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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Could it be a feeling of control over the situation? I wonder, because of how negatively many men have reacted to my desire made explicit, and because the ones I’ve had most success with sexually were either former or current habitual drug users who repeatedly sought out a certain kind of surrender. (Now there’s a sentence my mother would love.)

This is just one more reason why I’m grateful for my weed-redolent young friend Rick, actually. He’s an outsider in many ways already, and he responds unconventionally to my unconventional talk. Our wildly divergent habits make spending time together a challenge, but we’re still in the midst of a very honest conversation, with a great deal of genuine regard on both sides.

“Do you love him?” asked my coach friend last week. “Yeah, a little,” I answered with a sheepish grin. I’m surprised how much this unlikely character has come to mean to me in so short a time. He scares me a little, but I think I scare him too. Who knows what will happen next? He has resolved to at least refrain from drinking around me; I’ve disclosed how intense my sexual feelings for him have become. It may not be long before we act on them…I feel vaguely like Thelma in Thelma and Louise, hooking up with this funny, sexy young outlaw (and while Rick is a far cry from Brad Pitt, as far as I’m concerned he is rapidly becoming the Sexiest Man Alive). Then sometimes I feel like I’m in the middle of Say Anything with the hilarious and sincere underachiever Lloyd Dobler, while at still other times I think I’ve wound up in Buffalo ‘66 with a volatile but heartbreaking Billy Brown.

Yes, Rick is definitely lovable. And yet I don’t get the impression that he’s received a great deal of love thus far in life. I don’t mind giving him mine. I may have to stay mindful of my boundaries and keep my expectations at a minimum, but so far I’ve had almost unprecedented success with speaking my mind (and heart), a need of mine that seems to typically cost me relationship. Rick actually seems to appreciate that level of candor. For this alone, the endeavor has been worth the trouble.

But now I’ll give you what will likely be the last installment of my Italy diary, due to low hits and nearly nonexistent comments. I’m afraid I’ve killed my blog!!! What happened over in Italy with James seems entirely relevant, however, because it’s a perfect example of how my habits have worked so perfectly against me, at least with the majority of men I’ve known (Sonny excepted). I really was crazy about James. I sensed that he felt something similar. But I was left, as usual, swinging in the wind ass-out for confronting the situation the way I did.

__________

PART THREE: MORE THAN THIS

So. I’m finally over the raging cold I had for over a week, thanks to the hot days, cool nights, and the drinking of wine on those cool nights that makes one unaware that one is getting overly cool oneself. Fortunately Elke, my gracious German roommate, who speaks only slightly more English than I do German, brought along some homeopathic remedies, which she generously shared. Günter prescribed fresh ginger, which I took in hot water with lemon and honey. What would I do without the Germans? Ah, mein annen. (My ancestors.) I love to listen to them talking to each other in that singularly expectorating way, with all those patched-together words comprised of shorter words. Elke is delighted that my catchphrase has become Alles ist gut. It’s all good.

This cold kept me from going on a field trip with the others last Saturday. All the paying guests were gone, and the working guests went with some of the staff to Lago Maggiore, the big lake nearby that’s much better known than our little Lago D’Orta. Everyone raved about how lovely it was and what great gelato they had, but, as Bettina is fond of saying in English — what to do? I slept most of the day away. James came to find me in the morning, wondering loudly outside my door where that lazy American might be. When he poked his head in, I croaked from under my quilt that I wasn’t going to make it. He seemed genuinely disappointed.

Did I mention that I managed to fall madly, utterly in love with James?

I really didn’t come to Italy for that. No, really, I didn’t. I know people do, but I didn’t. The whole thing was completely unintentional.

You may have noticed that I was well on my way by the last episode. Alessandro, dear to me as he is, may as well be my actual nephew in his childlike and almost scandalous innocence. I’ve never met a young man in his twenties who was so utterly guileless and so oblivous to his own best attributes. You’d think his family had kept him in a shed in back of the house all these years. With Alessandro, what you see is what you get. Which should actually recommend him…there’s a lot to be said for someone whose thoughts flow unhampered to his mouth. If he thinks I’m a worthless piece of shit, he says “I’m a worthless piece of shit.” He doesn’t have to act it out so that you’ll believe it too.

But back to the matter at hand. I’ve read that an atom has recently been photographed as being in two places at once, so I imagine it’s not a theoretical impossibility for the human heart, either.

Life at Centro and Bisetti is definitely exceptional and intense, like summer camp in the land of Oz. You spend a great deal of time talking with your working guest comrades in this circumscribed but technicolor environment, amid green mountains and peacocks. Being a stranger in a strange land is a vulnerable position, and can make you more open more quickly than you might have been at home. My joke with James was that he and Alessandro were my Scarecrow and Tin Man. (I’ll leave it up to you to determine which is which. I suppose it’s not the nicest joke.) I recognize that this is all in fact like a dream, that I will probably never see any of these people again, and that my time here is precious. Ever since my little meltdown on the kitchen steps, I’ve held nothing back. What’s the point? I’m either fully here or I may as well not be here. Which means that I’ll also fully grieve leaving, along with all the departures and necessary losses that happen before.

James happens to be the first loss.

In “Lost in Translation,” a film James and I both loved, there is a poignant scene where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are out singing karaoke with some Japanese acquaintances. Murray’s character gazes at Johansson as he sings the words to Roxy Music’s haunting “More Than This.” More than this/there is nothing/more than this. These two English-speaking characters, afloat in a foreign land, separated by age and circumstance, act out a unique and unconsummated love story, and in that particular scene their unspoken yearning is palpable. At the time, it gave me goosebumps.

**

Obviously, it wasn’t difficult to be charmed by someone who has Denis Leary’s wicked sense of humor (as well as his potty mouth) and resembles Ewan MacGregor, even if I never considered Ewan my type (I’m more of a Johnny Depp girl). James and I spent so much time together, much of it involving me laughing uncontrollably, that I’m certain all of the other working guests thought I was getting colonized by the Empire. Eventually I had to put forth that possibility myself, seeing as I was technically bound by nothing at home other than the one-sided loyalty of my own heart. I had nothing more serious in mind than some good old-fashioned fooling around, because the cheeky limey was just so fookin irresistible, and the chemistry was so potent…

But as soon as I made the suggestion, I hit a wall.

Apparently James files women into two categories: viable relationship material, and shit. Actually, he called them one-night stand types, but really, they’re worthless. They must be reasonably hot, fairly stupid, and fail to amount to more to him than a stain on his shirt. I told him that I don’t really have categories anymore, I have priorities, and that beauty and joy have become more important to me than self-protection or sure things.

Thus began a two or three hour conversation in Bisetti’s kitchen, with James drinking more and more (he’s a real Englishman all right, I can’t believe how much he can hold). I’m sure he divulged more that night than he had intended. Essentially, without going into too much detail, I heard this young man’s court case against himself. He seemed to want very much to convince me that he was a sick, miserable, cold-hearted bastard, but all he did was convince me of the depth of his despair and the reality of his suffering. (Fathers and teachers, wrote Dostoevsky’s character Father Zossima, I ponder: what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.)

As Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh observes, the more we understand such things about someone, the more deeply we begin to love him. So James’s tactic backfired quite spectacularly. What he said didn’t scare me; it didn’t suck me in; it didn’t shake my faith in the beauty of life, or even in the beauty of James. It was too familiar. I had been here before. Dostoevsky had distilled all of this anguish into the character of the Underground Man, and I had known this man. I had loved this man. I had even, in a sense, been this man. I’ll call his malady the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death: a classic and distinctly macho nihilism communicated by the likes of Friedrich Nietszche, Blaise Pascal, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, and more contemporary writers like Chuck Palahniuk and Norman Mailer. It’s what happens when you prescribe for yourself the most impossible and inhuman precepts for attaining manhood, and utterly reject everything that smacks of what Jung characterized as the Eternal Feminine. For the more spiritually oriented, what you might call the Source, the Great Mother, the God who is Love. In other words, everything in life that makes tenderness and connection possible.

If you cut yourself off like this, banishing half of your humanity, it will not only make your soul sick, you may wind up putting a gun in your mouth. James seems to see Hemingway as an ideal role model. Certainly, the man could write, but he’s an awfully shitty role model. (A man would be much better off looking up to someone like Nelson Mandela. Dignity, strength, courage, compassion…now that guy’s got class.)

To put it another way, if James were drowning (and I dare say he is, in several litres of alcohol every night) and the Feminine were a life preserver, he’d go under the waves yelling “Fook off, ya pussy shit, and let me die like a mahn!”

The next morning as I hiked up the mountainside to Centro, I felt full to overflowing with a love and a joy I wished I could bottle and pour directly into James’s beer. When did I cease to be an Underground Woman myself, and surface into the light of day? How did it happen, and how could I explain it? I thought of Esther, a wonderful yoga teacher I know who is fond of saying “It’s all grace,” and I felt as if I’d been bodily lifted from misery by unseen hands. I began to sing the chorus of “Amazing Grace” as I walked, emotion making my voice crack.

When I saw him at lunchtime, I was amazed that he was still talking to me. I fully expected him to despise me out of shame, but over the course of the day he warmed up even more. After dinner, at Bisetti, a group of us watched “What the Bleep Do We Know,” which, one has to admit (whatever one’s orientation toward that goofy Ramtha woman) has some compelling things to say about the way we talk to ourselves. James, having smoked some weed with his alcohol, seemed affected (surprisingly, calling the film “brilliant”), and I wondered if any of these things would stick.

(Editorial note: in retrospect, I wonder what would have happened if I had slid onto the couch next to James after the movie, and taken a hit myself, and lain my arm across the back of the couch behind his neck…but hindsight is 20/20! I probably missed my only chance.)

It was the next afternoon, when he was acting strange and distant again, that I divulged that I no longer felt I needed anything from him, and that I loved him, that it was fierce and unconditional. His response was an icy “How dare you say such a thing to me,” and, of course, “fook you!”

“I thought you’d say something like that,” I replied with a resigned sigh. He smiled a little then, almost in spite of himself, musing on my choice of words and liking the use of the term “fierce.” At least the guy appreciates my diction. In a moment we were talking about something else as if we had only just been discussing the weather. (In a little while, we would go with the others to a bar in Pettenasco, and he would demonstrate the extent of his panic by immediately beginning to seduce a friend of Raffe’s.)

Ah, the dreaded L-word. Tell me, friends, what is the big fookin deal??? It should be the most natural thing in the world for human beings to say to one another, but thanks to this macho bullshit crap, it’s this outrageous declaration, laden with all manner of weighty prerequisites (in order to even utter it), and bales of shame. What happened between James and me, the sparkling rapport, the give-and-take of mirroring and response, that deeply satisfying pleasure of relatedness, it was all real, it was all true. Everyone around us felt it, the chemistry of our connection. There are witnesses, although I no longer need them in order to believe in its veracity.

**

My own father is not unlike Pascal — he filled the hole in his soul with religion, but he has little respect for anything other than the intellect. I don’t believe, like some psychoanalysts, that everyone we fall in love with is strictly some projection of our original caregivers, but there is a degree of truth to this theory. Anyone could reasonably say I have tried to win his approval in the persons of these unhappiest of men…but in that case I have also attempted to redeem him, to save him somehow. Call it pathological, but I don’t believe the attempt is without merit. James Baldwin, the passionate, gay black antithesis of the spiritually ailing Straight White Western Male, believed that only a human being can save another human being, and that we create one another’s consciousness.

Still, what struck me the other day, sitting in a ristorante in Pettenasco eating an insalata with fresh mozzarella (and keeping away from Bisetti), is that I have lately stopped courting my father by proxy — this episode has been something of a retread of old, painful ground — and that I am the one who has been redeemed. My equanimity in the face of James’s rejecting cruelty would never have been possible if an old pattern had not already been decisively broken. They say that to do the same thing over and over again, and expect a different result, is insanity…but what if you meet that one rare gentleman who can hear everything you’re saying, and not panic? It’s difficult in Western culture to encounter intelligent heterosexual men not somehow hobbled by the legacy of Hemingway. Speaking from the heart is seen as foolish (if not outrageous), and even we women are regularly shamed out of it.

But I have been redeemed: by the warm and affirmative response of a decidedly straight man who is not afraid of me, or for that matter of feeling, or connection, or the Feminine. Even if we were never together again, even if he chooses to be with someone else, or things just don’t work out, what has been done cannot be undone. I finally believe that It’s Not About Me. I am not crazy, repugnant, or fundamentally flawed. If you’re reading this, my dearest hipster daddy, let me just say this from the bottom of my heart: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. My deja-vu experience has deepened my appreciation for you, and for what a miracle of a man you are. You think I exaggerate…but a sincere seeker, who has already been to hell and back, and who flings himself at life with an open heart and without the distortions of pride, is a much rarer thing in my experience than fanatically self-censoring, contemptuous misanthropes who won’t allow themselves the pleasure of a natural emotion. And I have known them already, known them all…

**

In the sunlit and car-free square of Orta, breathing in the aroma of what smelled like a local cousin of the linden flower and facing the magnificent medieval monastery on the island of San Giulio, I ate a cup of freshly made, creamy gelato, but after the first bite I could taste nothing but grief. It’s like what I told Alessandro that day in the square: you buy now, you pay later…but at least it works the other way around as well.

I felt that James was already gone; everything was over, it was in the past, even with him still physically present, shagging the Italian girl he had charmed the other night at the local watering hole. His room was located diagonally above mine, and late at night I could hear her giggling like a schoolgirl on dope.

With “Lost in Translation,” the audience, at least, knows how much Bill Murray’s character cares for Scarlett Johansson’s, even when he picks up the blowsy lounge singer from the hotel bar for a tawdry one-night stand. There was slightly vicious comfort in knowing that James would only “stuff” a woman he finds stupid and doesn’t respect…but listening to the whole business wasn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy. I lay there feeling absolutely sick to my stomach, taking deep yoga breaths and trying to empty my mind. If I could have vomited, it might have brought some relief. I pretended that it was only a window on London, where he had flown already, picking up giggly blondes in dimly lit pubs. James was gone. It was time to let go, and to feel the loss of something that had been beautiful, if ephemeral as a mayfly.

Nietzsche, the proudest all-star in the Straight White Western Male Sickness Unto Death gallery, was in Orta once, with the highly educated and independent woman of letters Lou Salome. She ultimately rejected him, whereupon he promptly became despondent (and allegedly suicidal) and went off to write “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” This explains a lot to me, as far as the man’s nihilism and raging misogyny are concerned. Later Lou would become the lover and confidante of Rainer Maria Rilke, a luminous man so unlike poor Friedrich that one waggish writer called him “the world’s greatest lesbian poet.”

I ate my dinner at Leon d’Oro, the hotel where Friedrich and Lou stayed: pasta with aubergine and pomodoro in a cream sauce, accompanied by a half bottle of Valpolicella. The waiter, to my astonishment, resembled Rilke. I kid you not.

Gazing at the beautiful island of San Guilio, I paraphrased James in my head, copping his attitude. That evil harpy of a woman! How dare she have the unapologetic gall to love me, and the unmitigated temerity to say it out loud? She must be put to DEATH!!!! Wine-warm laughter bubbled up from within me as I realized the ridiculous, Pythonesque absurdity of his position. What the fook, James?

And then I thought, Good God, but I like myself. It’s taken thirty-eight years, but I honestly do. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to apologize for. I have been honorable and true with an open and loving heart.

On the long walk back to Pettenasco at sunset, I bought myself a chocolate gelato in the shop by the rotary.

It tasted delicious.

**

I made myself as scarce as possible at Bisetti until the morning of his last day. Leaving for Centro early in the morning (I had breakfast dishwashing duty) I slipped a note under his door. It explained my absence, briefly, as the unwillingness to subject myself to watching what he was doing. I loved myself too. I wished him luck and goodbye. Expecting that to be the end of it, I went about my workday in a vague funk of bereavement.

He came up to Centro at lunchtime to say goodbye to everyone. When I first saw him walking up the drive, my heart leapt into my throat. While I was back in the work area behind the kitchen, squeezing fresh orange juice, he came to shake Bruno’s hand. I didn’t expect to speak to him myself, and after he left the kitchen I let myself cry all over the oranges. I was washing the juicer parts when I heard him say my name.

I turned to see him coming at me with a politely outstetched hand, as if to bid farewell with an impersonal handshake. Seeing my wet face and eyes must have been what made him open his arms. I flung my arms around his neck and clung to him, most impolitely, and for a long time, as he said something about Robert having his email address. I said that I’d send him my travel diary (boy will he love this one). Finally he let go of me with an abrupt English “right,” and I released him, turning my head to kiss his cheek at the jawline where his beard grew soft and thick. After he had walked away (never looking at me directly) I finished cleaning up, and then locked myself in the handicapped restroom and sobbed violently and inconsolably for about ten minutes.

When I emerged, I felt as fresh and clean as Colorado air after a hailstorm.

**

You may ask me: what the fook, C? He told you to fuck off and then went about poking someone else right under (or above) your nose, and you still feel this way about him?

That night in Bisetti’s kitchen, I told James that no matter how shittily the men in my life have behaved, in the end what stays with me are the wonderful things, and how much I loved them, whether it was for five years or five minutes.

I won’t keep the sick-to-my-stomach feeling. What I’ll keep are things like this: the raffishly saucy look in his eye as he bit a cluster of shrimp off of my proffered fork in Novara (my pizza had come with shrimp through a misunderstanding); the way he would say simply “quality,” with a grin, when something pleased or amused him; the night we watched Günter’s DVD of “Shaft” on my iBook in his room, and I wanted so badly to kiss him; the private universe we could be at a table full of people; and the soft-focus, almost melancholy look he had at Centro’s bar one of those last nights, when Robert played a torchy Tom Waits song for us from his laptop. So close he was, so close and yet so far away, my beautiful English so-called bastard. There is nothing/more than this…but to quote another Tom Waits tune, I’m gonna take it with me when I go.

**

People go to great lengths not to be here — that place of having relinquished everything you dreamed of for years for the sake of a greater value, of walking through the worst fear and pain you can imagine because you know you have to speak your truth. Trudging home through whirling snow the other night, I considered that if we can’t be personally courageous, and brave this nauseous, chilling, near-catatonic I’d-rather-die-than-feel-this terror and grief in our private lives, what will we do if the Nazis or the Fascists come again? Really? How do we learn to stand up in the face of grave fear and loss? Especially when it’s safer to mind our own business?

Here in the United States we live in a time and a culture of a sort of extreme libertarianism, where individual rights are paramount and responsibilities to one another are almost nil. I talked to a charming elderly man from Surrey, England on a plane a few years ago who was horrified to hear that while there was no limit to the wealth an individual American CEO could acquire, there was also no safety net available to a destitute person with cancer. That would never happen in his commie pinko socialist country.

Looking after people is a “feminine” value; sensing that we are part of a web rather than a dog-eat-dog hierarchy is often part of the experience of owning a womb (on which someone else may, in fact, depend). We have to be able to anticipate and interpret the needs of tiny, helpless creatures who can’t talk to us or tell us what’s wrong, so our empathic and subtle emotional capacities are turned up to eleven. We read others; we feel them; we feel for them. In an socially isolationist culture, this can expose us to tremendous scorn — instead of the respect we may more accurately deserve — because we’re seen as weak, hysterical, irrational, even crazy.

This time, I trusted my craziness.

**

The introjected Critic starts flogging me immediately, with help from his buddy The Rationalist, for following such a dubious compass. Together they make me the queen of self-second-guessing. It was they who bound and gagged me all the way through college, leaving me mute in a forgotten corner. Shut up, you stupid bitch! Who do you think you are? What do you think you know? Unless you have all the airtight evidence in your briefing file and a lineup of impeccable witnesses, you should keep your goddamn mouth shut. No one could possibly take your unscientific ravings seriously! You’re likely to get slapped with a hefty fee, or sued for libel.

I wept yesterday, gratefully, hearing personal-development guru Michael Skye say in an online audio recording that the emotionality of women is our greatest gift, that the depth of our pain in relationships indicates the depth to which we can love, and that this “gift” of ours is the source of our true beauty and power.

It makes perfect sense, then — assuming Michael is correct — why Damien Rice’s emotionally rich music would restore me to such a strong sense of self, and why I would have such a bastard of a time explaining this to a male reader.

(A momentary aside here: where are all the women out there? I’d really like to hear from you. Not that I’m ungrateful for the few vociferous gentlemen who want to engage, but sometimes things feel a little unbalanced.)

I’m supposed to remain “reasonable”…and nice. A nice, reasonable female, who isn’t too convinced of what’s what (certainly not by anything “irrational”), and doesn’t assert anything too strongly. It’s already hard enough for me to be firm about anything, even when dealing with my friend Natalie’s defiant teenager, who is constantly sneaking out, getting in trouble, and breaking promises to her mother. I’m always asking myself: how is it my place to judge anyone else’s behavior, or tell him or her what to do?

Yet I’ve always admired those bitch-goddesses of tough love in movies and books, who lay it all out for the protagonist, three-quarters of the way through, telling him just how it is, boyyy, so you better straighten up that sorry ass before it’s grass. You’re runnin out of foolin, as the Queen of Soul sang, and I ain’t lyin.

They remind me of Ms. Cribb.

**

Ms. Cribb was my volleyball coach and modern dance teacher in high school. She was a petite African-American whippet of a woman, lean and powerful at nearly fifty, and leagues sexier than any of us fresh-faced teenagers on the dance floor. I had never encountered anyone who so perfectly embodied the prototypical coach-as-caring-hardass. She made sure we all knew we were valued, but she drove us relentlessly, and when we screwed up everybody had to drop and give her ten (pushups). We wanted to do our best for her, to push beyond our known limits, to make mamma proud. Her ironclad certainty was like our anchor; she didn’t have a tentative or wavering bone in her body. We felt her love, and that love was tough.

Sometimes in life, the Ms. Cribbs are absolutely necessary. In sports, in parenting teens like Natalie’s, and in dealing with anyone lapsing into unconscious or destructive behavior, the “whatever floats your boat” response just doesn’t cut it. Not, at least, if you give a shit. And bear in mind that this is coming from someone who wriggled her way out from under an authoritarian religious structure. I don’t ordinarily welcome the imposition of external judges, or the presumptuousness of intervention.

But Jessie Cribb saw diamonds in us; she wasn’t going to let us get away with slumping through practice like big lumps of coal. That’s the essence of a good coach or teacher: to see students’ potential, to believe in them, and to kick their asses out of their familiar, dead-end ruts.

Most of us want, whether we know it or not, to be the best possible version of ourselves; the hero, as John Barth said, of our own life story. But when we’re acting less than heroic, we may need a Ms. Cribb.

**

It was outrageous, really, from the standpoint of reason, of social protocols and the dictates of politeness, and what typically passes for common sense, to do what I did, to say what I said to someone without direct provocation. But I felt the emotional reality of a situation in my bowels, rather than connecting all the dots in my brain — although some of the indications were there too. I knew what was what, the way a wolf or a bat knows what’s what, the way my mother knows (whether I want her to or not) when I’ve been crying. My intuitive pointillism coalesced into a coherent whole, and the picture was not a pretty one. I shivered with the awareness of an old, intransigent, endlessly painful motif, wounded by my investment in the scene, tired of paying the unrewarding cost of admission. I deserved better. Everyone deserved better. All at once, I grasped with sharp-edged clarity that I could step outside the frame. I could opt out of the picture, and in that freedom, I could say what I saw.

So I spoke my truth. I took an outrageous, offensive, chance-murdering stand. I dived on a grenade, giving up on life as I’d known it (or hoped it could be) and consigning myself to an indefinite purgatory of grief (and possibly being hated), for the sake of something more important and possibly more real. I stood up for traditionally “feminine” values like empathy, and universal values like respect for self and others. I stood up for myself, painfully yet irrevocably realizing that sometimes you have to choose. I stood up for women, with our “unreasonable,” relational, emotional natures. And lastly, I stood up for the best possible version of a lapsed hero. Trusting myself…no questions, and no apologies.

Please-won’t-you-like-me little AlienBaby went hardass bitch-goddess for once, and pulled a Ms. Cribb.

To be that tough, I had to summon all my resources, and I cried my way through it — breaking every personal rule I had ever held about maintaining bonds, like a sister finally kicking her crack-addicted brother out of the house. I thought about how at my old job I could have continued to ingratiate myself by telling the owner only what she wanted to hear, and being a good little girl, but it’s not always the best thing to tell people only what they want to hear. I had to tell myself things I didn’t want to hear, ultimately. What do you do when you see no self-respecting alternative? All of the above could describe, to a certain extent, the essence of what happened at the studio.

And the last thing I wanted to do was leave a place that was like home to me.

**

My life coach friend applauds these radical acts as progress, as the emergence of a more aware aspect of myself into the driver’s seat. He (like many others in the personal development field) has always insisted that life shows up for us differently when we show up for it differently. I do think I’ve done much to dislodge the massive boulder of undeserving that’s been sitting in the middle of my road…but I lack his confidence that it will make that huge of a difference, or that I have the wherewithal to live through my current, almost overwhelming fear and grief. Employers haven’t exactly been beating down my door in this nose-diving economy…and having surrendered my dearest, fiercest desires, living within the limbo of these solitary, bean-eating grey days, I have less of a sense of purpose now than I ever have. Where do I go now? What do I do? I can’t think forward; I can’t look back.

Chop wood, carry water.

**

No, I don’t want to go into what happened in more detail. You have the feeling of it, you have Ms. Cribb, let that be enough. I will say that if anyone starts quoting Stephen Stills at me right now, love the one you’re with and all that, I will have to virtually restrain myself from virtually punching said individual in the virtual nose. Now is not the time.

The only man-fantasy I’m willing to entertain at present (which is still far more likely to happen than anything else I’ve wanted lately) is of literally bumping into a certain Irish troubadour coming out of a downtown hotel. Oh my God, it’s you!

We start to chat — he is, as he appears in interviews, down-to-earth, warm, and unassuming — and it turns out he’s staying through tomorrow as a surprise solo act in one of our innumerable music festivals. So I bring him to that pub in Lower Downtown that has seventy-five beers on tap, even though I never touch the stuff, and I nurse a glass of wine as we talk for hours and hours about life and love and music and how much better Ireland is about taking care of people, and then we wind up going back to his hotel for a spontaneous, sensual evening of amicable international relations.

This scrappy, passionate leprechaun of a man makes love, not surprisingly, with the unsqueamish gusto of a horny lesbian, and is quite possibly the best I’ve ever had. We order room service in the morning and eat honeydew melon in bed, and I get to watch his gig in the afternoon from stageside…and on the plane later maybe he’ll pick up his guitar and start to write a song about a fading flower in a Western town, loved a man who was scattered all around. So at least for my troubles I gain a measure of immortality in the material world, like that sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, and I have an extraordinary memory and a singular story to tell my grand-nieces and nephews about a man who by then should be a legend, even if he’s not.

Like I’ve told you, I’ve got quite an imagination. But honestly, the only (other) guy I’d say yes to right now is a stormy little singer from County Kildare.

Well I could throw it out, and I could live without
And I could do it all for you
I could be true…

This has got to stop.

No doubt anyone with a distant, indifferent, or downright cruel mother will think that what I’m about to expound upon is a self-indulgent non-problem, and that I’m a horrible, ungrateful child. But those who grew up with mothers who behaved in an over-involved, invasive, controlling, or obsessive manner, all in the name of love, will know exactly what I’m talking about. And know exactly what Summers was yelling about. “Oh mother dear, please listen, and don’t DEVOUR me!”

Far on into life, the umbilical cord is still wrapped around our necks, and we’re suffocating.

**

Psychology that makes use of myths and archetypes, particularly Freudian and Jungian psychology, posits as one of its primary characters the dark counterpart of the loving, nurturing Good Mother: the devouring, engulfing annihilator of identity Jung called the “Terrible Mother.” Terrible not necessarily in the colloquial sense of “bad,” but powerful and demonic: a woman driven by fear, anger, and/or insatiable emotional hunger, seeking to overpower and bind her offspring to her forever.

How confusing for a child to be presented with both mothers at the same time. Love becomes confused with control and manipulation; independence and individuation become like a major insurrection. This is actually not too far afield of the characterization of God that Bible-believing Christians are required to worship. I am the personification of love, so it goes. If I love you, I must control you; if you separate from me, in your selfishness, I will pursue you and blot you out. The destruction is not literal in the case of the Mother (as it is with the Father-God), but more of a smothering of the separate self.

Boys are forced, in the process of becoming men, to separate more decisively from Mother than girls are, an initiation that can prove emotionally crippling and affect all of their later relationships…but girls often have what are called “merged attachments” with their mothers that aren’t exactly healthy, either. Mutual over-identification can result in a claustrophobic lack of boundaries and the snuffing of any conflicting differentiating thoughts or desires. (What gets snuffed, and stuffed, however, doesn’t go away — it just winds up in the pressure cooker of repression, slowly turning to rage that may one day blow the lid off.)

While sons may sacrifice relationship to become autonomous adults, daughters will sacrifice becoming autonomous adults to maintain relationship.

**

I’ve been experiencing bouts of rage, and falling into ancient feedback loops in my brain about the futility of trying to live my own life as an adult, ever since my mother joined Facebook and began hovering over my every move. Not only does it cramp my style and inhibit my self-expression, but I’ve been bombarded with messages inquiring about my cryptic status updates and making judgments about my subject matter. She writes on my wall and comments on my posted items. (My friends, in the meantime, fall silent, and the ones from whom I most want to hear say nothing for weeks.) She even downloaded a photo from my page, blew it up, and began obsessing about whether or not I was eating enough. (What doesn’t make sense is that it’s like pulling teeth to get the smallest financial assist from my parents, but she can waste hours and hours of a day fretting herself into a lather about my imaginary starvation.) She hasn’t said anything publicly humiliating, at least not yet. Most of her public comments sound like the quintessential supportive mother. And she does have those Good Mother qualities: when I was completely dependent and undifferentiated, she was completely loving and nurturing.

But she has become, in effect, my stalker.

There are several good reasons why I moved two thousand miles away from my family of origin. One was to stretch the apron strings to the breaking point, which worked, mostly, for a while, at least in terms of minimizing fresh incidents. But now, thanks to the miracle of the Internets, my mother can pick up where she left off twenty years ago, and virtually micromanage me to her heart’s content.

Could I have ignored her friend request?

**

When I was growing up, she would go through my notebooks. This is how she discovered a “dirty” story I had written in the fourth grade with my best friend Maria. That incident prompted the most humiliating lecture of my entire childhood, with my tight-lipped Puritan mother uttering innumerable uncomfortable euphemisms regarding the sacredness of holy matrimony. (Ever have one of those moments where you wished the ground would open up and swallow you whole?) Maria and Judy Blume were almost entirely responsible for my sexual education. If my mother had had her way, I probably would have believed babies grew from a seed in their mommy’s tummy until I was twenty-five and married to some poor God-fearing boy who would have to break the news to me in our post-nuptial motel room.

But I’ll come back to the subject of sex later. My mother’s snooping also enabled her to find the hidden bus ticket I’d bought during my senior year of high school to visit a prospective college a second time. She went into hysterics, as was her wont, thinking I was running away. (I had been planning on telling them at the last minute, with a friend waiting outside to take me to the station; it was the only way I thought I had a chance of pulling it off, in that household.) Ultimately my father decided to let me go, and in the end I wound up attending that college, but ever after I kept all my most personal notes and diaries with me at all times. I carted them to school with me every day, knowing that if I left them at home she would find them and read them.

**

She was always so full of fear, my mother. Maybe it comes naturally with the territory of parenthood, but in her case I believe it was excessive. It could only have been exacerbated by a terrifying belief system in which sinners have to fear falling into the hands of an angry God, and wayward children can wind up in the torturous pits of eternal fire. I took it in through my umbilical cord; I was nourished and weaned on the chemicals of perpetual anxiety. As a child, I was severely punished for going to the corner convenience store alone, and educated with Bible and religious stories about the unrepentant wickedness of the godless world. It’s a wonder I ever learned to go anywhere alone or try anything new. Peril, peril, peril was everywhere; Satan and his demons were hiding in the shrubbery. (Even today my mother is constantly forwarding those viral email alerts about home burglaries and identity thefts and people breaking into your car.)

Ironically, parental overprotectiveness couldn’t prevent me from being molested by a sixteen-year-old neighbor when I was eight. He didn’t do much of anything to me — he mainly wanted me to do something to him — but I never told my parents. For one thing, I didn’t even understand what had just happened, and for another, I didn’t have the language to describe it, thanks to their outstanding sex-ed program. (Parents take note: ignorance does not preserve innocence.)

I have to remind myself how afraid she is, when I get so angry with her…and when I find myself dominated by mostly imagined terrors myself. She seeks to control me when things feel out of control for her. I don’t want to continue that legacy.

**

But I promised we’d come back to the subject of sex, and here we are.

One morning at my grandmother’s house, having stayed overnight on the way to what would be my freshman orientation at my “secular” college (where I’d be on my own), my mother and I were seated at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee. During a lull in the conversation, my mother gazed at me with that solemn, prissy expression that took over the shape of her mouth on those rare occasions she felt compelled to speak about “private” matters, and said, apropos of nothing,“You know, no man will ever satisfy you.”

I just stared, then shrugged, quietly and utterly mortified. What she meant to imply, I’m sure, was that no mere human being could ever fulfill me the way Jesus — if I would just let him — could fulfill my petulant agnostic ass. But her pronouncement had the gravity of a malevolent old wives’ spell. (Later, I would mention this ominous utterance to my more sophisticated and thoroughly atheist best friend from high school, and she would burst out laughing and say, “That doesn’t speak very well of your dad, does it?!!”)

I had no idea then of the difficulties that awaited me. If I had, I would have concluded that I had definitely been cursed. What a damning statement for a mother to make to her sexually emerging daughter! I know it’s superstition to blame those words, and not genetics, for an appallingly (still) misunderstood condition I share with Alfred Kinsey’s wife (one which set him on the path of sex research almost ninety years ago), but a part of me still believes that she and her petty, jealous God were determined to ruin my secular, non-marital sex life. This was meddling of the highest order; even my meddling mother had outdone herself.

The question you probably have reading this is: if it’s genetics, did she suffer from the same painful condition? All I can answer is: it’s likely, although it’s unlikely I’ll ever ask her. (I’ll take a root canal over that conversation any day, thank you very much.) Childbirth could have forced a resolution, but I can’t imagine my mother discussing the problem with anyone, including her doctor (who wouldn’t have understood it anyway). The women in my family are martyrs, gritters of teeth, towel-biters. My ancestors, as the old joke goes, walked ten miles to school in knee-deep snow, and it was uphill both ways.

So her doomsaying may have been based in her own unhappy experience. (It was certainly clear growing up that my parents didn’t have an even remotely passionate relationship). All along, however, that same shred of me that maintains a shred of belief in her angry God felt as if this were some kind of punishment — or perhaps a not-quite-perfect answer to her overbearing prayers to preserve my premarital purity. Eventually I figured out what was wrong (one positive about the advent of the Internet) and how to overcome it without the help of the paleolithic medical establishment…but my pet myth will forever be Anderson’s fairy tale of the little mermaid who, in exchange for legs — and by extension everything between them, with which to love her human beloved — has to endure the sensation of walking on knives for the rest of her physical life. (I wonder if I will ever truly feel like a Real Live Girl, to steal from another children’s story, and not just a duct-taped broken doll cheating her way to legitimacy. A cruel joke on someone practically born chasing after boys — like the clubfooted girl who wants only to be a ballerina. Why would a man like Sonny want a broken doll when he could have his pick of Real Live Girls?) This irrational sense of divine persecution still adds to my self-destructive despair during my more suicidal moments.

I would come back for visits during college and find pamphlets like “The Hound of Heaven” on my nightstand, the message of which was that God would hunt you down, like a tireless bloodhound, no matter what you did. The narrow, exclusive, punitive God she believed in, that is. You could run, but you could never escape.

My invasive, fearful, controlling parent wanted nothing so much as for me to believe in her invasive, fearsome, controlling deity…with Whose help she would seem to have successfully sabotaged my budding sexuality. Is it any wonder my shaky twenty-three-year-old self had to get as far away from her as possible? I broke and ran. The Good Daughter sacrificed relationship for the sake of self-preservation.

Unfortunately, I had internalized them both.

**

“And every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end,” Andy moans, his voice cracking with despair. My fear isn’t of dating my mother, it’s of becoming her. I have a horror of driving away the hapless objects of my affections with that same hungry, devouring, engulfing energy, that fearfulness that becomes controlling, the I-love-you that becomes I-annihilate-you. Psychologically speaking, coming from where I come from, I honestly don’t understand how any man could want to have sexual relations with a woman. How could she not remind him of the terrible Mother-Destroyer who could swallow him up forever in her ravenous maw? (Perhaps you gentlemen can enlighten me.)

I wonder sometimes, too, if my exercises in supernatural communication and “manifestation” aren’t as unwelcome, unfair, and controlling a psychic invasion as my mother’s fervent prayers and intentions for her Prodigal child’s return. Or as unnerving as when she tells me she had a sense that I was crying, shortly after one of my dark nights of the soul. I shudder; it’s like having her reading my notebooks again. Even on the spiritual plane, it seems I can’t escape her omnipresent tentacles.

I realize, in my more lucid moments, that she’s simply driven by a natural desire for love and connection, gone dysfunctional and somewhat mad with unaddressed need. And perhaps the unique position of mother as germinator and source instills a built-in sense of ownership and entitlement: I made you, therefore you are mine. Her God, after all, created us to alleviate his own boredom.

But I once joked with a friend that my romantic tendency is to respond to a snowball with an avalanche, overwhelming constitutionally wary males of the species with a glut of sudden emotion. I become fearful; I obsess; I’m jealous. Not unlike my mother and her humanly insecure God. I have my own stalker tendencies, and have been known to Google like a private investigator. I’m not proud of this. It’s constant work, unpacking my own fears, owning my own projections, asking myself why I need to live through someone else. As I said, I understand that we seek to control others when things feel frighteningly out of control for us, and I don’t want to continue that legacy.

But I have no road map for the alternative. I wonder these days if I err too much on the side of caution, reining myself in when I should act. Then again, perhaps action would be just another symptom of my twisted Mother pathology…pursuing at all costs, when the other just wants to be let be. I sincerely don’t know.

What I do know is that the person I most want to hear from doesn’t communicate with me on Facebook (or elsewhere) anymore, while my mother has practically hijacked my homepage. It’s like a virtual drama by a millennial Jean-Paul Sartre, a No Exit of social networking. Hell as your worst online nightmare.

Having written this post to exorcise intolerable feelings and restore my own sanity, I can see the humor in it. It’s actually quite hilarious. As is that insane Police song. A recent visitor to this blog was convinced I was writing a tragicomic novel…and maybe that’s what my life is. My very own Confederacy of Dunces. Or maybe a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman.

I open the floor to you, friends: what should I call it? Mamma Mia is taken.

The first is a regular column with a nationally-based Web site that provides news, entertainment, and opinion articles specific to particular cities. It pays based on numbers of hits per page (which, in my city, isn’t much yet). The second is an informal contract job helping my Kundalini teacher rewrite the copy on his Web site — for pay. The last, which is only in the talking stages right now, is a blogging position with a popular local online magazine that probably won’t pay me a dime but would look great on a resume.

All of this transpired in less than a week.

**

Give me a sign, I had begged, just days before, of The Universe or The Gods or Whoever might be listening. Or as Tracy Chapman once put it, Give me one reason to stay here.

As you know, I recently lost my job. And with it, my spiritual home, my cherished community. I don’t own a house. I don’t have a family of my own. I’m not in a relationship. I love someone, but we’re not together, and may never be. Even my beloved little vintage Volkswagen has given up the ghost. I have friends here…but I have friends all over the United States.

I found myself wondering if all of this were itself an indication that I should take my ball and go home — wherever home is. Maybe I’d need to find a new one. Or fly to places unknown.

**

“You should come!” my beautiful Indian girlfriend Samira had said.

She and her bite-sized boyfriend Ken were preparing to embark upon a series of globetrotting travels of indefinite duration: first to India, then Indonesia and Thailand and Vietnam and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Nepal — not necessarily in that order. When she told me they were leaving, I cried. I love them both so much; I love being with them; traveling abroad with them would undoubtedly be a delight, even it meant being a bit of a third wheel.

After Samira made the suggestion, I found myself thinking about it in my most desperate moments — much like I entertain thoughts of suicide — as another way of leaving behind everything I’ve cared about for so long. Rushing headlong into the unknown, as it were.

Paying for such a splurge with next to no money would, after all, necessarily require maxing out credit cards I’d have no hope of ever paying off. Then I really would have to kill myself.

**

I’ve lived vicariously through Samira and Ken, through their obstacle-ridden but ultimately triumphant love story. It was only nine months ago that I was sharing a picnic with Samira in the park and listening to her fatalistic pronouncements about her feelings for Ken. “I don’t know why I even think about it,” she was sighing. “It’s never going to happen.”

She had met Ken in a teacher training, while attempting to struggle her way through an unhappy arranged marriage. Their friendship, and her growing attraction to her new friend, only increased her internal conflict. Now, a year later, she was going through a bitter divorce. Ken still had no inkling of her true feelings. Knowing Ken the way I did, I strongly suspected that he’d be over the moon to discover that this gorgeous creature was even thinking about him. But Samira wouldn’t believe it for a minute. Her “sensible” voice, the voice of self-preservation (informed by damaged self-esteem), kept arguing that he couldn’t possibly be interested in her. Ever the incorrigible romantic, I kept urging her to spend more time with him.

When they finally kissed, one night after sharing some wine, and Samira told me about it the next day, I literally jumped up and down.

Their love has only grown since. They’ve traveled and taught classes together and visited each others’ families in other states. Their happiness has been my happiness. And yet Samira almost talked herself out of the whole thing with her voice of so-called “reason.” So I have to take some credit, for always being such a damned fool.

**

The fantasy of taking off with these two felt to me like the second-choice Make-A-Wish of a terminally ill woman. People grieving major losses in life have been known to make similarly impetuous and haphazard leaps. It’s how I wound up out here in the first place. (And found myself depressed, lonely, and bored for a long time after, so I don’t believe a change of scenery is necessarily the magic cure.)

But the question persisted: should I leave? Move back East? Move further West? Is there anything left for me here? Whether I stayed or went, it seemed I risked missing something. Whether I stayed or went, I would still be dying little by little every day.

So I asked for some indication that I was in the right place. Here, now.

**

I look at my page on the Web site, and the feeling is indescribable. There’s my face, there’s my title, those are my words. Suddenly I have a public media presence. Suddenly, to the world outside, I’m somebody. I may not be Arianna Huffington, or the late Molly Ivins — not yet, anyway! — but I’m out there. And now two other people right here in the area are interested in making use of my gifts.

My high school obsession Damien Moreau wrote for Slate magazine years ago, and co-authored an award-winning screenplay. I always envied that ability to successfully make an impact, and a name for oneself, in the world; much of my overwhelming desire for Damien may have actually been envy. Seeing him acting on the stage in high school, and in independent films years later, I felt an ineffable yearning, like that of a groupie with pretensions to playing lead guitar. For centuries women denied professions did have to live through their men, so this confusion of desire and envy is probably nothing unique.

My own mother never particularly modeled or encouraged feminine achievement, and from my earliest years I felt instinctively that my accomplishments were less important to everyone than my brother’s. Men were the true masters of the world; I could only be elevated by association.

Jung was one of the first to point out how we seek out in others the missing or disowned parts of ourselves…when what we need to do, for the sake of wholeness, is to own our own capacities  — our own inner masters of the world.

**

An odd thing is happening. For the first time in a long time, I can look at the world without the dark filter of unworthiness and insecurity that has been coloring my every perception. My unspoken mantra for the past few months has been I’m not good enough, and much of how I’ve interpreted what has or hasn’t happened to me has supported that hypothesis. Naturally.

That mantra places you in a space of fear, a space of extreme neediness, where your very right to be alive can be challenged by how others react to you. I‘ve become extremely sensitive to what I perceive as my status as a community pariah; people who were once a large part of my life seem to have backed away, as if I suddenly contracted the Ebola virus by leaving the studio. Lord only knows what they’re thinking. (I will say that I used to believe that everyone who left there the way I did must have done something absolutely awful; the pure-intentioned, divinely inspired owner could do no wrong. Now I realize that those conclusions were most likely unjust…as unjust as the accusations that I was “negative” or “toxic.”)

A beautiful young man I dearly loved confessed to me once that he was close to suicide over the conviction that his ex-girlfriend’s circle of friends was gossiping cruelly about him. He was confused at the time about his sexual orientation, and for him, their damning judgments (or what he perceived to be their damning judgments) seemed an accurate assessment of his fitness to live. My emphatic insistence that he was a worthy and wonderful being fell on deaf ears. Obviously I didn’t know what I was talking about. He was fatally flawed, not good enough.

That mantra, that assumption, has also informed my reactions regarding a certain gentleman’s doings (and not-doings). In that space of unworthiness, everything is personal, and rife with evidence of my unworthiness (and inferiority, compared to other women). In that space of unworthiness, I’m desperate for him to validate me. Pretty soon, that’s all I know, and all I can feel. And that kind of dreadful anxiety leads in the exact opposite direction from any kind of love.

Without that dark filter, I can see myself as deserving…talented…even amazing. Without that dark filter, suddenly I feel like he’s missing out. How much better would Sonny’s life be with me in it? How is he, anyway? Is he okay? Maybe he’s having a hard time himself. Maybe he’s listening to the Smiths because he’s feeling as bad as I do when I listen to the Smiths.

When he’s not master of the world — or of me — he becomes human-sized again. He becomes my warm-eyed, affable friend in scuffed cowboy boots who has no more of a clue than any of the rest of us. (He’d be the first to tell you he has no more of a clue than any of the rest of us.) It’s not his job to validate me. It’s not my job to validate him. But I do remember why I love him.

**

Everything looks different when the proportions change. It’s as if we’ve been little children, looking up at others as the giants grownups seem to be when we’re knee-high. As toddlers, we really do live at the mercy and the whims of the giants. As adults, perhaps the most important thing we can remind ourselves is that there are no giants anymore.

Coming off the preschool autopilot, all of a sudden you’ve got to be a grownup and take some responsibility for yourself. I’ve said before, in not so many words, that I’m frequently a chickenshit when confronted with an honest-to-goodness opportunity. Hopefully writing this regular column will be the beginning of the end of some of that, career-wise…but as far as my gentleman friend goes — if he is, in fact, nervous, I’m petrified. Let’s not forget who couldn’t answer the damn phone.

If we did somehow manage to meet, it’s quite possible, based on past experience, that we could wind up at my place, or his, and if we wound up at my place, or his, it’s quite possible, based on past experience, that we’d be having more than tea (knock wood, no pun intended)…but what then? Honestly, we’re both like a couple of wild animals skittish about nets. I can’t project all of my historic ambivalence onto him, however convenient that may be. I should know by now that it’s not his job to carry everything I won’t own.

Way back when, I turned him onto Hesse’s classic about a wandering artist who makes love to every woman he meets and never settles down, and he loved it. I knew he would; I did. There’s something expansive and exhilirating about that total freedom, access to the endless variety of beauty, rapturous intimacy without routine or risk. (Don’t think that such scenarios appeal only to men, even if they’re more likely to act them out.) At the end of the day, Sonny and I are both just a couple of gregarious, warmhearted, lovable, imaginative, curious, restless, moody, passionate, sensual, ambivalent commitment-phobes. I told you he was my soul brother!!!

Dear God, I do love that man. Regardless of how fucked up either of us may be, at least in this lifetime. So sue me. Maybe we’ll get it right in 2095.

**

“Keep writing,” my coach friend advises when I ask him what I should do. I share with Samira and Ken what’s been happening, and Samira says that it sounds like things are starting to “come into alignment” for me.

I still wake up in the morning nervous that I have no real income (people keep asking me “Did you find a job yet???”), still feeling the wordless longing I’ve had for as long as I can remember. It’s hard not to reach for the usual strategies — poring over not-even-vaguely-intriguing listings of hateful-but-necessary jobs, and attaching to palliative fantasies about rolling around deliriously happily ever after in bed with my yummy but MIA kindred spirit. Having nothing but time, without the usual distractions of a job and a social hive, really does force you to confront yourself, much like a silent retreat at a monastery does. You realize how much you project into the future, hoping for something exciting or gratifying, or dwell on the past, remembering something exciting or gratifying. Anything not to feel your present discomfort! Linda, my coworker at the studio, used to say she would go crazy if she weren’t busy all the time. I think most of us prefer to be occupied like that.

Unease aside, perhaps this is a time to trust and relax, despite my skeptic’s inclination to think I have to earn every possible desired gain by the sweat of my brow (and even then, often not). Because, frankly, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that I’m doing what I love, what I do best, and finally getting some recognition for it. I’ve read literally hundreds of testimonies from people for whom things began to turn around once they started moving in the direction of their true talents. Why not for me? Stranger things have happened.

As for that other matter…who knows. Would either of us carrot-chasers ever want to belong to a club that would have us as a member?

What do you say, Sonny? We could book ourselves in at the Y…WCA…

I like it here, can I stay…and do you have a vacancy for a back-scrubber?

The Birth of Pleasure brings to light the experience of young boys and adolescent girls who, in adapting to the rigid and rationalistic framework of patriarchy, are effectively silenced about what they “see, feel and know” through those supposedly more “feminine” capacities of intuition, empathy, and emotional attunement. When I first read the book, I wept; it was like reading the history of my struggle with my father, many, many men, and in some ways the whole world.

So much of what I perceive filters in through these unofficial channels, unsupported by fact, “indefensible.” Confronted with my Harvard-educated, emotionally disconnected father’s capital-K Knowing, I frequently came off as weak, foolish, or hopelessly fanciful; my information was illegitimate, received through a faulty and “irrational” navigational system that often contradicted the Official Story. To compensate, I strove to become a master of the rational, strove to become legitimate, even going so far as to get a degree in philosophy at a school populated and run by more atheistic versions of my father. I tried very hard to belong there, but it always felt as if I were…well, an alien, forced to communicate in a dry, poetry-free language that didn’t even admit concepts central to my experience.

Something in me always resisted, however, always felt there was a baby in the scornfully discarded bathwater.

**

Carol Gilligan weaves her stories of couples in therapy and children in the classroom together with the ancient myth of Psyche and Cupid. It’s a tale that comes very close to tragedy, with a heroine who has to make her way through confusion, fear, the fear-based stories of others, abandonment, suicidal impulses, and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. She is beaten by Venus’s handmaidens, Sadness, Habit, and Trouble, until she is unable to speak. All because she refuses to adhere to a role others have chosen for her, and because she insists on seeing Cupid in the light. (I don’t think it’s such a stretch to say that this is what can happen to women within patriarchal culture who violate the rules by trusting themselves and saying what they see, feel, and know.) Seeing Cupid is what is not allowed; he leaves her crying in the dust when she violates his rule and lights the lamp to look at him.

The author introduces us to Eileen, a client in her private practice who feels crazy for picking up on an intensity of feeling between herself and the husband who is thinking of separating from her. Initially she says “He’s no more right than I am about it…it’s his reality, and then my reality.” Gilligan, asking further questions that aim to access Eileen’s non-rational knowing regarding the situation, concludes “If he is saying that your relationship lacks intensity and intimacy and you are picking up the vibes of fire and chemistry between you, then it’s not his reality and your reality, but reality and not-reality.” Eileen sits up and becomes animated; she proceeds to voice her feeling that the opposite of what her husband is saying is true. The intensity is precisely why he is withdrawing from her.

“I don’t know how to talk about this kind of knowing,” says Gilligan, “since it so readily seems suspect. It is the way animals know. Through vibrations. Something that passes between people. We pore over novels and poems because this is what writers put into words. Truths that have until recently escaped the nets put out by science.” A recent article in Salon by Laura Miller (about C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, of all things) actually touched upon this same phenomenon by comparing the world of pre-verbal infants and toddlers with that of our animal friends.

**

It’s frankly heartbreaking to read Gilligan’s accounts of four-year-old boys — who have not yet been initiated into the stoic silences of traditional masculinity — and their vociferous intimacy with their preschool friends and their parents. They say things to their mothers like “Mommy, you have a happy voice, but I also hear a little worried voice.” They are tremendously tuned in emotionally, contrary to the popular belief about boys’ obtuseness. They like to talk about their “buddies” with their daddies, and the fathers, in a particularly poignant passage in the book, worry about what will happen to their sons’ “spunk” and their “sensitive side.” They seem to be at a loss as to what to do; their sons bring up in them the uncomfortable memory of their own dissociation, their own tragic narrative.

Adolescent girls, at least, have the advantage of having acquired greater language skills; they are better able to speak about and remember having to choose between being in relationship (being their authentic selves) and having relationships (fitting an image of womanhood that won’t challenge the status quo). “If I were to say what I was feeling and thinking,” says seventeen-year-old Iris, “no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud. But you have to have relationships.” And as thirteen-year-old Tracy puts it, “When we were nine, we were stupid…we were honest.”

This developmental difference is perhaps why the greater burden of speaking about these unspeakable things, of restoring love, authentic connection, and the lost pieces of our humanness, falls upon women — much as Rilke predicted it would in his Letters to a Young Poet:

This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it…This advance…will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman.

Over and over again Gilligan hears from women how insane and out of touch they feel when they are abruptly dropped like a hot potato, following what they felt as shared joy, connection, and chemistry with a man. “While she may have seemed crazy or pathetic,” Gilligan says of one client, “like Psyche holding on to Cupid, in danger of losing herself, she was holding onto a core sense of self, her ability to register her experience.” Equally distressing as the loss of love itself is the self-doubt it engenders, the fear that one’s inner compass is hopelessly broken. “It’s a fight,” says Eileen, “at the foundation, in the arenas that are most important to me, my relationships with other people…how I read people and how I read where we are in terms of intimacy. I value that more than anything…to fight there, I mean, it’s fighting for your life.”

For the men’s part, as Gilligan writes in a section about the Michael Ondaatje novel The English Patient — whose protagonist is quite literally a man burned beyond recognition — “The pattern of men turning away from love, leaving without saying a word, suggests that they have already been burned. It is a history that bears the hallmarks of trauma: a heightened vigilance, a loss of voice, the inability to tell one’s story.”

**

Sitting at the dinner table adjacent to my father, I often felt a profound and nameless frustration that ended in despair. I know now that it was precisely my own loss of voice, my inability to tell my own story, that sank me into many hopeless and resentful silences. I would probably have never have worked so hard on my writing if I had felt in any way understood and honored by this all-important man. Later I would feel crazy, shamed, and devastated when, time and again, men would either cut me off completely or tell me my reading of their feelings was flat-out wrong. That is not what I meant at all, as the T.S. Eliot poem goes, that is not it, at all…

This is probably why Max Vujevic’s undeniably thunderous heartbeat (mentioned in my last post) was so validating. The body, at least, doesn’t lie. Although I’ve actually been told an erection was nothing personal. No, the violence with which Max pushed me away matched the violence with which he embraced me. There was definitely more going on there than I’ll ever fully know. But something was clearly going on.

In recent weeks I’ve found myself lapsing into crestfallen silence at the table of a surrogate father figure, and struggling once more to translate my experience into the foreign language of my Dead White Men’s college with a former classmate. Like Psyche allowed a visit with her sisters, I’ve listened to another woman’s fearful story about reality that challenged my self-trust, and I’ve wondered about my own sanity, reviewing my experiences of being left crying in the dust. The feelings aroused are the same frustration and despair the young girl sitting beside her father experienced thirty years ago, that mute hopeless surrender to a louder and more powerful voice.

**

How does the story end? You may ask. What happens to Psyche? After completing several seemingly impossible labors with the intervention of a helpful natural world, she is required by Venus (the goddess of love) to travel to Hades, and to ask a favor of Persephone, queen of the underworld. Like the heroes of patriarchal civilization, Odysseus and Aeneas, she has to find the courage to make her way through the land of the dead while alive. Existential psychotherapist and Renaissance man Rollo May once wrote in The Cry for Myth that one has to go through hell to get to heaven, and this is no less true for Psyche. It’s only after she has completed this tricky journey (and nearly been killed by her own curiosity) that Cupid returns to her. Granted immortality by Jupiter, Psyche gives birth to a daughter named Pleasure.

I have to admit, it’s kind of nice to read about a Hero’s Journey for chicks.

What I suppose I take from all that is this: Keep walking through fear. Do the thing, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, that you think you cannot do. If you refuse to be silenced and defeated, the forces of nature will find gentle ways to support you.

**

Gilligan begins her book with the image of water, likening it to love. It is the softest thing in the world, but it can wear through stone. Vulnerability, in a world built on power politics and competition, is viewed as a fatal weakness; emotional sensitivity is a liability. Yet we can see every day where the paradigm of power politics, the values of a patriarchal culture, have left us. It may be that the transformation of the world begins with women — and men — who dare to recover their lost voices, the voices of those tuned-in girls and boys who knew instinctively how to read the vibrations of interrelatedness, how to be authentic in relationship, how to love.

The first time I ever read that line it made me choke back tears.

I came across it again the other day, and it hit even harder, thanks to the seed of self-doubt a friend of a friend had sown in me with an offhand but devastating comment.
**

In hindsight, what he said was probably as insulting a thing as you can say to a member of the opposite sex, short of ridiculing their physical characteristics.

Some background: François is an artist and hairstylist who blows into town occasionally; he used to be involved with my friend Natalie, and they’re still friends. He will typically stay with her and do her friends’ hair for a small fee. François is unusual, to put it mildly. He has a fondness for black vinyl, hair extensions, and makeup reminiscent of ancient Egypt. His father was Moroccan and his mother was a French model. He has traveled and lived like a gypsy, and seems to revel in looking and being exotic.

So there I am at Natalie’s with François, and they’re talking about the ongoing dramas of Natalie’s love life. Then François turns his keen gaze on me. “So what about you?” he presses. “Anything going on?” François has done my hair before, but I’ve always managed to steer him clear and afar of such topics.

“N-Nothing at the moment,” I stammer, caught off guard.

He then observes that I usually have nothing to say regarding these matters, which is true, and concludes, “I think you must be asexual or something.” He goes on about how he and Natalie are the kind of people who have to have it all the time, et cetera, blah blah blah, only I’m not really listening now because I’m reeling like someone who has just had her injured foot stomped upon repeatedly. After the kind of ordeals a gal like me has gone through just to reach home plate (see my migraine post), this is not what I want to have said about me by anyone, including a guy who deliberately looks like he just fell off the circus caravan.

Only later do I realize not only just how rude his comment was (French bluntness?), but perhaps how effective my powers of deflection have become after twenty-five years of careful practice.

By deflection, I mean that I put up, consciously, a sort of energetic wall as soon as I met François. Not an interpersonal wall (I’ve been exceedingly friendly and forthcoming otherwise) but a specifically sexual one. I may have projected those boundaries so convincingly that he concluded there was “no there there.” I suspect that women reading this will know what I’m talking about.

**
You see, those of us who live in even an semi-urban environment discover by the age of fifteen or so that once we go out on the street, we become objects for public commentary and assessment. And I don’t mean just leers and catcalls, but also evaluations of our weight, age, and other perceived shortcomings. (The book Passing By catalogued this phenomenon very well; I’m sure there are others.) Every city-dweller with a va-jay-jay has experienced this to some extent. So far, most of the attention I’ve received in my lifetime has been “positive” — if by “positive” you mean I-hope-I-don’t-get-followed-by-this-guy-and-raped-in-an-alley. Because that’s what we women all fear, when some strange character starts shit-talking us on the sidewalk. It’s the flip side of trying to make ourselves as attractive as possible to you guys; every unhinged and unwashed lurker out there takes it as a personal invitation. One of the gifts of age may be the ebbing of these kinds of attentions. (Sadly, I fear the wanted ones will be among its losses.)

I’ve lived alone in urban areas for half my life, and I learned early on that if I wanted to go anywhere and do anything at all, unescorted, I would have to develop and project a very strong shield. So I did. I learned to navigate that thin line dividing personable (friendly, giving directions and spare change) and available (open, engaging in further conversation). It also turned out to be a valuable skill when deflecting any kind of unwelcome attention, at clubs or coffeehouses or in dealing with customers at work — as well as when confronted by over-the-top characters like François, who look like they want to bowl women over, visually or otherwise. Unsure whether or not he might be some vaguely devious or manipulative “sorcerer of seduction” like the infamous (and equally eyelinered) Mystery, I wasn’t about to let that highly cultivated guard of mine down. I still chattered away in his chair like a chickadee, and we had a pretty good time covering a variety of subjects, but my invisible boundary held firm. (I now know that he means no harm and is essentially trustworthy, but I still have no desire to go there.)

His pronouncement, I guess, could be taken as a confirmation of my mastery at this skill. Still, it made me wonder for a minute if that’s truly how others see me, and how it is that I could be perceived in a way so contrary to my core being. Such a bind to be in, as a female! Self-protection means self-misrepresentation. (I know this is no less true for males, of course, in a wholly different way; you guys learn by the third grade to guard against coming off as a “pussy” and to adhere to confusing unwritten and arbitrary rules about what it means to “man up” in a brutally hierarchical world. But that’s fodder for a whole other post.)

I do let the wall completely down in some contexts, even with strangers, like when getting a massage. In contrast to the aforementioned experience, one male massage therapist who gave me a hot stone massage threw all protocol and professionalism to the wind and asked me to dinner afterwards. (I went, but insisted on going dutch.) At least this experience seems to provide objective evidence that I’m not somehow energetically frigid! Perhaps the opposite. (I could tell that this guy was really getting into it while I was on the table, but I thought he just loved his work.) So there, François.

But he was completely right that I don’t talk much. I’m as tight-lipped as David Fisher before he came out of the closet. I protect what’s in my heart, because there are always too many people who want me to succeed at a life other than my own. Always. Much like concerned parents might want their child to be an affluent lawyer in an established practice rather than a precariously funded artist with no health insurance.

Nevertheless I really would rather fail at my own life than succeed at someone else’s.

**

Sitting on a picnic table in my city’s “gay” park the other day, where the cruisers cruise the loop with house music blasting, I watched male couples walking their small barky dogs through drifts of orange leaves. This comforted me indescribably. I’ve always felt a sort of soul-affinity for gays and lesbians, perennially forced to endure, as they have been, a massive collective misunderstanding of who they are and how they love. My childhood friend Garth was told by his gentle Christian parents that they would pay for him to go to one of those special “conversion” counselors who could “fix” him. He politely declined. The choice to listen to yourself rather than the chorus of opinions around you is not an easy one, especially when they’re telling you that there’s something wrong with you, that you can’t be trusted — so trust them! Live the way they want, do as they do, and everything will work out just fine. (Only, maybe, when you actually look at what they’re doing, at their own lives…you start to see that they may not be the best judges after all.)

No doubt many other women would chide me for the ostensibly “golden opportunities” I’ve let pass, if I were to talk about them. It’s not like they don’t happen. Just last week I was chatted up pointedly and at length by an occasional visitor to our studio who prompts female staff and students alike to whisper to me “Who’s that???” I realized mid-conversation that there was not even a spark of amorous interest in me toward this very pleasant and conventionally good-looking young man five to ten years my junior. That’s the gospel truth. And I’m not of the school that says you can readily manufacture such things out of sheer willpower or wishful thinking (although at times I’ve tried). The quality of beauty that moves me to the root of my being isn’t found in the proportional alignment of features or even in the geometrics of a perfectly developed torso. It’s that lamp that burns inside some men, like Kerouac’s famed roman candles, and imbues their entire presence with a subtle lambency. You can literally see that the harsh process of socialization and domestication hasn’t succeeded in snuffing the spirited, curious, radiant beings they were as children.

But this is a right-brained observation, and most of our Western dialogue about matters of the heart comes from the left. (Forgive me, I’ve been reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s new book about her stroke; maybe I’ll write more on it next week.) This may be the only area of my life where I come from the other hemisphere. Popular gurus like John Gray are big on lists, steps, evaluations, and strategies to help you protect your vulnerability and winnow out the chaff in order to get your needs met; the lesser known John Welwood, whom I prefer, says things like

As earthly creatures continually subject to relative disappointment, pain, and loss, we cannot avoid feeling vulnerable. Yet as an open channel through which great love enters this world, the human heart remains invincible. Being wholly and genuinely human means standing firmly planted in both dimensions, celebrating that we are both vulnerable and indestructible at the same time. Here at this crossroads where yes and no, limitless love and human limitation, intersect, we discover the essential human calling: progressively unveiling the sun in our heart, that it may embrace the whole of ourselves and the whole of creation within the sphere of its radiant warmth.

I remember having an “aha” moment with my Buddhist counselor years ago, observing “Everyone equates relationship with love. But relationship isn’t necessarily love, and love isn’t necessarily relationship.”

I thought I was here on the planet for relationship, from the time I chased my cousin Nate around the coffee table at two years old through all the times I heard the erroneous prediction from men “You’ll find someone else,” but lately I’m more inclined to think I came here to grow in my capacity for unconditional love.

**

When responding to others from the expansive (or right brain) side of ourselves results in disappointment or difficulty or pain, our usual solution is to let the left brain take over and do damage control, criticizing us all the way for being a moron and brainstorming ways to avoid this in the future. But what if we trusted the legitimacy of our initial spontaneous overflow and kept ourselves open? What if we refused to talk ourselves out of that place of generosity and openness when things didn’t go the way we wanted?

Oftentimes what I’ve wound up colliding with are my own oldest wounds and other obstacles that have caused me to view others through the prism of unfinished business and unmet needs. (Byron Katie’s Four Questions are a great tool for unpacking such unconscious projections.) Sometimes all I’m left with in the end is that radiant warmth, that deep, breathless, astonished appreciation, that fierce ache in the ribs for the greatest possible good — of the other. Completely independently of me and my own preferences. Unconditional. (And thus far, each and every one has continued on independently of me and my own preferences. But then again, we all do that eventually, don’t we?)

Since I left the born-agains, I’ve found no other spiritual practice (including yoga) that likewise orients me in the world — but perhaps this is my spiritual practice.

In light of all of this, my soul may not be a failure at its own life, after all. It may look like it, by left-brained standards, in lacking a safe haven of publicly acknowledged reciprocity blessed by regular sexual contact and a recognizable definition. And as a limited and destructible human being, I do miss that comfort. I miss having certain needs met (by someone other than myself). I get lonely. I get tired. I yearn for communion, as we all do, as Rumi and Hafiz have expressed so beautifully in their poetry. I feel like a freak, and then I’m susceptible to being hurt by comments like the one made by François.

But ever since walking out on church, I made a commitment to my own soul. I go where it leads me, and not where other people think I should go. One thing it’s shown me is that love isn’t “out there,” it’s in here. When I transcend my injuries, my fears, and my incessantly scheming left brain, it can, on occasion, fill me up from the inside out.

Someday I may be so evolved that it won’t be just specific individuals who inspire it.

I’m not there yet, however.

It seemed apropos, after all, on a warm spring day, when everything is budding and filling the air with strange nectars, and all of nature is participating in its most lascivious display of fecundity, to talk about both the Feminine and appetite. Not to mention that the authors of these books have made me feel somewhat less crazy (see Being an Alien, Baby) by assuring me “It’s not you, it’s the rest of the culture!”

Like Caroline Knapp, I’ve always been unhappy with the shape of my body (getting the ubiquitous message since before puberty that only the wasp-waisted deserve to be desired), but unlike her, love food too much to have ever been able to exist on one bagel or one yogurt a day. Like Carol Gilligan’s subjects, I know what it is to be shamed (within and without my family) for having inordinate or inappropriate feelings and desires, and to be effectively silenced by the alternate, less “emotional” version of interpersonal interaction given by some of the (straight) men in my life. Often I have found myself wondering if it might be necessary to kill off everything that feels alive in me simply to be able to exist successfully in the world.

So here’s a book review for all us crazy bitches.

…

Let Her Be Filled:

Two books on women that begin to untangle “this knotted place in our souls”

Reading Freud’s famous analysis of Dora in college, many of my fellow students and I found it disturbing how little the good doctor appeared to actually listen to his “hysterical” young patient. For a man who asked the famous question “What do women want?” he seemed all too keen on replacing her words with his own.

The late Caroline Knapp, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Drinking: A Love Story, undertakes the illumination of the shadowy territory that is women’s desire in her introspective final book, Appetites: Why Women Want. With her elegiac prose, Knapp describes her own struggles with anorexia and alcoholism, and addresses the root issues of hunger, privation, and control.

“I’m so hungry,” she explains with the despairing logic of the anorexic, “I will never be fed.” Unlike the robust bathing goddesses of Renoir, whose images open the book, women in contemporary Western culture who exhibit too much appetite risk being seen as bad, out of control, gluttonous. She notes that every women’s magazine invariably boasts an article about becoming or staying thin, and how to please a man in bed — but what is this silence, she wonders, about what pleases oneself?

It is the swallowed and stifled longings and cravings of women driven underground, she asserts, that manifest themselves as these self-destructive compulsions.

So what do these out-of-control women crave? Knapp’s speculations are so simple as to seem deceptive: only what other human beings crave. Joy, beauty, self-determination, love — the pleasures of being and feeling fully alive.

If only Knapp had lived to see the publication of Carol Gilligan’s controversial new book, The Birth of Pleasure. Gilligan, best known for her women’s studies classic, In a Different Voice, expands her research on women and “voice” to explore how women’s loss of voice in adolescence facilitates the suffocation of authentic love relationships. The cultural mandates of hierarchical, patriarchal “reality,” she theorizes, which separate the mind from the body, and valid knowing from emotion, require dissociation from and denial of the reality of felt connections and intuitive knowledge — the stuff of love. The author finds the same refreshing honesty in preschool boys (who are still on the cusp of initiation into the enforced silences of traditional masculinity) as she does in preadolescent girls, who do not hesitate to say what they see, feel, and know.

Using the myth of Psyche and Cupid, Gilligan draws a map through the wilderness of standard tragic narratives, where love’s voice is denied and silenced, to a possible alternate destination where a child — a daughter named Pleasure — may be born. Like the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Freud and his ideological opposite, Gilligan envisions love as the setting for revolution, and women as its incendiaries.

Both of these beautifully written and thought-provoking books provide today’s embattled women with much-needed understanding and comfort, but they also present a challenge: to be not only the barometers of an ailing and oppressive culture, but the resistance.

…

Wow, that sounds heroic, doesn’t it? I told you I had delusions of grandeur.

I had been talking with her about my own terror of “falling through the cracks,” of winding up pushing a shopping cart if I dared to leave the secure (if low-paying and dead-end) job that offered me health benefits and a bus pass.

I had been living independently, paying my own rent and eating Ramen, since the age of nineteen, and had struggled on in genteel poverty for years since graduating college. Returning “home” was not an option; I had vowed (even under threat of homelessness) never to come crawling back there like the Prodigal Daughter to relinquish my identity. Feeling burdened by the debt of my student loans, I saw myself as one misfortune away from sleeping in a refrigerator box.

But my counselor was telling me that I had something in common with other single women, regardless of background or circumstances: the inner bag lady.

This observation has since been backed up by a good friend of mine who has worked with a number of unattached women on their career and financial issues. One way or another, this fear surfaces. His own ex-wife, who currently brings in a six-figure income as a company vice-president, went into bag lady panic contemplating her status as a newly divorced woman. What was going to happen to her? How would she take care of herself? Would she wind up shivering on a grate somewhere?

Whence came ye, o inner bag lady?

Well, it’s not like there’s no historical or statistical basis for our fears. Anita Petry of the InterPress Service reported in October 2007 that according to World Bank estimates, women represent roughly 70 percent of the world’s poor. Furthermore

The U.N. Population Fund notes that worldwide, women on average earn slightly more than 50 percent of what men are earning, while women and girls are often the last to eat, and women’s health problems are considered less important than other family priorities.

Not exactly encouraging news. Persistent global undervaluing of women has to have an impact on our psyches. Even if we aren’t ensconced in burkas or prohibited from going to school ourselves.

A recent article in Chicago’s Daily Herald about women and retirement actually mentions the ‘bag lady’ fear as a common one. Some statistics cited:

• Of the 59 million women currently earning a salary nationwide, less than half, 47 percent, have a retirement plan, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s new Women’s Bureau.

• Nearly half of all women work in jobs without retirement plans or 401(k)s, said the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement.

• A retired woman’s median income in 2004 was $12,080, compared to $21,102 for men, according to the institute.

• On average, a woman’s monthly Social Security benefits check is $824, compared to $1,195 for a man, according to AARP.

So we don’t earn as much as men, and often don’t have a 401K. Our Social Security income isn’t even livable. Not so good, ladies.

But then, at least we’re earning. Around the time of the Great Depression (when everyone’s worst fears about poverty came true), Virginia Woolf was writing passionately and persuasively (in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas) about the prosperity of one sex versus the poverty of the other. Why had it been so difficult, for instance, for women to raise the miserable thirty thousand pounds it took to start a women’s college that had few amenities and prunes for dinner? But it really wasn’t that long before, in our country or hers, that female independence from father, brother, or husband was unthinkable — unless perhaps a lady opted to engage in the oldest profession (which couldn’t, for obvious reasons, be a viable long-term career choice). Even now women face this cultural stricture in third world and fundamentalist-run countries.

We may have come a long way, baby, at least in the West, but there’s still some serious financial disparity, globally and locally, and we women are cognizant of it on a core level. The weight of our collective history may in fact be dragging down our aspirations, and the statistics themselves create something of a glass ceiling.

So it makes sense that even a man who lives extravagantly on his female partner’s income could be seen as an asset, in the light of our apparent lesser value and lesser power as an earner.

All this is not to mention the Cinderella-esque cultural expectations with which many of us were raised, even in the late twentieth century. In my case, both parents were highly traditional religious conservatives whose gender roles came straight from Father Knows Best. My mother stayed at home with us and cleaned house; my father brought home the (admittedly lean) bacon. It was always tacitly assumed that I would grow up, get married, and rely financially on my husband, whether or not I decided to have some cute little job on the side. Neither parent ever taught me a thing about handling money. In my late teens, I decided: screw all that, I would be self-supporting if I had to live on beans and rice, and that if I married at all, it would be for love and not for money or security.

But I still expected to be living on beans and rice. And so far I have definitely met my expectations.

Seriously, though, this crap is a lot for us chicks to overcome. But the first step is to recognize what’s going on. To own our inner bag lady. To know where she comes from. She’s trying to protect us, in her way. Maybe she’s telling us that we need to learn to manage our money better. That Prince Charming is no substitute for understanding our own financial affairs. Ignorance is not always bliss. Sometimes ignorance means waking up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, dreaming of shivering on a grate.

Or maybe she just wants us to aim higher.