Interpersonal Acts of Softness
For once, as I sit down to write this week's newsletter, I have the problem of too many things vying for attention in my brain and not knowing which to pluck. It's a welcome change from the frantic scrabbling for something, anything to make meaning of, but I'm struggling to figure out how to turn them into a cohesive peice.
Something about a conversation I had with a friend this past weekend during which we discussed our difficulties with figuring out how to have relationships. How to be in relationships. What we want from relationships. We're both feeling a lack of fulfillment from the way we've been approaching romantic love, both hopelessly devoted to people who can't or won't meet us where we want to be met, who can't or won't give us what we know we deserve. She is a single mother and longs for someone to walk beside her in the journey of parenting, to be there for her in practical, tangible ways, to help her bear her burdens and build and strengthen her family. What I want is not so much, only to be seen, to be wanted and chosen, for someone to know me and, through that knowing, to love me even more. I don't need to be their only one, the sun they orbit around, but I do need to be something. Not a friend. Something else. We have both concluded that we need to go more lightly, take it all less seriously. We need, perhaps, to settle a little. Stop wanting something grand and sweeping and accept what we can find. I suspect neither of us will be very successful at this.
Something about having finished reading The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, a book that is tremblingly tender and defiantly gorgeous and made me so, so happy. Ross Gay writes the way I wish I could write and so rarely allow myself the freedom to try, and he finds ways to make meaning out of the smallest things. A basketball hoop, a tomato seedling, a wave from a stranger. The whole book is imbued with a sense of whimsy, playfulness both with language and with the subjects he chooses to cover, and it's incredibly charming and, yes, delightful. There is such a sense of community in these essays, so many friends and family mentioned, but, just as important, the moments of camaraderie and bonding that can exist between complete strangers who have never met before and will likely never meet again. I felt known as I read, despite the intense specificity of many of the delights included. It's a very human book. It also covers some heavy subjects, anti-blackness and mortality among them, but with such a light touch that they seem, never acceptable or comfortable, but bearable when weighed out against all the rest. And here is a masculinity I can love.
Something about the way I have reached out to friends recently who have always occupied warm places in my heart, and other friends have reached out to me for whom the same is true, but we had fallen out of touch for various reasons. I don't think I can describe to you the particular happiness of sending or receiving a "hey, just thinking about you, I miss you, you matter to me" message. The wording is not always that, but that's the subtext. I'm not unique in my desire to be thought of without prompting, to be significant enough to someone that they seek me out. We all want this. We all need reminders that our existences are important and that we impact other people simply by being our wonderful selves. You know what I mean when I talk about this. I'm trying my best to focus my energy where it feels like it's desired and reciprocated, to tend the gardens that bear good fruit. I've spent hours in therapy trying to unpack the thing that compels me to give my best and brightest to people who neither want nor return it, people who leave me feeling excessive and annoying and who wouldn't be a part of my life if I didn't chase and cling to them. I don't know why these are the people I'll consistently exhaust myself for. Their attention, brief as it is, feels like a reward I've earned. Maybe that's it. I've somehow internalized the idea that love and care are only worthwhile if I have to fight for them, but this isn't actually true and I know it's not. I know because when I rekindle a relationship I let fade away, with someone who has always cared for and valued me, my whole being lights up.
Something about the way I have been preoccupied with thoughts of my body as a vessel for desire, desire that doesn't have to bring with it guilt or shame, but can simply exist as what it is. To want is not a moral judgment. To want someone who may not want me the same way is also not a moral judgment. If sometimes, often, I think of a time when hands were laid on me and I let myself feel the full force of what that brought out in me, and if I have to take to my bed about it, well, then that's just me letting the soft animal of my body love what it loves. Mary Oliver told me that's all I have to do. The name on my lips doesn't have to be heard by the person who bears it. This can just be another thing, like drinking enough water or making myself a green smoothie or feeding myself when I really, really don't want to or moving my body, that I do to ground myself in my physical form and remind myself that it's not my enemy. It deserves these little acts of love from me. I deserve little acts of love from others, too, and I had them once and I'll have them again, but I won't try to force anyone to meet me in a space they don't want to occupy. I can meet myself there and lay hands on myself and it can be good.
This is not a cohesive piece by any stretch of the imagination, is it? I tried. And there is a theme here. Call it interpersonal acts of softness. We're all tangled together in a web of humanity, and I think what I'm getting at is the ways we extend ourselves to one another to make space, make love, make safety and joy and home. I've been feeling more sentimental than usual, which is saying something, more overflowing with gratitude for the outstanding human beings I have been blessed to know, and I wanted to capture that, at least a little. The things we do to feel seen and the things others do to make us feel seen. The things we can do for ourselves if visibility feels lacking. It's also a reminder to myself that when I think I'm not being seen, it's only that I'm trying to force it with someone who isn't interested in seeing me. There are so many others who are, always, and they're not less valuable because they give of themselves freely and easily. If anything, they're more valuable and I should treat them as such.
I have a tendency to retreat inward, to pull silence around me like a comforting cloak and focus only on myself and books and podcasts and shows. I feel safe when I do this. No one knows anything about me and so no one can hurt me. Sometimes I think it's a good and useful practice, but the thing I forget is that community is everything. People have the capacity for so much goodness, and I am always enriched by allowing myself to connect. It used to be the thing to say in my circles that you preferred books to people, or animals to people, or literally anything to people, and it's an attitude I fundamentally can't understand. I love people and I love being loved by people. Sometimes I just want more than I'm owed and I have to learn how to temper that so it doesn't turn me bitter. Like everything else, it's a process.