The light has been returning, as the days grow longer again and we set the clocks forward, and so has my equilibrium and happiness — unresolved tensions with Ted notwithstanding. (Per some breaking gossip, it appears as if he may have quit or been let go after an angry confrontation with management.)

As I continue to go on dates with strange men from the free dating site — including an extremely tall Polish Ph.D who cautions that he will “test my humanitarianism and liberalism” — it occurs to me: I don’t want any man to change this. In the past, I have identified so completely with my caustic amours that their pet miseries became (and added to) my own.

**

When I was younger, I used to think if I can just get with this or that guy, life will be complete, and I will be happy. Never mind that my interactions and conversations with that particular individual more often than not left me feeling the exact opposite. I have the unfortunate (or enviable, depending on your point of view) tendency to fall into the reality and thought-world (and depression) of other people the way one might slip on some slick tile and fall into a swimming pool. And it’s hard enough for me to climb out of my own thought-pool. It took me twenty-five years the first time.

Of course you, loyal readers, well know that one of my habits is to think everything completely to death. I went to the proper philosophy-oriented college for this, of course: the brain-wanking went on around the clock, and it was highly fashionable to be as grim as possible in one’s premises and conclusions. Somewhere along the line, I had become convinced that the truth of a thought was directly proportional to how painful it was to entertain. Perhaps because the “truth” with which I grew up depended upon the paranoid avoidance of all other, threateningly contradictory input, and facing that input and experiencing the subsequent disillusionment was painful. I felt deeply betrayed by those who had, I felt, sold me a so-called bill of goods.

Closed-minded cynicism seems to be common among kids who go through these kinds of betrayals: we tend to view the world through the prism of our personal injuries and disappointments, and take the good things for granted. What’s worse, we would rather be “right” (this time) than heal, or make the changes that might just possibly allow a thin sliver of sunlight to penetrate the gloom. Pessimism becomes a habit, a chronic disease that becomes part of our identity. We wouldn’t know who we were without our bitterness and our depression.

Funny thing is, I didn’t miss it at all when it went away.

And it’s hit me, amid all these coffee and lunch dates: I’d rather be by myself than with someone who triggers those old habits. I feel like an alcoholic might when confronted with dates who are big drinkers. I like being out of pain. I like enjoying the present moment. Simple presence — and not some constant remove from the now, the restless daydreams of a dissatisfied imagination, into which I’ve escaped since adolescence — is what saves me now, every day.

**

My saucy gay 74-year-old former monk friend, who turned me onto the contemporary English poet David Whyte, has lent me a DVD of David giving a live talk in San Francisco. During the course of the talk, David recites several of his poems with his gorgeous, resonant Yorkshire accent, including the poem “Start Close In.”

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.

**

Give up on other people’s questions, he says. Don’t let them smother something simple. This is exactly the danger when, like me, you have a tendency to get derailed by other people’s realities. Especially when those “other people” are men — who tend to have better-policed boundaries and a more robust ego than I do — particularly men to whom I form some kind of romantic attachment.

“You don’t let anyone take you away from the conversation that you were born to, and that you were made for,” David cautions.

In today’s world, we should be saying “no” about three times for every “yes” that we say…a good “no” says that there’s a bigger “yes” to be said…and it says that you have a promise inside you, and a faithfulness that you’re holding to that’s beyond this present sense of besiegement…

Lately I have felt somewhat besieged by the demands of my gentleman callers. Last week a man about whom I felt decidedly ambivalent (at best!) decided he wanted to see me again — right away! (Not free tomorrow? What about this weekend?! Soon! Soon!)

I could already feel my old habits kicking in on the first date, when confronted with his educated, urbane naysaying — the placating nodding, the disingenuous smile, the beginnings of invisibility. I wasn’t comfortable being myself. I was making an effort to identify with him and to please. The things women learn tacitly from our mothers and from cultural messages that relate the expectations for our gender (as wives and mothers): Take care of everyone! Don’t hurt anybody’s feelings! Don’t be disagreeable! (Even the most ostensibly “liberated” women I’ve met occasionally find themselves slipping into passive aggression rather than face a conflict head-on.)

After a few attempts to direct the flow, I let my date dominate the conversation, which, while certainly intelligent and even interesting, was not particularly warm or personal. I found myself glancing at my watch.

Of course he liked me; I wasn’t even there. I was a mirror. As I have been so often in the past. This is not what I’d call being “faithful” to the “promises” I’ve made to myself. This feels like a leap backwards, visiting unhappier days…and I have no desire to return to those days.

A “no” to this suitor may be a “yes” to me.

**

Words cannot express, however, the love and gratitude I feel toward David Whyte. I wouldn’t mind losing myself in his expansive and generous worldview, but he wouldn’t want me to walk any path other than my own. And for that I say: Can we clone him, please? He is precisely the sort of man I would love to meet.

I did actually meet him, once, at a signing at a local bookstore. He was as gracious, approachable, and good-humored as he seems on tape, a striking Anglo-Irishman with what they call distinguished graying at the temples of his thick shock of dark hair. With his look and his presence, he could easily have had a career as an actor. He is in an apparently happy second marriage now, and has two children, including a son who recently graduated college. But surely he can’t be the only man alive who perceives the grandeur in everyday objects and listens respectfully to silence? Who has such a finely tuned sense of the numinous he can elicit an almost religious awe in atheists like my former monk friend with a single well-spoken observation?

I’ve spent time with plenty of self-titled (why would one want a label anyway?) nihilists and pessimists and positivists and scientific materialists and existentialists and Marxists and hedonists and anarchists and academic Buddhists and all form of hyperintellectual wank-ists. I just can’t take the fluorescent-lit mental masturbation anymore, which turns arid and sore without the lush swampy wetness of feeling, intuition, and mystery — those “dark,” “irrational,” and yes, even “feminine” elements that resist pigeonholing, analysis, and compartmentalization. “Not everything that counts can be counted,” said Gandhi. A bumper sticker sound byte, but nonetheless astute.

I want a poet, damn it. At least one in spirit. Not a furious slammer-jammer or a conventional sentimentalist who pens syrupy greeting card verse, but someone who will get the things about me I need to get gotten. Who won’t attempt to make me feel crazy, or wrong, or as if I should just kill myself now. Who will help remind me of beauty, and of why human experience is unbelievably rich, instead of trying to make me forget it (again) now that I know it. Someone who doesn’t take every bloody fucking miracle of existence for granted just because the religious fundamentalists are out of their minds. It’s not an either-or proposition, for Christ’s sake.

**

When I got an email from my would-be beau after our second date, interpreting my own experience for me in condescending terms — that my hesitation to see him again was not because I didn’t think he was a good fit (I didn’t), or because I wasn’t sexually attracted to him (I wasn’t), but because I was “afraid” — that was the dealbreaker.

For a moment I flashed back to the various passages in Fear of Flying, which I had read again recently, in which Isadora Wing obediently accepts the arrogant armchair psychoanalysis practiced upon her by her cool-headed Asian husband and her potty-mouthed British lover. Erica Jong expertly captures how even the smartest, most educated women will still go on allowing the males in their lives to be the final authorities and to infantilize them (with an indulgent smile and a metaphorical pat on the head), as if Daddy still knows best.

Another story David Whyte tells is the old myth of an early tribe in Ireland, a peaceable lot, lovers of beauty, whose attitude toward strangers is hospitable rather than hostile. These gentle souls are confronted by a very martial group of new immigrants on a hillside. The latter group charges the former with their weapons raised, and the peaceable natives “turn sideways into the light and disappear.” David describes them as “refusing to have that kind of conversation.” They will not engage under the terms set by the aggressors. He warns us against falling into our habitual patterns of engagement and contention, the same old tired arguments we’ve had a hundred times. And I know as he speaks that I don’t want that.

One of the nicest things about being with Sam (who is twenty years younger than I am) was that he showed me implicit respect (respect for his elders?) without my having to fight, negotiate, or otherwise struggle for it. He didn’t seem interested in exerting or exhibiting power over me in any way. That was refreshing — and healing. It showed me that not all my relationships with men have to be about who wins. Just being with Sam felt like winning.

I want more of that. I want a peer and a co-explorer, not another father. Not another competitor seeking weaknesses to exploit. Sonny was, oddly enough, a movement in the right direction, when I think about things from this angle: his open-ended curiosity outweighed his need to label everything, including me. He was definitely more like a peer, at times something like a fellow traveler, not a self-appointed authority figure or scold. (Like what my brother used to be, before he bought his acre of land, became a father himself, and stiffened into rigid fundamentalism.) Sonny loves yoga, Eastern spirituality, women…and David Whyte.

So even while I was making not quite the best choices for myself, I was starting to make better ones. Progress. And then Sam. In this light, it’s hard to be pessimistic.

**

David also mentions that the root of the word “desire” is the Latin de sider, “of the stars,” suggesting that to have a desire is to hold one’s “star” inside oneself…to follow a sort of true North of the soul.

What kind of “star” was my irresistible, persistent desire for Ted? I never had it under control, even a year ago, when I felt pangs of jealousy about his fondness for young women and resolved not to surrender to my nascent feelings. A lot of good that did. Lately I fancy I see his face everywhere — on strangers in the street, in newspaper photos, on extras in movies. As if everything and everyone were conspiring to make me think about him. They say we see what we look for.

Now he may be gone. I may be delivered, belatedly. I’ll miss him, even though he was blocking the entrance for anyone else. I doubt he’ll contact me, either by phone or online. Part of me wishes he would. A large part, actually.

But what kind of “conversation” were we having, really? On the surface, a good one, an affable one between peers who liked and respected each other. He appreciated literature and Eastern thought and had an attitude of curiosity toward the larger world. Beneath that sunny veneer, however, existed the all too familiar narrative of the carrot and the stick — of one person subtly lording it over the other, hinting at rewards never to come. I said yes to being toyed with, alternately the object of intense flirting and casual ignoring.

Is it any wonder that the only way to take back my power was to ignore him right back?

Maybe that was my way of turning sideways into the light.

**

I almost didn’t participate in the yard sale. Two women on my floor let me know they were going to do it — one has just moved out — but I wasn’t sure I was ready to take that leap, to act as-if. As if I were really leaving, that is. Besides which, the forecast was for rain all day. I got a bunch of items ready and priced the night before, but in the morning I was reluctant to get out of bed. At eight-thirty I shuffled to the window and opened the curtain, expecting to see clouds and drizzle, but the sky was an uninterrupted blue. Throwing on some old clothes, I started carting things down the three flights of stairs. My housemates were already set up on the lawn, their secondhand wares spread out on blankets. I enlisted one to help me with my heavier items.

While I was still bringing armfuls of miscellanea downstairs, Meg Ferris showed up.

Margaret Ferris is a writing coach and blogger my age who leads writing tours in France and Italy, and who just came back into town after living in Portugal for a year with her sexy younger Portuguese boyfriend. In other words: my heroine.

Now here she was on my lawn, asking about my baker’s rack and my printer.

When I reminded her of who I was — citing emails we’d exchanged recently, in which I asked her for advice — she remembered, and said she’d been thinking about me. “I think I might have an idea for you,” she said. She had sent me her 29-step process to “taking a creative leap,” one she had gone through herself on her own recent journey, and she thought it might be interesting to have me be the first outside guinea pig, following her steps myself and publicly blogging about them.

I felt a thrill go through me. It was as if she had appeared out of nowhere and said, “I was thinking about how we could have you do precisely the sort of thing you want to be doing.” (She calls these kinds of happy synchronicities “juju,” when our intentions and actions seem to magically draw in serendipitous people and opportunities.) Meg said she had a full plate at the moment, getting situated in her new apartment, but we exchanged phone numbers before she carted off my former belongings.

Later that morning, a former work acquaintance came walking by. I started chatting with him about my European aspirations, and he mentioned that he had been intent upon going to Ireland last year. Amazed, I told him that that was actually my first choice of destinations. “I have a great book I could give you!” he exclaimed. This excited me even further. It was like getting two green lights in a row from the Forces of the Universe — not something, as you know, that I’ve experienced much, so I’ve been skeptical about trendy personal development concepts like the Law of Attraction.

**

I haven’t had any follow-up contact since then, although my former co-worker promised to drop off that book. I don’t want to be guilty of pestering Meg, especially since she asked for a little time…so, nervous and impatient as I am, I haven’t been in touch with her for a week. At least at the moment, I’m earning some income, so I’m not in quite as anxious a situation as I was last time around.

But this strange new employment opportunity has turned out to be the unexpected occasion for some additional lessons in (non)attachment.

**

For those of you who weren’t following my last comment thread, that progressive telephone fundraising employer did hire me on, after a probationary period in which I did well enough to merit over two dollars more per hour than the base wage. Amazingly, even though I tend to watch the clock, I don’t hate calling donors like I thought I would, because enough of the people turn out to be friendly, intelligent, and chatty once I get past the initial self-identification and the script’s bottom line. I also enjoy scoring substantial donations for good causes and watching my percentages rise. Plus the people who run the place are smart, ethical, and well-informed. So there’s one prejudice shattered.

Another was shattered when I started developing a crush on a younger coworker who isn’t at all what I consider my “type” other than coloring-wise (a brunette with dark eyes). Unlike the aforementioned Dexter, he’s by no means a “brain,” and physically he resembles a thin version of Kevin Smith in his Silent Bob incarnation (right down to the backward baseball cap). But he seemed — at least initially — somehow fascinated by me, asking me lots of questions about myself and gazing furtively at some of my better attributes (which flattered this horny old broad’s ego). So shortly thereafter I started matching his attentions, and what appeared to be mutual electricity crackled in the air between us like kindling. When he disappeared for the better part of a week I found myself suffering from disproportionately severe withdrawal symptoms.

After having been in a place of freedom from attachment for once, finally able to think clearly about my future, I was a little annoyed to be thrown back into the uproar I’ve been in for most of my life, but I decided to simply observe it — neither encouraging it or pushing it away. I tried just sitting with the butterflies and the all-too-familiar impatience and craving.

It was a new exercise for me. Usually I invent a delicious story to fit the more pleasurable feelings, project hopefully into the future, and lose myself in obsessive fantasies. Interestingly, the intensity of the feelings subsided after a couple of days, and I resigned myself to the probability that Rick had quit or been let go.

**

What a sped-up version of my old story! Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl loses boy, girl moves on. The whole process in just one week. I had to laugh. Maybe I am making progress. I tend to cling like polyester in Arizona.

**

He did return, eventually, but when (with that predictable rush of fight-or-flight hormones) I tried to resume the flirtation, I felt a change and a distance in his energy. The spell had been broken. Perhaps it’s my personal Heisenberg/Schrodinger observer effect in action — that the moment I focus on a man, his behavior instantly changes — but I didn’t habitually spiral into the usual self-questioning and overanalysis and brainstorming about how to get the magic back.

I made the firm choice, too, to refuse to feel ashamed of myself. Normally the little kid in me immediately believes — the way little kids do — that a rejection is somehow due to my inherent rejectability, and that I’ve been humiliated for showing (so baldly) my unreciprocated feelings.

Screw that. If I’m open, it’s to my credit, especially given what I say my values are.

**

Which reminds me…I mentioned, the other week, a much-loved teacher who impressed upon my adolescent brain the integral importance of authenticity in all things. He indisputably changed my life, with his mini-lectures on Zen and his Thomas Merton handouts and his in-class readings of Pablo Neruda. This past week, I received word that he had died (from I know not what) at the relatively young age of 61. I read a beautiful tribute written in a local paper by one of his recent students, and wept. I loved that man like a father.

If the woo-woos are right about each of us having a cheering section of personal spiritual guides and disembodied advisors, I sure hope he’ll be on my team.

I’d like to think, at least, that he’d be proud of me.

**

If I’ve learned anything from this latest tempest in a teacup, it’s how much our inventions can cause us to suffer (or not). Asking the perennial question, What The Hell Is This? was truly invaluable in this case. I became a total stranger’s creature in a matter of hours. So what was all that about?

As it so happens, I’ve lately been reading the literate and intimate autobiographical work The World is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved by Trebbe Johnson. I think the title appealed to me because on some level I already knew that the voice I had been hearing — in the guise of Damien’s incomparable tenor — was the voice of the Beloved calling me back to my own truth, away from my “small-b” beloved. This has got to die. This has got to stop. This has got to lie down with someone else on top. He knew what I needed to do before I was ready to even acknowledge it, and the anguish in his lovely representative’s voice didn’t gloss over how much it would hurt.

It’s definitely more of a classicist-Platonist-Jungian-spiritual concept than a existentialist-Romantic-materialist-literalist one (and I’ve been on both sides of that fence): the idea that what we’re longing for and seeking is really much bigger than the one human person. Even six months ago, I would not have found this book all that useful or apropos. Today, I’m practically on the same page. Although I still refuse to conclude whether the Other is really a mirror or a parent or a portal or a body double for the Divine — all of which have been postulated by various psychologies, mythologies, philosophies, and religions, and are dutifully reported by Ms. Johnson. I’m partial to Rumi, myself, who experienced unsayable ecstasies through the medium of Shams Al-Tabriz, but who liked to leave things mysterious.

Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me,
if this is the time.
Do it gently with a touch of a hand, or a look.
Every morning I wait at dawn. That’s when
it’s happened before. Or do it suddenly
like an execution. How else
can I get ready for death?

If I’m that ripe to be dissolved, Silent Bob can come along with just the right look or the right touch and melt me in the middle of a night shift between ACLU calls. And it will have very little to do with Silent Bob and everything to do with my ripeness.

But that’s where I didn’t run away with inventions this time. And I’m proud of this: that I didn’t gallop full speed ahead and write the whole thing into a romance (or porn) novel the way I usually do, and then become inconsolable when things didn’t proceed as scripted.

As it turns out, if you don’t indulge a habit, it can cease to be one. Who knew?

**

But I still don’t have a plan for following that soul-call I heard through my darling Irish brother. I was discouraged to find out that a “green card” permit for Ireland would require at least $1000 and a year wait. (I still check job listings every day for sponsoring employers and organizations, but if you don’t have IT or foreign language skills, there aren’t many.) Residency for non-EU members is as tough to achieve there as it is anywhere else in Europe. (An artist friend of mine, a terrific, anarchic soul of considerable talent, said in response to this “You should just go!!!”) I did manage to get pictures taken and send off my passport for renewal, as it’s due to expire in six months.

My life coach friend has former in-laws in Holland, and might be able to find me temporary accommodations in the Amsterdam area. I’m still waiting to hear back from my best friend from high school regarding her cousin in London and her college friend’s brother-in-law in Dublin. My friend Karl, whom I mentioned last time, just emailed that old friend of his who lives in Dublin, so no word there yet.

Last week I joined Couchsurfing.org, an organization I found out about through Meg’s blog that lets world travelers help each other out by (you guessed it) providing their couches, guest beds, or floors as an alternative to hotels and hostels. I also attended a Peace Corps orientation meeting on Wednesday, but they don’t go anywhere I want to be. I even checked out The World by Road, a documentary film crew on a 2-year world tour who were passing through on their way up to Alaska, but nothing about the last leg of their trip or the people involved particularly struck me. I’m interested in seeing Alaska and Canada sometime, just not right now.

My dream, after all, is to be in Europe. I’ve never been quite this clear about anything. What I did during that summer in Italy, living my adventure and writing about it the way I write here, felt like what I was meant to do. (Incidentally, would you guys like to read parts — or all — of that journey?) Ever since I rode the buoyant current of that experience, nothing else has felt right. Maybe I’m hopelessly “self-indulgent,” something of which Elizabeth Gilbert has been accused (and I fear she stole all the available thunder, too), but so help me God, this is what I want to do.

It would be great if Meg could help me find the means, because as you know, I lack funds. I’ve certainly worked hard these last twenty years, but like so many people have nothing in the bank to show for it. This is my largest obstacle. I’d be more than happy to write under the auspices of her Web site or blog if it meant getting financial assistance or sponsorship on my mad journey.

**

But then again, it may take something entirely mad. About ten days ago, I had the delight and privilege of going to hear the wonderful, internationally loved poet David Whyte talk about his latest book The Three Marriages at a local bookstore. Born in Yorkshire to an Irish mother, David speaks with gorgeous lyrical intonation on subjects like longing and vocation and what the soul really needs in a world based on logistics and expediency.

During the course of his talk, he told us the story of how Robert Louis Stevenson first met the love of his life, Fanny Osborne. A young man of slender means, Robert was out walking one night at dusk when he passed a large window, on the other side of which an elegant dinner party of about a dozen people was taking place. The window was slightly ajar. Peering inside, Robert saw a radiant woman sitting at the head of the table (who happened to be eleven years his senior, and married), and he was at once captivated and smitten.

“Now, perhaps, if he were like most of us,” said David, “he might go around to the front or the back door and make some inquiries about whose house this was, and so forth, or made a mental note to ask around in the following days, among people he might know in the area, regarding who that woman might be…generally going about things in the orthodox and polite way to which we are all accustomed.” But this is not what Robert did. Instead, he opened up that window and stepped right through, bursting in upon the party like a sudden apparition. Amazingly, rather than getting himself arrested, he made quite a hit at the party that night, and a strong impression upon the lady in question. Many years later (after Robert nearly died of consumption pursuing her across the American continent), they were married.

The point of David’s story being, as he told us, that sometimes you have to forego The Way Things Are Always Done and burst in through the window.

I laughed, and I cried. This is exactly what I feel I have to do, somehow. Break the rules. Do something crazy. Come crashing through the window by committing some original and unexpected act. And then the doors will start opening.

I just don’t know what the thing is. Will I have the courage to do it when and if I do?

**

Well, I practiced a little courage yesterday.

I saw Dexter Sunday afternoon, unexpectedly. He was working for someone else when I came into his cafe to write after finishing my weekend shift. Conversing with him over the espresso machine, I found that he still makes me flush hot in some pretty cool places. (And I know I’m not menopausal quite yet.) Such a bite-my-finger gorgeous boy…he has incredible bone structure, glossy golden skin, and enormous liquid eyes the color of seawater. Even the moles on his face are perfectly placed. Are the girls at his school blind, or just stupid?

Before leaving, I stopped by the counter again and asked in a casual joking tone if he needed to see my ticket to Amsterdam before he’d agree to have a beer with me. This made him laugh (and I think took him aback a little) but he was unhesitatingly open to meeting, possibly even this week. He asked me for my email address, in case we didn’t see each other there at the cafe. It was all very friendly and painless, and I walked away believing I’ll actually have a drink with Dexter very soon.

Beyond that, I’m not going to write a novel — porn or otherwise. I could be wrong, but I think he was actually pleased to be asked. For my part, I felt like a champ…or at least like a seasoned adult woman who knows what she’s doing.

**

And end note: this may strike you all as cheesy, but as long as WordPress provides me the means, I may as well do it. I’m going to add a PayPal ‘donate’ button so that readers can make a contribution toward the What The Hell Is This? European Dream Fund if they are so inclined. If some shameless blogger paid off her exorbitant debt through online begging, why should I feel bad about putting the option out there for people to give to something slightly more constructive?

Far be it from me to leave any stone unturned. Shoot, I’m even buying a lottery ticket every week.

**

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.