It’s been a bit of a welcome break. I lost my voice again (!), which means I haven’t been able to work. (The metaphorical implications of this I’ll leave alone for now.) I haven’t had to step outside my little studio and deal with people, Ted included, for almost a week. Not that I was actually dealing with him in any way, shape, or form. But when you can barely swallow and you have a temperature of 101º F, other concerns recede for the moment.

**

On the dreaded Valentine’s Day holiday I went back and read my ‘Candy Candy Candy’ post from 2009. Once again, unfortunately, it was all too relevant. Once again I’m finding myself confronting the same shame and paralyzing fear (not to mention the same agonizing frustration) surrounding my overwhelming but rarely satisfied erotic longings.

And I’ve never even told you about Greg Schulz, the Star-Trek-geek bookseller who consumed my imagination for most of my twenties. I wasted six whole years, between twenty-three and twenty-nine, hopelessly obsessed with a guy who not only spurned me, but at one point almost reported me for sexual harassment.

To be a woman rejected by Greg was truly a badge of shame. The only way I could have lived through more humiliation would have been if I were a staunchly conservative politician caught soliciting homoerotic dalliances in a public restroom.

**

Why was I so attracted to Greg? He was nice-looking, to be sure (with the kind of large, expressive brown eyes that never fail to slay me behind round nerd glasses), but there was also something extremely sexual about him — he “oozed sex,” in the words of a thoroughly unimpressed coworker — which made most of the other young women find him somehow creepy. These, of course, were the women he pursued. Aggressively. To the point of actually being accused of sexual harassment himself. He already had an unflattering reputation when I arrived on the scene.

Perhaps we had a similar injury.

The craziest thing is that I felt tacitly encouraged by Greg, even after he explicitly turned me down. Repeatedly. Maybe he enjoyed the unexpected admiration, but placed little value on it (and on me) as it had cost him nothing. I was a hound, not a fox — no doubt a turnoff for another hound — and I came running, hard.

Too hard. Desperately so. I couldn’t bear to accept rejection. It wasn’t all about Greg…perhaps it was very little about Greg. (“When you chase someone this hard,” as Tony the surly music critic said, “it’s never about the other person.”) I’m sure I was desperate to prove I wasn’t unlovable and undesirable to those who “mattered” (i.e. those who aroused my own desire). He must have been driven by a similar demon, forever turning his unwelcome attentions on extraordinarily pretty, fashionable young women, one of whom was the lead singer in a local underground band.

Truthfully, I felt not only crazy much of the time, but also ashamed, as if my lust for him were monstrous, and the sexual feelings themselves were what turned me into some kind of repulsive monster. Sometimes when he sauntered by in his butt-hugging jeans and shot me a knee-withering glance, which seemed like nothing so much as an invitation, I thought I would explode. I fancied I felt my ovaries literally aching — and, in fact, after two years of this torture, I started to develop painful ovarian cysts that would require invasive emergency surgery and a lifetime of medication. (One reason why I’m a big believer in the mind-body connection.) This madness continued for six years, and only ended when he left the employ of the bookstore.

I don’t like revisiting this memory, which is why you haven’t heard about it until now. It’s one of the most humiliating episodes of my past, in a past that hasn’t been short of humiliating episodes, and one that casts me in the most unflattering light.

**

But I return to it now because I’m sure the whole ordeal only reinforced that feeling I had already, of being some kind of sexual pariah (even the sexual pariah rejected me!), as if the very act of desiring itself was what made me so undesirable.

Of course, I had long been taught that “good girls don’t.” Truly, a conservative fundamentalist church and youth group is no place for a curious, hot-blooded young woman to come of age. Particularly when one’s very protective and territorial older brother precedes one among said youth.

I believed, as a teen, that none of my attractive male peers would come near me because there was something inherently amiss with me, that I was in some intrinsic way deficient in beauty or charm. Now I am willing to allow that maybe all those heavy religious prohibitions against unchaste pursuits, along with the looming shadow of my wrathful protector, might have acted as kryptonite to any interested parties (other than parentally-approved Jerry Baines, who seemed about as exciting as my dad).

At any rate, my idolatrous obsessions with certain comely members of the opposite sex seemed more commensurate with the breathless infatuations of my more worldly, “secular” girlfriends than in any way analogous to the wholesome games of basketball my popular friend Katie was playing with the church boys who adored and dated her.

I had learned early on to hide my inordinate sexual curiosity and feelings. The tight lips, the stiffening that occured in the spines of my parents when certain subjects were broached, told me that such subjects were shameful and not to be spoken of  — regardless of what they might dutifully if uncomfortably call the Joys of Married Life. (Mind you, I never saw any evidence of such Joy.)

In my last year of elementary school, I endured the single most mortifying incident of my life when my very pious and equally nosy mother found an innocuous-looking ruled notebook in which my unsaved Catholic friend Adriana and I had scribbled a tale which could best be described as pornographic. (We were both almost morbidly fascinated with the male sexual organs at the time, objects largely foreign to us, and these figured prominently, if inaccurately.)

She confronted me when I came home for lunch. I can still taste the Kraft macaroni & cheese turning to orange sawdust in my mouth as she lectured me for what seemed like hours about God’s Sacred Gift To Married People and the Tragedy Of Cheapening His Wonderful Intention For Our Bodies and all that precious holy bullshit that bore absolutely no resemblance to the nonverbal messages I’d gotten from both my parents since forever.

Staring at the yellow and green happy faces painted on my milk glass by the Wyler’s Lemonade company, I found myself hoping that the Four Horses of the Apocalypse would crash through the back screen door and whisk me away from our kitchen table, interrupting what was surely a fate worse than death and hellfire. As I recall, I didn’t get spanked. I might have gotten grounded. But my mother’s speech was punishment enough.

I hid my dirty stories in my desk at school after that.

**

I’m revisiting my Hall of Shame because I believe these past things shaped my present beliefs about my own sexuality. I suspect that at heart I still fear I am monstrous, that my sexual longings are something to be ashamed of, and that any frank expression of desire on my part will be met with violent repulsion and humiliating censure.

It’s true that Sonny, surely the most godlike of mortals ever to grace my boudoir, seemed unfazed by the expression — a thing for which I am still grateful, God bless his chiseled Greek torso and priapic attributes, not that size is necessarily preferable — but he was also a self-professed sex addict, as I recall. I was only one of many. The same could be said of my friend-with-benefits Jim, man-whore of the book-store (but even then, he made the first move, not me). What am I to think of that? That only the warped and the complusive can successfully come together in their complementary illnesses? My initial feelings for Sam, as you know, were not primarily overwhelmingly sexual. Had I come at him from that angle, would he have responded as positively?

Granted, it’s difficult to untangle these desires from what are earlier, pre-sexual spurned desires involving family and peers. Every rejection is a painful reminder of every other rejection. I clung to Greg like a rabid dog rather than accept that I might be unwanted — unwanted like the uncoordinated toddler banished from the vacant lot by the neighborhood kids, or perhaps unwanted like the daughter who wrote dirty stories in her notebook.

But I also know that while it’s easy to write here about how I long to do this and that with Mister So-and-So, I blush and tremble to think of saying such a thing to the person in question. On paper I may talk like Erica Jong, but in real life I might as well be Christine fucking O’Donnell. I expect to be punished. Rejected, perhaps, for being the “unfeminine” bad girl, the one who doesn’t wait to be wanted first. (As the late, former anorexic Caroline Knapp wrote in her brilliant book Appetites, “To be sexy is to be found sexy, to be permitted to want, you must first be wanted.”)

If it’s “unfeminine” or bad, it’s also who I really am.

**

What an interesting time to have lost my voice: while I’m beating myself up about my inability to say a word to Ted. I have had a conversation with him many times in my head. More of a monologue, actually. It goes something like this.

“Ted…I want you to know that my actions — the shunning and all that — have been actions of desperation. I just didn’t know what else to do.

“You saw 127 Hours, didn’t you? That guy cut off his own arm to escape. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and he had to get free. He didn’t see any other options. So he did something extreme, something painful, something that meant he had to lose something.

“I didn’t know how else to get free. I’m stuck, too.

“Look, you’ve got your Good Thing. You’ve got your place in the sun, right? I want my own Good Thing. I want my own place in the sun. I deserve to be happy as much as anyone else. I’ve been dating, but guys keep passing me up because they can tell I’m stuck.

“I had a really great guy, the whole package — smart and hot and totally into me — just up and walk away from me. He said I was stuck, and he wasn’t willing to be patient. He didn’t want to hear that he was my ‘healthy, conscious choice,’ or an attempt to ‘be better to myself.’ He didn’t want to hear that my decision to spend time with him was a deliberate, rational act. He didn’t want to hear that I was waiting for my feelings to catch up with the rest of me.

“Then again, what guy really wants to hear those things?

No, he wanted to hear things like: I want to taste your sweat. I want to feel the weight of your body on me. I want your hot breath on my neck. I want to feel the hair on your chest brushing my bare skin. I want to inhale your scent and feel your big, warm fingers rove my thighs. But not only your fingers. And not only my thighs.

“I couldn’t honestly say these things, because I didn’t feel that way…about him. God knows I wanted to. All that energy is just stuck. It’s not moving.

“You’ve had me on a chain, and you could yank it every now and again by smelling my hair or whatever — but I don’t want to be any man’s bitch if he’s never going to give me a nice bone.

“I don’t want to be stuck. I want to be happy.”

**

I also want to know how the italicized words would fall on Ted’s ears. Because they’re hot words. Not the explicit words you’d find in erotica, which seem to have more in common with comic books than with how people actually talk in casual company, but words you’d seldom hear a woman speak beyond closed doors with someone other than a Sure Thing. Words that attempt to start a fire in public — in the break room or the hallway or out on the sidewalk. They communicate my powerful sexual feelings for Ted in an unexpected context, blindsiding him while talking about another man.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that it bothers me to no end that he doesn’t even know they exist. When I spoke with him last fall, I was still just Christine fucking O’Donnell, professing nothing more than a chaste affection. As if I were ashamed of how I really feel.

I have misrepresented myself. Not that it would necessarily make all the difference, but at the end of the day, perhaps it’s better to be rejected as Erica Jong, if I’m going to be.

Would Ted be offended by these words? Aroused? Are they beside the point, because he’s way more serious about Ms. Whomeverthehell now, or already too angered and alienated by my silent treatment? Could he even handle hearing them? Lordy, he is a big old nerd. I could just see him turning beet red and giggling like a schoolboy. It’s almost embarrassing that he’s done this to me.

Of course I wish he’d be aroused….and ready and willing to do something about it toute suite. Perhaps fueled by an impassioned combination of relief and anger. What’s more likely is that he’ll just get defensive, and sing me some version of the old song It’s Not My Fault, that one we all know so well and learn so young. I’ve heard it a hundred times from various men, including Greg Schulz.

But maybe I’d get my own voice back for good.

*

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.

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.

My young manfriend has still not contacted me in any way, shape, or form. “Looks like he disappeared,” Doc commented glibly, almost jocularly, on my voice mail over a week ago. At that moment (and every moment thereafter when I thought of it), I felt a flash of blinding and uncontrollable rage. I wanted to punch Doc in the face for that. I wanted to put my fist through a wall. Or, better, a window — to feel that sharp, searing jump of exposed nerves, to see the ribbons of blood striping my hand and arm. All at once the adolescent female phenomenon of “cutting” made sense to me: the overwhelming emotion is so fucking intolerable, you feel you need to bleed.

In lieu of violence against myself or others, my solution (so far) has been to drink every night. Isn’t that enlightened of me? Not hard liquor, mind you, I have such a wussy-ass system I can’t take Jack Daniels every day. And beer and red wines overrun my system with yeast. So I drink cheap white wine. Lots of it. It blunts the pain, and helps me go to sleep. I feel like warmed-over shit in the morning, but I do get some relief, at least for a little while.

I’ve also been watching back-to-back episodes of Six Feet Under, a show I turned Sam onto. Alan Ball, god bless him, knows rawness — he knows what happens when you get the lid ripped off all your seething emotions. I watched American Beauty again, too, and discovered that Lester Burnham’s fuck-you attitude matches my own. Instead of throwing a plate of asparagus at the wall, or calmly blackmailing my bosses, I’ve scandalized my conservative Christian family with over-the-top liberal sarcasm, and started refusing to pay my student loan payments. I’ve even more or less told Doc to fuck off, for the time being, for his insensitive comment. Every emotion, including my usually buried anger, is bubbling up to the surface, and I don’t give a damn.

**

Sam has communicated with Rob, but not with me. I found this out last week when a coworker asked both of us if we’d heard anything. I said no; Rob then told us where Sam was (what state) and what he was doing (training). It was a pretty humiliating moment. I would have liked to have had a convenient hole to crawl into.

I have really got to find another job. Or leave the state. Or leave the country. Or leave the fucking planet.

Just seeing Rob, now, every day, fills me with indescribable shame. I can’t look him in the eye. Much of the time, I simply want to find that hole to crawl into. I want to hide. I want to die. I imagine I read pity in the faces of the other guys who knew about us: Poor thing, he was just fucking her. (With Rob, it’s the same, only without the “poor thing.”)

Some days, walking through the dry leaves in the fall sunlight on the way to work, I feel almost okay, almost as if I can survive this just fine; but once I enter cube-land, under those fluorescent lights, and see Rob, and Sam’s former party-buddies, and am required to read coercive scripts for hours on end to hostile or argumentative strangers, all the while being judged on my now very spotty performance, I get the overwhelming urge to fellate a Smith & Wesson. (Now that would be a real blow job.)

I want to escape, to run far, far away, and try to recapture my former enthusiasm for living and writing abroad, but I feel trapped here by my chronic lack of funds and my need for this tedious, repetitive, nerve-wracking job in a depressed poverty economy.

Gerald Three Rivers says I deserve better. A heavyset middle-aged Native American Libertarian who was one of Sam’s closest friends and mentors, he’s been one of the few people to check in with me on a daily basis and to be concerned about my well-being. I’m grateful for that, even if his strenuous exhortations to “move on” make it sound like he has his own agenda. Which he may have. (If he says that to me one more time, actually, I may lose my shit on him too.) Gerry’s always had a thing for me, or at least talked that talk. I have no doubt he’d change his tune, however, if I were suddenly available, if I suddenly “got over” Sam, and decided to exercise the willful blindness indulging him would require. (I’m not talking about being shallow about appearances, either: I’ve seen Gerry’s obstinate streak, in abundance. He’ll simply stop listening to other people, and reiterate his point of view over and over and over again. Even I know that’s not a good sign.)

Some things look better, baby, to borrow from Elton John, just passing through.

**

Along those lines, I discovered another choice tidbit this week: my college boyfriend León, who “friended” several of my friends on my social network, has ignored my friend request — and blocked me.

After this odd revelation (I thought we parted on good terms), I started searching for old crushes or flames of mine, and realized that almost every one would do the same. Most have already ignored my attempts at reconnecting. Tony would, for sure, even if he’s safe in Sweden now. Greg, without a doubt — he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Max, oh yes, he barely even looked at me the last time we met, at a friend’s graduation. Eric, probably, especially after the letter I wrote him back in 2003. Definitely Damien Moreau. Oh, Lord, Damien Moreau! I sent him a gushy letter after his biggest independent film…he most definitely did NOT respond. Although after September 11, I sent him a brief email at his Web site to make sure he was alive and well in New York City — he sent me about six unpunctuated words in response (something like: okay tired helping out down there). He lives in Morocco now, with an accomplished French photographer who looks like Audrey Tautou, and their adorable blond daughter. (A high school friend sent me their Flickr link.)

What a stellar record. I never want to see you again. The freak, the crazy stalker, the abomination. Get thee behind me, Milton! At least Sonny kept me on as a “friend,” even though we never communicate anymore…not since I called him out on what I called him out on. (At some point, like I said, I stopped making endless excuses for Sonny. Maybe people actually respect you more when you do that.)

I recently had a very frank and revealing conversation with Drew, that good-looking astrology buff who had been trying to get me to date him. He openly admitted that if I suddenly changed my tune and were as interested in him as he fancies himself to be in me, he couldn’t get away fast enough. He blamed his “Leo” nature, his inability to take anything seriously, and his relish of the chase over the apprehending. (Be it noted that León, Eric, and Sonny are all Leos.) He agreed that things are better off with us the way they are — as an ongoing, good-humored flirtation, nothing more. This way we get to remain friends, and nobody gets hurt.

You see, dear readers, I don’t willingly chase heartbreak. I thought Sam, even given his age and station, was a far better bet than my past gambles. (And for a while, he was.) In the beginning I was actually worried that he was more “into” me than I was “into” him.

Silly me! That is never, ever the way it plays out. Now I actually find myself wondering: if I had loved Jonathan Goldman, who’s to say he wouldn’t have spurned me too? Who says I wouldn’t have been left sobbing and alone at prom to be comforted by my pink-taffeta-swathed girlfriends in the ladies’ room?

Maybe those high school peers should have voted me Most Likely to be Rejected and Abandoned. Wouldn’t that have made for a nice byline in the yearbook? At any rate, I should have a T-shirt made, like the shirts Sam used to give out as prizes, that would serve to alert all the men who think they’re interested in me: “I Look A Whole Lot Better At Arm’s Length.”

**

Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart

I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain,

And lie disheveled in the grass apart,

A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain,

While rainy evening drips to misty night,

And misty night to cloudy morning clears,

And clouds disperse across the gathering light,

And birds grow noisy, and the sun appears,

Had I bethought me then, sweet love, sweet thorn,

How sharp an anguish even at the best,

When all’s requited and the future sworn,

The happy hour can leave within the breast,

I had not so come running at the call

Of one who loves me little, if at all.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

I’m reading Millay, Dickinson, Rilke, Rumi, seeking comfort, seeking understanding. Ultimately I find myself drawn to Carol Gilligan’s book, The Birth of Pleasure, yet again, to that age-old story of Cupid and Psyche, of men and women and the loss of love.

She speaks to me of trauma, and of that dissociation I’ve resisted (on Merton’s urging) since adolescence:

Trauma is the shock to the psyche that leads to dissociation: our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so that we can know and also not know what we know, feel and yet not feel our feelings. It is our ability, as Freud put it in Studies on Hysteria, to hold parts of of our experience not as a secret from others but as a “foreign body” within ourselves.

I’m not even sure I know what I know, anymore. I feel crazy, because the lover who promised, so tenderly, not to “disappear” has been completely eclipsed by other, conflicting versions of him: by Rob’s harder-edged party buddy, by the aloof stranger largely ignoring me in the office that last night, by the all too familiar story of rejection and abandonment that Gerry and Doc seem to embrace as the true narrative.

I stumble upon Gilligan’s definition of patriarchy again, which is very different from the charged interpretations my previous discussions of the term seem to have engendered:

Patriarchy, although frequently misinterpreted to mean the oppression of women by men, literally means a hierarchy — a rule of priests — in which the priest, the hieros, is a father. It describes an order of living that elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the men from the boys) and placing both sons and women under a father’s authority.

Both the women’s and the antiwar movements were antipatriarchal movements, according to Gilligan, because within the latter, the draftee “sons” of the new generation were starting to question the wisdom of the commanding “fathers.”

“The foundational stories we tell about Western civilization are stories of trauma,” she writes. She talks about some of the great Greek tragedies, like Oedipas Rex and The Oresteia. “When we focus more closely on what actually happens,” says Gilligan, “we see that a father or husband’s authority is challenged.” In the end, of course, his (culturally sanctioned) version of order and rectitude must prevail.

Her starkest example is that of Iphigenia, the daughter king Agamemnon sacrifices in order to gain the winds that will carry the Greek army to Troy — all to avenge the honor of a husband (Menelaus). Iphigenia and her mother both plead with Agamemnon, trying to appeal to the bonds of parental love. “It’s Greece for which I much sacrifice you, whether I want to or not,” the king replies. This sacrifice must be made on behalf of the honor of men and nations. It must not be derailed by the emotional pleas of women.

Imagine the dissociation that Agamemnon, as a parent, must have forced upon himself to be able to kill his child.

Euripides’ female chorus has this to say when the shamefaced Iphigenia aligns herself with her father’s murderous wishes (saying “it’s more important for one single man to look upon the light than a thousand women”): “Your intention, young girl, is noble. But what is happening here..(is) sick.”

Asserts Gilligan, anything that establishes “hierarchy in the heart of intimacy, is inherently tragic, and like all trauma survivors, we keep telling the story we need to listen to and to understand.” Jung likewise recognized that such power-politics had no place in love. “Where love rules,” he famously observed, “there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking.” Just as Rilke spoke of a “more human love” than one that simply “flows from man to woman,” Gilligan says

If feminism is understood not as a battle in the war between the sexes but rather a movement to transform a world in which both men and women suffer losses that constrain their ability to love, then the story of Psyche and Cupid is a feminist tale.

Perhaps the bottom line is this: that what Ms. Gilligan calls “patriarchy” is, essentially, a form of dehumanizing dissociation that many cultures force upon its children; something that divides and separates us, and allows us to effectively detach from, exploit, and even, in extreme cases, kill one another.

**

The mix CD I made for Sam included, as its penultimate song, the quietly gorgeous Tom Waits classic Time, which always struck me as his exhortation to hard-luck, hard-drinking loners like himself to forego the unnecessarily tragic posturings of maleness (the boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street), put down the bottle, and come in from the cold.

So put a candle in the window

And a kiss upon his lips

As the dish outside the window fills with rain

The band goes home, the bar closes down, it’s raining hammers and nails, and your woman is waiting for you at home.

And it’s time, time, time that you love

And it’s time, time, time.

**

“He’s just being a guy,” says my friend Theresa over breakfast scrambles at the vegetarian restaurant. “When men don’t know what to do with their emotions, they create distance.” Theresa has had many more relationships than I have, and has been married for the last eight years to the man she’s been with for eleven.

I don’t see her often, now that she has kids. Today she’s brought Rudy with her, the baby. He just turned one this month. I keep looking at him; he’s an adorable little boy. But it’s not just that. Something about the shape of his head, and his dark eyes, and those long eyelashes…I always thought Sam could have passed for Theresa’s brother, and now her child looks like the child that someone could have had with Sam. That I could have had with Sam.

When I pick him up, he clings to me like a koala cub. I melt. I kiss his soft-haired little head with a series of tiny pecks. He likes this, and gurgles. I have a lump in my throat. I never wanted babies, but I want this baby. I want to take him home. Again I feel that ineffable sense of bottomless loss.

**

Carol Gilligan reminds me of what I instinctively know: that love is pleasure, one of life’s most basic pleasures, and a shared one. This shared joy, communion, tenderness, bonding, sensuality, play — it renders us vulnerable, because we are responding from the core of who we are, like children.

I revisit our old friend Eileen, Gilligan’s client, and her intuition about her distancing husband Rick: “My hunch is that he really is connected with me, and he’s confused about that.” Later, talking about her young sons, Eileen speaks of “that tender piece of them that they sort of have to set aside to be what they think they are supposed to be.” Another client, Jude, talks about “the two Dans” she lives with, the man who will suddenly embrace and kiss her in the hallway, and the man who sits withdrawn and uncommunicative at the dinner table.

“When (Dan) closed himself off from her,” writes Gilligan, “(Jude) felt that he had slammed a door in her face, and she blamed herself, assuming that he had seen something in her that drove him away.”

Eileen and Jude, like me, ask endlessly: is it me? Am I, are my flaws, or my actions, to blame? Am I the girl Most Likely to Be Rejected and Abandoned?

Gilligan’s book reminds me that something else is at play — that we’re up against some deep-seated obstacles, created by this hierarchy-happy, martial power-culture inimical to feeling that punishes its boys and girls for being too human. These obstacles are so invisible and inherent, like the air we breathe, it’s no wonder I feel crazy trying to name them out loud. The responses I’ve generated just broaching the subject only make me feel that much more like some wild-haired Joan the Baptist crying out in the wilderness in an animal skin. But I know I’m far from alone in my experience.

**

Gilligan asks Jude, “Why would pleasure be followed by absence?” Neither woman directly answers the question. I wish someone would.

Cupid leaves Psyche at the moment when she falls in love with him. And Psyche falls in love with Cupid only when she has broken his injunction against seeing him or speaking about their love.

“When Psyche cannot see or speak about what she knows,” Gilligan says, “she has no way to frame her experience. And without framing it, she cannot tell her story, or counter the stories that others have told her.”

I find myself in an analogous position. I wasn’t supposed to let anything show at work after the director hassled Sam (Hush, hush/Keep it down down/Voices carry), I’m still not sure how much I should talk about us, and I have a feeling Sam wouldn’t be happy about my writings here, even with  the anonymity. There is still all this secrecy and shame surrounding our relationship — especially now that it looks as if I’ve been summarily abandoned.

Now, the story seems to belong to Rob, if he wishes to tell it. He can tell the homeboy version, with a bunch of his wasted buddies, passing the bowl, talking smack. Yeah, he was just fucking her. You know, she’s, like, 40, or something. Cougar town, right? And I have nothing current or relevant to offer, to counter that more macho and thoroughly derisive version of reality.

Like Psyche, all I knew was the pleasure of feeling, intimacy, sensuality, love, all those delicious and vulnerable things, in our hours alone. Maybe all of that was supposed to stay in the proverbial cave in the dark. Maybe I was never supposed to have challenged Sam in any way, even regarding potentially self-destructive decisions. Maybe I was never supposed to write, or speak, about the relationship. I feel as if I’ve broken rules that (unlike Cupid’s rules) were never even clearly outlined for me.

Psyche, according to Gilligan, by disobeying Cupid’s orders and lighting a candle to look at him, “…had betrayed him, she was not the woman he thought she was, she was not the woman he loved.” He would punish her now “merely by leaving.”

If Sam felt that way, leaving was certainly punishment enough.

**

No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are. — Rilke

Whether or not any of these musings is even relevant, I’m sure of one thing: I’m tired of hearing it from people who talk to me as if this should have been cheap, safe, and sure, like a public amusement…and if it wasn’t, then I did something wrong. Or who try to sell me the equivalent of Arundhati Roy’s “Love Laws” from The God of Small Things: laws that lay down “who should be loved. And how. And how much.” Sam was too young. I was too serious. What did I expect. Blah blah blah. It’s time to “move on.” You move on. Shut the fuck up.

Granted, if you play your cards right, and don’t go overboard, you won’t ever be in this kind of pain.

But shit, people. I fucking loved Sam, goddamn it. Being with him was like starting to live, at last, after some forty-year exile in hungry-ghost purgatory. I have never been happier or more satisfied with anyone: not with an older man, not with a taller man, not with one who could have worked as a male model (or porn star). I finally received everything I had been afraid to even yearn for anymore — with a big red bow on it — and it wasn’t disappointing, the way your begged-for childhood Christmas gifts sometimes were when they turned out to be nothing like the Sears catalog. Lifelong recurrent dreams about frustration and privation simply ceased, and have not come back.

Sam changed me. He changed my whole way of seeing other people. I was starting to fear that maybe I was addicted to shiny, sexy surfaces like SFU‘s Brenda Chenowith, or possibly Sonny, and that I wouldn’t be able to love a real person with real imperfections.

And there’s no one else who can hold me and soothe me the way Sam’s embrace soothes me. I melted into his warm, familiar body. Hand in glove. Now I’ve been torn away from him, with jagged, bloody bits of me missing, but the shape of him is still here.

**

Do I have a point? I don’t even have a point. This week’s rambling thesis can meander all over creation, can wonder about men and dissociation, and whether or not I have a grip on reality, but it can’t solve the burning question Doc and Gerry (and probably Rob) seem to presume they have the answer to: Have you abandoned me, Sam?

Why have you abandoned me, Sam?

You see, I dug in a entirely different variety of dirt this past week. My coach friend “regressed” me — he’s taking a past life regression course, and I was one of his test subjects.

You know by now, if you’ve been reading me for a while, that I walk a fine line sometimes between rationally skeptical and openly curious about “supernatural” phenomena. I’m of the opinion that we don’t necessarily even know what we don’t know. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…

I have to say I was surprised by what transpired. (But quite frankly I was surprised anything transpired.) There was definitely overwhelming emotion involved that lent the whole endeavor at the very least a sort of mythic or metaphorical aura of truth. If actually true, my “flashback” might illuminate a great deal about the way I experience my current life and its bizarrely recurrent disappointments. If wholly manufactured, it would still parallel this life in such a way that, had I encountered it as a movie or a novel, I would have shed a tear in identification with the protagonist.

But let me take you with me, in the order the images came.

**

What materializes first is a sort of bustling library, in what appears to be a converted church or chapel with a large stained glass window. There are different levels of books connected by wooden staircases. It feels very familiar, as if I’ve spent a lot of time there. The hair of the men is slicked back, as was the style in the ’20s and ’30s; the dress of both the men and the women is similarly retro. I stretch out my hand in front of me; it’s larger, with hair on it, and wears a decorative ring. A man’s hand. Holding up a mirror, as instructed by my guide, I see a man with shiny dark hair slicked back — not bad looking, but not particularly striking either.

Change of scene. A car pulls up, a sleek 1930s two-tone coupe. A good-looking, fair-haired young man, nattily dressed in a suit and long overcoat, gets out and greets me warmly with a handshake, calling me Milton (“old chap”). I am very happy to see him. He is a dear friend. But when my guide presses me about him, I am suddenly, spontaneously crying. Overwhelmed by that all too familiar sensation of hopeless, impotent longing and impossible desire, and shame at my perennially rejectable wrongness and freakishness. Fast, hot tears are wetting my hair at the temples as I tell my coach that I’m pretty sure I (Milton) love this man, and that he will repulse me violently before long, when I finally dare speak its name. My chest is sore with that ripped-open feeling I’ve often wondered about, that deep, acute pain like a knife wound. I’m quite helpless to stop weeping. I know this feeling so well.

My coach lets me cry for a while, and then moves me on to the day of my demise. How old am I? I let numbers spin like a slot machine in my mind several times and each time they settle on the number 54. Where am I? Driving in the countryside in a bumpy old car. It’s a beautiful summer day, with wildflowers blooming everywhere. But I’m grim and resigned. I don’t want to be here anymore. Wherever I’m headed, I sense it will be my final destination. Do I kill myself somewhere out there among the daisies? I don’t actually experience it, but I’m guessing so.

My coach asks me if I have any unfinished business before I leave that life, and I say (weeping again) that I’m sorry to those who were hurt by my leaving, but fortunately “there weren’t many.”

He brings me out of my reverie, and I’m emotionally drained and mentally spacey for the remainder of the day.

**

This week I’ve been listening to bouncy Depression-era big-band jazz on Last.fm and Pandora.com. I’ve always liked that music. Singer Annette Hanshaw comes on Eddie Cantor Radio after Ethel Waters, and I recall sitting next to Sonny in a darkened theater trying not to betray too much emotion as the Betty-Boop-esque character Sita mouths Hanshaw’s songs in the animated film “Sita Sings the Blues.” Hanshaw was partial to yearning torch songs, like her contemporary Billie Holiday, and a couple of songs that were hits for Holiday are on the “Sita” soundtrack. Every road I walk along/I walk along with you/ No wonder I’m lonely…Lover Come Back to Me.

It was the last time I’d spend any time with him, around Thanksgiving of last year. I was so happy to be sitting there beside him, I was giving thanks…and at the same time I couldn’t move. I was afraid I’d ruin everything, somehow, the way I always do.

**

The way I always do. There it is again: the absolute certainty, backed up by way too much experience, that things will go to hell in a handbasket no matter what — that either by reason of faulty constitution or faulty action, I am destined for abrupt and unequivocal rejection. Maybe because I don’t know what to do, or how to “be,” or maybe because I unconsciously emanate something that is the equivalent of Off! repellent for men. I have never been able to figure it out. But I literally beat my fists on any available surface and tear my hair out when some helpful dipshit refers to it as “my pattern.” As if I were some idiot fucktard willingly masterminding the very thing that (more than any other factor) makes me, at least at times, want to kill myself. My rage and despair at such moments is so intense that I could impulsively dash my brains out against the wall.

You may have noticed that I’m feeling some of that intense rage right now. It’s like this: imagine that I’m completely bloody from throwing myself for twenty-five years against the bars of the same barbed-wire cage, and some fucking know-it-all armchair Freud comes and says to me, “Why don’t you just get yourself out of there?”

**

A good friend of my best friend back home has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. I take a book out of the library by a professor of literature at Oxford who, given six months to live, opts out of the controlled poisoning of chemotherapy and instead adopts a regimen of raw food, supplements, acupuncture, and breathing exercises. (He lived eleven more years, at which point he died of a bacterial infection.) His book explores the limits of what we consider “rationalism” in medicine, which really just boils down to what has been arrived at by deductive reasoning (applying what are considered to be sufficiently established principles). Induction, which arrives at what works without necessarily understanding why, is largely derided within the Western tradition as “unscientific.”  It’s a delight to read the querulous musings of such a brilliant man, who gambles his life to swim against the current of conventional opinion. His “medical mutiny” is indeed Living Proof that we don’t even know what we don’t know.

I find the book in the inventory of a used book seller in a town near where my friend lives, and have it shipped directly to her house.

**

I am thinking about Milton, the gay Depression-era librarian, thwarted, heartbroken, and suicidal. Whether or not we ever shared a soul, he is nevertheless my soul brother. I feel his profound loneliness, his frustrated desire, his conviction of total un-acceptability. I am all wrong. The ones I want will never want me. Is it odd that I felt this inarticulate angst as early as the first grade (perhaps earlier)? Somehow I just knew it, when I gave my painstaking Lego sculpture to Daniel DuMont and he looked at me as if I were an alien. I knew, without having the words, that I would never win his heart, or anyone else’s for that matter. What came so easily to the rest of the world would require Herculean effort of me, and would most likely still be impossible. I felt this with total certitude.

I was six years old.

On the surface of things, and in the “objective” world of fact, or that-which-is-apparent, this just doesn’t compute. I was a cute kid, growing up, whom most everybody in my class liked. I went through a horribly awkward period in early adolescence when I was little more than a misshapen lump with dorky glasses, but I emerged from that into a teen girlhood that, judging from photos, was far more attractive than it felt from the inside at the time. I had the ability to relate to both the fringe Ally Sheedys and the popular-jock Emilio Estevezes among my peers. What’s more, I was attracted to the “right” gender in both Christian and mainstream expectation (even if I was a bit more enthusiastic than good girls were supposed to be). Yet no one I liked ever, ever liked me back — not when I was six, and not when I was sixteen. I never went on a single real “date.” Not until college, that is, and then a new paradigm emerged.

Which was not unlike what must have happened to brother Milton. You’re loved, all right (“old chap”), you’re the bees’ knees — until you’re in love — and then you’re vehemently spurned. Dropped like a hot potato. I would find out, time and time again over the years, that men would be overtly friendly and interested in me only until I really wanted them, whether that wanting was merely sexual or encompassed other longings as well. It didn’t matter; the outcome was the same. This latest escapade with Rick is nothing new — but somehow I always wind up proceeding as if this time will be different, as if this time I will be like “normal” people.

His desires made Milton an instant deviant, an abomination, at least to his beloved(s); my desires seem to make me an instant monster, a Medusa, to mine.

Driving in the countryside, Milton was weary. Weary of feeling like a social leper, weary of the burning thirsts and longings that smoldered unslaked all those years. He saw no way out of the barbed wire cage except for a gun, or a noose. I’ve felt that same despair. Is it the same despair?

**

Absence of proof is not proof of absence, the renegade cancer-surviving professor writes, quoting his unorthodox consultant Dr. Candace Pert. (She herself has placed herself outside of the mainstream by — among other things — appearing in the film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” as an expert talking head.)  There’s no way in Hades I can ever, using accepted scientific methods, confirm a connection between myself and a character who may or may not have ever existed in history. Even if I could somehow prove that he did in fact exist in history. But to the practical question Is this useful? or Can this help me? I may still be able to provide an answer.

I have spent most of my life digging for a reasonable cause of this seemingly fated solitude of mine, for the sexual kryptonite that, once excavated, might allow me to live and love “normally.” I exhausted ten years of weekly therapy, dozens of self-help and psychology texts, books on philosophy, sociology, and religion and that ever-nebulous field called “spirituality.” I meticulously dissected my relationships with my family members and peers, cross-examining my every need and motive and picking at various crusty old wounds. I have diagnosed myself variously as a narcissist, a neurotic, a love addict, a sex addict, an ambivalent-avoidant, a Woman Who Loves Too Much, a religious abuse survivor, an INFP, a typical egoic consciousness, and a Tragic Romantic (Four, in the Enneagram model). In the end I’ve found no ultimate internal “cause” powerful enough to have effected such an unequivocal and consistent legacy of abortive rejection and abandonment. I’ve speculated about external causes (men are X, women are Y), but inconclusively. The puzzle has remained unsolved.

I’ve searched the holy books
Tried to unravel the mystery of Jesus Christ the savior
I’ve read the poets and the analysts
Searched through the books on human behavior
I traveled this world round
For an answer that refused to be found
I don’t know why and I don’t know how
But she’s nobody’s baby now.

Milton gives me an unreasonable cause.

**

Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that I was Milton, and Milton is me. And that my psyche is imprinted indelibly with the endlessly painful experience of being attracted to members of the same sex –in this case, men — when such a thing was greater cause for censure and ostracism than it is in our still far-from-enlightened present. (While there was a brief “pansy craze” in urban clubs and entertainment in the 1920s, by the Depression-plagued 1930s a conservative backlash had taken over, which blamed society’s considerable ills on moral depravity — not unlike like today’s Jerry Falwells and their ilk.) A person would have to have had a very strong sense of self to trespass unapologetically, to persist, to find others of his kind, rather than just accept, like our contemporary Ted Haggard, that his innermost desires were aberrant and wrong in the eyes of God and man.

Not only that, but Milton was deeply, madly in love. With a man either straight or unwilling to embrace his feelings toward another man. I’d bet on the latter. It would add an element of complexity to the mix, of that confusion of subtle and mixed signals, of not knowing where one stands, or whether one should act. Let’s say, then, that Milton’s friend may have felt something reciprocal. But that he was constitutionally incapable of acknowledging or acting upon it. And when, one day, “after teas and cakes and ices,” Milton had the strength to force the moment to its crisis, said gentleman recoiled in horror, perhaps used epithets like nancy-boy or fairy, grabbed his coat, and fled. Don’t ring me. Don’t write me. I don’t ever want to see you again. You disgust me.

**

In the light of this hypothetical tale, my recurrent feelings and experiences do make more sense: the deep, deep shame about my fierce unmet longings that I felt even in childhood…the fear that my desires are somehow inordinate, or freakish, or wrong, and that I’m freakish and wrong (why else do I continuously repel the men I want most?)…the bewilderment and knife-twisting pain and humiliation of unexpected, often violent repulsion “when everything was going so well”…the bouts of resignation to lonely, masturbatory solitude (unless I just take what I can get, perhaps like Milton taking an eager female friend to dinner)…the suicidal rage and despair over my apparent barbed-wire cage.

Just imagine for a moment that Milton’s 21 grams of unhappy, aborted chi soon re-immerses itself in the river of embodied life as a little blonde girl in 1970s Massachusetts — but somehow retains the same set of experience-based assumptions it held as the person known as Milton. Without allowing for the fact that it is now an entirely different person in an entirely different situation (and body).

I know it sounds highly unlikely, or at least very odd, unless you believe wholeheartedly in this stuff.  But bear with me.

My question then would be, why wasn’t he pleasantly surprised in his new life?

I’m already way out on a limb about this past life business. I’ve certainly never been a card-carrying member of what I call the Omnipotence movement, which insists that you create everything that happens to you (so why’d you manifest those bombs at your wedding, Afghan villagers? ). Try telling that to a nine-year-old with bone cancer, incidentally. This (usually dogmatically delivered) assertion can wind up feeling the opposite of empowering  — which it’s actually meant to be, in its annoying New Agey way — and can often come off as just plain assholery.

I do, however, believe in that classic hippie concept, “vibes.” Do I think little AlienBaby had godlike control over which males came into her life when? No. Do I think that the ones that did may have responded to what she was unconsciously projecting about herself because of her assumptions? Now that’s a possibility.

So much of the fix-up work I’ve done on myself has been aimed at addressing these root shames I could never quite get to the bottom of, even with all the archaeological excavation and professional assistance. From what I’ve been able to tell, I really had no precedent for holding such dire beliefs about myself and my desires until experiencing negative reinforcement over and over and over again, from nursery school on. Which came first, chicken or egg? Statistically, it seems improbable I could have been so “unlucky” in love, a born failure, never getting a “break” even once growing up, when I liked so many boys. But how could I be projecting the internalized effects of something that had not yet happened, or was only just happening?

Unless I was truly a born failure.

Say whatever you want about reincarnation — Milton the librarian gives me a powerful precedent. My rational mind still doesn’t fully buy it…it seems crazy…but I wept hard during that session, and I felt what felt like the root of this old wound.

Milton gives me new hope, too: I can now tell myself, That was then, and this is now. You’re a different person, with a different life. You get a second chance. (I’m actually welling up a bit, irrationally, writing this.) For any scoffing materialists out there, you can ease your fretting mind by thinking of this exercise as a placebo experiment. Maybe, at long last, I can put my romantic and sexual failures behind me by putting them seventy years behind me. Maybe I can finally lay them to rest.

Lay them to rest. Yes. Perhaps with a visualization: me, in a pastoral cemetery, kneeling down to place a wreath against a headstone. Milton —, 1900-1954. The inscription reads Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter/In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter. The wreath is made up of red roses, with lots of thorns.

Rest in peace, brother Milton. I’m sorry your life was so painful that you had to end it. We can do better this time…and we will.

I promise to at least get us some hot c*ck by Christmas.

**

I guess I could have braved Sonny’s Super Bowl party, to which I was issued a Facebook invitation — along with 200 of his closest friends — but I feared I’d be sharing him with more than just the Steelers and the Cardinals. I didn’t want to take the risk of seeing him, for instance, lounging on the couch with an arm draped around the diffident NYU art student. I wrote a fine piece on jealousy a few posts back, but the truth is that I know this sensation too well: that ice-cold thunderbolt that strikes the innermost bowels, followed by an instantaneous flush of scalding shame that reaches all the way to the tips of the ears. That feeling that one has no right to even exist, much less to want what one wants so badly. To ask for anything at all would be unthinkable, now. No, no, the only thing to do is to flee and to hide — to hide one’s shameful, unwanted self from the real or imaginary judges of one’s embarrassing inadequacy.

Those who are either blissfully free or unaware of this feeling in themselves always look at me in disbelief when I express my fears — what’s the big deal about going to a fricking party? I don’t think they’d be too understanding if I told them that Sonny actually called me the week before last, and that I was too paralyzed to pick up the phone. It’s real time, you hear me, real time! an inner voice was screaming at me as the phone rang, like Angela Bassett in one of my favorite movies trying to get the leading man to live in the present. But I’ll say more about that shortly. My own writing could be seen as analogous to that film’s fictional invention, “playback” — a safe way to experience life in the past tense, a once-removed refuge from scary real-time reality. I won’t deal with this now; I’ll write about it later! Margaret Atwood put this preference for art over life in perspective with the brilliant lines

Please die I said
so I can write about it

But for me the retreat from “real time” always comes down to fear. (In my defense, I did call Sonny back after a while, and got his voice mail.) I’m like a dog that expects a vicious kick at every turn. This lead-heaviness that lives in my chest, the vast dimensions of the raw-edged pain I seem to lug along with every step…I have never been quite able to totally pinpoint how familial misunderstandings, peer rejections, and disappointed love alone could create such extensive and persistent trauma — wreckage you might only expect to see if you could take emotional X-rays of the hearts of war refugees. Am I really that much more sensitive than other people? Or did I come in with this?

**

“Fall into your heart,” my coach friend instructed me, to take my focus out of my endlessly ruminating brain, to try to get me to let go of what he says are limiting beliefs.

It’s always hard to move my awareness into a place that hurts so damn much most of the time — the request itself seems cruel — but I did. He asked me to imagine what it would feel like to receive everything I ever wanted. Such as: ample compensation for work I love to do…freedom from debt and want…enough of everything…plenty of money…plenty, perhaps, of Sonny.

My upper ribs feeling almost unbearably sore, I started to think about how that might entail feelings of joy and contentment…right? But there I was thinking again — not feeling. I was thinking in terms of “shoulds,” trying to conjure up the right emotion. I couldn’t feel anything, frankly, but that obstinate, accursed, age-old weight crushing my lungs, constricting my breath, making me ache.

I knew the answer, the feeling — I just didn’t know I knew it.

It came to me later that evening. It was right there in “Demolishing History,” the feeling I got watching Obama on Election Night:

…the sweet agony of relaxing the heart muscle into receiving kindness and respect after countless humiliations and cruelties have left it armored and tight…the raw, painful reawakening of joy after thousands upon thousands of deadening disappointments. You receive kisses where you were braced for blows; bread where you expected a stone.

I remembered, because I had actually felt this on a couple of occasions before.

**

Once was when, unemployed and in a panic over money, I received a notification in the mail that I had just won $45,000 in a sweepstakes, and I believed it. I sat down and sobbed for twenty minutes out of pure relief, thinking that a lifetime of poverty and struggle and debt might finally be coming to an end. (Only when I called the number and heard about the money transfer I’d be required to make did I realize I was being scammed.)

Another time was when I was awaiting the reply to a veritable dissertation of an email I had sent to our football-loving friend. As I’ve done so many times in my life, I had poured out my heart to him in writing, out of whatever foolhardy personal necessity compels me to fly in the face of all common sense. When his response finally showed up, bold black in my inbox, I was unable to open it for nearly an hour — instead washing all the dishes in my sink with trembling hands, sitting and chanting a comforting mantra on my bed, rocking, nearly crying, terrified of the killing words of men that can land like atom bombs in your soft center. I had heard so many variations of “I don’t know what you want from me (but you’re not going to get it)” and “I never asked for any of this” and “I’m sorry, but…” that I didn’t know if I could survive even one more of the same. (Icy thunderbolt, flash burn.)

I opened it. I love the email, it said. He promised to write more soon.

I started to laugh. I started to cry. I shook. I lay down on the bed and laugh-cried hysterically for over half an hour, as if thirty-eight years of unbearable tightness and tension, the constant bracing for more merciless blows, were being shaken loose from my heart and my body in thirty-eight minutes of unprecedented release. It was like a reprieve from execution. More than that, he loved what I had to say. I almost couldn’t handle that much grace.

And you wonder why Sonny is so dear to me.

**

“Fall into your heart” got “Fall in the Light” going through my head — what was probably my favorite track on one of my favorite movie soundtracks from one of my favorite big-budget Hollywood movies. I dug out the CD again the other day to listen, and then decided to rent the movie again. The song, as it so happens, coincides with a moment not too different from the one I’m describing.

Strange Days is, in my opinion, the best thing James Cameron (Mr. Terminator and Titanic) ever did, but it was also, unfortunately, one of his biggest box-office flops. It was one of those stories that seized me with the compelling potency of personally relevant mythology…a tarnished hero’s journey that contains within it a complementary heroine’s journey, and also addresses a much larger challenge at the heart of our collective existence. It’s dark, and far more violent than I usually like, but sometimes I’ll stomach scenes I’d otherwise avoid (like the brutal rape and murder of a prostitute) when the overall project is worthwhile.

The 1995 film, which boasted top actors like Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and Vincent D’Onofrio, as well as inveterate character actors like Tom Sizemore and William Fichtner (not to mention a typecast Juliette Lewis), is set in a dystopian Los Angeles not unlike the lawless, chaotic, polluted L.A. of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, on the eve of the year 2000. Fiennes plays our flawed hero Lenny Nero (doing his best to downplay his scruffy, unwashed beauty in sleazy pimp shirts and leather pants), who fiddles while L.A. burns. A former vice cop, Lenny now makes a living selling “playback” clips on the black market, addictive slices of virtual reality that allow the “wired” person to experience someone else’s pre-recorded experiences within their own brains, as if firsthand, but without the attendant risk. He is himself addicted to clips from his own past, clips featuring his cherished ex-girlfriend Faith.

As the ironically named Faith, Juliette Lewis is poledancer-perfect as the kind of weak, fickle, hopelessly lost white-trash princess with bee-stung lips that well-meaning men have been trying to rescue from time immemorial. And Lenny is, at heart, a well-meaning man, a “goofball romantic” swimming around in the big toilet bowl of the underworld, as his good friend Lornette “Mace” Mason puts it. Angela Bassett plays Mace, a limouisine driver and bodyguard as hardworking and honest as her surname and as tough as her nickname. She’s the film’s moral center, a literal mother (she has a young son), the mature feminine archetype. It becomes apparent over time that she loves Lenny, despite his criminal status as a playback dealer and his obsession with Faith — but throughout the movie she has to play the role of the desexualized Sidekick, what Hollywood typically makes of African-Americans in movies with predominantly white leads. “You look good in that dress,” says Lenny at one point, adding, jokingly, “I mean, better than I would.” At least initially, it is she who comes to his rescue, metaphorically slaying the dragons who want him injured or dead.

Mythically speaking, if Lenny is a sort of Orpheus, wending his way through a Hades of burned-out cars and warehouse fetish clubs guarded by violent thugs to retrieve a sullen and resistant Eurydice, Mace may be Ariadne, holding out to his Theseus a thread to help him find his way out of an increasingly dangerous labyrinth — and being set up for abandonment. (I’m afraid I know that myth all too well.)

**

But here I must point out that the mainstream film industry is still pretty cowardly about interracial romance onscreen (Spike Lee and other relative outsiders notwithstanding). And no, I don’t count as some kind of landmark the success of that outrageous Halle Berry exploitation fantasy known as Monster’s Ball, which was unanimously praised by white male film reviewers everywhere, and universally despised by every African-American I know. (Way to not get it, Hollywood.)

Yet this movie does seem to be trying to tackle racial tension head-on. The plot pivots upon the execution-style murder of a prominent rapper and social activist known as Jericho One, which investigators blame (too easily) on gang violence. The film particularly distinguishes itself in its incidental details, like convincing fragments of the slain artist’s music videos caught on background TVs — fragments that possess authentic force and power. Cameron gives the character aggressive words and images that are unflinching in their Farrakhan-esque assault on the status quo. The soundtrack, too, atypically represents unapologetic black rage, with fictional band Strange Fruit magnificently howling “No white clouds in my blue sky!” and Me Phi Me (featuring Jericho One) accusing “Did you steal the land that you’re on?/And is my red brother nearly gone?/Took my ancestors from their homes!/Built your fucking nation on their bones!”

It really is a great soundtrack. The Deep Forest and Lords of Acid tracks sound a little dated now, but Skunk Anansie’s ferocious punk-metal numbers still blow the roof off (their badass lead singer was a bald black Englishwoman wearing tribal face paint), and even Juliette Lewis’s off-key caterwauling on a great P.J. Harvey song has its charm. Tricky is still trippy, and Kate Gibson glides honey-voiced through Leonard Cohen on accordion accompaniment.

But as I mentioned, “Fall in the Light” is my favorite. Graeme Revell, master of the atmospheric movie soundtrack (he scored “Until the End of the World,” among other things), uses Lori Carson‘s ethereal vocals over a dreamy shuffle to create a hypnotic sonic experience of transcendence. I used to get tears in my eyes at the bridge, where she sings

sweet, how it falls into place
sun through the haze
doesn’t it feel a little like grace?

There, as the music swells gently, just before the final verse, ascendant synthesized strings enter from below to embrace and lift you up on a wave of sound; you can feel the rising, as if some mysterious force were spreading your long-hidden, secret wings in spite of yourself. And you rise, rise, rise…

The first thirty times or so, I got goosebumps; sometimes I still do.

**

But to return to the film…during the last remaining minutes of 1999, in downtown L.A. amid wall-to-wall people and police in riot gear, the perpetrators are exposed, Lenny sees Faith for what she is, false friends literally fall away, and perplexing plot elements are solved — but not before a near race riot (reminiscent of Rodney King) and some bloody fights-to-the-death. There are at least three false endings (I love it when filmmakers keep you guessing), including the last one, where an exhausted and battered Lenny and Mace go their separate ways — she headed directly for the police station for questioning, and he headed in an ambulance for the hospital.

It seems only natural, in a typical Hollywood action film, for the black Sidekick to get in one vehicle and the white Protagonist to head for another, as the celebratory New Year’s crowds cheer and hug and kiss and confetti swirls around them. The striking of midnight is a beautiful, unexpectedly peaceful moment; the world doesn’t end, the confetti falls gently like snow, the background noise goes quiet, and we see a woman in a tiara embracing a National Guardsman, his gun lowered. But Mace’s face looks weary and resigned, watching Lenny walk away with a medic, and as she gets into the back of the squad car, I feel for her aloneness and her unreturned affections; this is the way my stories always end, too.

But wait (huge spoiler alert)! As the car slowly rolls through the exultant throng, the viewer’s eye is suddenly drawn to a figure, left of center, that seems to come out of nowhere, groping its way along the slow-moving chain of police cars. It’s Lenny, bloody and limping, palm thumping against the squad car window.

He pulls Mace decisively out of the back seat with his good arm, and they stand facing each other without speaking. Fortunately, these are some of the best actors around, so they don’t need words — Fiennes’ Lenny bleeds tenderness from his lovely eyes, and Bassett’s expression melts from confusion to one of a proud, almost regal sensuality. Mace always knew she was the real woman, even if he didn’t. It’s in this moment/hold on/when everything has come apart… Lori Carson’s voice lilts gently. It’s in this moment/right now/when it can come together…

**

The first time I saw their passionate, film-ending kiss was one of the most gratifying moments in my long history of moviegoing. Suddenly the Sidekick becomes the Leading Lady, as she always should have been. This long-suffering, loyal, strong, beautiful, incredible woman is finally seen by the man she loves. Identifying with the overlooked and underappreciated Mace, I felt my tightly bound heart loosening, expanding, with that painfully sweet relief.

But it was so much bigger than me, at the same time: it was a moment of hope that hinted at what we as Americans might be able to achieve together (perhaps in only another decade). Because after all of the preceding story’s racial strife and violence and darkness and brutality and chaos and trauma, we, the audience, find ourselves standing there with Mace and Lenny, on the cusp of a new millennium, man and woman, black and white, friends and equals, in a moment of love requited at long last. Tears streamed down my cheeks with an intimation of that feeling I would have one day, Election Day.

**

Here the camera begins to lift above Lenny and Mace, losing them in the happy, seething crowd, the crescendo of “Fall in the Light” lifting us with it into the streamer-laced sky, and as the music begins to ebb away we hear Carson’s angelic murmurs…Hold on…hold on…

Her last line before the fadeout is a whisper: you catch me.

*

From the time I was a wee slip of a girl, I’ve suffered from searing jealousies so powerful they seemed to bring with them the threat of annihilation. Perhaps there was originally an instinctual element at play: to be neglected or forgotten by one’s caretakers as a completely dependent child, after all, can mean one really doesn’t survive. The underlying fear, anyway, feels that deep and primal. It’s not just run-of-the-mill fear, it’s visceral terror. Inspiring some uneasy nausea to boot. Over this nearly intolerable baseline emotion there’s an equally painful acquired overlay of shame, of self-blame: Why am I not deserving? What fatal flaw do I have that prevents me from mattering?

I can look over my elementary and secondary school years and see how having these emotions percolating in my young psyche created an infinite regress of reactivity, a heightened propensity to take every instance (and later every intimation) of not being the chosen one as a fundamental threat as well as a core criticism. Having my little playmate Caitlin decide she wanted to play with Laura, for instance, rather than with me, felt tantamount at the time to taking out a big eraser and rubbing me off the planet. And that barely even approaches the degree of pain and humiliation I experienced in my teens when my friend Katie was perennially preferred to me by our clean-cut church cohorts. So when my first love started spending quality time with one of my best friends, I looked the other way — dreading but at the same time refusing to entertain the worst. The mere thought was intolerable to me. Of course the inevitable happened, anyway, and I was in such an agony and felt so worthless I wanted to throw myself in the river and drown.

Time and time again I found myself confronting these same overpowering emotions as an adult. Granted, I could have decided to actively avoid situations and people that would bring them up; this is often considered the healthy thing to do. Find friends and lovers who don’t evoke your jealousies or will never do anything that threatens your sense of security. This is what my mother did, I think, in marrying my father. She wanted none of the drama of her parents’ endlessly painful marriage; she longed for safety, and she found it in a partner who would never even do anything unpredictable.

But transcendence can’t come from avoidance. Safety doesn’t necessarily bring about growth. My soul, at least, knew what it wanted. It wanted to face down and even befriend its dreadful green-eyed monster, not lock it in the closet.

I didn’t consciously figure this out until recently. For a long time I blamed myself (as is the trend) for gravitating toward everything and everyone “wrong.” When in fact everything was all right.
*

“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough,” said Blaise Pascal (or so quoth Rob Brezsny), a man so sour on human relations I would have thought him incapable of making such a statement. Women Who Love Too Much: that was a bestseller by Robin Norwood full of cautionary finger-wagging about catering to The Wrong Men. What does it mean to love too much? And are these two talking about the same thing?

I doubt it. Obsessive behavior, groveling, desperation, and tolerance of abuse may be considered manifestations of “love,” as well as misguided efforts to change the other person, but I don’t think that’s what Pascal was talking about. No, it’s something other than the compulsive enslavement to one’s own unresolved emotional dramas and residue that can act as the golden thread, leading one out of the labyrinth of neurosis.

But it takes spools and spools of it.

Byron Katie spins out the gold simply and beautifully in one of her workshops with a participant upset by the interest the man she’s been dating has in another woman.

*

Woman: I want Roger to break up with Francesca…
Katie: Is that true? Go there (laughs). Just a question.
Woman: (Pause) I don’t know.
Katie: Do you care about him?
Woman: (Long pause) Only if he does what I want. (Audience laughter; Katie and the woman start laughing too)
Katie: Is it beginning to make sense why he wants another relationship? (Everyone laughs uproariously)
Woman: (Laughing) No!
Katie: (Laughing) Not at all! You want him to break up with this woman. Is that true? Is that what you want?
Woman: No…I don’t think so.
Katie: So how do you react when you pretend to believe that thought?
Woman: Um…pretty hysterically, pretty dramatically.
Kate: Isn’t it juicy? Don’t you love it? (They laugh)
…

Woman: Roger shouldn’t fall in love with another woman….
Katie: Is that true?
Woman: (Long pause) Mmm…that’s a hard one…(sighs)..God…
Katie: He shouldn’t fall in love with another woman. Can you really know that that’s true?
Woman: No.
Katie: So how do react when you believe that thought?
Woman: Oh…God…I want to kill him. I want to kill myself, actually. (Starts crying softly.)
Katie: (Gently) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really understand this. You know, that’s why I’m a lover of what-is. It’s so painful when I’m not. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing we can do about it. It is what it is. And where the pain really comes in is, we’re all lovers of reality, we’re just not aware of it yet. We want what is. And the term is unconditional love, you know. I call it just “sanity.”

*
We tell tales, we write stories (often based on our past), and leave out at least half the truth. Radical honesty like Katie’s dismantles that frame, dissipates the plot, allows us to see without those superimposed interpretations. Can we really say we know what’s best? Would we honestly want someone to be with us if it weren’t the right thing for them, or for us?

Freed up, we become more generous with each other. We recover that initial “too-much” love that led us into a full confrontation with our vulnerabilities.

*

When you dive fully into a feeling that’s unpleasant and fear-based, like jealousy, surrendering to the waves, at first it seems like a vast ocean that will drown you. Who would want to swim in that cold, cold water?
‘
But when you don’t actually die, you become curious: what is this I’m feeling, and where did it come from? The emotional reaction always has, for me, had its source in those vulnerabilities from a much earlier time — episodes of humiliation or of being left out (e.g. by Caitlin). Once I’ve really let myself feel the original dramas, the ancient terror and the shame, I find that the present becomes much less overwhelming and much clearer. Now is not then, and you are not my daddy. What I am so desperate for is back there, on the playground. The nightmare fades in the light of day, and I see you for the first time.

Taking the emotional charge off whatever is happening, de-personalizing it, I can look at everyone involved as themselves rather than as characters in my tragic story. I can better see their own fears and their own needs, and feel compassion toward their own situations. Seeing them, I can relate to them as something other than my highly charged and unresolved projections.

Like anyone, they just want happiness, after all, an end to fear, and to be loved. Single mothers may worry whether they’ll be able to provide for their children, and if they’ll grow old alone. Other women may struggle with their weight and a cultural image of beauty that largely excludes them. Still others may hide beneath independence and a brassy exterior a deep woundedness. A man, for his part, may fear for his freedom and yearn for a greater purpose — unsure, perhaps, what any further entanglements will cost him (emotionally and otherwise) and whether he is viewed as a mere commodity.

Relieved of my intense vulnerability, I find that I want them all to be happy, not to be afraid, and to feel loved.

I want the man to feel free…as free as my overwhelming love for him is. I want him to live his adventure, whether or not I ever get to caress his beautiful loins again. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can only bless him, and wish for the best outcome for everyone. This “sublime generosity” (Rumi) wells me up until I’m full from the inside out.

The next time I dive into jealousy, I find that I am only swimming in a pond.

*
The common wisdom is to contract rather than to expand, to protect against further triggering of old pain. Reject those who seem so much as inclined to reject you. Don’t go there! Don’t let it happen again! But I consider turning around and walking toward my demons to be a spiritual practice. Once again I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke:

And if we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

My green-eyed monster is only a very scared and hurt little girl inside me who needs my love and compassion. And the wolves and sirens and pirates that appear to threaten me in others are, at heart, just other small girls and boys trying to find their way the best way they know how. There is no dragon. There are no bad guys. There is only us.

Happy New Year, everyone. May you transform all your dragons.

**

During the American Thanksgiving holiday, it’s a tradition to reflect upon all the things one is grateful for. Being accidentally locked out of my apartment house for an hour and a half the other day (in the cold, without a phone or money, and still ill) reminded me how fortunate I am simply to have a roof over my head. For that short (and rather frightening) period of time, I existed on the same stripped-down level as the denizens of the skid-row type boulevard down the block. I was effectively “nobody,” cut off from my friends and acquaintances, without a penny or the leverage of credit in my pocket, seeking assistance from understandably guarded strangers. I wound up asking to use the phone at a nearby homeless shelter to call a locksmith (which wasn’t in the budget, either, but what can you do? My landlord is apparently unlisted, and his cell number was in my phone, inside the house).

So I’m very grateful that I have my survival needs met. I realize how much worse things could be.

Yet as anyone with a knowledge of basic psychology knows, there’s more to life than survival. Abraham Maslow created a whole hierarchy of needs, a now-famous pyramid. I know my phone is full of the numbers of people who would have gladly come had I been able to call them, and I’m grateful for that. I have a community, a social network, a web of care. The people I saw at the shelter were not so lucky.

At the same time I’ll never forget Elizabeth Gilbert (in Eat Pray Love) writing about the experience of a friend who worked with Cambodian refugees. Even in the most wretched camps, with people who had lived through war and famine, her friend heard plaints like “I was in love with this boy, but then he liked my cousin.” And in the film “Playing for Time,” based on the pianist Fania Fenelon’s memoir about life in Auschwitz, two women fall in love inside the concentration camp. It would appear that amid the most dire of circumstances, certain universal longings prevail. Man (or woman) does not live by bread alone. Even when there’s not much else around.

**

The other day I was listening to a CD my friend and mentor gave me that is meant to help the listener “move through challenging times.” When it got to the part in the guided meditation and visualization where I was supposed to imagine drawing support from the many people, friends and family, who love me, and to imagine them standing behind me, I started to sob. Hard. Uncontrollably. And not from happiness, although I knew (it goes without saying) I should be grateful for each and every one of them. It’s not that I’m not.

No, all I could feel, on some almost pre-verbal level, was how none of them could make up for the one who wasn’t there.

None of them could make up for “Chris.”

**

In some primal, irrational, and thoroughly powerful corner of my psyche, my childhood neighbor’s cousin still lives. I was only about three, which makes me wonder where this utterly defining narrative came from, really — whether it was a leftover from some other place and time — that is, some other life. How does a three-year-old child come up with something like this on her own? There’s no comparable attachment drama I can locate within my immediate family.  And I was actually disappointed when my parents (and brother) showed up to rescue me.

The story is this: the neighborhood kids, along with my older brother, liked to play softball in the vacant lot down the street. Sometimes they’d play in our large, fenced-in yard. On at least one of the latter occasions, Chris was visiting his cousin Ricky, who lived two doors down from us.

I don’t recall whether I noticed him beforehand or not — if I did, I’m sure I hung back out of my characteristic shyness — but at some point I climbed up in the lowest crook of our big apple tree and couldn’t get myself down. Chris, this strange, tall boy with cowlicked dark hair, who was older than my brother and most of the kids there, came and lifted me gently out of the tree and set me lightly down on the ground.

That was it for me. This skinny kid instantly became my towering hero, my knight in shining rugby shirt. Novelist Milan Kundera once observed that happiness may be linked to repetition, and I was eager to repeat this novel and exciting experience with this novel and exciting person. I think I must have duplicated my damsel-in-distress scenario at least three more times that afternoon.

From then on, I climbed up in that crook every time the neighborhood kids came over to play. I really didn’t know how to get down once I was up there (!), and I’d sit there and clamor for Chris — even though he was undoubtedly miles away. My mother would come to get me down, or my father, or Ricky’s older sister, or the stocky boy from up the street, and I would be so upset! Even my beloved big brother’s uplifted arms couldn’t console me — and he was, all things considered, the next best thing. No, I wanted Chris. No one else would do. It didn’t matter who else showed up — they weren’t Chris! I even cried, and clung to the tree, refusing to budge. My disappointment knew no bounds. Of course to the other kids and the grownups it became a huge joke. My family teased me about it for years afterward.

But it took root in me, that feeling of calling and wishing and wanting and waiting, and having everyone but the one I wanted show up. (Again: how did I get so stubbornly particular so young?) The feeling of impotence and frustration was overwhelming, because at three years old I really was helpless, and I honestly couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t come. Is it any wonder I get mad at those Law of Attraction people? Who should that kind of thing work for, if not a child with a child’s capacity for faith (or magical thinking, at least)?  At that age, we do feel responsible for everything that happens to us, the way young kids blame themselves for Mommy and Daddy splitting up. So if Chris didn’t come, according to my rudimentary logic, it must have been my fault; there must have been something inherently wrong with me.

Hence the birth of a very particular kind of shame. I was powerless to effect what I most wanted; for some unknown reason, I was apparently unworthy. What’s more, everyone else found my predicament hilarious.

You can tell me, certainly, that I should count myself lucky that anyone came to get me, and that I didn’t get hided for repeatedly climbing up in that tree, and you’d be right — but when we’re talking about a small child’s developing emotional life, ‘shoulds’ are essentially meaningless. My experience was my experience, for better or worse. I don’t know why it mattered so much to me that this particular boy get me down. Send me to a hypnotist, if you have the cash, and we may finally get some backstory.

**

So here we are more than three and a half decades later, and I’m crying while listening to this CD, because everyone but Chris shows up. The whole rest of the world may come to my aid, but it doesn’t matter…

Incidentally, I could totally see this tale as a children’s book: a child, who’s locked herself in a tower or something from the inside, keeps stubbornly asking for so-and-so. Family members come, and the neighbors, and the townspeople, and the constable (in children’s books there’s always a constable), and then the mayor, and the governor, and eventually the king. You get the picture. Only I wouldn’t know how to end the story! With the exception of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, childrens’ books aren’t supposed to be a big old bummer. (At least not until they get to The Yearling.)

Anyway…I’m reminded of something an insightful friend of mine once said to Hector Haversham, a Falstaff-like character at my college who, despite his considerable girth, had quite a following among the ladies. Unbeknownst to me, he aspired to add me as a notch on his lengthy belt. My friend informed him that it wasn’t my errant boyfriend León he would have to contend with, it was me he would have to contend with. She knew me better than I knew myself.

Stubborn and particular. I called and wished and wanted and waited a year and a half for Max Vujevic — and he did come, twice, in the middle of the night, to crawl into bed with me in my third floor dorm room. No one on campus knew; Max was something of a legend around there, being several years older and seemingly decades wiser. (That saying about the late Steve McQueen was true of Max: women wanted to be with him and men wanted to be him.) He always came across as so calm and imperturbable, but one time when he put his arms around me, after sharing a couple of beers, I could feel his heart thundering in his chest like a runaway freight train. He said he didn’t think he could make me happy. What he didn’t understand was that what made me happy was hearing his heart thundering in his chest like a runaway freight train. These men never seem to understand I’m that simple.

I moved out West to the mountains (Max loved mountains) and waited some more, too afraid to call: Chris! Chris! This time he didn’t come, anyway. He was busy making a baby and playing house with someone else back East. I have no idea what happened to him after that.

**

The depression that crushed me every morning on waking for most of my adult life (and that still occasionally visits), was as much as anything a feeling of powerlessness, a despair of the ability to fulfill my impassioned wishes in the outer world. All along, there were well-meaning friends urging me to modify my wants, to accept whatever metaphorical arms proffered themselves to that inner child in the tree. As you might imagine, given the original story, this only sharpened the despair and feelings of impotence and worthlessness, until sometimes I would erupt into tears of three-year-old rage. But I want Chris!!!

**

Of course Max Vujevic was nothing like that tall, skinny hometown boy in a striped shirt. What did the two have in common except shared real estate in my imagination?

To my developing toddler mind, Chris was more symbol than person, a template by which to order the future. When you’re young, everything is All About You, and even far into adulthood experience gets filtered through the prism of those powerful early emotions and the narratives that grow up around them. One day you find yourself living within an outdated metaphor, which may not have anything to do with the current situation. Part of finally growing up involves untangling the present from the past, and recognizing the autonomous existence of other people beyond whatever your preassigned roles for them may be.

Every “Chris” who has ever crossed my path has had a life of his own, and thoughts, motives and feelings wholly unknown to me; I will never know why Max ultimately refused me, for instance, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that his doing so was incontrovertible proof of my unlovability, inefficacy, or inadequacy. It’s not always personal. Some sages say that it never is.

Many people would still fault me for my stubbornness and particularity. “Constancy” hasn’t been a virtue since the days of Jane Austen, who died a spinster at the ripe old age of 41. You have to wonder what undisclosed Darcy may have been lost to her along the way, and how many Mr. Collinses she refused.

Are we selective, or pathological? If the desired goal, as is true for a majority of people (and certainly in Jane’s day), is matrimony, there’s no question we’re self-defeating. It’s not the smartest way to get some of those pyramid needs met, either. But if you’re driven by your soul’s deeper objective of expanding its capacity for loving awareness…well, then it depends.

It depends on whether or not what’s being played out is the same basic drama with different actors. Is it just about the story, or is the other person in the story allowed to be who he is? The way out of the depressing fairy tale may be in honoring and even loving those vital differences, and ceasing to insist on a nonnegotiable denouement. Upend the narrative, and look with fresh eyes. Who is this “Chris?”

It’s possible, after all, that he just wanted someone to play softball with. Maybe his arms are tired right now. Maybe he’s lifted a hundred little girls out of trees. Maybe one of them bit him. Maybe he’s over it. Or maybe he needs help getting out of his own tree.

It takes a long time to get out of your own tree.

At the risk of sounding crazy (when has that ever stopped me?) I’ll divulge that I was seized by dark, self-destructive thoughts and urges all during that week myself, and that they were at their depressive worst on Friday. My more psychically inclined friends are convinced there’s a direct connection; I don’t know about that, but I marvel at the synchronicity.

Friday evening, in fact, I found myself contemplating the feasibility of emptying a pint of whisky and going down to the railyards by the river to wait for one of those freight trains that come clacking and wailing through the city late at night, so I could throw myself under it in the dark (properly anaesthetized), and no one would be the wiser until daybreak. Maybe even write ‘DNR’ in permanent magic marker across my chest, just for good measure. (What, after all, could be worse than a botched attempt, and the pity and disfigurement and permanent disability that might attend it?)

While I was entertaining this morbid little scenario in my head, an hour behind me in California David was tying the noose.

At the time, of course, I had no idea. Now before you go calling the paramedics, let me say that I hadn’t felt quite that self-destructive for a while. Besides, I suspect (if the wildly popular PostSecret blog is any gauge) that such thoughts are far more prevalent (even “normal”) than most people will admit. If my confession shocks you, I’m probably just breaking a cultural taboo. At any rate, by Saturday night I had shifted out of that frame of mind, and that’s when I read the news. A sharp shiver passed through my entire body, and sudden sadness landed in my chest with a leaden thud. Writing a few initial words about him on my blog, I shed tears for this relative stranger.

**

David Foster Wallace. In the rare taped interview, he appeared as a 90s grunge-nerd, like the unassuming bassist in the garage band, with his ubiquitous bandanna and his long hair, pale, bespectacled, soft-spoken, betraying the occasional tic and stammer, clearly ill at ease with the camera’s eye. He reminded me of so many of my classmates at St. John’s College, the “Great Books school,” which by virtue of its curriculum attracted brilliant, serious, abstracted, entirely non-materialistic young men whose greatest passion in life was thinking. I could definitely see myself staying up with David in the basement coffee shop of McDowell Hall until one in the morning discussing Hume. (I would probably have been mentally jogging and panting to keep up with the long strides of his churning mind.) He would have been a friend for sure. Not a lover, I think, but a good friend. If I talk about him, then, with too great a familiarity, forgive me — he just felt so familiar.

Well versed in the ways of postmodern academia and its infatuation with irony and avant-garde arcana and snark, David (who could way out-footnote Nabokov) demonstrated an unfashionable commitment to sincerity and authenticity and (what he called in his 1996 conversation with Salon) “that feeling in the stomach, which is why we read.” He wanted to create work that challenged his readers intellectually while making them feel “like someone was talking to (them) rather than striking a number of poses.” Newsweek wrote a fine elegy shedding light upon the “terrible master” that was David’s teeming brain; I won’t reiterate everything here, but suffice it to say that while he emphatically believed that solipsism — the generally empirically sound conclusion that one’s own perceiving consciousness is, in fact, the center of the universe — is a sucky orientation to call home, he also acknowledged the terrible loneliness of being a singular, bounded, perceiving consciousness. Writing and reading were a way of reaching out.

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

This has always been my take, bounded as I feel within the walls of my own infernally solitary unit of human consciousness. How jealous I am of those fluid, blissful, mystic types who claim to experience the seamless oneness of all things! My circumscribed brain more often than not feels like a prison — a prison where I am intermittently but masterfully tortured.

I’ll wager it was similar for David, who urged the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College to avoid “getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head” — the advice of many a Zen master and spiritual teacher — and went on to say

…learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

What was happening in my own brain those few dark days last week was a constant monologue of repetitive and despairing thoughts masquerading as the only truth. A longtime sufferer of depression myself, I’m skeptical of all the strictly biochemical explanations for it, including those that go swirling around in the wake of suicides. Comparative religion scholar Huston Smith, among others, has observed that just because we can describe something scientifically doesn’t mean we have isolated its cause (or made full sense of it). The explanation that has always made the most sense to me is that we assist and perpetuate certain chemical cocktails within our brains when we travel well-worn synaptic paths that trigger stressful emotions. Drugs can interrupt this process and fuzz out the distress, but they don’t really address its origins.

Imagine having a brain capable of grasping every reason on earth to despair — on 24-hour overdrive. I have no doubt, too, given my comparatively modest intellect and my nevertheless oversized ego, that David’s own intense self-consciousness must have only magnified his suffering. (See The Albatross of Personal Importance for more on ego-driven suffering.) Talking to Charlie Rose, he frequently flinched and grimaced when he finished making a point, as if his incisive formulations were embarrassingly inadequate. Shame and grandiosity are the flip-side extremes within perfectionistic, hierarchical minds that tend to turn the merciless spotlight on themselves…

Grappling with isolation, despair, dread, personal inadequacy — how is it possible not to be “totally hosed?”

**

According to David, by exercising some choice over “how and what you think.” Fine advice, so it would seem, though much easier said than done. He was suggesting, as psychologists and spiritual teachers have, that we use our minds more consciously, and choose what we pay attention to.

But I’m starting to entertain the possibility, again, that this is not enough. That this is just another ploy to sustain an unsustainable status quo. (It wasn’t sustainable for him, after all.) I’m starting to wonder if I’ve let the clarity of an initial ‘aha’ more than a year ago become muddied by the assurances of those who insist I can have my cake and ego too — whether it’s the manifest-your-desires crowd or others who argue that my constructed self (or selves, as the case may be) really isn’t essentially a “parasite” that could eventually kill me. Based on how I felt that Friday, I’m pretty sure it could, and I’m not talking about just one overly zealous critical aspect of it.

You see, I felt like I’d hit a vein of gold when I first read “The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.” In a few sentences, Eckhart Tolle managed to negate the mountains of self-help literature, psychology, philosophy, positive-thinking new-agey type books, and religious dogma I’d plowed my way through over the years to no avail. “The study of madness is not enough to create sanity.”

All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments, and aversions, and apart from them there is no “I” except as a mere possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted. In that state, even my desire to become enlightened is just another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future.

I don’t know if a craving for some sort of recognition motivated David, although I do know that he told Charlie Rose that when he got it, he found that it changed nothing, and that people still didn’t recognize what he thought was important, anyway. This is interesting to those of us still laboring away under the impression that “success” will make some kind of major difference in our lives. What constitutes this effing “success,” anyway? William S. Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch as an attempt to get Allen Ginsberg to come back to him. He wound up with multiple accolades and acolytes, but no Allen. For old Bill, that may have meant failure.

I know all about that kind of failure. (My motto could be “Those who can, live; those who can’t, write.”) But what I’m trying to say is that all of this anxiety-ridden achievement (or lack thereof) is measured with a yardstick provided by the tireless but tiresome ego. I need, I crave, I hate…am I this or that enough? Am I better or worse than you? Will I ever get what I want/deserve? Who wins and who loses?

**

By chance I recently picked up a strange pink-lettered book on Kabbalah (it was free, at a festival) the thesis of which is that the root of all evil is “the desire to receive for the self alone.” This desire is known as the “Opponent” (can you say ego?), who keeps us locked up in a prison of suffering. In order to escape this prison (and “become like God”) we must practice “transformative sharing.” The greater the discomfort this sharing creates, the better it’s working to destroy the desire to receive for the self alone.

I have to say, Rabbi Berg’s clown suit story kind of got to me. He tells the story of a famous Kabbalist who goes out walking with a companion and smells the scent of the Garden of Eden wafting from a house. They go inside to investigate, and find that this wonderful scent is coming from a clown suit in the back of the owner’s closet. When they ask him about it, he blushes and recounts the following story.

The man had been trying to help a friend in financial straits, and had attempted to take up a collection among their neighbors. Failing to collect more than a pittance, he went to a local tavern where he encountered a table full of wealthy, drunken men. One of them offered to give him all the money his friend needed — on the condition that he don a clown suit and parade around the town with the lot of them in the wee hours, singing and shouting and waking up the townspeople. He reluctantly agreed to be part of this Fellini-esque scene. Of course, the angry townspeople hollered obscenities out of their windows and even emptied their chamber pots on him, and he was thoroughly disgraced in front of every last person he knew — but he obtained the money for his friend. He ran home in shame and threw the suit in the back of his closet.

When the man had finished his story, the Kabbalist looked at him with bright eyes. “That explains why this extraordinary fragrance was coming from your closet,’ he said. “Your sharing action shattered your ego so completely that a tremendous amount of Light was revealed. Indeed, so powerful is the protection that even after your death it will continue. Tell your family to bury you in the suit when you die, for it will give you immediate admission into the Garden of Eden.”

**

One of the things that makes me feel like disappearing is a feeling of perpetual humiliation. Sometimes I start to view my entire past as nothing more than a series of indignities both great and small, a sort of decades-long hazing, while my present appears to be only a ripe opportunity for more of the same. Underlying this nearly intolerable feeling is the thwarted egoic craving to be respected, sought after, esteemed and desired, and to get what I want for a change, regardless of whether it costs anyone else. Gimmeeeeeee! Despairing of this, I actually start to question whether life is worth living.

The assumption that gives rise to such a question is that life is about getting what’s coming to you (“receiving for the self alone”). Certainly this is quintessentially American. (Just look at the wonders it’s worked on Wall Street!) What hit me so hard reading the Kabbalah story was the idea that relinquishing this assumption can be a painful and humiliating, but perhaps ultimately worthwhile, process. What if everything I’ve regarded as a failure, slight, or slap in the face has been a necessary step toward not “coming into my own,” but getting out of myself? What if sharing what (credit, responsibilities, attention, people) I don’t want to share is exactly what I need to do?

When we live in ego nature, sharing is an unnatural act. Sharing violates the ego’s fundamental survival need: I want it for myself. This is a deep, dark pit, an unscratchable itch, a bottomless longing destined never to be filled.

David once (a bit too presciently, perhaps) noted that suicides often shoot themselves in the head — the location of that “terrible master.” I would add — maybe what they really intended to kill, however unconsiously, was their ego.

I, for one, am sick to death of mine. Tired of the same old thoughts, obsessions, anxieties, criticisms, and unsatisfied wants.

Hand me those big red Bozo shoes, Rabbi.

What I found was a large dragonfly, maybe four inches long and a glittering silvery-blue color, flinging itself against one of the window panes in a vain attempt to get out. I propped open the room’s door to the outside, and with a sheet of paper gently guided the exotic critter to the opening. It took flight immediately and disappeared.

This occurrence was extraordinary enough that it made me go straight to the computer and Google “dragonfly spirit,” as if the dragonfly’s appearance were some kind of augury. On a personal website that depicts certain Medicine Cards, I found this about The Dragonfly:

Look within and feel the sense-of-self energy within yourself. Notice if it is ebbing, and find the point in time when you were deluded into believing that you would be happier if you changed because someone else wanted you to. Misery is a prime clue that you lost your will and personal validity when you bought into someone else’s idea of who or what you should be. The illusion was that you would be happier if you did it their way. In forfeiting what you know is right and true for you personally, you give away your power. It is time for you to take it back.

A few other sites yielded strikingly similar themes.

The thing that hit me like a truckload of bricks today is: I have always been unacceptable to somebody. And it was usually someone pretty darn important, starting with the big guy in the sky himself. The Ultimate Father Figure.

Sure, evangelical Christians will fall all over themselves telling you how God is love, love, love, baby, so much love you won’t even be able to stand it, but if you actually read the Bible and pay attention to the theology you get quite a different picture. That some chick 4000 years ago ate the wrong kind of fruit now means that, on your own, you are totally unreliable, and a worthless turd to boot, unless you prostrate yourself, beg forgiveness, and get neurotic about doing (or not doing) all the stuff this book tells you to. And in this book you get to read about what befell all the people who displeased God by bringing the wrong offering or showing up at the wrong time or even thinking the wrong thing. Shoot, Job didn’t even do anything wrong, and look what happened to him! So you just better watch it.

Yeah, as soon as I could understand concepts, I learned the concept that I was fundamentally flawed, lacking, unacceptable, and that if I was going to please the almighty Creator of the universe, I was going to have to change. My very survival depended upon it.

It’s not unlike the way a young child’s survival depends upon his or her parents. A young child can’t afford to be critical; a young child can’t step back and say, hey, wait a minute, this is whack. Mommy and Daddy are inconsistent, unkind, and possibly downright abusive to me. No, the child has to adapt — to anticipate, to obsess over cues, and to try to be whatever he or she thinks the parent wants.

This was the extent of my so-called “relationship with God.” And it was also, to a lesser degree, my relationship with my parents, who are to this day neck-deep in that faith, and lived out its assumptions in their James-Dobson-style childrearing. So it was actually communicated to me that to the three most important figures in my early life, I was unacceptable at my core.

When high school rolled around I immersed myself enthusiastically in my church’s thriving youth group. But again, there was something lacking in me. I watched both of the guys I had monster crushes on (as well as my beloved brother) go out with my victorious Christian girlfriend. She was breezy and bouncy and good at sports, but when I asked her what her secret was, she pretty much ontologically flattened me by offering up the made-for-Sunday-school answer “My identity is Christ!” Well, then! Not only was I not cutting it as a female, I wasn’t cutting it as a Christian, either. (Personally, I suspected it had more to do with her pouty bottom lip and her elegant jump shot, but whatever.)

Still, that didn’t stop me from mimicking her style of dress, her expressions and manner of speaking, her opinions on the faith, and her makeup preferences. I even went out for junior varsity volleyball, as she was captain of her varsity team. I was like some larger, lamer mini-me.

And it didn’t work. I was still me. I was still unacceptable to those by whom I most wanted to be accepted.

Here’s the simple truth, that I still haven’t seemed to learn after four decades: you can pretend to be someone you’re not, or you can be authentic, but either way there are absolutely no guarantees you will make anyone, no matter how “important,” accept you. So are you going to toe the line and squeeze your butt-cheeks, or are you going to break out and dance like the unabashed dork you are?

Timely dragonfly. There is still that young child very much alive in me, who truly believes that she will literally die, die, if someone important to her disapproves of her, if she says or does the “wrong” thing, if her unscripted actions manage to prove her unworthy of love. The reaction no longer fits the situation; I can cry for hours, like a baby left in her crib to starve. This vulnerability itself seems like a liability; who wants to be around that when you could be around shiny happy people holding hands? Although I suspect a lot of them are on Paxil.

But there it is again, that wish to be different in order to be acceptable. As if five gay guys could come in and make over my soul. In the end, it just ain’t up to me or the Bravo network. I’ll fumble along on my meandering path, and try to tell the truth, and maybe stick my foot in my mouth, sometimes, and if you love me, you’ll love me, and if you don’t, you won’t.

But damn if saying that doesn’t still make me cry.