adaptation of the book Into the Wild, which proved uncannily apropos.

Christopher McCandless, the film’s protagonist, models himself upon the lone-wolf archetype depicted by writers like Jack London and Henry David Thoreau — sacrificing what he sees as a compromised belonging for fierce, purist self-sufficiency. Minimizing the importance of human connection, he could be quoting a yogi or a born-again Christian when he preaches to a much older (and probably wiser) man, “You’re wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God’s place is all around us — it’s in everything and in anything we can experience.”

One thing that intrigued me, however, was his observation, made to a RV-driving hippie, that “Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.” On the surface of things, McCandless is referring to the hippie’s girlfriend wandering alone on the beach, but he speaks with such authority that one can’t help but wonder if he’s talking about himself. What does he do but “walk away quietly into empty spaces” (where he will eventually die)? Earlier scenes suggest that he isn’t exactly visible to his parents, whose values (and fights) trouble him deeply. Perhaps his ferocious independence, like mine, germinated from a sour-grapes rejection of belonging.

His last scrawl (before starving to death on an abandoned bus in the middle of nowhere) is made between paragraphs in one of his beloved books (ironically, Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy): “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”

McCandless seems to recognize, at last, that he has missed the point…but by then it’s too late.

**

I can say it now: I want to love and be loved. I want to have the kind of amazing emotional and sexual connection I experienced with Sam, but I want that bond, and the two of us, to be strong enough to weather challenges. I want us to create the kind of safe space where we can both be free to have all of our feelings, desires, and needs…to get angry, to get scared, to work through our difficulties, and be the best occasion for one another’s growth and evolution. But most of all, I want — I need — that relationship to be the setting for the experience of love I never had. Not another replay of an old script, with a new person playing my mother or father, acting out the same impossible scenarios of the past where I somehow wind up invisible, frustrated, voiceless.

Lisa predicted that success in other areas would come if I found success in this one. And honestly, I do feel as if I’ve been trying to swim with cement blocks on my feet. I’ve done the best I could, but it’s hard to contribute much to the world when you’re starving inside and won’t admit it.

**

Our old friend Rick returns to the call center, eyes characteristically bloodshot and evasive. I walk right up to him and tell him that there are no hard feelings, that I know where he went (i.e. jail, which visibly embarrasses him), and that after he left, something really great happened to me. This last tidbit makes him focus for all of ten seconds. “Oh yeah?” he says, finally looking me in the eye, intrigued.

“Yeah.” I say, smiling. I realize that I am over Rick. He seems decades younger than Sam now. Then again, he did warn me that he was essentially a fifteen-year-old boy.

**

At a rally downtown for health care and financial reform, my attention is arrested by a young man recording the proceedings with a digital camcorder. He looks a lot like my beloved Damien, gaaargeous in a certain bearded Irish way with his tweed cap and plaid scarf, and I have a hard time not staring. I may have become more egalitarian in my tastes, but his beauty mesmerizes me. He notices me noticing him, and I look away. More than once. I wish that there were some uncontrived way to meet him. After the rally, while I am standing with a circle of activist friends, he works his way over until he is chatting with someone standing beside us. He is practically at my elbow.

When his companion walks away, I turn to him and smile. “So what were you filming?”

He has beautiful green eyes and a high-tenor voice, and is probably no older than twenty-five. We chat amicably for a minute or two, until we are interrupted by some Jobs With Justice cohorts requiring his attention. He gives me an apologetic nod and a smile, and I nod and smile back. I turn back to my circle, marveling at how easy that was. And then I see Eli.

**

“Eli!” That history grad student I called “beautiful and whip-smart,” who disappeared from work at almost exactly the same time Rick did, clearing the way for Sam. Impulsively I hug him, without even thinking about it. I discover as we talk that I no longer feel intimidated by his looks or his intelligence, nor am I worrying about saying something stupid. He’s still writing his doctoral thesis, volunteering for MoveOn, and working for his father’s construction company. He tells me that he made a point of asking an activist co-worker at the call center to say hello to me. (I did get that message. Eli was so far from my mind at the time, however, that I actually had to think for a minute!) Apparently Eli has never forgotten me.

Now he enters my number directly into his phone — supposedly in order to let me know about another demonstration — and calls me that same evening with the details. He adds that we need to have drinks or coffee and “catch up.” I say we do indeed.

So that’s happening Sunday.

**

Is Eli “the one?” I doubt it. But we’ll see, won’t we? I can’t believe how much simpler everything seems since I owned up to what I never got, figured out what I need now, and threw the doors wide open. It’s almost as if I just got visible.

Every disaster, whether natural or man-made, always makes me question: Why you, and not me? Why am I here, and not there? Especially now, as I shuffle through drab winter days made greyer through the filter of depression, and continuous news of death and destruction in an already desperately impoverished country pours in. That kind of poverty makes me look ridiculously wealthy, even if I have to walk everywhere I go and can’t justify replacing holey socks. I have a sunny little studio all to myself, after all, and fresh fruits and vegetables in the refrigerator.

I’m sure there were among the thousands killed many good and purposeful people who were making a difference in their world…and yet here I am, alive, listless, self-absorbed, contributing little or nothing to my fellow man (except a measly $10 to the Red Cross), untouched by the merciless machete of nature. Survivor’s guilt…accompanied by the shame of doubting my own entitlement to live. Who the hell am I, at such a time, to concern myself with the trivial American pursuit of happiness?

**

My work with Lisa has more or less stalled. She wants me to do some visualizations involving my mother that feel really uncomfortable, and I haven’t been able to finish them. This may be the source of the depression, as well as the persistent feeling of being unworthy: unworthy of better work, of having a life that I love, of simply being loved.

**

“Why Is Such A Man Alive?” is the title of one of the chapters in one of my favorite novels, The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s story has always resonated with me because of the prominence of the theme of shame as the driving force in human psychology. The question of whether or not one deserves to be alive is a question that springs from a deep shame about one’s own apparent unworthiness.

Of course, the whole point in born-again Christianity is to realize your own boundless unworthiness, and to throw yourself upon the good Lord’s mercy. We born sinners deserve hell, and it is only through God’s grace and the selfless sacrifice of Jesus on the cross that we are redeemed. (What I never could figure out was that if we were so worthless, why did God even bother?!!)

There is a helplessness — and a hopelessness — in believing that there is something inherently wrong with you, and that only an omnipotent outside force can make something acceptable out of you. You are not only bad, but powerless. Whatever dysfunctions may or may not already exist within your family of origin, fundamentalism creates its own.

Much of my hopelessness as a born-again Christian teen sprang from the conviction that even God couldn’t make something acceptable of me. (My experiences with youth group crushes seemed to prove this.) Today, even a “passive” rejection carries a similar sting.

**

Finding Evid3nc3, that whip-smart and yummy young ex-Christian I linked to in my last post, brought back what was most agonizing about my adolescence. It seems to me even now, in remembering, that I experienced more intense sexual longings for boys than the other girls my age. (Maybe it was the Milton in me.) But boys lived on another planet entirely.

Our “Christian” beliefs made it crystal clear: we were to wait for marriage to share our Sacred Gift From God, and that was that. But how on earth was I going to get one of these elusive creatures to come close enough to marry me? The desirable boys in my youth group worshipped my brother, and (at best) patted me on the head. Marriage may as well have been Jupiter. Tori Amos was speaking for me when she growled, in her thunderous ode to girlhood rejection, “Precious Things” –

He said you’re really an ugly girl
but I like the way you play
and I died
but I thanked him
can you believe that
sick sick
holding on to his picture
dressing up every day
I want to smash the faces
of those beautiful boys
those Christian boys
so you can make me COME
that doesn’t make you JESUS…

I remember suffering at one retreat over a dynamic young visiting speaker. I spent the entire weekend staring up at the podium, cow-eyed and in agony. I wrote godawful poems about him in my diary. I knew quite well he was out of my reach. But then every boy I wanted that badly seemed out of my reach. They weren’t going to grant me so much as a date, much less a lacy white dress and a ring. The situation seemed hopeless, impossible. It is better to marry than to burn, said Paul (I Cor 7:9), but it seemed as if I were going to burn alive. Who needed hell? I had Camp Brookwoods.

At least while watching Chris-the-atheist with his winsome boy-next-door demeanor, I could entertain “sinful” thoughts to my heart’s desire that were not entirely out of the realm of possibility. As an apostate, he was no longer off limits by divine decree. Neither of us had to buy the cow to get the milk anymore. We could, at least in theory, hook up. This thought felt both exhilarating and liberating to my inner Sunday Schooler. We were co-escapees from the institution of rigid conservative born-again morality…which meant that we were no longer bound by that pietistic blah blah blah about the Precious And Beautiful God-Given Things for which the Lord had given us these Holy Temples as a Wonderful Gift to be shared Only In Marriage For His Glory.

In theory, at least, I could actually get to know this former Royal Ranger in the Biblical sense. His wholesome midwestern nice-ness, so much like the nice-ness of the church boys I grew up with, only served to make me that much hotter.

**

For the past couple of weeks, I have been reading, or should I say devouring, the novels of Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s fictional alter ego, Calvin Becker, is the child of missionaries running a retreat center for young God-seekers in Switzerland that is strikingly similar to the “L’Abri” started by Schaeffer’s famous evangelical parents. Calvin is part Huck Finn and part Holden Caulfield, too curious to stay out of trouble and too smart not to see through the hypocrisy of God’s so-called “chosen.” Like most adolescent boys he has sex on the brain, and would rather be fantasizing about his English friend Jennifer than listening to his mother’s Monday morning Bible studies. (As you can imagine, I identified with him closely.)

Few books have made me laugh out loud the way these did. Schaeffer has the born-agains’ pious King Jamesian metaphors as well as their tortured Calvinist theology down pat. Calvin’s morally rigid mother Elsa, the spiritual leader of the family, is at times hilarious in her hand-wringing martyrdom and unconstrained grandiosity. Her narcissism is epic. Readers are made, at times, to feel sorry for Calvin’s tempestuous father, whose moodiness and violence resembles that of a trapped animal. In the book Zermatt in particular, we get a glimpse of a man who might have been much happier as a thoughtful agnostic engineer leading a quiet life out of the spotlight and enjoying hikes with his son. I know from Schaeffer’s autobiography Crazy for God that his famous father was very much like Ralph Becker, and I have to wonder if, deep down, the acclaimed evangelical thinker my own dad used to quote wanted out of the fundamentalist circus.

While reading Zermatt I also wondered if Schaeffer were working out some of his rage toward his mother. It’s hard not to actively hate Elsa Becker, especially if you’ve seen very many holier-than-thou religious matrons use the same kinds of manipulative tactics (with a sweet smile) that are so effectively satirized and skewered in the book. I saw some of my own mother in Elsa’s shows of saccharine “Christian” sentimentality and in her anxious hovering readiness to take offense and disapprove. Lisa is probably right that I have more work to do here. She believes I have been somehow rejected by my mother, not just smothered.

Any rejection is easier to see in Elsa, who faults Calvin for practically every natural thought or desire he has. Like me at his age, he asks “blasphemous” questions and escapes into “sinful” daydreams and fantasies.

**

Which brings me back to my throwback of a crush. Alas, reality soon intruded upon fantasy. That’s what happens, sometimes, when you actually try to connect with and find out more about the object of your lust. The young man is, unfortunately, spoken for.

In keeping with the work I’m trying to do with Lisa, I let myself feel the disappointment.

Disappointment is an unpleasant emotion, and I know I tend to try to minimize it, because there’s a tinge of humiliation involved. You’ve let yourself want something, badly, from someone else, and they have the very inequitable power to withhold it from you. Thus my typical habit is to act as if there’s nothing to see here, people, everything’s fine…but the fact is that once again I let myself feel a desire pretty intensely, and it energized me, briefly, and put me in a fine mood, thinking Anything Can Happen…my dormant sex drive reactivated itself, and I allowed myself to fantasize about someone new. Maybe I was being unrealistic, and idealizing or projecting upon the guy, but I had no idea, really, how things might pan out. Not too long ago, after all, my expectations were quite spectacularly exceeded.

If I don’t try to disown this desire, I’m not sure quite what to do with it, or my disappointment. It hurts. It sends me back in time. It makes me cry a little. Certainly, I learned helplessness back when everything I wanted seemed so hopelessly out of reach.

I also learned to pretend — to save face, perhaps — that I wasn’t lonely, or for that matter unbearably horny. It was more important to love than be loved. Throw me a bone now and then, so to speak, and I was grateful…but in general I could be sufficient unto myself, like Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation. Most spiritual teachings toward which I gravitated, after all, whether born-again or Buddhist or New Age, aimed to attack and eliminate desires that created a feeling of lack. Lisa, however, pointed out very frankly to me that certain needs of mine were simply not being met.

In the past, they’ve been met so inconsistently and incompletely I really didn’t know what I was missing. Until I got involved with Sam. That was a revelation. It was as if I’d been coping with (and learning to ignore) a low-grade migraine all my life…and then, not only was my migraine gone, I actually felt good for a change.

In all honesty, when I’d gotten close, before, to some of my coveted, larger-than-life Others, like Max, or even Sonny, there had been a vague feeling of is that all there is? that I would never have admitted simply because the something that was happening was so much better than the nothing I usually got.

It wasn’t their fault; I placed them on such a pedestal they never could have lived up to all the hype. But again, that’s the shortcoming of having a “list,” when you fall for what someone appears to represent, for the sum of desirable or admirable qualities you believe you want, rather than someone’s mere human presence and the astonishing and unimaginable world that springs up between the two of you. I’ve been so dazzled by a pretty face alone that at times I would likely have argued leniency for a serial killer if he looked like Jared Leto.

With Sam, briefly, I allowed myself to be cared for. I accepted the abundant warmth and tenderness of someone I had previously not thought of that way rather than worshipping a physically or emotionally remote, idealized man the way I had worshipped God…and, wonder of wonders, found out, possibly for the first time, what it felt like to have those perennially ignored needs met.

**

When I lie still and quiet, I can feel the ancient emotion dully aching in my chest. It’s like a bodily memory reactivated, of a shock, the shock of deep and painful shame. My impulse is to run away from it, medicate it, minimize it, pretend it isn’t there. I’ve never been able to pinpoint its source, though I can remember many a reactivation, even as a small child. It didn’t have to be a violent rejection; simply being passed over for someone else, or not even being seen, was enough to trigger that burning impulse to get away and hide — and in doing so, hide my embarrassment.

Shame is about fifty times more painful than guilt, because guilt is about behaviors, which can be changed. Shame is about who you are. There is something inherently wrong with you, according to shame, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

There’s a part of me that reacts, when someone I favor turns out to be otherwise occupied, by saying, Well of course he has someone, someone normal, and not like you. And that believes there’s a whole universe out there of “normal” couples doing “normal” couple things, having “normal” couple sex…whereas everything I do is either a sham or a freakish aberration.

Even as a wee toddler among the neighborhood kids in our neighbor’s backyard, I was a thing apart. They played their ball games together, while I was left to my own devices. My beloved older brother’s schizoid affection didn’t help  — he could be the doting big brother at home, but with other kids he frequently ignored me, and once in a while would make me the butt of a mean joke. He was definitely the “normal” kid. He was also the one who dated in high school, and the one who got married and bought a house and had three kids (whom his wife is now home-schooling).

The beautiful Christian boys I longed for in adolescence followed similarly “normal” paths.

**

I‘ve been thinking about Jonathan again, whom I never fully grieved because I was distracted by my sudden joy with Sam. Jonathan loved me all through our childhood. As an adolescent, I wouldn’t think about him that way — not just because he wasn’t a Christian, but because he was a brainy, clique-less weirdo like me — and I so desperately wanted to be normal. Besides, he disqualified himself through his persistent and lifelong esteem of me. Who but a loser would love a loser like me? Without any of my concentrated efforts to be captivating or prove my worth? Love I hadn’t earned meant nothing to me!

And yet I’ve still never managed to earn it from the ones who withhold it.

**

This week I’ve been airing my opinions quite nakedly on my social network, without regard to how I think my family will react. They have been surprisingly silent. This feels like a step in the right direction — letting out some more of the “real me” in spite of the fear of judgment and rejection. I also allowed myself to show my irritation to a coworker about being officiously micromanaged, without worrying about whether I was being sufficiently “nice.” I keep expecting something terrible to happen, but the worst of it so far seems to be the cold shoulder from an ex-boyfriend, and the mild alienation of a couple of elementary school friends. Not that that doesn’t bother me, but it’s not exactly the apocalypse.

But here’s the question all this pondering leads to: no matter how strenuously you try to be worthy, are you ever really going to earn love for the person you are…or just for the “lovable” person you try to be? Doing challenging Dharma Mittra yoga and listening to hipster indie music didn’t net me Sonny any more than reading Lord Byron and learning more about art impressed León. But if it had, would that mean they wanted me, or just some accessories I picked up that any number of other women had too?

Have I been hung up in some forty-year Purgatory where my Sisyphean task has been to try to gain the approval I never got from my mother, or my brother, or my peers, or my God? (It seems too embarrassingly simple, but Occam’s Razor can make for a painful shave.) What if I already deserved the love that Jonathan and Sam gave me, without any of my pre-emptive efforts to be attractive or cool or deserving?

**

I still hate to think of Jonathan as gone. Once in a while I talk to him, as if he were right beside me. Sometimes I half believe he brought Sam to me, to teach me what he wasn’t able to, to break my resistance down once and for all, to make me see. To help me start living before I die.

Maybe I’ll try Lisa’s visualization about my mother again tonight.

I tried not to visibly wince and smiled wanly, saying nothing. My mother was doing it again. Laying the sugary icing on the conversion cake with a trowel, as born-agains are wont to do. I hadn’t been looking forward to this particular aspect of my parents’ Christmas visit.

To “born-again,” evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, the three modifiers I just used for clarification are superfluous. They are the only real, true Christians. When my mother says her friend “became a Christian,” it doesn’t mean he got confirmed by the Catholic Church. He didn’t join the Quakers or get baptized into Eastern Orthodoxy or start attending a Methodist church. No, he said a prayer, no doubt on his knees, to “accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior” — and then embarked upon a “relationship” with his New Best Friend by adopting a whole bunch of conflicting and sometimes outrageous dogmas as well as the unshakable certainty that the (Protestant) Bible, as the Word of God, is the inerrant source of all truth (including historic and scientific truth).

**

Conversion stories like these are offered up by “Christians” like my mother as evidence that their God is the only game in town, and that only accepting their version of Jesus can solve your major life problems. It’s a message I heard (and internalized) throughout my childhood, and even now, having had firsthand experience of the failures of such a belief system, I’m still at a loss for words.

“Testimonials in support of the faith,” notes missionary child Marlene Winell in her religious-recovery book Leaving the Fold, a book which saved my sanity, if not my soul, “are heard and recorded, whereas stories of failure go unnoticed.” (Only recently did I find out that the hallowed former pastor of my parents’ celebrated church had “nonbelievers” for children.) “Similarly,” Winell goes on, “reports of success with other belief systems may not be heard.”

Certainly within the yoga world I heard some miraculous redemption stories attributed to the power of yoga, or meditation, or a Hindu Swami by the name of Kaleshwar. My friend Natalie straightened out her chaotic life, apparently, with the help of all three.

This kind of selective perception proves useful in other areas as well:

An area of selection that is always interesting is the convenient use of “scientific evidence.” If it does not serve the fundamentalist belief system, as in the case of evolution, it is disregarded as “of man,” or worse yet, Satanic. But if it supports anything biblical, it is hailed as “proof.”

I remember excitedly watching, with my family, a Christian documentary about “evidence” of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, as well as reading articles in my parents’ Christian magazines about the Shroud of Turin. We found these “scientific discoveries” very gratifying.

It was that Satanic evolution taught in my “secular” biology classes, however, that became a major chink in the wall of my mighty fortress — a fortress that during my pluralistic public-schooled adolescence developed rapidly multiplying cracks.

**

My greatest objections with my parents’ faith are not about the ridiculously outmoded (scientific or historical) worldviews perpetuated by Biblical literalism. I don’t even identify myself as an atheist at this point. I did call myself an atheist before I studied philosophy, epistemology, and the history of science in more depth; after all that, I started identifying myself as an agnostic. (Now I’m just a yoga woo-woo wannabe.)

A tangent here: a friend of mine from the bookstore once gave me grief about not self-identifying as an atheist. She thought I was being cowardly and evading the question. I told her that I found the assertion that there is no God as hubristic as the assertion that there is one. The presumed omniscience of some scientific materialists is as baffling to me as the rock-hard certainty of some theists; they act as if there’s a kind of epistemological consensus among rational people that doesn’t really exist. The pure Skeptics question whether knowledge is even possible.

Here we are, after all, little nano-bits of nature ostensibly evolved from the primeval soup, yet we convince ourselves that the a priori categories we impose on nature with our evolved-out-of-nature brains can make definitive pronouncements about the nature which encompasses them…not to mention reality itself!

What’s more, given that the means we typically use to achieve scientific certainty is the controlled experiment (to prove or disprove a hypothesis), and that we can only experiment upon what we can control, i.e. that which is “inferior” to us (subject to our manipulations), anything “superior” to us (not subject to our manipulations) cannot be experimented upon this way.  A Twilight-Zone-y example: imagine that we are, at this very moment, being watched by a highly evolved alien race that has the technology to cloak themselves against detection by our primitive instruments and senses. How would we ever know they’re there?

For that matter, how do we know we’re not “in the Matrix?!!!”

**

But enough with the sci-fi head-tripping. I’m not about to pick apart my parents’ version of Christianity with science or so-called objective reasoning. There are better people available for that (some of them are even non-literalist Christians, like John Shelby Spong). I stumbled across one such rationalist, actually, while seeking some fortification after my parents’ Christmas bombardment…

Okay, one more tangent: I am currently utterly infatuated with yet another younger man*, this one a delightful 27-year-old Kansan named Chris who goes by the handle of Evid3nc3 on YouTube. Chris, a graduate student in advanced computer science, has made a series of highly intelligent yet compassionately delivered videos about the gradual loss of his Christian faith. You can find the playlist for his wonderful series here.

After fifteen minutes of listening to Chris’s soothing, mellifluous voice and looking at his kind, easy-on-the-eyeballs face (not to mention being impressed by the generosity and openness it took to offer such an anti-testimony), I was ready to give it up, and not for Jesus. At any rate, his series is a terrific thing to watch if you’re a “fallen” born-again Christian seeking comfort and solidarity. It’s extremely well done, from the graphics to the music. I felt as if I were watching PBS at moments.

(*Before anyone goes labeling me a cougar, I would like to point out that I don’t go out of my way to pursue younger men. If Sam was young enough to be my son, Seamus was old enough to be my dad. “It’s not the years in a man’s life that count, but the life in his years.” Besides, can I help it if I’m such a MILF-lookin’ mama that nobody but twentysomethings have been hitting on me all year?)

**

Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to go into some of my greatest objections with what I was raised to believe. For starters, check out a batshit-crazy Bible passage like this one:

(Romans 9:18-23) Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?” But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’ “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath — prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory?

The picture the apostle Paul paints of God is one of a totalitarian asshole for whom some people are, entirely arbitrarily, more equal than others. This passage, among others, supports the whole Calvinist notion of a saved “elect,” predestined for glory, while the great sinful mass of humanity trundles off to hell. So much for “red and yellow, black and white…(being) precious in His sight.” Some people are wholly expendable. (It brings to my mind a yearbook byline written by one of the most incorrigible wags in my high school: “If ten innocent people died to save one human life, it would be worth it.”) Such theology informs the attitude I see on display when our religious and political leaders talk about Our Great Land as a Christian Nation founded by our Christian Fathers (never mind Jefferson), entitled to military and moral dominion over all the world. Naturally, we should be the exception to things like weapons bans, climate treaties, and inconvenient Geneva accords. (Just as members of evangelical power group “The Family” in D.C. have to be allowed different standards of marital fidelity and morality in general.)

Of course, I find the apostle Paul to have generally been a major asshole himself — but where I come from, you’d better not say that. Paul is just taking holy dictation from God.

Bruce Bawer, a “liberal” gay Episcopalian, who has written cogently and at length about what he calls “legalistic Christianity,” puts the noxiousness this way in Stealing Jesus:

…(T)he problem with legalistic Christianity is not simply that it affirms that God can be evil; it’s that it imagines a manifestly evil God and calls that evil good. In effect…it worships evil. In America right now, millions of children are taught by their legalistic Christian parents and ministers to revere a God of wrath and to take a sanguine view of human suffering. They are taught to view their fellow Americans not as having been “created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence would have it, but as being saved or unsaved, children of God or creatures of Satan; they are taught not to respect those most different from themselves but to regard them as the enemy, to resist their influence, and to seek to restrict their rights.

**

I am just now starting to unpack what it meant to grow up with a truly warped fundamentalist conception of “love”  — but this, happily, also begins to explain why my mother’s loaded use of the word can arouse rage, as well as why I have had so much trouble “staying out of the circle” (respecting boundaries) in my romantic (or would-be romantic) relationships.

To be blunt, the “Christians” from whence I came are soupily sentimental — yet their beliefs demand an almost sociopathic withholding of empathy. With sensibilities seemingly derived from Hallmark or Thomas Kinkade, they love to imagine their soft-focus, handsome white Jesus cuddling fuzzy little lost lambs (oh how Jesus loves the little lost lambs!), but when it gets down to brass tacks, these folk neither spare the rod on their own little lambs nor bat an eye at the outright sadism and inhumanity of their capricious and abusive Old Testament “Father.” (I’m sure all those Midianite children deserved what they got.)

One has only to watch Rachel Maddow’s interview with born-again author Richard Cohen — the alleged “ex-gay” therapist (kicked out of the APA) whose book helped spur Uganda’s horrifying proposed death-penalty law — to witness the depth of sentimental “Christian” self-delusion at play. Cohen goes on and on about “loving” gay people, about “having compassion” for gay people, even “healing” them with his innovative (if questionable) hug therapy…but such blinkered and overstated sentimentality belies the bigoted and alarmist language in his book (gays are pedophiles who will recruit your kids!) that incites the kind of fear and hatred behind Uganda’s anything-but-warm-and-fuzzy legislation. (Don’t even get me started on that “love the sinner, hate the sin” bullshit.)

Then there’s the fundamental lack of respect for personal boundaries. In order to evangelize the “unsaved,” you have to continue to push and push them, to get all up “in their circle.” You’re supposed to be like God, after all, and God, as I’ve written before, is the Hound of Heaven who’ll hunt you down like a bloodhound whether you like it or not!

How shudderingly claustrophobic. As life coach Lisa Brown often says, a person pursued will run. We don’t like our boundaries invaded. My experience of both God and Family, as my inveterate readers know, was an invasive one; hence my flashes of seemingly inordinate rage when my mother coos about this sentimental but schizoid and suffocating “Christian” version of “love.” You and your soft-focus sociopath stay the fuck out of my circle, Ma!

Unfortunately, I also learned how to over-pursue. Sorry, guys. (I feel like writing one of those 12-Step-recovery “amends” letters to about half a dozen men from my past. But I doubt most of them want to hear from me.)

**

The perfectionism this belief system instills is also crazy-making. We “Christians” start out with some impossibly high expectations.

“When you feel disappointed,” Marlene Winell explains to those of us who grew up with reassurances of perfect bliss in Christ, “you are more likely to panic about having a bad life instead of a bad day.” This accurately describes the all-or-nothing thoughts that have often sent me spiraling into depression.

Lacking perfection, however, does not equal total failure.

…You were taught to think you needed life to be ideal. You were probably told that you had a void in your life that only God could fill, because only God could fill it perfectly. The implication was that you had to have your needs met perfectly. That is, only Jesus could truly understand you, and you needed to be understood completely. Only God could give you enough purpose in life, and you had to have a grand, compelling purpose.

Winell shares the experience of finally getting her emotional needs met by another human being in her first marriage. “The closeness with a real live person had a profound effect: it broke my addiction to God.” Likewise, for me, finally having a wholly pleasurable and fulfilling sexual relationship with Sam seemed to break my mother’s holy-perfectionist “curse”– No man will ever satisfy you. I could finally say she had been wrong.

This relentless “Christian” perfectionism extends not only to expectations about how life should be, but also to how we should behave and believe in order to make sure God is pleased and we’re doing everything right. (Otherwise we could lose our salvation, and wind up with the goats instead of the sheep.) Paul instructs us to be perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect…but I had a devil of a time trying to interpret all the conflicting messages in the Bible and determine whether or not it was even up to me, or to God’s grace. Predestination vs. free will, faith vs. works…what to think? (Check out the wiki History of the Calvinist-Arminian Debate if you’d like a little taste of the madness.)

Frank Schaeffer, son of the evangelical “intellectual giant” Francis Schaeffer, and father of the modern Religious Right, who is now basically a damned apostate like me, writes hilariously in his memoir Crazy for God about the infinite regress involved in simply trying to have faith “the size of a mustard seed” in order to have his prayers answered:

How exactly was this supposed to work? God was in charge, but he wouldn’t do anything for us unless we believed he would do it. But if he didn’t do anything, what reason was there to believe?

We lacked the faith to pray effectively and make God do stuff. So we prayed for the faith to make God give us faith to make him do stuff. But getting enough faith was the biggest problem, so we prayed for the faith we needed to pray for faith. But how much faith did it take to pray to have enough faith to pray for faith? And if God knew you wanted faith, why didn’t he just give it to you? It was like spending all your time calling directory information for phone numbers that you aren’t allowed to call unless you can guess the number right without asking.

Even if we did accidentally do something right, we couldn’t take credit for it. “Good things were always due to God,” Marlene Winell recalls, “and failures were always mine.” This is, interestingly enough, almost exactly the “pessimist” stance our old friend Martin Seligman discovered while doing research for a book on optimism. He found that those with a more pessimistic worldview took little or no credit for their successes, yet blamed themselves for their failures. (The optimists did the opposite, shrugging off failures as due to forces beyond their control, while taking full credit for their successes.)

So this rather insane version of Christianity breeds perfectionistic pessimists.

**

Is it any wonder I’ve been stuck? Lisa, while helping me identify my areas of learned helplessness and set some goals, asked me if I were a perfectionist. I said Hell yeah!

What reason is there to so much as move, if whatever you do is certain not to be good enough, and whatever good things that may happen aren’t up to you?

Meg Ferris, that writing and creativity coach who travels all over Europe and essentially lives the life I wish I could, cautioned me against overthinking. “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” When I realized, as a teenager, that God wasn’t going to show or tell me what to do, I still tried to make the perfect decisions every time by weighing all the pros and cons, trying to build watertight arguments for my preferred choice, and attempting to predict every eventuality (something my father still constantly hammers, in classic did-you-pack-your-long-underwear fashion)…which, I can tell you right now, is a recipe for inaction.

One of my favorite passages in Frank Schaeffer’s book is his reflection, infused with characteristic  humor and humility, on what faith really means in most of our lives. Even if you believe the events he describes are completely random in a completely random universe, they nevertheless invite us to be brave and curious and take a leap of faith. We can certainly choose to let them pass us by. I for one have let too many pass me by, while I stood immobile trying to write my own Consumer Report.

The irony is that we all — secular or religious people alike — make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well. So we make a leap of faith when it comes to what we should believe in, who we will marry, and our careers. Who we happen to meet, one conversation when you were eighteen, the college course you happened to sign up for, the teacher you liked, the elevator you missed and the girl you met in the next one, decide whole lives. You would have to live a lifetime to be qualified to make any big decisions. And since we can’t do that, we trust to luck, religion, or the kindness of strangers. Only the trivialities — say, buying cars, washing machines, or airline seats — are chosen on the basis of good information. I’ve always known I like aisle seats, but what does one really want in a wife? And spiritual leaders are selected like spouses, not like airline seats. There is never a good reason, just a feeling, just that fear of death that must be overcome somehow by something — by religion, or orgasms, or art, or having children, or politics — by anything that interrupts the contemplation of oblivion.

This is the kind of faith I need, far more than I need the kind I was sold as a kid.

**

As for my parents, I’d like to send them off with a quote from Woody Allen’s classic comedy Love and Death: “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that He’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He’s an underachiever.”

A bitterly pessimistic assessment of the show’s central character by a cerebral, cynical materialist (in the scientific, not consumer sense) who was forever attacking or picking apart her less intellectual husband for looking for a greater meaning in life and for becoming fascinated with various spiritualities, like reform Judaism or Maggie’s Quaker faith. (His final insult to her, or so she imagined, was his choice of a mystic Rumi ode for his burial.)

George Sibley, Nate’s stepfather, and a man of science himself, was far more generous, and perhaps more accurate, at Nate’s funeral. “Nate was an idealist,” George mused soberly but kindly to the assemblage, “and he struggled, all through his life, to be a good man. He wasn’t perfect — but then who among us is? — and he never gave up on himself, the people he loved, or even love itself — in all its vexing, beautiful forms.”

This reduced me to tears. I loved the character of Nate, because he didn’t have answers, but was always trying to find them. He made mistakes, and he made a fool of himself, but he did try to do the right thing, even as he let himself be pulled in the direction of his longings. He behaved as if growth and change were both desirable and possible. (Even Brenda, despite her know-it-all cynicism, was forced to admit she needed help with her compulsive behavior, and her decision to pursue a career as a psychotherapist showed some kind of belief in the necessity of growth and change.)

**

Maybe I’m an idealist like Nate, running after the latest glimmer of promise, but a couple of weeks ago I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Not because anything external changed — Sam is still incomunicado (though I do have news of him), and I’m still laboring away in a punishing job I now unequivocally hate — but because I decided to listen to someone whose email dispatches have been trickling in over the past six months, whose approach has been the first in ages to make any sort of new and unexplored sense to me.

My falling-out with Doc was a gift, in a way, because over time I’d become passive, pretending I was making progress when I was clearly just spinning my wheels. Of course he had been working with me pro bono, and of late his own health issues had become his overarching concern, so he was distracted and could probably have used this break from me as well.

In the interim, because of some other personal-development email list I was on, I had been encouraged to sign up for Lisa Lane Brown’s newsletter, so I had. Lisa is a former ringette champion who plowed her way through all kinds of programs, courses, books, and psychological whatnot to try and figure out why she often “choked” at critical moments — during games and otherwise.

Normally I don’t go for the “motivational jocks,” those former basketball players et.al. who morph into successful business owners and write peppy bestsellers, but what I noticed about Lisa’s newsletters was that she wasn’t parroting the same-old, same-old about positive thinking, getting in The Zone, or self-discipline. She wasn’t talking about “attitude” or “the law of attraction” or any of the usual buzzwords. She was talking about things that had resonated powerfully with me before (like Martin Seligman’s work on learned helplessness, which I mentioned in this post) as well as some things I’d never considered before that resonated powerfully with me now. When you’ve ingested as much self-help gobbledygook as I have, to come across something you haven’t heard yet is nothing short of remarkable.

During my two-month bender, I made up my mind to try her special-offer 30-day downloadable course once I’d finished drinking and wallowing and watching the entire series of SFU. If nothing else, I reasoned, she might be able to help me move out of my dead-end, draining chore of a job. Her words were the first in a long time to ignite a flicker of hope about my future.

**

My main intention was to tackle my lack of motivation, confidence, and competence as it related to work and vocation. (Thus far, I’ve completed the first exercise and gotten some excellent feedback from Lisa — she provides personal email support.) But Lisa also supplied, as part of the package, a downloadable CD on relationships. I listened to it immediately, the same night I received it, while sewing up holes in my threadbare socks. (You can see why I need a new job.)

Lisa used a visual image that suddenly made sense, for me, of a multitude of situations — from my extensively chronicled difficulties with my mother, to my various obsessions with elusive men, to my blowout with Sam. Without making me defensive.

Draw a circle, she said. Put the other person’s initials within that circle, and yours outside it. As long as you stay “outside the circle,” the other person will want to be around you, will appreciate you, may even pursue you…but insert yourself inside that circle, and he or she will want to evade or get away from you, may get angry with you, and may even forcefully push you away. It’s very important, in relationships, to stay outside of the other person’s “circle.”

The circle, of course, as I recognized, symbolizes the other person’s boundaries. All at once I saw that this principle isn’t about learning to play games, it’s about learning to respect boundaries. Over-pursuing, the way my mother does with me, and the way I’ve done with Tony and Sonny and so many other men, is one way to violate another person’s boundaries and make him or her want to get the hell away from us.

With Sam, who generally ran toward me with equal or greater force, my fatal mistake lay in the way I came on so strong about the brakes situation, trying to take over and tell him what to do (I also then proceeded to call him too many times about it). As Lisa points out, attempting to control other people violates their boundaries just as surely as over-pursuit does.

So I got inside Sam’s circle, all right, but not via the route one might (and one reader did) expect.

Intuitively, I already knew this principle. But these realities of boundary-dynamics had always been framed in such strategic or manipulative ways before that I considered any advice about navigating them to be nothing short of exhortations to inauthenticity. Lessons on How to Play the Game, instead of on How to Effectively Cultivate Your Connection With Another Person. Lisa’s presentation, however, was clear-eyed, authentic, and somehow empowering. She outlined what we often do wrong, as well as how to “get outside of the circle” — essentially by backing off, and in some cases owning up to our errors.

As you well know, I’ve said why, why, why for two whole months, and marinated in confusion and utter helplessness about Sam’s absence and silence. It was actually a relief to accept some responsibility, and to pinpoint an unidentified dynamic I’d actually set in motion that probably resulted in his craving for distance. I am not, after all, the boss of him. (Even if he was briefly the boss of me.)

**

According to the laws of boundary-dynamics, the only damage control you can perform when it seems your loved one no longer wants you is this: to accept it.

I wrote to Sam one more time, owning up to my controlling behavior, and accepting that he no longer wants to be in the relationship. No more pleas, just an indication of what I would prefer (I’d still prefer to be with him)…as I go on with my life. Plus an invitation to tell me where else I went wrong, for future reference.

After this, I leave him alone.

Relieved of all the pressure (and “no one responds well to pressure,” observes Ms. Brown) Sam has more freedom to respond — or not — but in the meantime I’ve gotten outside of his “circle” and started acting like a self-respecting adult who can function without him.

**

It’s not that I’m disowning my desire to be connected to Sam…in fact, one of the things I like most about Lisa is that she emphasizes that we not disown our desires. Too many other approaches take the sour-grapes route, resulting in the suppression of inconvenient feelings and desires (e.g. “He probably wasn’t the right guy for me anyway.”). She doesn’t think we should “just get over it,” or “relinquish attachment,” or distract ourselves with TV, or work, or substances, or exercise…or even, I would venture, yoga. I’m pretty sure I’ve known people who used yoga to avoid inconvenient or painful feelings. I may have even worked for one or two. (By the way, did I mention that my old friend Ingrid abruptly left the studio, in a mysterious exodus not unlike mine?) The more we try to suppress those feelings, even when it’s in favor of things like affirmations, forced “positivity,” or the “fake it till you make it” philosophy so popular among fitness professionals, the more we alienate ourselves from ourselves.

No, Lisa encourages us to fully feel and accept our desires and our longings, even the ones that we feel helpless to fulfill. What we need to unlearn, she explains, is psychological leaning. That unconscious tendency we all have to put pressure on other people to validate and approve of us, unwittingly invading their “circles,” without making clear or direct requests.

So I’m trying to implement the practice of “self-acceptance,” accepting my feelings without judgment. Even when I feel like hell. Which I have for the past several weeks, between dreading getting on the phones at my job (just to get yelled at by “donors”), and dreading the visit of my uber-religious parents during this depleted time (my mother, of course, will invade my circle — and try to bring Jesus with her). And then there’s what I found out about Sam from Rob on Friday.

**

Yes, I finally approached ole Rob, Sam’s good-lookin’, man-lovin’, very politic and ambitious buddy, whom I never quite trusted (and who lately seems always to be chatting up the comeliest boychiks among the new hires, alleviating some of my anxieties from the last post). Ever since Obama announced he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, I’ve been beside myself, thinking about what escalation could mean for civilian contractors. Bombs. Landmines. Snipers. So I bit the bullet and swallowed my pride and asked Rob point-blank if he knew where Sam was. Was he somewhere where he could get blown up?

“He’s not overseas,” said Rob, to my astonishment. When it was clear I wasn’t going to probe, and instead told him gently that I didn’t mean to put him on the spot, he divulged even more information. Sam was back working in his home state. He never made it through the screening, so he never took the job. Up until a couple of weeks ago, he and Rob had been communicating regularly via phone.

All this time, Sam had been here, in the States, fully capable of communicating. “I think he just wanted to cut the cords, you know?” Rob offered helpfully. I knew. But he was going to cut the cords with people like you, Rob, I thought, not me. I recalled the part in Crossing the Unknown Sea where David Whyte points out that the root within the word humiliation is humus, earth, or ground. I had been brought straight to the ground after believing I’d be the exception.

But Sam had led me to believe I’d be the exception. That was the worst of it: when Sam told me he was leaving, my immediate reaction was to prepare for the end. “Well, I’m really glad we did this,” I started to say, already calculating mentally how I might best ready myself emotionally to part with him. Sam interrupted my train of thought, protesting that he would only be gone a few months, that we’d be in communication. Nothing was going to be over. It was he who cranked up the intensity, wanting us to learn as much about each other and spend as much time together as possible in the time remaining. I was so reassured that he intended to be around long-term that I divulged to my mother — my mother! — that I was in a relationship. Big mistake.

Now I’ve really complicated their Christmas visit, at a time when I don’t feel like taking questions.

**

“Anger is desire contaminated by helplessness,” says Lisa. When I finally got home from work that day, I cried. And I raged. What was my helpless desire? There was that same desire, as always, to be connected to Sam…but there was also the desire to be treated as a person of value (who deserved communication, consideration, and at the very least closure) by this person who had been of such inestimable value to me. He had treated me that way in the past; obviously, it wasn’t happening now. And there wasn’t much more I could do about it, now that I’d put myself “outside of the circle,” except to accept my anger, and the thwarted desires underlying the anger, intolerable as they might feel.

The pain and weight in my chest, when I allow myself to feel the grief of Sam’s disconnection and/or loss, seems crushing to the point that I can hardly breathe. The other night I opened the window in single-digit weather; I thought I was suffocating. It’s a different order of suffering than my longing for the various guys I never got the chance to really be with, even those I slept with or dated. In those cases, I was missing something that had not yet come into existence (and, as it turns out, never did).

“In some ways, I feel like he was my first love,” I wrote to my closest friend of twenty-three years, who has heard literally everything about my more successful relations with men as well as my many fruitless obsessions. She knew León, that catastrophic college beau, as well as Max Vujevic. She had listened to me moan about a guy named Greg Schmidt for six years.

“I feel like he was your first love, too,” she wrote back.

**

In my more lucid moments I also realize that much of my suffering comes from “psychological leaning” — obsessing about whether he hates me now, how love could turn to hate (or worse, indifference), what he thinks of me now, and going over and over happier memories. (I just deleted a whole long, unnecessary paragraph of reminiscences!) I want Sam to go back to thinking I’m okay.

The obsessing itself, as Lisa astutely points out, is, indeed, another form of escape. Out here, I experience helplessness about the situation; in my head, I make an attempt to gain some semblance of control. I’ve retreated into my head all my life, the way other people might retreat into things like TV or shopping. The biggest problem is that whatever you achieve in your head doesn’t have much to do with “out here” unless you know what to do “out here” about the helplessness. Which is why I decided to listen to someone else who sounded like she had a clue.

When I stop “leaning” for a second, I know I still want (and deserve) word from Sam. But I also remember that he was twenty-one, and that his life here had already become unbearably chaotic — even more so than usual for such a differently abled and gifted human being. It was like inserting Powder into the middle of a tangle of competing electromagnetic fields. I don’t even know that we could have survived, that I could have stayed with him amid the chaos, if things had continued on the way they were. I’m actually glad he got out the hell out of Dodge. Maybe the only way Sam knew how to simplify his landscape was to torch every bridge (Rob’s simply being the last to burn).

I’ve done all I can, anyway, by putting myself beyond his boundary and relieving any pressure. As much as I’d rather avoid moving forward (still looking over my shoulder), I still have the same life dilemmas waiting for me, about how to make my way in the world, make a living, maybe even make a difference. Believe it or not, that’s the primary thing I’m working on now, with help from Ms. Brown. Having the guidance of someone who actually knows something firsthand about success, and understands how things like learned helplessness and boundaries work to hinder or assist us, gives me a little more confidence that I might yet be able to make constructive changes. Even at my advanced age.

After all, just seven months ago I would never have believed I’d have the most amazing, if brief, love affair of my life with that supervisor guy Sam.

It could never have happened had I not been able to truly change.

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