Then, as necessity dawns, dread. Pulse-quickening fear. Ripples of anxiety burning through my gut like a sulphurous acid. What will I do today? What will I do tomorrow? How will I live? And what, exactly, do I have to live for?

I want to go back to sleep, but the adrenaline won’t let me relax. My racing thoughts are running a familiar track. Going over and over the abysmal loop about the little girl whose dreams never seemed to come true, who grew old alone, destitute, scarcely having lived life, as the world’s ecosystem and economy disintegrated around her.

At that point the only course of action seems clear. And it ain’t sending out résumés.

**

49:49:2. These numbers popped into my head the other day. My coach friend has pressed me to talk about my “dreams,” has encouraged me to run wild with my imagination, and I’ve had trouble explaining why this prodding feels so cruel to me. I might elaborate now that my life often seems to me to have consisted of 49 percent daydreams, 49 percent suffering, and 2 percent actual living.

You see, from the time I was a very young child, I have always been able to vividly imagine the way I would like things to be. And I typically suffered (from feelings ranging in intensity from mere disappointment to heartbreak and total despair) when what actually happened around me — nearly all of the time — was radically different from what I envisioned. (Woody Allen dealt with this conflict between imagination and reality brilliantly in The Purple Rose of Cairo.) Those rare times when there was a match, or more accurately a near-match, between what I wanted and what really occurred, make up the other 2 percent. Some might call me lucky for ever hitting that 2 percent. Some might say, “Welcome to the real world, sweetheart!” Then there are those who would fault me, like the Christians with their mustard seeds, for not having faith enough.

I wonder, in response: how can a young child who believes in Santa Claus and the resurrection not have faith enough?

So I can’t help but react viscerally when asked about my dreams. Especially at times like these, when everyone wants to know what I intend to do with my life. If I could even tell you, friends, would it matter? At 41, is the question even still relevant?

All this historic angst resurfaces when the routines and relationships and duties that have defined me and paid my way for a time are completely stripped away, and I’m left with the pressing immediate question of survival — but also the perennial (and still unresolved) question of life purpose. While the clock keeps ticking.

**

“Unknown” called again on my cell yesterday. “Unknown” has been calling me a lot lately.

If I pick up, I know I’ll most likely hear Officer Frank Lipinsky from the Fraternal Order of Police or Sargeant George Dodd from Disabled Veterans of America or Something Somebody Something from the Society for Blind Homeless Mormon Puppies making a persistent guilt appeal to me for money I don’t have.

If I don’t pick up, I can pretend it’s Sonny (to borrow an old alias of his), calling to see how I’m doing, if I’m okay, if I want to meet somewhere. He’s blocked his number because he’s not completely sure he’ll be ready to talk to me if I pick up. He didn’t respond electronically, after all, when I replied to his brief expression of concern with a heartfelt plea to stay connected.

So I don’t pick up. As usual, there’s no message.

You see how my imagination works?

**

I honestly don’t know what I mean to this man, now, if I mean much of anything to him anymore. I only know what he’s meant to me, and if you’ve been reading me attentively for a while, I don’t have to tell you. He did liberate himself, at last, from the clutches of one of those Fascinating Women who look supermodel-pretty from a short distance, but when you get close to them you see the perpetual discontent drawing down the corners of their mouths (rendering them oddly plain), and hear the chronic disapproval dripping from their voices. I extended her the benefit of the doubt way past its expiration date because I honestly believed she was contributing to Sonny’s happiness.

When it’s quiet at night I think I can hear the dull thwack of him rebounding off of half a dozen headboards around the city. I know the opportunities are there, attractive and ruby-ripe for the picking, and he’s definitely got the appetite (as well as some of the attributes) of a young Warren Beatty. Now that he doesn’t have to behave, he’ll probably be making up for lost time. (I once likened his pleasure-loving nature to that of a five-year-old boy left alone with a tub of ice cream.)

It’s all right, folks; I don’t own him. I know I’ve never had any claim to him in the slightest. None of us ever really do, even if we decide to play by the rules and stand up in front of a person of the cloth or the law and repeat after him or her. We made that stuff up to create a safe boundary, to protect our vulnerability, to not have to relive the irrecoverable losses of our helpless childhoods. The fact is that people are born free, and if what they really need to do isn’t what we would have them do…well, if we love them enough to want them to follow their bliss, we’ve got to let them go. (Once in a while, as happened for the fortunate Joseph Campbell and his wife, two people decide that being together is folllowing their bliss.) From almost the very beginning, three years ago, I knew I’d found a soul brother I would have to wish the best, even if he wound up breaking my heart into a million bleeding pieces.

You may not want me to feel the way I do about Sonny, either, but that’s what I’ve elected to do with my freedom.

**

A friend and I go to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Brad Pitt, comely as he is, has never been my favorite actor, but the film is deeply affecting because it’s essentially about change, and, ultimately, loss.

The title character, a man aging in reverse, weathers everything that happens to him with a sort of melancholy equanimity. Raised in a home for the elderly, he becomes used to seeing his companions vanish and new ones take their place. When Benjamin, in his wizened early twenties, finally comes to know the father who abandoned him at birth, he brings the fatally ill man out to the lake where he was happiest. One of the film’s most memorable quotes occurs as son and dying father watch the sun rise over the lake: “You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”

I don’t know about you, but at twice his age I’m still having trouble with that.

Benjamin knows, too, when to exit stage right, when his lifelong love Daisy is obviously not open to being with him — first at a smoky, boozy dancers’ after-show party in New York City where she is surrounded by male admirers (he walks away), and later after a crippling injury in Paris robs her of her livelihood and her pride (she sends him away).

Eventually they will “meet in the middle,” when he has grown substantially younger physically and she has grown substantially older emotionally. Of course Benjamin has no way of knowing if their time will ever come; that’s one thing that makes his surrender to the inexorable conditions of the present all the more admirable.

I can let my time at the studio go, the way Benjamin let his father go: mad as a mad dog at the way things went, swearing and cursing the fates, yet knowing when the end is the end.

But Sonny…I can’t go there. Not now. I can only hope for Benjamin’s equanimity, the gracious exit stage right after seeing the crowded room and the competition (and, perhaps, the injury). The time isn’t right; we aren’t welcome.

Maybe someday.

**

Like Benjamin, my life’s trajectory has been shaped more by haphazard coincidences and personal connections than by some grand overarching plan. His early years were played out on small stages: a house, a tugboat, a hotel — while mine were equally circumscribed by classrooms, kitchens, bookstores, and coffeeshops. I was 38 when I left the country for the first time and traveled to Italy. (That was my “2 percent“ year, the year of exceptions, the year I met Sonny. I could write an entire post on that spring, broad and sunny with possibility like the early years of life.) I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone who knows exactly what she wants to become from childhood and spends her life pursuing that path. My ideas kept changing: today, a nurse; tomorrow, an artist; the day after, a veterinarian; or, on second thought, maybe an actress; a mother; a pilot; a poet.

The only constants along the way, truthfully, were a burning desire for approval, and an even fiercer desire to be loved by those who elicited my own affections.

Which is funny, really, given the way things have turned out. As if everything that has happened since was meant to teach me that in order to maintain my integrity I might have to relinquish those very fundamental desires. Just as an example, I can introduce you to a few people at my former job who definitely don’t approve of me (!), but I didn’t submit to their bullying in order to be liked — did I?!

As for the second part…well, I’ve discovered along the way that it’s true what the otherwise astringent Christian mystic Anthony DeMello postulated: that the human spirit needs to love more than it needs to be loved. (He identified our two basic existential needs as to love and to be free.) For sure, not getting what you were after from the people you think you love will inevitably teach you the meaning of “unconditional.”

**

A fairly random, heart-driven existence, with no great accomplishments to cite: this has been my résumé, much like that of the curious Mr. Button. I only wish that I were aging in reverse right now. My chronic pain has been intensifying recently, perhaps as a response to all the new stresses. A friend of a friend who does Network Spinal Analysis has just told me that I’ve stored multiple traumas, both physical and emotional, in my spine, and that the blockages are cutting off my healthy nervous system functioning. (This is also, apparently, the reason why I’ve spent so much time in the overstimulated state of fight-or-flight.) It could be treated, if I had several hundred dollars to spend, but right now I’m more likely to be treating every dollar like a plank in my life raft, and seeing what I can cut out of my grocery bill.

The uncertainty and anxiety of poverty and unemployment in dismal economic times, the specter of encroaching physical breakdown and even disability, the prospect of being forced to give up my home and return to the bleak Northeast to live stifled within my relatives’ claustrophobic closet of millennial Puritanism… all of these things have driven me, in recent days, to the handrail of George Bailey’s bridge, staring at the water, wild-eyed. (Where’s that paunchy, bulb-nosed angel when you need him?)

**

Which is where we began. TAKAHO, my best friend from college always says: Tie A Knot And Hang On. I know my body can’t withstand another bruising stint in food service. The prospect of cubicles and fluorescents and sales calls gives me waves of existential nausea. I don’t even know whether I should put the yoga studio on my résumé, or how to talk about what happened there. The mere thought of paging or clicking through classifieds and job boards, attempting to find a round hole I can try to force my square peg into, is enough to make me break into a sweat.

The world of cold, hard survival is no place for choosy daydreamers.

And yet…the little girl still daydreams. Of kindred spirits and of giving help, of creating, of contributing, of having enough.

What she needs right now, frankly, is a miracle.

**

Sonny once wrote to me, “ask and you shall receive” — the irony of which was utterly lost on him. It’s a thing I have only found true, myself, that lucky 2 percent of the time. It’s hard to hear that particular Bible verse quoted, at any rate, when part of you is convinced Jesus fast-forwarded through all your fervent, begging childhood messages, including that one about Grandma’s cancer. Nevertheless, like those raving Secret people, I try to visualize the checks coming in (from where?) and to imagine fortuitous meetings and life-altering chance encounters. We can’t all be Forrest Gump, but poet David Whyte has mapped his life that way in the past, and he’s not exactly a member of the rah-rah manifestation crowd. The angel intervened when George Bailey was at the end of his rope and out of ideas (except for a very permanent solution to a temporary problem). If ever I needed a freakish coincidence, the time is now.

So I’ll refrain from drinking bleach for the moment, and let myself surrender and fall. As if there really are forces working in my favor. Even if the forces amount to nothing more than my belief that forces are working in my favor. I just don’t know. Maybe, sometimes, you simply have to trust that the net will appear.

As Benjamin’s adoptive mother Queenie was fond of saying, you never know what’s comin’ for you.

This particular Shakespearean tragedy’s protagonist has been called the first real existential (anti)hero in literature, with his anguished vacillations and the crushing burden of responsibility he feels, trapped within his profoundly lonely dilemma, lacking divine guidance or any other means of moral support. A “perennial student,” as one of my college professors called him, Hamlet suffers from that most modern of disorders, overthinking. You can imagine why I might be interested in reading about that.

For the bulk of the play, too, he falls back on passive-aggressive tactics rather than instigating any kind of confrontation. (Not that I can identify with that!) When we meet him, he’s muttering double-edged responses rife with undetected hostility to the cheerful queries of his loathed uncle-turned-stepfather. Why the cloudy countenance, Hamlet? asks uncle. “Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun (son),” Hamlet snarls. Later, Hamlet uses a traveling troupe of entertainers to act out his father’s murder, publicly demonstrating to his uncle I know what you did while leaving everyone else in the room clueless. Only when all hell has broken loose and his own death is imminent and absolutely certain does he act directly and decisively. Consequences don’t matter anymore; the game’s over.

**

You may remember these lines from one of the play’s most famous monologues:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

The fact that most of us aren’t operating under the terrifying onus to personally avenge a murder, vigilante-style, doesn’t mean that Hamlet has nothing in common with us. Au contraire. It’s far too easy to lose one’s resolve and be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought whenever one considers embarking upon an insecure venture or risk of any magnitude. The more one thinks, the more spooked one can become. There are always a million possibilities for failure, for unintended consequences, for doing exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. Second-guessing can turn into ninth- or tenth-guessing, and suddenly one is completely paralyzed. An acquaintance of mine who now lives abroad with her Portuguese boyfriend and organizes writers’ trips to Paris and Rome recently wrote in her email newsletter, “If you overthink it, you’ll never do it.” I guess she would be one to know about that.

Of course, as a friend recently put it (regarding a work-related confrontation that did not go well), sometimes we’re “not eager to touch the stove again.” Like the proverbial rat in the cage who just got a painful electric shock, maybe we’re reluctant to step on that lever one more time — no matter how badly we want the cheese. After a lifetime of the “thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to,” actually, we may be tempted to just lie down on the floor and whimper like the dogs in Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness experiments.

**

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. T.S. Eliot’s poem became an immediate favorite of mine the first time I read it in high school. J. Alfred Prufrock, whose name alone is not exactly that of a hero but more like that of a comical character out of P.G. Wodehouse, stands vacillating in his upstairs hall, wondering Do I dare disturb the universe? He frets and fusses and makes dozens of “visions and revisions” before going downstairs for “the taking of a toast and tea” — where he loses his resolve. A somewhat clownish figure like Brazil’s Sam Lowry (whom I talked about in this post), with a head full of impractical dreams and longings, he is all too aware of how he must appear to other people. (“But how his arms and legs are thin!”) More like Polonius, Hamlet’s resident fool, than its title character, he is, perhaps (to quote from another earlier post), too small for what brings him alive.

Alas, poor Prufrock, I know him well. As a fellow clown, I’ll let him wear this little red nose I’ve got that honks when you squeeze it. The kids love it! Once we’ve done our Kabbalah homework and burned off that desire to receive for the self alone, we won’t feel so sorry for ourselves…

I do remember being a little shocked when I read somewhere that the J. Alfred Prufrock poem was a favorite of Monica Lewinsky’s. Then again, who said she was stupid? Intelligence and judgment aren’t the same thing. No, what strikes me as so incongruous is that she exhibited a confident recklessness so utterly contrary to that character, and utterly foreign to anyone remotely like him. This chubby, giggly kid fresh out of school flashed her thong at not just some sought-after schmoe like the most popular guy in her senior class, but at the leader of the free world. She (as well as the rest of the country, and maybe the planet) might have benefited from some overthinking in this case (!), but I’ve got to hand it to her for sheer unmitigated chutzpah. She may forever live on in infamy, but she sure didn’t allow herself to be paralyzed by the prospect. That’s probably a weird thing to admire, but methinks Hamlet could have used some of that quality a bit earlier in the play.

**

Ah, where is that happy medium? Is there one? I could, for example, go crashing into one of my staff meetings like a baby elephant, flattening everything in sight; I could sit and wait and say nothing, trusting or at least hoping that things will work themselves out. Sometimes delicacy and forbearance are warranted in times of upheaval. I’m reminded of a book written by a widow that we used to carry in the grief section of the bookstore where I worked — Don’t Ask for the Dead Man’s Golf Clubs. Obviously, she had encountered some staggering obtuseness from acquaintances so preoccupied with their individual agendas that they lost all sensitivity and respectfulness regarding the situation, all awareness of her needs and feelings. I never want to be that person. I’ve been told, however, and by more than one individual, that I actually err too much on the side of the needs and feelings of others, that I defer to the point of virtual nonexistence. Hell, I’ve run down the wrong side of the field clutching the ball, and bounced the rival team’s touchdown triumphantly in the end zone. (Rabbi Berg and his Kabbalists, of course, would say this is a good thing.)

The problem for me and Prufrock and Hamlet and all our existential kin is that we just don’t have a clue what the right course of action might be, or when to take it. There are pitfalls at every step…contingencies…unforseen complications…wild cards…timing may be of the essence…what was true yesterday may not be true today…and there’s no one else on whom to pin responsibility but ourselves. My mother reads the Bible and prays, and trusts that whatever does or doesn’t happen is her interventionist God’s will. (As Dana Carvey’s church lady used to say, how convenient.) The ancient Greeks had a whole pantheon of gods to intervene in their affairs, and occasionally during a drama one would pull a deus ex machina and make a cameo.

(Hey, gimme a deus ex machina over here! No, seriously!)

Much of what we believe as human beings seems to me to be an effort to insulate ourselves from a lack of control over our surroundings. I often think of what poet David Whyte said about the way people talk about “enlightenment” — he opined that very often you could just as easily substitute the word “safety.” Lord knows, much of this strenuous soul-searching I’ve done over the years has been performed in the hope of attaining relief (safety?) from suffering and determining what, exactly, is in my power. All those manifesting gurus are so, so very seductive to me because they promise that the sky’s the limit — yet they can also enrage me with their blithe assessments of other people’s disappointments. (Oh, I’ve had faith, mister. About two hundred times. I’ll show you the scars to prove it.) If you think I’m a cynic, well, remember that inside every cynic is a romantic idealist beaten to within an inch of her life.

Verily, gentle reader, if my dearest wishes came true tomorrow, I would drop down on my knees and give thanks unto any deity you chose. I would believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Tinkerbell. You could tell me the moon was made of cottage cheese, and I’d believe you. Virginia Woolf was extremely astute to have a character in To the Lighthouse surmise that the prickly intellectual in her company must never have gotten to go to the circus. What are we, after all, but children walking around sad because we didn’t get any candy? It may be no more complicated than that. I don’t think I’m any more complicated than that.

**

But back to the question of action vs. paralysis. These are not the only choices; I seem to have overlooked the proverbial “third way.” Now, there certainly would have been far less of a drama to watch if Hamlet had stepped back with zen-like serenity and let his uncle the king work out his own karma, but it’s possible the latter would have promptly hanged himself with his own rope (literally or figuratively), the way the McCain-Palin campaign has in recent weeks with no help from a calm and smiling Obama.

The one spiritual teaching to which I keep returning, over and over again, is the one about nonresistance. It’s the Tao, the wisdom of water, which yields in all gentleness to whatever is in its path, and always flows downhill. We all know you can’t push the river — but good luck stopping it! Perhaps the wisest ones among us have learned to cease the tiresome and anxious struggle for control, and to simply accept whatever happens to be here. (Without all that stressful obsessing, who knows — the “right” course of action might become clearer.)

While this may seem counterintuitive to both the existentialist and the born-again Christian (not to mention the Secret disciple), it may be the most appropriate response to the most accurate assessment of our condition as humans. We are likely not the omnipotent creators of every facet of our experience. It’s doubtful that we’re ever going to be totally “safe,” and Jesus is probably not going to appear in the bathroom mirror and tell us His Plan while we floss. We definitely don’t have power over other people and their choices — nor should we. What we do have a say about is whether we’re going to resist or reject the way things stand (and fret over it endlessly) or whether we can surround whatever-is like water, and go with the flow.

Dude.

Really, that may be why surfers are like that. They spend a lot of time in the water, riding the waves.

Now there’s an adaptation for you. Hamlet, Prince of Malibu.

**

This week an older woman friend, who represents for me that unconditionally loving, Divine-mother figure we all secretly long for, was trying to recall the ending lines from David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness.” She intended to cite them in reference to the distress I was feeling at my job.

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

What she had meant to communicate, she explained once we had found them, was actually something more along the lines of anything or anyone that makes you feel small is too small for you. I had been brimming with practical suggestions regarding the latest problem at work, but my immediate superiors seemed to be more or less ignoring my impassioned input. I even got into an argument with one of my managers, who was quick to put me back in my “place.” So I did feel minimized. And angry. I fretted that if I were in her shoes, I would be doing things quite differently. I started playing armchair CEO, mentally cataloguing all the things I thought she and the rest of the management were doing wrong. Believe me, they were legion.

Until, that is, I had the thought — so what if I were in charge here? With the multitude of responsibilities that entails? Would I really be prepared to take it all on? Would I want to? Would I put in long hours, and sacrifice my evenings and weekends, my sleepy Saturday afternoons writing at the coffeehouse? I really went there for a minute and imagined it. And I had to admit to myself, with brutal honesty: I am, in all probability, too lazy to manage a company. I love my down time and my freedom. I like being able to leave my responsibilities at the door. And as much as I dislike being bossed, I don’t really want to boss anyone else, either.

With those thoughts, my righteous indignation and bitter grievances dissipated like a vapor. Telling the whole truth can do that.

Why was I complaining? I had in all likelihood dodged a bullet, by my own admission.

It was a revelation.

**

But this same sort of radical truth-telling was long overdue in another area of my life that is even more fraught with stressful feelings and grievances and always has been. The first admission led naturally to the second — that I am likewise unprepared (and dishonest) when it comes to a certain kind of relationship I generally don’t have to manage, either. This particular brand of unpreparedness isn’t much talked about, but I suspect it may be more widespread than anyone thinks. Of course, I can only speak for myself, and project upon famous dead people who aren’t around to defend themselves.

But let me back up and tell you a story I could call “Playing Chicken with Damien Moreau.” (That’s not his real name; all names on this blog have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty.) Damien was a young man Destined for Greatness at my gargantuan and cutthroat Boston-area high school. Before graduation he was already a playwright, actor, director, award-winning writer, and world traveler, a Harvard-bound skate punk who spoke three languages and penned spare, melancholy prose. I had never paid much attention to this skinny kid with a Gallic nose until we shared a homeroom senior year. I can’t even tell you what first happened to plunge me into a life-altering, poetry-inducing infatuated madness (an obsession I have to credit for honing my writing skills) other than a taste of his dark, Beat-influenced, existentialist universe, following closely upon the loss of my sunny Christian one. Damien visited extremes that none of the good churchgoing boys I’d ever known would dare set foot in. (Since then I’ve always seemed to fall hardest for men who, like Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs, are as prodigious in their breadth of spirit as they are in their iniquities. But I could write a whole other post on that.) His ideas, perspectives, and behaviors were edgy, anarchic, and colored by a postmodern bleakness. He became my new hero, and the arbiter of everything worth knowing.

In short, I made a god of him.

And wrote a sort of prayer, of both praise and supplication, in pencil, on college-ruled paper, which I passed to him after English class. My heart was hammering wildly in my throat. The effect of this act on my digestion was so dramatic that I skipped the rest of my classes that day, lying on the couch in the literary magazine office one door down from the girls’ room. I had never felt more exhiliratingly alive, or more excruciatingly vulnerable. I was so terrified by what I’d done that I couldn’t even imagine encountering Damien again.

He didn’t come to homeroom the next morning. Or the next. When he finally appeared in English class, just before the bell, I could barely look at him, and felt as if I would faint. When I did dare to glance his way, and caught his eye, he gave me a sort of Mona Lisa smile. I felt a current like a thunderbolt pass through my entire body. Still viscerally terrified, but jazzed and emboldened by the electric jolt, I caught up to him after class and asked him what he thought about my note. “I don’t know…I don’t know…” he muttered, hurrying away, not looking at me. “I am not competent.”

Which was a hell of a thing for Damien Moreau to say. (Not to mention an exceedingly gracious thing, especially seeing as he happened to be the highly ungracious age of seventeen. Bless his punk little heart.)

What I could never quite admit to myself is that in addition to a gigantic letdown, I felt relief. It really was something like a game of Chicken, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. There I was, rushing headlong like a headbanger’s Camaro toward poor ambushed Damien, propelled recklessly by my 275-horsepower adolescent passion, yet with a dread fear of actually colliding. And he swerved out of the way first. He got to be the “chicken,” and I got to walk away feeling like the crazy-brave one.

But what would I have done if he hadn’t “swerved?”

**

No, Damien wasn’t the only one who felt incompetent. Let me let you in on a little secret: I have never, in the throes of overpowering emotion from the inside or overwhelming stimulation from the outside, felt like I knew what the hell I was doing or should do. In my last post I mentioned High Autonomic Reactivity (HAR), a nervous phenomenon that, as Dr. Hyatt explains it, makes sense of most of my life. I have no idea how widespread it is, whether I’m a freak or whether other people just don’t talk about it.

I was the kid who spent the first two weeks of nursery school under the crafts table. I’m not kidding. When the world is too much with me, I retreat. I hide in my apartment the way Emily Dickinson hid in her upstairs room. And once in a while, when life actually bothers to confront me with an opportunity I say I want more than anything, I back down. I swerve. I completely understand what biographers are talking about when they write about the reclusive Dickinson’s “retiring nature,” and I think I know why Kierkegaard invented theoretical obstacles to make marriage with his beloved Regine impossible. These were highly sensitive people, bundles of walking nerves who felt everything painfully deeply, and simply living in the world was difficult and frightening enough without the added challenge of navigating a passionate confrontation that made them feel even more vulnerable. Perhaps for them, as for me, it was just too much. I’ve shed tears almost every time I’ve read the Dickinson poem that begins

I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf

because I have so often felt that “I can’t do this, it’s real Life,” in all its terrifying unpredictability, unfamiliarity, and ability to flatten me, and that it’s always been and will always be “over there.” But only when the strongest emotions are involved.

My life coach friend marvels about how the majority of his female clients have gotten into relationships with men mainly for economic reasons. (See “The Inner Bag Lady” for an exploration of why this may be so.) There’s none of this scary stark-nakedness; they “take off their clothes/to reveal other clothes,” to borrow a brilliant line from Margaret Atwood, and complete what is first and foremost a business transaction. Call it an even trade of goods and services. I get that; I’ve had “transactions” of my own that never touched me, that never much threatened or excited me in any way. But I don’t consider them “Life,” either, even if to the outside world there was an appearance of something happening. Ultimately I always resisted settling for anything or anyone that didn’t “bring me alive” — I would rather soldier on alone than be a unenthusiastic kept woman — but when I think of that David Whyte poem, I wonder if my metaphorical eyes are bigger than my metaphorical stomach. In other words: what if my problem is that I’m too small for what brings me alive? What if I’m constitutionally incapable of the fortitude it would require to reach behind that shelf and yank Life out by the good parts, in those moments of abject fear?

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” wrote Anaïs Nin, and she knew what she was talking about. As with my job, I can moan and groan about the way things are, but how honest is that? I know how much I like my lazy time, just like I know how downright inadequate I feel to the demands of sustained contact and engagement with anyone who without effort dismantles my wobbly defenses and exposes the child under the table. Put up or shut up, right? If I’m not up for the big leagues, I should reconcile myself with my solitary upstairs room, or else arrange a less risky transaction that may buy me some moderate gratifications and at least the semblance of less loneliness. In the end, the responsibility is no one’s but mine.

I must mention, in my defense, that this under-the-table toddler did leave home for good at nineteen, endured wild frat parties full of predatory upperclassmen, moved two thousand miles from home to a city where she knew no one, ventured into downtown clubs and dive bars late at night and alone to hear bands being covered by a certain local music critic, traveled to Italy by herself, and wrote a lot of poorly received love letters. She approached men she considered totally out of her league. And she was terrified the entire time. (Beat that, Emily!)

And yet, when it comes to the things I claim I want most…it was not so very long ago that I sat on a sofa in a coffeehouse beside someone whose presence and proximity made my knees quake. He was talking about a book by Rilke I had given him, and how it had made him wonder if he really deserved love. I gazed mutely at him, this radiant, messy Karamazov of a man, who was rarely absent from my thoughts or my half-assed agnostic prayers, to whom I would have happily given all my earthly goods and possibly a kidney. Did he deserve love? The boundary gate had just been thrown wide open. Confronted abruptly with an unmapped frontier, where the very next moment could mean being lost in unknown and unpredictable territory, my brain froze; my tongue seemed to stick in my mouth and refused to work. Eventually I managed to blurt out some forgettable inanity. Then we were interrupted by another friend. Later, I would write my courage often fails me at pivotal moments. I had swerved. I had Chickened out, yet again.

Next time, next time, I reassured myself, betting on that future that never materializes.

Can’t you see it? It’s over there, behind the shelf.