December 4, 2017

 

Beautiful, incredible M,

I have owed you an updated letter.  And while the original intent was to enrich the continually growing story of the impact you’ve had on my life (which only deepens with each chapter), with this letter I have something different, but equally loving to say.

I know you are always much more than tolerant of my preachy wisdom (from the future), so I hope you’ll indulge me one more time.  I love you very much – and I see you.  I both work at it and can’t help it – you just make sense to me a lot of the time in ways that kind of delight me.  I feel also like the combination of being close to you but likewise having a good deal of natural distance in the situation gives me a vantage point that can be useful in a unique way.

Sometimes from that vantage point, a concept pokes at me hard and wants to be shared.  So I am listening to that and sharing with you now.  As always, you can take anything useful and reject any or all of it, depending on its relevance and value to you.  In this case, in trying to make sense of my own pain and loss, which have some strongly confusing and conflicting elements, I came to a theory that brought my confusion into focus, and I wondered if it might have any insight you could use.  If it doesn’t, and/or if I am way off track (definitely not out of the question), then I just appreciate the grace you always have for me and I hope you know how deeply committed my heart is to you, through understanding and misunderstanding alike.  You are a permanent part of me, and someone I will never stop trying to see, understand, support, and love, no matter what circumstance holds.

One of the biggest challenges for me in loving you (and letting you go) is reconciling the person I see in you with some of your actions.

The person I see in you is incredible.  You’ve heard me say all this many times, but you’re a breathtaking work of art and you kind of glow from some core right at the center of you.  You are expansive and minute by minute bring your strength, intellect, and heart to transcending the obvious.  You don’t sit in the easy answer.  You are looking out to the better view of what could be, seeing the goodness, possibilities, and subtle colors of what’s just beyond where most people would stop and accept a reality.  You have vision, but it isn’t just a manufactured sense of what’s possible, it is an extension of the way you honestly find and accept beauty, goodness, and potential in the things and people around you.  You love people with a constancy, depth, generosity, and loyalty that is intense and powerful.  You are always getting better, curious, learning, and reaching deeper into yourself to be able to grab up more life, more richness, more goodness.  You consume life with a kind of glee, and simply being around you is beautiful and moving.  Being loved by you is life-changing.  For me, it has been (as I have said many times) a gift I could never begin to repay.

But the coin that is our greatest, most beautiful strength still has two sides, and for most of us, where we find our magic is where we also find our toils.  I wonder if this is true for you, and thinking from this perspective gave me my first sense of peace and understanding in this whole thing.

Your incredible skill for making and finding goodness keeps you from sitting in, accepting, and assimilating ugliness and pain.

Think about that for a minute.  Maybe read it again. See if it rings true at all.

I watch you see things in truth, understand fully, feel the pain of them, and then quickly transcend and move to the next thing without addressing your role in what caused the pain, whether you can influence it to a different outcome, or whether you could make choices to realign the forces in play to a stronger advantage.  It’s not the worst system and it begs the question: If you have the skill to transcend things that suck and be happy in anything, then does it really matter whether you are acknowledging and improving your impact?  Is the net result the same?  If you can find happiness in everything, then maybe it doesn’t matter where you are or what you make in your life, right?

I want to propose to you that it does.  Here’s why:  You are an expansive, glorious, curious, strong person.  You are well-resourced, gifted, supported, loved.  The world should be at your feet.  But it isn’t.  And it won’t be.  You inherently want to gobble up all the life you can, but you are limiting yourself to a tiny slice of life which comes from accepting happiness in what you are handed and what you create by default.  At the least, incredible, rich opportunities and people will tend not to open to you because of the messages you send out when you make these choices.  At the worst, you will over time lose important people, opportunities, and depth of understanding and connection, which will mean watching life shrink when it could be growing. This near-term happiness may bring you limits and loss that mean long-term voids.

When you choose happiness and avoidance over dealing with ugliness and pain, you are doing it from a place of beauty and good intent, but it doesn’t translate that way to the people around you.  Here are the ways it does translate to those of us experiencing you:

You appear deeply selfish.  I don’t think I need to explain this one.  You see and hear about it often.  But in your drive to keep your positive outlook, you chase your own happiness relentlessly, often without regard for how it impacts others.

You bring out the worst in people around you.  Once you have on your PMA earmuffs, the people around you with real needs and pains sometimes caused by you have to scream to try to be heard – to try to convince you to see the problem and help with the solution.  The louder we scream, the more you just let things roll off and look off into the distance.  I have watched S do this again and again.  You persist in saying everything is fine, she’s good, there’s no problem, we should just continue as we have been, it’s all making things better ultimately.  But she isn’t fine.  That wasn’t fine at all.  She wasn’t good.  She was in pain and she needed you to see her, but you didn’t, so she escalates and you just tune it out more.  Your persistent “Batman” means her “Joker” has to be in force more than anybody wants.  I found myself going more this direction over time as well, trying to get my own needs heard.  Your blindness to the pain around you brings the people who need you to desperation.

You appear powerless.  This is both a professional and personal handicap.  You appear to not be able to influence your own world.  You take what comes, shrug it off, and keep going with a smile.  This is a powerful tool when it comes to things you can’t or shouldn’t control and need to let go of, but for much of life, you both can and should influence things around you for the better – and that takes seeing and accepting the broken parts and feeling the pain of how those broken parts impact you and others.  You have an incredible ability to do hard things, but you only use it selectively.

You feel untrustworthy and irresponsible.  This goes in hand with the previous, but cultivated ignorance often masquerades as deceit, irresponsibility, or lack of integrity. That makes it too risky to rely on you because when the chips are down, you may or may not do the hard thing that makes the difference.  You may or may not show up for the people and situations that want to rely on you, picking up the burden someone you love needs to set down for a minute – or proactively seeing trouble coming and making things easier for those you care about – or seizing an opportunity to run closer to advantage for the greater good.  You choose to protect your own comfort first.

You search for distraction.  Women, weed, being incredibly, unmanageably and unhealthily busy.  It’s easy to be “happy” when you jump from one distraction to the next.

The reason I feel it is so important to share this perspective with you is that I know you aren’t these things.  You aren’t selfish (I have stood steadfastly in this belief from the beginning).  I know how deeply you care for people.  I know you are powerful.  And I know people can trust you beyond measure. I know all these things to be true.

But the ways you act don’t allow you to show up to the world as this incredible person you are.  You leave people feeling uncared for and marginalized.  You create chaos.  It is hard to trust you.  You cause pain.  Sometimes a lot of pain.  And you don’t seem to take responsibility for yourself or the impact you have on the world around you.  And that doesn’t reflect who you are.  And trying to reconcile the beauty of who you are with the messes you leave around you creates confusion and question.  And more pain.

I believe it reflects a powerful fear of dealing with darkness.  And I don’t think you’ll be free until you get honest with the good and the bad both.  I could suggest where to start that journey and certainly you can find those yourself in lots of other places as well, but that’s a different chapter, and yours to choose or not.  But just know it isn’t a hard step to take, nor some mystery you’ll have to solve all on your own.  It is how you become yourself.

I didn’t get to the rest of the letter, the part where I tell you once more how grateful I am.  I will write you a different letter, maybe here, maybe soon or maybe not.  But I hope there was some use in this and I wasn’t just entirely off track.  I care a lot, I am processing my own pain and loss, and trying to make sense of difficult things.  If I am wrong, I apologize.  I love you.  I feel responsible for you and for the things and people important to you.

k