Oh Say Can You See?

On spell-breaking endings and true love

I got back from Paris Monday night and I’m now somewhat recovered from jet lag. This is not me looking for you to feel sorry that I have jet lag, this is me telling you my brain is moving slowly, kind of like my neurons are firing but it’s taking them twice as long to cross the synapses, like I’m yelling through water, or I sound to myself like all the grownups in Charlie Brown. Nonetheless, it’s Wednesday as I write this, which means tomorrow is Thursday which means I need to make an essay happen. I can do it. I can do it with a jet-lagged brain. 

The retreat was everything I hoped it would be and more. Portugal is stunning and full of incredible history and the warmest people. I understand why so many expats have moved there, and I caught myself fantasizing about buying the entire top floor of one of those gorgeous, tiled buildings that face the ocean in Sesimbra. The tiles are hand-painted and change color as the sun rises, crosses overhead, and sets, becoming bluer or less blue incrementally.

I could almost see myself writing away, looking out the window at the ocean, feeling the breeze on my face and thanking myself for finding respite from a crazy world. Doesn’t that sound romantic? The possible me of the future with my long crazy hair turned grey and the wrinkles around my eyes deepened from life and time and loss and also joy. I was lucky enough to have attracted the best group of retreat-goers - smart, funny, open-minded people who were full of curiosity, and ready for adventure and real conversation. We soaked it all up for a week and it reminded me that the world is a beautiful place and people are so good at heart.

I wasn’t home 13 hours when the Supreme Court decided presidents can do whatever the fuck they like with full immunity as long as they’re acting in an “official” capacity where the word official is anyone’s guess. I was hoping I wouldn’t be screaming into the abyss the second I got home, but here we are, Happy 4th.

I mean…can you see it?

I started an essay yesterday and I got about five paragraphs in, but when I reread it this morning it didn’t inspire me, so I deleted it. It was about discernment, and particularly about the freedom that comes from seeing clearly. I was trying to write about the gift of that - of simply seeing clearly - and how, for me, it was a relief and a bit of a shock to discover somewhere in my mid-to-late twenties that when I focused on seeing things as they are - that alone gave me relief and peace, and that it felt like the closest thing to happiness I’d ever known. It still does. I’d spent so much time trying to be happy, and grabbing the brass rings everyone said you needed to grab in order to be happy, and all I ended up with was a pile of brass rings at my feet and a sense of dread because they weren’t working. I couldn’t figure out if the problem was that I hadn’t yet grabbed enough of them, or if it was me, that I was so messed up no matter how many milestones I crossed, it wouldn’t matter.

Turns out you can have a roomful of brass rings but if you think you’re broken in some unfixable way, a whole house-full won’t fix that for you. A warehouse full, a vault, whatever. Brass rings aren’t it. In case this needs to be said, I’m talking about things like getting good grades, graduating from a good school, being a good girl, trying to please everyone, starving yourself, shrinking yourself in other ways to make the people around you feel comfortable, trying to find someone to complete you, and working your way toward some kind of success. It’s the whole I’ll be happy when (I lose ten pounds, have a faster car, bigger house, better job, different partner, more money, accolades from my peers, etc and so on). The external validation formula where all that shit is supposed to equal happiness but it never does.

Anyway, somewhere in my twenties after I’d been practicing yoga for a few years, I started digging into the philosophy underneath the poses, and this whole idea of seeing things as they are - and not as we need or want them to be - really took hold of me. Vidya means clear-seeing and viveka means discernment - being able to recognize what is permanent (very little) versus what is fleeting (almost everything). Probably because I grew up in an alcoholic household where no one would admit it was an alcoholic household, and where, in fact, I was told explicitly it was not an alcoholic household, even though anyone with eyes, ears and a brain could plainly see that it was. That is crazy-making and it took a lot of time for me to trust myself and my ability to perceive reality correctly and not have to ask trusted people in my life whether what I was feeling made sense.

I started so many conversations with the words is it just me, or … and I would follow that with, does this seem: shady, weird, strange, uncool, mean, manipulative, thoughtless, messed up, confusing (insert any descriptor of someone else’s behavior) to you, too? This was such an area of concentration for me, I got Viveka tattooed on my arm so I wouldn’t ever forget to be brave enough to keep my eyes open. Wanting to see the best in people is a good quality, but being blinded to what they’re showing you with their actions because you’re attached to the idea that they love you? Not so much.

Not trusting yourself is devastating for so many reasons. For me the worst of those was staying in relationships with people when I really should have left a lot sooner. The problem with not leaving relationships sooner is you suffer longer and you twist yourself in knots and sometimes you work really hard not to see the simple truth right in front of your eyes. Things like - love shouldn’t hurt like this. If someone is my person, they wouldn’t say these horrific things to me that I will never be able to un-hear. Being disrespected is not part of a healthy relationship. Someone who treats you like a pain in the ass when you are doing everything possible to make their life better is not someone you should invest a lot of time and energy trying to please.

Just really basic stuff. But when you don’t trust yourself, you’re susceptible to manipulation, so if you feel something and you say something and your partner or close friend says what you’re feeling isn’t valid and it’s your trauma talking, you believe them, or you doubt yourself at the very least. Anyway, you probably want them to love you, so convincing yourself it’s your trauma that’s screwing things up and not their super shitty behavior seems like the better option. Until it doesn’t.

Once I stayed in a relationship with a guy who was amazing to me when we started dating, but once he felt like he “had me” he pulled a bait-and-switch and was so awful to me I often felt breathless from the words that came out of his mouth, like I’d been punched in the gut. Stuff that cuts you to the bone if you’re in love with someone, and I was, or thought I was. When I look back on it, I think I was just playing out an old tape and trying to get blood from a stone. Trying to get my mom to love me as a little kid by getting this man to love me in the present, which sounds nuts when I put it that way, but is a thing I think a lot of people do.

Every once in a blue moon he’d be kind to me, like he was in the beginning, and I’d forgive him and stay, and the cycle would repeat. It went on longer than I’d like to say, and it gutted me. And then one day I’d had ENOUGH and some small part of me that had nothing to do with trying to earn brass rings - the part that knew, somehow, we all deserve to be loved wholeheartedly or let loose - decided this was just not it, and I looked at him and said seven words that broke the spell. These were the words: 

You do not want to be here.

This was probably the most truthful thing I’d ever said to him. We’d been in therapy with a Jungian therapist for a year trying to get to the “root of the problem.” I hesitate to share with you that one of the things the Jungian therapist said to me at some point in that room with the leather couch and gorgeous lighting - is that I was being seen as the Madonna and my partner needed to see me as the whore. Isn’t that just lovely?

Anyhoo, the truth was the guy just didn’t want to be in a relationship with me. The reasons why had very little to do with me, he had his own stuff he was healing from or not healing from, his own fear of intimacy or the idea that commitment equaled death or god knows what else. Or maybe I was just too hard for him, too complicated by the messy feelings and needs of a grown woman, and the desire to be appreciated occasionally.

The reasons don’t matter, they were his to solve. But the seven words that came out of my mouth set me free, and they set him free, too, and they were simple. No Jungian therapist required, just enough bravery to finally see and say the obvious thing. The sun came out. The birds broke into song. The sea parted. Whatever, it was magic and I was done with that shit, and I have never not been done with that shit since. 

One of the things no one tells you (or no one told me, anyway) is to watch out for who you become inside a relationship. If you turn into a needy, desperate version of yourself, someone you wouldn’t want to know if you met her at a party, you’re in the wrong relationship. That spell-breaking ending was a turning point for me, because something shifted. I realized I’d never betray myself again in that way, I’d never allow someone to be close to me if they weren’t going to treat me with respect and kindness, because I’d worked too hard to heal.

When I say that, I don’t mean to suggest that healing is some finite thing, some destination you reach - but there’s a very tangible difference when you recognize your old issues aren’t wreaking havoc on your present-day life anymore. You have tools, so when your stuff comes up you recognize what’s happening and you pause and recenter yourself. I finally got the download that my well-being meant something to me, it was valuable to me, and no one I would ever meet would be worth the sacrifice of my own internal feelings about myself. If the price you pay to be in a relationship with someone is the loss of your self-respect, that is too high a price.

I’ve been thinking about love lately, and what it looks like and feels like, because we all have our definitions of these things, just like “official” has different definitions to different people. It’s something I’m writing about in my memoir, so it’s on my mind more than usual these days. I finally started Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book Less on the plane to Paris, and I finished it on the way back. I devoured it, if I hadn’t been leading a retreat, I would have read it in a couple of days. It’s been on my TBR stack forever. It’s a fact of my life that I’m often having to choose between writing my own book, or reading someone else’s. Time is short and there’s only so much I can pack into a day. I am so close to finishing this draft of my memoir that I really haven’t had the time to dive into anyone else’s book for the last little while, so I was happy to have some uninterrupted hours to read, since writing on a plane is not my jam.

My god was it good. If you somehow have not read it, do yourself a favor and order it. I laughed out loud countless times and didn’t care that there were strangers around me. There’s a moment in the book (and I’m not ruining anything by sharing this) where our protagonist, Arthur Less, is trying to get over a heartbreak. He meets a woman named Zohra on his travels, and she is also recovering from the end of a relationship with her partner Janet. I reread these paragraphs more times than I can say:

Less begins to BREATHE unevenly. Sorry, can’t help it.

People can say “I love you” and it might mean one thing to them and something else to me, just like a person can think love means letting your partner sleep in while they walk the dog, and someone else can think it’s the feeling of there’s no one else in the world for me other than this person, whether it makes sense or not, whether I saw it coming or not, whether I have to explode my whole life to make this work or not. And your definitions may change as you change.

Sometimes people say “I love you”, and what they really mean is I love you when you do what I want you to do, or feel how I want you to feel. That’s the kind of love I experienced with my mom growing up. She loved me unless I did, said, or felt something she didn’t like, and then her love could be withdrawn. That isn’t love to me, though I get it - love makes you vulnerable, and knowing someone could crush your heart into pieces is scary as hell - but to me, if you love someone, you just love them, however they feel or whatever they need. You want for them what they want for themselves, even if what they want is to leave you.

That doesn’t mean you allow yourself to be mistreated, it just means you keep your eyes open to what is real, and figure out what you want to do (or not do) about whatever that is as you go. I do think loving people means seeing them clearly - seeing all of their vulnerabilities and quirks, the places where they might be getting in their own way or allowing fear to have too much room at the table - and still saying yes, I choose you. 

My son is in Amsterdam right now, and I am in my den in Santa Monica. He’s going to be traveling until the 12th. He came with me to Portugal and stayed behind in Paris with his good buddy who also just graduated. They’re going to Prague next, and then to Athens. He has location services on so I can see him moving around, and we’re texting every day. We FaceTimed earlier. He’s having a blast, so I am loving this for him, even though it was weird to leave him on a different continent. We’re in that stage where he is leaving the nest and I am finding my job is to help him do that. Loving your children wholeheartedly is easy. Wanting them to pursue the things that light them up is a no-brainer. Being excited because they’re excited is a good sign you’re doing it right. You’re also allowed to grieve for the season that is over, the season of chubby arms around your neck where you can make everything okay with a hug.

Once many years ago two people I thought were friends betrayed me in a really crappy way. When it came to light, they were remorseless and unwilling to acknowledge they’d done something hurtful by anyone’s standards, and their unwillingness to own that was probably harder to deal with than the betrayal itself. But it was a great lesson because I realized I’d been blinded by my attachment to this idea that we were friends, when they had been showing me for quite a while we were not.

This is what I mean by seeing clearly - a lot of the time we don’t want to see something so we twist ourselves like a pretzel and make excuses and tell ourselves that thing that happened isn’t what it seemed, that it was really something else, the person’s history or fear and not that they just don’t really love us. There’s such a relief in seeing that someone doesn’t love us, even if it hurts like hell. There’s such a freedom that comes from dealing with things as they are, even if what we have to face is our own heartbreak. I’d rather be heartbroken than living in a lie, wouldn’t you? I’d rather figure out who really has my back and who doesn’t, who is worth my investment of time and energy and who isn’t, because life is short.

We don’t have to agree on the definitions of all the words, and we never will, but I know for myself, I share definitions with the people closest to me. I don’t have to explain to my best friend what I mean when I say I love you, because our shared definition when we say that to each other is: I will get on a plane at any time of night or day if you need me, if you tell me you aren’t okay I will stop what I’m doing and get on the phone, if you are acting like an asshat I will tell you, and if I am, you will tell me, if someone crosses you they are dead to me, too, I will always be here to root you on and celebrate your successes, and I’ll never let you give up on yourself.

Life is easier when you don’t have to litigate the definitions of the really important words. It’s liberating. 

On this day that’s supposed to be about freedom from tyranny, may we all free ourselves from avoiding the truth, whatever it may be. Wishing you love and the courage to keep your eyes open.

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about the freedom that comes with seeing clearly and the liberation of sharing definitions with the people closest to you, I’ll be here 7/5/24 at 11:15am PST or you are welcome to wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. As ever, thank you so much for spending some of your time with me.