I will be blunt.

1/ Someone I loved deeply and kind of painfully died too early and now all I have left to do is wrestle wth the history of us and come up with the lessons that she taught me that will help me. and forgive her for the lessons that she taught that aren't going to help. And I have to forgive myself for leaving her and moving here and failing to accept the attempts she made to live her life the way she wanted. For failing to honour her. Then I have to stop being angry at all the ways I am like her. Because the hating of her failures is an extension or maybe a displacement of hating the things about me that are like her.

2/ People get angry at each other and then they take off, worse yet people can love each other in ways that hurt and then they need to spend time apart. Which most of the time has this weird capacity to feel both better and worse than the hurting. And the switch between better and worse is like the difference between afternoon light and early morning light, which is to say, minimal in effect but quite profoundly different in attitude.

I miss these people every day, in stupid ways, by letting the plants they have given me die in revenge, by sending them emails that they don't reply to. By deleting their mix_cds on my itunes. By lying in my bed constructing elaborate fantasies where I re-structure how I love them so we aren't hurting each other anymore.

And this is where the Alice Walker books come in.

I have to remember that most of human relationships live or die based on how we succeed or fail to communicate our love to one another in good life-affirming ways.

I have to remember that even if wires are getting crossed now, that they can come uncrossed later, and it is not up to me to try and untangle them all by myself. It takes time and both of us getting to a good place again, where we are being loving and not needy and not selfish or worse yet selfless to achieve a selfish end.

3/ I have to take responsability for loving myself enough to look at my own shit for a while, and not focus on what someone else "must be thinking" right now, or what someone else must have done to me while i was too young to have my own opinions. I have to make peace with my own history and not try to control the future for a while. It's a lot harder than it sounds.

4/ As I write that, I am fighting against this idea of loving oneself - it feels like one of those self-help statements that are excuses for all sorts of horrible behaviours, but what I am talking about is not self-indugence or leniancy or narcissism. I don't think.

Digression about self-love versus self-hate craftily disguised as confidence or self esteem or plain old ego and hubris.

I think western culture (the part of it that I belong to) has done a fairly miserable job of teaching people how to take care of themselves while being respectful of, and caring for, the well-being of others. There is a concept in judiasm called tikkun olam, which means taking care of the world, ie learning to do good works, but when I was learning about it the first principle wasn't the world is good because we are in it, and we help to make it good. It was the world is fucked because we are in it, and fucking it. Which is a weird concept- when you come right down to it. Why should I take care of a place that is suffering my presence, because my only job is to fix my own mistakes. Then the burden of being responsible towards how i treat others doesn't come from being happy with myself, but actually is the effect of hating myself and seeking some kind of expiation for that self-hate by loving others... Focusing on whats wrong outside instead of turning around and saying maybe I should stop hating myself before I start trying to love other things/people. I think love is selfish, and only functions selflessly when that selfishness is given the correct set of circumstances, ie positive self-regard. Knowing when to care about myself, and when I should take a backseat for the feelings and experiences of others.

The physical manifestations of that are really simple too, and nothing at all that I am good at. Things like; Remembering other peoples names and experiences, sharing my food, listening more than talking, leaving people alone when they need to be alone. Describe a jewish mother and all you get of the above is the sharing food and even that is done with some hellacious agenda and once you've finished eating the conversation turns to who's getting fat. I am not blaming my culture, I just came up with that comparison while I was writing. Plus I am hardly a jewish mother, I never share my food.

5/I guess I have to care about people out of desire to share, not to control our relationship, or to be "loved-back". Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that saying I love you to someone is actually saying "love me". I need to learn how not to say "love me" and it is going to take a hella long time, I am now thinking. And I can only hope that the people who I really want to be able to say the right words to will still be around to hear them once I have figured it all out.

6/ And, I have to give people time..( that's the part I hate) and leave them alone to do what hey want to do, and if its hurtful to me, than that's fine but I can't punish them for it, or blame them. Unless they are being malicious and most people aren't being malicious, we are all working with the same tools, sometimes we just haven't read the instructions very carefully.

Posted by Miriam at April 27, 2005 11:43 AM | TrackBack Posted to Hope